LIFESTYLES
WEEKEND, OCTOBER 21-22, 2017
Beaver believers
Umatilla County OSU alums preserved in oral history
By ANTONIO SIERRA
East Oregonian
In 2013, Oregon State University’s planning
for its sesquicentennial began in earnest.
Ahead of its 150th anniversary in 2018, OSU
originally planned to conduct 50 interviews as a
part of an oral history project.
Chris Petersen, a senior faculty research assis-
tant for OSU’s Special Collections & Archives
Research Center, said the project eventually
ballooned to 243 interviews of Oregon State
alumni, faculty, staff and current students that
comprise 150 oral histories.
Petersen wanted to feature Beavers from every
region of the state, and as a Pendleton native and
Pendleton High School graduate, Eastern Oregon
wasn’t going to get short shrift.
OSU identifi ed four Umatilla County resi-
dents for the oral history project, and in 2014
Petersen made the trip to Pendleton to record the
history of their lives.
Through the OSU Alumni Association,
Petersen found Pendleton City Attorney Nancy
Kerns and Hermiston farmer Bryan Wolfe. Wolfe
was actually unavailable the week Petersen made
the trip to Eastern Oregon, but Wolfe traveled to
Corvallis to round out the interviews.
Petersen was more familiar with former
Columbia Basin Agriculture Research Center
Director Dick Smiley, having worked a summer
job at the Adams facility during high school.
Petersen also wanted to make sure he included
an alum from the Confederated Tribes of the
Umatilla Indian Reservation, and through a
contact passed along by his mother, he tracked
down Jerimiah Bonifer, a technician for the tribal
fi sheries program and the only person interviewed
for the project who graduated through OSU’s
Extended Campus online degree program.
During the extensive interviews, OSU was
just one chapter in their oral autobiographies.
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Oregon State graduate Nancy Kerns stopped in Pendleton after college during
the Round-Up and has been here ever since.
Nancy Kerns
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Bryan Wolfe speaks during a recent Hermiston City Council meeting.
Bryan Wolfe
Class of 1978
Class of 1966
A chance encounter during a vacation in Pend-
leton led Kerns to a legal career in Pendleton.
After graduating from Oregon State with a
degree in American studies and getting her law
degree from the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma,
Kerns practiced as an attorney in Portland and
Klamath Falls.
Kerns was on a break in 1986 when she visited
Pendleton for the Round-Up.
“My brother lived here and it was the Round-Up
and I came to enjoy the visit here,” she told Petersen.
“And during the Round-Up – as you know, having
grown up here – there are a couple of good parades.
And my brother is an attorney and he introduced
me to the guy that was standing next to me at the
parade, who was the district attorney. So by about the end of the parade, he offered
me a job. And I’m still in Pendleton.”
Kerns spent the ensuing years as a Umatilla County deputy district attorney and
in private practice before she accepted a job as assistant city attorney for the city
of Pendleton in 2006. In 2011, she was elevated to city attorney, the fi rst woman in
Pendleton history to inhabit that role.
Already the daughter of OSU alums, Kerns’ daughter, Virginia, has established a
third generation of Beavers.
Wolfe is a fi fth generation farmer, his family moving
from to the “mountains of Northeast Tennessee” to the
“mountains of Northeast Oregon” in Wallowa County
the 1890s.
He grew up on his family farm near Enterprise and
graduated from Wallowa High School in 1962.
Wolfe immediately enrolled at OSU, although it
was a bit of an adjustment. Wolfe recounted to Petersen
about the time he invited his father out to Corvallis to
watch a Beaver basketball game.
“And I can remember Dad and I walking into Gill
Coliseum to fi nd a seat to watch the ball game, and he
just stopped. ‘Man, this place would hold a lot of hay,’
he said.”
Wolfe returned to the family farm after graduating
and was involved with the farm’s cattle expansion into Umatilla County. Wolfe relocated
to Hermiston permanently in 1975 and focused the farm’s attention on irrigated crops.
In an interview with the East Oregonian, Wolfe said he didn’t know why OSU would
want to talk to a “little Eastern Oregon farm boy,” but his involvement in the community
isn’t refl ective of the humble moniker.
Wolfe serves on the Umatilla Energy Cooperative Board of Directors, the Oregon
Board of Forestry, the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council and was named Hermis-
ton’s Man of the Year in 1999.
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Retired CBARC director Dick Smiley has spent nearly his whole life in agriculture.
Jerimiah Bonifer graduated from Oregon State University in 2014.
Dick Smiley
Jerimiah Bonifer
Retired CBARC director
Class of 2014
Smiley’s career as a scientist has taken him to Australia, the Ivy League, and the
OSU Extension Service, but his life started in a farming family in rural California.
The son of a ranch foreman and hog farmer, Smiley grew up in rural San Luis
Obispo County on California’s central coast before embarking on an academic career
in soil science at Washington State University and Cornell University in New York.
Smiley was hired as a professor of plant pathology and the station director in 1985,
fi lling the latter role until 2000.
“One of the nice things that happens at a research center like this, compared to
being on campus, is that when growers have a problem, or their advisory people from
the agri-business sector have a challenge that comes along — wheat isn’t growing
real well, or other crops are not growing real well, or as expected — they’ll walk in
the front door with buckets or bags in hand, and they don’t really care too much what
you’re doing at that particular time, because they need help, and they expect help,”
he told Petersen. “Our obligation is to make sure that we can help them if possible.”
Known for his research into turf grass and nematodes diseases in small grain, he
retired from the plant pathology program in 2014 but continues to conduct research
at the station.
When Bonifer attended his commencement ceremony, it was only the second time he
had ever set foot on OSU’s Corvallis campus.
The descendant of a French-Canadian fur trapper and a member of the CTUIR, Bonifer
grew up on the reservation and graduated from Pilot Rock High School.
After a couple of summers of commercial fi shing in Alaska, Bonifer got married in 2008
and had a son six months later. With a young family in Pendleton, Bonifer decided to take
courses with Oregon State’s Extended Campus program and work a fi sheries technician job
with the tribes at the same time.
“I received education leave that allowed me to perform some of my schooling here at
work, on work time,” he told Petersen. “They paid me, essentially paid me a couple hours a
day to go to school. That’s the level of commitment that the tribal government and the tribal
community has for getting our tribal members educated so that they can come back and be
the decision makers and the policy makers for our community and so that we truly do have
ownership of what we are about, where we want to go and who we want to be in the future.”
His work as fi sheries technician now encompasses fi eld supervision and data analysis,
including radio telemetry studies on adult steelhead and examining the ability of fi sh to pass
through irrigation dams on the Umatilla River.