Barbara Roberts: Governor, author and humanitarian

Former governor Barbara Roberts — Oregon’s only woman governor to date — has added “reasonably successful author” to the resume.

Her new book, “Death without Denial, Grief without Apology: A Guide for Facing Death and Loss,” tells of her husband Frank’s lung cancer in 1993, his last days, and the personal story of how she mourned. It’s sold roughly 10,000 copies, and is on Oregon’s best-seller list — quite a feat for a non-fiction book by a first-time author.

“I never thought of myself as a writer; I thought of myself as a speaker,” Roberts said, breaking from a book tour to relax in the backyard shade of her West Mooreland home. “I’d written to motivate people. I’d written to move people. I’d written to influence people, to change people. All this writing, and I’d never thought of myself as a writer. So when I started actually writing the book, and realized how much I like to write, I started looking for an agent.”

“It’s very addictive to find that you can literally change government in a way that helps people. And so in addition to the kids and families I helped with that law, I obviously changed my life pretty dramatically.”

– Barbara Roberts, on her entry into Oregon politics after lobbying for special education requirements

For an agent, a commodity such as Roberts is a find. Name recognition means everything in the publishing business. And Roberts has that.

She was Oregon governor from 1990 to 1994, and before that was secretary of state, House of Representatives majority leader, and member of the Parkrose School Board, Multnomah County Commission and Mt. Hood Community College Board. She now travels the country for her book, makes presentations on leadership and women’s issues, and directs Portland State University’s Kennedy School programs for government executives.

Born Dec. 21, 1936, in Corvallis and raised in Sheridan, a small milling and farming town in lower Yamhill County, Roberts began public service as a volunteer advocate for handicapped children. Here, in an interview with Lifestyles Northwest contributing editor Jennifer Meacham Dirks, she tells her story.

Roberts: I’m 65. I’ll turn 66 in September, on the first day of winter, the 21st. Shortest day of the year.

When I was a kid, I thought I’d get gypped. I thought my birthday had fewer hours in it then other people’s. I thought that was awful when I was little, but I later discovered it meant there were more night hours. When I was a teenager, I thought that was great.

I went to Sheridan High School, where the federal prison is now. It was a town of 2,000. My graduating class was like 54 students.

LSN: Your latest book is about your husband and his death. How long were you married?

Roberts: I’ve been married twice. Both my first husband (we divorced after almost 17 years of marriage) and Frank (we were married just short of 20 years) both died about a month apart in 1993.

Roberts: Obviously, you don’t stay married 16 or 17 years if you … We met in high school and actually married in the middle of my senior year in high school. He was in the military, came home on leave and we got married. He went back and I stayed and finished school.

We had some tough years when he moved to California and wasn’t paying child support for lots of years. But toward the end of his life, although we didn’t know it was going to be the end of his life, we patched up our relationship and chitchatted on the phone.

He died of a brain hemorrhage that was absolutely unexpected, about five weeks before Frank died. So it was a little heavy to be dealing with that.

And my sister had what we thought was terminal lung cancer at the same time. So it was like, Frank was dying, my ex-husband died, my sister was — we thought — terminally ill. It was a horrible year. If I never have a year as bad as that again, my life will be OK. 1993 was a year I’d just like to forget in some respects. Of course, if I forgot it, I wouldn’t have had a book.

Roberts: My older son, who’s autistic, lives with me. Mike works at Mt. Hood Community College, and has been there 21 years. He really is a success story. At six years old, they told us to institutionalize him, that he would never be functional. Now he knows the Tri-Met system probably better than the people who manage it. He can tell you anything about the buses and the mass transit in the metropolitan area. And he’s a math expert. He knows math inside out, and knows all kinds of music, everything but country western. He has this huge music collection, everything from classical to Japanese music to jazz. He moved in with me four years ago when I moved into this house.

Roberts: It was built in 1911, and so it’s approaching 100 years. I really love the house, and I love the backyard. It’s got a fountain and a pond here, and another pond around the corner. I can get in my car and be down at Portland State [University] in seven minutes, and sitting in this backyard you feel like you’re in the country. It’s quiet. It’s just amazing.

I actually worked in this neighborhood years and years and years ago, as a bookkeeper in a construction office just a couple of blocks from here. I’ve always loved the neighborhood, when I got ready to look, I didn’t look anyplace else. I just looked here.

LSN: What did you learn working at a construction office that you would not have learned otherwise?

Roberts: I worked totally around men. There were no other women in either of the offices I worked in, so I really learned how to work with men.

My dad ran a machine shop in the little town I grew up in, in Sheridan. I worked part of the summers in that machine shop, so I worked around men there as well. And then my dad owned a company in Portland. It was, again, all male, and I worked there.

