June 2024
It’s a chilly winter morning in Oregon, December 1944, and members of the Wiitala family are just getting their day started when there’s a knock on the door of their new living quarters.
It’s unlikely they would have been expecting a visitor having just moved in the previous evening after a long trip from rural North Dakota, where the loss of a job had led to the loss of the family home, creating an urgent need for a comprehensive solution. Hearing there was work in Oregon, William and Hilma Wiitala loaded up their four kids and set out for the complete unknown.
“We were moving from a little farm community where there were maybe 20 families and we knew everyone to a strange city; we knew it would be interesting,” recalls Bill Wiitala (Roosevelt, 1954), only 8 at the time.
Simply relocating from bucolic Midwest to urban Oregon would have been culture shock aplenty all by itself. But the cops delivering this morning’s wake-up knock were about to kickstart the process with a high-voltage jolt to the family’s comfort level.
“One of the cops asked Dad if he had heard any strange noises the night before,” Bill says. “It turned out the man who lived above us had killed his wife. I imagine my mother was thinking, ‘What in the world have we moved into?’”
Welcome to Vanport, folks. Maybe don’t get too comfortable.
About four years later, the Wiitalas would face another life-changing event, but in the interim young Bill was having a ball in his new hometown, built near today’s Delta Park and Portland International Speedway to house the influx of people moving in during the World War II years to work in Portland’s busy shipyards.
“We lived right across from the recreation hall, and that’s where I started playing sports,” Wiitala remembers. “Starting in third grade, I’d walk across the street and spend every day in the gym. I’d never even seen a basketball before that. In North Dakota, all I had to throw around were rocks.”
By the time Wiitala was in seventh grade at James John Elementary School, Vanport had grown to 40,000 people, making it Oregon’s second-largest city and the nation’s largest housing project. That would change suddenly and dramatically May 30, 1948, a Memorial Day that Wiitala remembers vividly.
“That day, my older sister and I had gone to Columbia Park to watch a semi-pro baseball game,” he says. “Mom and Dad stayed home but decided later to join us. They were on their way when the adults we were with told us we had to leave.”
Wiitala and his sister were back home by the time a railroad embankment on a levee system collapsed under the pressure of the Columbia River, engorged by two major rainstorms that month. The breach sent waves of water into Vanport, which was inundated within 10 minutes.
“Once we got home, our neighbors came downstairs and said the dyke broke and we needed to get out. So we jumped in their car and took off for my aunt’s house about three miles away,” Wiitala says. “Meanwhile, Mom and Dad were heading home. They got stopped at a barricade but said they had to get their kids and drove around it. They didn’t find us because we had already left, but we wound up having a happy reunion at my aunt’s.
“The building we were living in housed about 13 families, but a 15-foot wall of water came through and just swept it away.”
That quickly, the Wiitala family was homeless once again.
“It was a tough time but we got through it, and I had so much respect for my dad,” Wiitala says. “We were homeless in North Dakota, and he kept the family together. Just a few years later, we were homeless in Vanport, and he kept the family together again. And before he died of a heart attack at 70 while welding on top of a box car, he had been able to buy his own home.”
NOW IT’S THE EARLY 50s and Wiitala is hanging out with basketball teammates in a Roosevelt High School hallway. Given the choice, Wiitala might have opted out of high school entirely. Despite the early misfortunes, his dad was now doing all right with no education past fourth grade. That was part of Wiitala’s thinking. In addition, none of those North Dakota farm families had prioritized academics over hard work and Wiitala still remembered them with admiration.
“I have to admit I was one of those not-too-smart teenagers; I had no interest in school, really,” he says. “When I got to Roosevelt and started asking myself what I was going to do in life, the only thing that came to mind was to be a truck driver. Because I liked trucks. I knew how much money Dad made cutting up iron for Schnitzer Steel, so I knew I could at least make that much. That was fine with me.”
College hadn’t crossed Wiitala’s mind even though, as early as his sophomore year, he had started to draw some attention for his athletic skills. At the time, the early 50s, Roosevelt had become a powerhouse in baseball and basketball, bolstered by the influx of kids who’d earlier moved into Vanport. Wiitala was excelling in both sports.
He was All-PIL guard on a Roughrider team that took second in the league his junior year before winning the PIL title and finishing fourth in state his senior year. “I still hold a state record,” Wiitala deadpans. “For what, you ask? Most fouls in four games. I picked up 19 out of a possible 20. There are three of us who still hold the record, and Mel Counts is one of the others. So, I keep good company.”
As a sophomore on the diamond, Wiitala’s pitching helped Roosevelt win the PIL championship and take second in state. He made the All-PIL team as a junior and again his senior year when he hit .486 as an outfielder and was 9-1 as a pitcher, leading the Roughriders to the state championship game. This time they won 3-0 behind Wiitala’s three-hit, 12-strikeout gem.
His pitching exploits continued over the summer when he played for Norgan’s Beavers of the American Baseball Congress (ABC), earning three wins without giving up an earned run and helping the Beavers win the state semi-pro championship and earn a trip to the ABC World Series.
His success in baseball and the attention he’d gotten from scouts had Wiitala thinking a pro career might be within his reach. “A Roosevelt catcher and pitcher had gotten signing bonuses my sophomore year and I thought if I played well enough maybe I could get a bonus and buy my parents a house,” he remembers.
