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Almanac: November

November 1

This is the solemnity of All Saints in the Church calendar. It was the very early custom of the Church to remember martyrs on the anniversary of their death. The present feast dates back to the middle of the eighth century.

November 2

The liturgical commemoration of All Souls is observed on this date. Much celebrated in music and poetry, this day provides a starting point for Richard Wilbur's lyrical poem, "In the Elegy Season." The most famous of the works associated with this day, however, is perhaps the medieval song, "Dies Irae," a haunting description of the last judgment which found its way into the liturgy for the dead as a sequence or responsorial song used after a reading from scripture. The poem and its musical setting defied the reservations of more sophisticated critical taste and theological discernment to capture the ear and imagination of centuries of devotional and artistic admirers.
In 1990 at a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the School of Business Administration, the University conferred the degree Doctor of Laws on Arthur A. Schulte Jr., Executive and Financial Vice President of the University, Pamplin Professor of Business Administration, and former dean of the school. Dr. Schulte also served as Acting President of the University on two occasions: from June, 1981, until July, 1982, and again from the death of Father Oddo in October, 1989, until July, 1990. He came to the University in 1958 as a faculty member in accounting and, as the citation for his degree noted, "he has remained in all these years a teacher, but where once his classes were filled exclusively with the young and inexperienced, in later years his students included faculty and staff, deans and vice presidents, and presidents and regents." On the same occasion in 1990 the University bestowed for the first time the Distinguished Alumnus Award on Robert B. Pamplin Jr., M.B.A. of the class of 1968, and M. Ed. of the class of 1975.
June Weber, a retired member of the faculty in the Department of English and Foreign Languages, died on this date in 1992. Her arrival at the University in 1970 as the University's first full-time instructor of English as a second language was occasioned in part by the merger into the University of Multnomah College, where she had had a similar role. She continued on the faculty until her retirement in 1983.

November 3

The University of Portland Almanac attempts to present for each day of the year information particular to that date from the history of the University and its constituent membership, or information, still particular to the date, regarding persons and topics connected with the University’s academic interests, or other matters of general interest and appropriate to this site. We presently offer no specific entry for this date. If you wish to suggest material that would appropriately be listed under this date, or corrections, please contact the editor.

November 4

At a special convocation on this day in 1975 the University conferred the degree doctor of fine arts honoris causa on Aaron Copland, the American composer. When Copland died fifteen years later he left the University of Portland a complete copy of the scores of all of his compositions. The collection is kept in the Clark Library on campus for the examination and study of scholars.
Sister Margaret Mary Duggan, C.S.C., who worked in the University's office of financial aid from 1980 to 1986, first as assistant director and later as director, died on this date in 2008 at St. Mary's Convent at Notre Dame, Indiana. She had reported that she enjoyed her years working with Holy Cross Brothers and Priests and found her ministry here fruitful and rewarding.

November 5

This date in 1958 was marked by the first meeting of the University's History Club.
Former Governor of Louisiana Jimmie Davis died on this date in the year 2000 at the age of 100. He was the composer of the words for the popular song, "You Are My Sunshine."

November 6

In 2009 this date was marked by the dedication and blessing of the addition to the University Commons. This extension of the University dining facilities was made possible by gifts of friends of the University, especially by the gift of Fidel Baucio, a graduate of the University and the founder of Bon Appetit, the provider of food service to staff and students.
In Washington, D.C., this was the birthday in 1854 of John Philip Sousa. And in Peoria, Illinois, it marked the birthday in 1896 of Jim Jordon, who would gain fame as a radio comedian in the role of Fibber McGee. It is also the anniversary of the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States in 1860. He won with less than forty per cent of the popular vote, not having received a single vote in ten southern states.

November 7

The University of Portland Almanac presently offers no specific entry for this date. If you wish to suggest material that would appropriately be listed under this date, please contact the editor.

November 8

The University of Portland Almanac presently offers no specific entry for this date. If you wish to suggest material that would appropriately be listed under this date, please contact the editor.

November 9

On this date in 1938, rioters throughout Germany attacked Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes. The breaking of windows in storefronts gave the episode the name Kristallnacht or "night of broken glass." Many Jews were taken off to concentration camps, the beginning of what would become known as the Holocaust.

November 10

This is the feast of St. Leo the Great, Pope (440-461) and doctor of the Church.
Pope John Paul II announced on this date in 1994 the celebration of the year 2000 as a Great Jubilee of the bimillennium of the Incarnation.
The Very Reverend John A. Zahm, C.S.C., died on this date in 1921 at age 70. In 1902, as provincial superior of the Congregation of Holy Cross in the United States, he had sent the first Holy Cross religious to Portland and purchased the property on which the University now stands. He was well known for his research, publications, and public addresses on embryology and evolution. His efforts to resolve the conflict between religious and scientific views of creation and evolution attracted admiration and criticism in Europe as well as in America. After he left the office of provincial in 1906 he led excursions of scientific exploration, on one occasion along the Amazon when he counted among his traveling companions former President Teddy Roosevelt.

