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Charles Orlando (C.P.) Porter was born on April 4, 1919 in Klamath Falls, Oregon and spent most of his childhood in Eugene, Oregon where his father, Frank J. Porter, worked as a railroad yardmaster. He attended the Eugene High School and edited a newspaper, which won state and national honors. Upon graduation he attended Northwestern University on scholarship and worked at the same time as a special correspondent for the New York Times. In 1937 a merit scholarship allowed C.P. to transfer to Harvard University from which he graduated cum laude.

In 1941 C.P. was inducted into the U.S. Army. He served during World War II in Europe and in Latin America where he was the first Caribbean correspondent for the Yank, an Army weekly news publication.

Reentering Harvard University as a law student at the end of the war, C.P. completed the three-year law program in two years and received his LL.B. degree in 1947. After working for one year as a law clerk for Judge William Healey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (San Francisco), he was admitted to the Oregon bar in 1948. From 1948 to 1951 C.P. published articles on the courts system in Cincinnati and on surveys by the American Bar Association on the legal profession in the U.S. In 1954 he co-authored the book The American Lawyer, published by the University of Chicago Press.

C.P. returned to Eugene, Oregon in 1951 and with Skelton set up the law firm of Porter and Skelton. Between 1957 and 1961 Charles Porter served as a congressional representative of the fourth district of Oregon.