Learning how to work with men worked very nicely when I got into politics, because it was predominantly a male domain at that point in time. And, of course, I learned a lot about construction. Both of the construction companies that I worked for specialized in insurance renovation for fires wind damage and that kind of thing, so it’s much like remodeling. So, when I get ready to call someone to repair something here, I’m real comfortable getting on the phone and talking to a plumber or an electrician or a painter or a wallpaper guy. It’s what I did at the office, so for me that turned out to be a huge asset. When you maintain a house that’s this old, it’s just really nice to know how to deal with people who work in renovation and repair.

Roberts: And people always assume I don’t know anything about construction. I came from a rural community, so everybody was either in agriculture or they were in timber. So as a result, I knew quite a bit about the timber industry and how it worked and a lot of the jargon, and the same was true with agriculture. My dad was both a machinist and a mechanic, so I grew up with no brothers in the household, and as the oldest daughter I knew how to use hammers and pliers and drills and all that kind of stuff, and I knew a little bit about cars, and I knew a lot about machine shops.

My sister and my mother and dad all did small businesses over the years, so I had a lot of connection with small business. In fact, I worked for small business, and I also worked for two companies that were union shops, so I learned a lot about the labor union framework in that time.

So I was lucky to learn a lot of unusual things for some women to know. And I always felt people assumed I didn’t know it, and that was really to my advantage sometimes.

Roberts: Well, because they assumed that I wouldn’t understand, and then when I would retort with something that indicated knowledge, it would always make them sort of step back and reevaluate me. I had a lot broader span of knowledge then I think a lot of people assumed I would have, first as a woman, and next as a person from Portland.

Roberts: My other son, Mark, lives in West Linn. He’s in car sales. He works in Salem right now, and he has a 13-year-old daughter, Katie, and a son Robert who’s almost 11.

Roberts: Oh, yes. They stay overnight with me every Friday night, if I’m not out of state. That’s sort of bottom line. If I’m not out of town or out of state, they stay overnight with me every single Friday night.

And we usually travel together, each of them separately, for a week during the summer.

Roberts: Sometimes we’ll just go to the coast. I’m trying to show them all of Oregon. One time we’ll go to central Oregon, one time we’ll go to eastern Oregon, one time we’ll go to the northern coast or the southern coast.

I just take them for a week, so I get individual time with them and they get individual time with me. And I help them learn about the state. They were both born in the state, and I want them to know -- so it’s really fun.

So now they talk about Redman and Sisters and they talk about Baker City, and the only piece we haven’t done is Ashland.

Roberts: Well, I don’t know. My granddaughter is actually traveling with me while I do some book readings this summer, and so she’s going to be with me for a week while I’m going from Lincoln City to Coos Bay.

Roberts: Listen. Yes, my grandkids are, unfortunately, used to being in the audience. Oftentimes they’ve been with me at speeches and at public events and ribbon-cuttings.

When Katie was little, I was governor, and so we traveled -- she traveled with me to a number of things. Some day, when she is an older woman, she’ll say, ‘I was here on the day the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center opened. I was here the day they opened the new bridge in Waldport and I was here the day they opened the Aquarium in Newport.’ I took her to a lot of openings, because someday she’ll be able to say she was there. And it was a great way for me to spend time with her when she was little.

I usually traveled either with Frank or with a friend who traveled with me, when Frank was ill and after his death. And so we took Katie a lot when we could take her. Because it was a way to spend time with her when I was governor, and it was hard to find that kind of time.

But my kids get that time now. They both wish I were still governor, because now they’re old enough to understand…

Roberts: (Nod.) I just said back, ‘If I were governor, we wouldn’t get this time together. I’d be too busy.’ So, I really treasure that time I spend with them. I really enjoy it tremendously.

Roberts: Yeah, and the kids love it. When we miss a Friday night and they miss going in there, it’s just like a big trauma.

But the kids order almost the same thing every time they go in, and they know the waiter, and they know the cooks, and they know the guy who buses the tables, and they’re just like real regulars in there, so it’s very funny.

Roberts: When I’m with my grandkids. Very definitely. The other time I’m happy is when I get to be someplace and it’s quite and beautiful.

I just came back from eastern Oregon and I would just pull off the highway and look at the mountains, or pull off beside a stream or the John Day River. The most nurturing thing for me, other than being a grandmother, is water over rock. I love the sound of water on rock. I like driving along a river, and pulling off, and just listening to the water and rocks.

LSN: Was there one particular thing in life that you really sought out to do or accomplish and that you finally did?

Roberts: There were a lot of those. My initial entry into politics was one of those times. I went to the legislature as a divorced single-mom, with no money and no experience, and passed a piece of legislation that changed the law in this state, and was really the forerunner to national reform.