November 11

On this day in 1973 the Fremont Bridge spanning the Willamette River was officially opened. In fact vehicular traffic was not permitted until the next day. On this day, however, a ceremony opening the bridge was part of a day-long celebration that allowed pedestrians access to both levels of the bridge.
Joseph McCoy, professor of chemistry, died on this date in 1985 at the age of 55. He had just finished a game of tennis and was leaving the campus in his car when he apparently suffered a heart attack. He was found slumped over the steering wheel of his car in the middle of Willamette Boulevard at the corner of N. Haven. He had graduated from the University in 1952 and had joined the faculty in 1960.
This is Veterans Day. Originally known as Armistice Day, this date marks the anniversary of the cease-fire that ended the First World War. Negotiators settled on this date partly because of the repetition of the number eleven: the cease-fire was to take effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month as a kind of symbol of the urgency of the agreement. There was wide-spread criticism at the time of this choice as it in fact delayed the armistice by several days; the casualties suffered in the interim were considered needless sacrifices to the nicety of the choice. The date had been observed for centuries earlier as the feast of St. Martin of Tours, known in England as Martinmas. St. Martin himself had been a Roman soldier of the fourth century, who was converted to Christianity, took up a monastic life, and then was elected bishop of Tours in France. He is remembered in iconography as a soldier cutting his cloak in two with his sword in order to share it with a shivering beggar. Among others, Martin Luther undoubtedly owes his name to St. Martin; Luther was born in 1483 and was christened on this, the day following his birth.
This was the birthday in 1922 of the writer Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, which includes an episode about the fire-bombing of Dresden toward the end of World War II. Vonnegut was himself in Dresden as a prisoner of war at the time of the bombing.

November 12

The University of Portland Almanac presently offers no specific entry for this date. If you wish to suggest material that would appropriately be listed under this date, please contact the editor.

November 13

The University's Monogram Club was organized on this date in 1921.
Father Theodore J. Mehling, C.S.C., eleventh president of the University, died on this date in 1961 in Santiago, Chile. He had first come to the University in 1940 and had taught English and served as dean of faculties before becoming President in 1946. He served in that position until 1950, when he was appointed provincial superior of the Indiana Province, whose headquarters are at Notre Dame. He was still Provincial when he died unexpectedly, at the age of 55, on a visit to members of the Congregation under his direction in Chile. The residence hall on campus that bears his name was under construction at the time of his death.
In the church calendar this is the feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first U. S. citizen to be declared a saint. She was born in Italy in 1850, founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in 1880, and came to the United States in 1889 where she established many schools, hospitals, and orphanages, especially among Italian immigrants in American cities. She died in Chicago in 1917 and was canonized by Pope Pius XII in 1946.

November 14

This date in 1952 saw the establishment of the Oregon College Foundation, an association of independent institutions of higher education in the state established to solicit financial support for its members.
On this date in 1919 the University was visited by Eamon de Valera, the New-York-born president of the Sinn Fein Party, who later served as prime minister of Ireland and, from 1959 to 1973 as president of the Republic of Ireland. At the time of his visit to Portland he was on a fund-raising tour of the United States having escaped from a jail in Lincoln, England, in February.
This was the birthday in 1900 of Aaron Copland, the American composer. Among his best known compositions are the ballet scores Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944). When Copland died in 1990, he left the University a complete collection of the scores of his compositions, which is available for examination by musicologists in the Wilson Clark Library on the campus. This bequest makes the University of Portland one of only twenty-four institutions to hold a complete copy of Copland's works, the only one west of the Mississippi. Each year the University's music department presents a concert of Copland's music on a date near the anniversary of his birth.

November 15

This is the feast of St. Albert the Great (1206-1280), Dominican friar and bishop, doctor of the Church, professor of the University of Paris, and, because he is celebrated as a man of especially great learning, patron of scientists. He is said to have "surpassed all his contemporaries, except perhaps Roger Bacon (1214-94), in the knowledge of nature." He was the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas.
At Regensburg in Germany this date saw the death in 1630, at the age of 59, of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who greatly contributed to the development of science with his discovery of three major laws of planetary motion and with a new explanation of how vision occurs.
In 1935 the first annual homecoming of the newly renamed University of Portland was held on this date.

November 16

This is the feast of St. Gertrude, mystical theologian.

November 17

According to The Writer's Almanac the Union Pacific Railroad began daily passenger service between Portland and Chicago on this date in 1889.
On this date in 1558 Elizabeth I ascended the English throne, succeeding her sister Mary.

