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Today's Featured Biography

 
Susan Tomlinson Gisvold

In the fall of 1959 I entered Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, which was the right school for me. I was involved in campus activities, president of my residence, Pi Beta Phi, on the Dean's Advisory Board, and tapped for Mortar Board. Most importantly, I met my husband Dean Gisvold. We were married June 22, 1963, at Westminster Presbyterian in downtown Minneapolis. That fall Dean entered law school at the UofM and I began teaching at Bloomington High School. The next year I enrolled in graduate school at the University part-time and the following year I taught at the experimental high school on campus.
We left Minneapolis to begin our lives in Portland, Oregon, following Dean's graduation from Law School. We chose Portland because of the beauty of the Northwest and a strong desire to be on our own. Our story for the last forty two years is intertwined with the Portland story. Our city is now regarded as one of the most progressive and liveable in the country. That was hardly the case when we arrived, but others of like mind were arriving too. Young couples from all over with freshly minted degrees were looking for a place to create community and to be involved. After two years on the Model City Board, Dean was appointed in 1970 by the mayor to chair the citizen involvement committee of the Downtown Plan. The Plan was adopted by the council in 1972 and endures to this day.

Things were busy on the home front as well. We bought a seventy five year old home in an inner-city neighborhood. We fell in love with the many stained and leaded glass windows and began work to put this gem of a house back together. In addition to a large home, we were also on our way to acquiring a growing family. Our son Gregory arrived in 1966. We had heard about interracial adoption while in graduate school and in early 1968 our second son Douglas arrived two days old and the first all African American child placed with a Caucasian family in the state. Our daughter Lisa in November, 1968, followed by Jonathan in 1969, Chinese and Caucasian, Annemarie in 1970, Japanese and African American and finally David in 1972, Caucasian and African American. So our home was full with six children, ages five and under. It was natural that we would get involved in the public schools. During a very difficult time involving school closures, Dean ran for the Portland School Board. The race was close; it was three days before we learned that he had won by three hundred votes. At his first school board meeting, which ended at 3 am the next morning, six schools were closed and we had a police escort home.
After years of being involved with a natural child birth association and many community and political activities, I decided to go back to teaching. I taught low-income mothers for Portland Community College for several years. In I984, I purchased the second oldest (1890) house in the neighborhood in a state of complete disrepair and remodeled it as a bed and breakfast inn, the Portland Guest House, which I opened in 1986. I ran the guest house for twenty years before retiring in January, 2007. I will miss many of the guests and their stories and I have already heard they will miss my wonderful breakfasts.
So now I am looking forward to a new stage of life: retirement. Travel is a major passion, followed by politics, gardening and exercise. Dean has not quite given up his responsibilities as senior partner in charge of commercial real estate, but he does make room for several trips a year. We have six grandchildren in Portland, two in Washington DC, and one in Istanbul, Turkey. Our daughter Lisa is a Foreign Service officer with the US State Department and her postings have taken us to Caracas, Venezuela, and Skopje, Macedonia. She and her husband served in Baghdad and are now posted to Istanbul, Turkey. Son Gregory does international legal work (nation building, rule of law), which has taken us to Pristina, Kosovo, where he spent 2 years. We continue to value good health, family, friendships, and each other as we move through the next decades.

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