Roberts: Yes. This was a bill that required public education for children with emotional problems. And at that time, there were no laws in Oregon. There were no laws in any other state in the union, that we knew about, and there was no federal law. So it is believed to be the first special education requirement in the nation.

So, to go down there as someone who had no experience in politics, no money … Frank actually became my mentor. He taught me the legislative process. He was my legislator at the time, and this group of parents when to him and asked for help, and he introduced our bill.

But to be able to do that successfully, when you’ve never done anything like that in your life before, was absolutely earthshaking. It was like, ‘I moved the mountain of government.’ It was a remarkable accomplishment for me, and it felt like a remarkable accomplishment.

The problem with that is it’s very addictive to find that you can literally change government in a way that helps people. And so in addition to the kids and families I helped with that law, I obviously changed my life pretty dramatically.

LSN: You talk about the year 1993, which I guess I would consider probably the saddest point in your life.

Roberts: No question about it. It was an awful year. It just went from bad to worse, from bad to worse, from bad to worse. It was like unending trauma that year. You would just think the worst thing had happened, and one more worse thing would happen. That’s how it felt that year.

Last year wasn’t a good year either, but it didn’t compare with 1993. My sister died last year, in February of 2001. Just dropped dead, totally unexpected. And that was really traumatic for me.

I had just signed my contract with my publisher and was so excited and called her and said, “Guess what? I’ve got a publisher!” You know, one of those sister things. And then, suddenly, five days later she was dead.

It was just unbelievable. Both of my parents were dead, and I’d lost both of my husbands, and then here was my only sibling. It was like, I felt totally orphaned. It sounds funny to say that you feel orphaned in your 60s, but I felt orphaned.

And last August [August 2001], I had skin cancer on my nose, and I lost about half of my nose tissue, and they had to reconstruct my nose, and put all these skin grafts on and stuff. The doctor said it didn’t come from my years of sailing— we sailed the Virgin Islands, San Juan Islands, off the coast of Puerto Rico. It didn’t come from gardening. It came from when I was a teenager picking strawberries every summer. We never put a hat on; we never heard of sunscreen. We just went out and picked crops in the summer.

But if you’ve got to have cancer, this is about as easy as it gets. I don’t whine about this.

I had breast tumor removed just a few months before that that turned out not to be malignant. The difference between those two was that one of them was a positive experience in the sense that it wasn’t malignant. But it was still so frightening. And the skin cancer, I knew in this case that I wasn’t going to die from it. The rest of it was just vanity.

Roberts: 1993 was just a horrible year, and yet it was a year of growth. It was a year of rare experience. A lot of good things happened in that year, too. Frank and I really had a lot of wonderful things happen between us.

It was his last legislative session, and my last legislative session, and we accomplished a lot, both of us, that we felt strongly about. It was wonderful to see him accomplishing things he wanted to do, even when people didn’t know he was dying yet. In his mind, he had things to get done, because there wasn’t going to be another chance.

From that standpoint, we felt those accomplishments in a different way then you might if you could say, ‘Well, I’ll come back next session and get that done.’ There wasn’t going to be a next session.

Knowing he was dying, we used our time with great care that year. We did the things that we had always planned to do ‘next summer,’ ‘next spring,’ ‘next fall,’ ‘next week,’ ‘next year.’ People waste time like it was an easy ingredient to get back, which it’s not.

LSN: Most of this is in your book, but how have you personally dealt with the blows of 1993 and the blow of your sister dying in 2001?

Roberts: You don’t get a lot of choice. You just have to deal with it. You can either bury it, like you bury the people, and just not deal with it, or you can go through a grieving process.

And with Frank’s death, and with my sister’s death, and with my parent’s death, I went through those grieving experiences. I didn’t ignore them. I felt them. I experienced them. I tried to learn from them. And it’s painful. It’s a very painful process. But I think I came out a whole lot healthier then if I had tried to bury all that grief.

I think if I had tried to just put a cover over it and hoped it’d go away, I think I wouldn’t be as happy a person as I am now.

Roberts: I’m still working. I have a third of a position at Portland State, so I have a responsibility there, and then all the marketing on the book, and I still do a lot of public speaking. I’m not doing quite as much this year, because of the book, but I mean, I’ve got a speech tonight, and I did one Saturday in Woodburn, to the labor union women.

Roberts: Generally not. They are when I go out of state, but I seldom take money for a speech in Oregon. I think when you’ve been the governor of the state you owe something back. Vic Atiyeh has a wonderful way of describing being governor of Oregon. He says once you’ve been the governor of Oregon, they own you forever. And I think that’s true. There’s this sense, for me at least, and I know Mark Hatfield feels this way, and I know Vic Atiyeh feels this way, that you just owe back. That the people have given you an incredible honor, and I think you owe back for a long time. And I feel very obligated to try to do that whenever I can.