So, yes to a possible pro baseball career, but continuing to play while also attending college? That was out of the question. Then came that afternoon in the Roosevelt hallway when it was brought to Wiitala’s attention that he wasn’t fully understanding the question.
“We’re all just talking and along comes Coach Marv Rasmussen (a Franklin grad, former Roosevelt baseball and basketball coach and 2004 Hall of Fame inductee),” Wiitala remembers. “He goes down the line and asks each of us where we’re going to college. A lot of the other guys had families with more money than mine and they said they had plans. But when he got to me, I said, ‘I’m not going.’ I’ll never forget it. He was about 6-4 and he grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled, ‘You’re gonna get a scholarship and you’re gonna go to college! And the next time I ask this question, I want a smart answer.’
“A couple weeks later, he called me into his office for some counseling. My head’s spinning wondering what I’m going to tell him this time. And, sure enough, he asks me what I plan to do when I graduate. This time I tell him, ‘I want to be a coach and teacher like you.’ I think that showed I wasn’t too dumb. He was a great man who showed me coaching and teaching really were options for me.”
Wiitala did, indeed, wind up getting and accepting a full-ride offer from the University of Portland, which had the added economic advantage of being just a mile and a half from his home. The Pilots enjoyed success all four years that Wiitala played outfield and pitched for the team. As a senior year, his 8-1 record on the mound earned him a spot on the All Coast team. The Pilots were on the doorstep of the college World Series that year but lost a two-game series to USC that determined who would advance.
After graduating with his education degree, Wiitala worked for the Portland Parks Bureau before taking a substitute teaching position with Jefferson.
“Back then if there was a surplus of teachers, they would put you in a pool and schools could, essentially, draft you,” Wiitala says. “I wanted to stay at Jeff, but Madison claimed me. They didn’t have any coaching jobs, so I wound up just teaching world culture to sophomores.”
At the end of his first year at Madison, the school’s varsity baseball coach resigned, and Wiitala was offered the job. Having never coached a baseball game in his life, he wrestled with his decision before opting to take the job over another offer from Jefferson.
“I was fortunate that I did,” Wiitala says. “I didn’t even know it at the time, but we had all these future stars coming into the program like (fellow Hall of Fame inductees and future major leaguers or draftees) Rick Wise, Terry Ley and Keith Lampard, and we would be loaded up for a few years. Anybody could have won games with that bunch. My job was to just not mess them up.”
He certainly didn’t. Wiitala coached the Senators from 1961 to 1964, finishing second in state in ’61 before winning the PIL and state championships in both ’63 and ’64.
“I probably never should have got that job,” he says. “I mean, what school that has all this talent coming in is going to hire a guy with no coaching experience? I could hear coaches all over the city saying, ‘How’d that guy get that job?’”
It was a job Wiitala would keep for just four years before resigning after the ’64 championship over a philosophical difference with the Madison principal. “They had fired the varsity basketball coach, who was a wonderful teacher and coach, but he had no talent on his team,” Wiitala recalls. “I told the principal, ‘I don’t want to coach at a school where I have to look over my shoulder and worry that I’ll be fired if I bench a kid or don’t win enough games.”
Wiitala continued teaching history at Madison until 1966, when that same principal asked if he’d consider becoming the school’s athletic director. Wiitala agreed on the condition he would have input on coaching hiring and firing decisions.
“I wanted to make sure good teachers and coaches weren’t being hired and fired just based on wins and losses. Some people say athletics are extracurricular, but they’re not. They’re a critical link in a school’s curriculum. In athletics you can teach concepts like self-discipline and self-sacrifice better than you can in any classroom situation.”
Wiitala served as Madison’s A.D. until moving in 1988 to the PIL District AD office, where he worked until retiring in 1991.
The scene shifts to Newberg, where Wiitala now lives near his daughters, Carol and Joanne, who both followed him into careers in education, and three grandchildren. He and his wife, Nancy, were married for 40 years before she died of cancer in 1996.
“We met in eighth grade, started dating our senior year in high school and got married two years later,” Wiitala says. “It’s a lifelong love story. I still adore that woman.”
While he has been slowed by a left knee devoid of cartilage (“That has to be from pitching,” he says), he has had an active retirement. He was instrumental in reviving the PIL Hall of Fame after it went dormant for several years. Four years ago, he lent his name and support to the Madison Alumni Association’s efforts to raise $150,000 toward the construction of a state-of-the-art athletic fieldhouse. They wound up bringing in more than $400,000, and Wiitala is effusive in his praise of the multi-sport facility and the alumni who brought it to life.
He still enjoys regular lunches with some of his former teammates and occasionally with ex-players.
“I’ve lived long enough to be able to see young people grow up to become 60- and 70-year-old adults,” he says. “And they still have an appreciation for what they learned at Madison. One of my former players, a Wall Street executive who has built several companies, once told me he learned everything he needed to know while on the fields at Madison.”
It’s not Bill Wiitala’s style to take credit for that, but it sure wasn’t the dirt or grass doing the teaching. And there are countless other successful former Senators and four decades worth of unrivaled baseball success that are proof of that.
Do you know Bill Wiitala? If you’d like to reconnect, he can be reached at [email protected]
Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption.
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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