Collection is open for research.
Gift of Betty Oringdulph, January 2001 (Lib. Acc. 24446).
In February 1950, Dorothy McCullough Lee, mayor of Portland, Oregon, appointed Charles P. Pray as head of a new civil defense bureau. The bureau, which soon became known as Disaster Relief and Civil Defense, was created under the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, which placed the funding responsibility for civil defense on local governments, to be matched with federal funds. The bureau was tasked with teaching the city's citizens how to respond to a nuclear attack, including providing information about fallout shelter construction, first aid and survival techniques, and evacuation procedures. In 1952, Portland voters passed a $600,000 levy to fund the bureau.
In 1955, the bureau ran Operation Green Light, a drill for evacuating Portland's downtown area. By following traffic light patterns to guide escape routes, more than 100,000 people and 29,000 vehicles had successfully evacuated the designated area in less than one hour. In 1956, the bureau opened the Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center, which was the first underground, self-sustaining civil defense center in the United States. The facility was meant to house up to 250 people, who would form an emergency local government. The center also housed microfilmed versions of the city's records. In 1957, CBS produced a television documentary about the bureau's work, titled "A Day Called X."
In spite of the bureau's work having received national recognition, in 1960 and 1962, voters rejected levy measures to continue funding it. In May 1963, the Portland City Council voted 4-1 to abolish the bureau, in spite of Mayor Terry Schrunk's protests. By that time, some figures, including City Commissioner Stanley Earl and U.S. Senator Wayne Morse, had become skeptical of the program's usefulness, saying that advances in nuclear weaponry meant that a direct attack would be unsurvivable. City officials had also criticized the bureau for an ineffective response to the Columbus Day Storm of October 1962.
Sources: "Portland Civil Defense," by Brian K. Johnson, Oregon Encyclopedia,
Portland Disaster Relief and Civil Defense pamphlets and brochures, Coll 916, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
Additional materials of and relating to the Portland Disaster Relief and Civil Defense bureau are included in a vertical file, Civil Defense - Portland, at the Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
The collection consists of pamphlets and brochures that the Portland, Oregon, Disaster Relief and Civil Defense bureau mailed to Portland resident Janet Oringdulph in October 1960. These materials include information about fallout shelter construction, first aid, emergency sanitation, procedures for evacuation, recommended actions for surviving a nuclear attack and dealing with nuclear fallout, and home protection measures. The collection also contains a brochure in favor of a tax levy to help fund the bureau, and a brochure in favor of a state constitutional amendment for a continuity of government measure. All the materials in the collection may have been mailed as part of the levy election campaign. The collection also contains the envelope that was used to mail these materials to Janet Oringdulph, whose name is written as "Mrs. Fred Oringdulph."
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