Gerry Caldwell
The Oregonian newspaper in 1991 published a picture of Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts watching a CNN TV report showing Desert Storm General Norman Schwarzkopf visiting an army postal station with an American soldier. The caption read: Oregon's Governor asks, "Who's that General with Gerry Caldwell?" That may be apocryphal but maybe not. Gerry Caldwell knows a lot of people and a lot of people know Gerry Caldwell.
Born in 1940 and raised in Portland, Oregon, Gerry experienced the city's 1940's Jim Crow rules for African American citizens when Black musical superstars would perform in Stumptown but were refused lodging there. They instead were housed in private homes in Northeast Portland and on one enchanted evening Gerry's parents hosted Lionel Hampton.
You could call Gerry gregarious, but you just couldn't call him tall. So at Washington High School he satisfied his love of football by becoming the team's manager. It set a lifelong pattern of making friendships while making himself an indispensable player wherever the action was. After high school one day he was downtown when the sky opened to a cloudburst so intense that Gerry ducked into the first doorway he could find to escape the deluge. It turned out to be an army recruiting station and the start of 28 years of service in the regular army and reserve units. He found himself in Vietnam advising Vietnamese troops before the actual beginning of American combat engagement.
While stationed in Japan, Gerry went with some buddies to a Lionel Hampton concert and got seats down front. At the end of the performance a runner came to say Lionel wanted to see him backstage. After all those years he remembered Gerry from that home stay.
He was in the Reserves when he got a job with the First National Bank as a bookkeeper and became friends with the bank's president. That friendship led to his becoming the first Black manager of a branch in Portland.
Gerry considers a top highlight of his life to be the parade he put together from scratch for the 1977 Trail Blazers after they won the NBA national championship. The First National Bank was a team sponsor and when it came down to the last two games and it was apparent Bill Walton's gang might actually pull it off, the need for a parade became clear, The bank president told the Blazer management and Portland's mayor that if anybody could organize an overnight parade it was his man Caldwell.
He got an 18-wheeler flatbed truck from the Rose Festival's Starlight parade and cut red tape with the help of his friend the police chief to park it overnight near the train depot. He got a high school jazz band with the help of a school band director friend. He got a friend connected with Raz Transportation to bus the bandsmen back from the parade's end. He pulled it all together and Portlanders lined the streets and went nuts cheering their team. Hey! Who's that guy sitting on the flatbed with his legs dangling off the end?
Forty years ago Gerry was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and now lives with his wheeled chair. But oh what memories he has of all those friends who shared his ride on that magical merry go round, grabbing the brass ring on every circuit.