November 18

This date in 1952 was marked by the death of James Culligan, treasurer of the University. The Culligan award, named in his honor and awarded annually at commencement to an outstanding member of the faculty, was established a year after his death.
Father Patrick J. Carroll, C.S.C., aged 84, a member of the first group of Holy Cross religious to come to Portland in 1902, died on this date in 1959 at Notre Dame.
This was the birthday, in France, in 1882 of Jacques Maritain. His philosophical writings, especially his contributions to a renewed study of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, made him a leading force in Catholic intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, but he was widely heralded as a significant voice in other areas as well. When the National Gallery of Art was dedicated in Washington, D. C., in 1940, Maritain was chosen to deliver the inaugural lectures. In 1958 the Jacques Maritain Center was opened at the University of Notre Dame to advance studies along the lines of his philosophy. Maritain died in France in 1973.

November 19

Brother Hubert (Thomas) Nolan, C.S.C, one of three Holy Cross religious buried at Portland (Mt. Calvary Cemetery), died on this date in 1924 at age 59.
President Abraham Lincoln delivered on this date in 1863 his address as part of the dedication of the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg.

November 20

On this date in 2003 the Board of Regents selected the Rev. E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C., as the nineteenth president of the University. Father Beauchamp had been senior vice president of the University since July, 2002, and before that had served as provincial steward of the Indiana Province of the Congregation of Holy Cross after serving 15 years as executive vice president of the University of Notre Dame.

November 21

The University of Portland Almanac presently offers no specific entry for this date. If you wish to suggest material that would appropriately be listed under this date, please contact the editor.

November 22

This is the feast of St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians.
This date was marked by the dedication in 1959 of the University Commons and of Holy Cross Hall (since renamed Kenna Hall).
And in 1964 this date saw the dedication of Mehling Hall.
Father James C. Buckley, C.S.C., the superior of the Holy Cross community at the University of Portland from 1980 to 1985, died on this date in 1997 at age 72.
In 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on this date. The University of Portland community received the news at about 11:00 a.m. local time. Students gathered in large numbers around the chapel in Christie Hall, then the principal place of worship on campus. A Mass previously scheduled for noon could not accommodate the large numbers of those wishing to attend. Father Paul Waldschmidt, C.S.C., the University president, celebrated a Mass in St. Mary's in the late afternoon, where crowds still greatly exceeded the capacity of the facility. The days that followed were marked chiefly by stunned silence as the campus, along with the rest of the nation, followed the events of the weekend on television.
This same date in 1963 marked the death also of C. S. Lewis, after a life of distinguished scholarship at Oxford and at Cambridge. He began as a scholar in classics but was celebrated for The Allegory of Love, a masterpiece on a medieval view of the romantic relationship between the sexes, and for his contribution to the Oxford History of English Literature in a book-length essay on the fifteenth century. He is better known, however, as a Christian apologist, as a writer of science fiction, and especially as the author of a series of books for children on the imaginary land of Narnia.

November 23

Brother Remy Aydt, C.S.C., who served at the University from 1946 to 1963, died on this date in 2000, at Holy Cross House, Notre Dame, Indiana, at age 94. A skilled machinist and artisan, he designed and built the altars that furnished the chapel of Christie Hall. Several of these altars were moved to Holy Cross Court in 1974 and one of them still serves as the main altar in the Holy Cross community's chapel there.

November 24

The University of Portland Almanac presently offers no specific entry for this date. If you wish to suggest material that would appropriately be listed under this date, please contact the editor.

November 25

In 2000 at University Park, Pennsylvania, the University of Portland women's soccer team defeated Penn State to advance, for the fifth time in seven years, to the final four of the NCAA Women's Soccer championships.
On this date in 1977 Pope Paul VI named University of Portland President Paul E. Waldschmidt, C.S.C., auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Portland. The public announcement was made eleven days later by Archbishop Cornelius Power.

November 26

In 1901 the first recorded gift to the University, in the amount of $230 was received from alumnae of St. Mary's Academy.

November 27

This was the birthday in 1701 of Anders Celsius, the Swedish astronomer who gave his name to the centigrade scale which he invented. He first described his scale in a paper which he read at a meeting of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1742.

November 28

The University of Portland Almanac presently offers no specific entry for this date. If you wish to suggest material that would appropriately be listed under this date, please contact the editor.

November 29

The University of Portland Almanac presently offers no specific entry for this date. If you wish to suggest material that would appropriately be listed under this date, please contact the editor.

November 30

In 1958 this date was marked by the dedication of the University Library. The original building consisted only of the front portion of the present structure, but the basic design and character of the building was already effected. When the library was expanded in 1979 it was renamed in honor of Wilson W. Clark, the father of Regent and benefactor, Maurie Clark.
Father Joseph E. Haley, C.S.C., died on this date in 1987 at age 72. He had served at the University of Portland from 1961 to 1980, first as a professor of theology and later as advisor to international students. He was religious superior of the local Holy Cross community from 1978 to 1980.