The People of the Building

Before the cars were automated, someone stood in each of them all day and worked the lever. The 1957 directory lists Sorensen's employer as the U.S. Courthouse and his home as 1122 SE 36th Avenue, where he lived with his wife, Beulah.

Everyone who came to this building on business — lawyers, defendants, jurors, the judges themselves — passed through his hands on the way up. Sidney Lezak, who was the United States Attorney here, once observed that the hardest part of having prosecutors and judges in one building was avoiding conversation “on the elevators, in the halls.” Sorensen heard all of it.

The marble lobby had a concession. Roberts sold cigars there for at least six years, listed in the directories simply as “Roberts Dan cigars, lobby.” He lived on SW Sunset Boulevard with his wife, Caroline.

There was no cafeteria in the building. When the courthouse broke for lunch, it went across Broadway — to Amato's Supper Club in the 1950s, and to the Ho-Ti Supper Club by 1962.

White kept the building clean. He lived at 828 NE Shaver Street with his wife, Lucile, in Albina — the neighborhood where Portland's redlining had concentrated most of the city's Black population, and which the city would begin clearing for freeways and a hospital within the decade.

He worked in a building whose chief judge was, at that moment, pressing Portland's law firms to hire Black lawyers and mostly failing.

Redmond cleaned the old Pioneer Courthouse and then this one, “after its completion in 1933.” A 1939 newspaper item about her named the judges she had served, which is the reason her name survives at all.

Every call into the federal government in Oregon came through a switchboard, and in 1957 Hughes was sitting at it. She lived at 125 NW 20th Place.

The crier called the court to order, and under the pay rules of the time he was compensated only on days the court actually opened. Judge Solomon, describing this arrangement decades later, said he opened court on Saturdays so the man could be paid.

Solomon did not give his name.

Harris was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1936 and came to Portland, where he swept streets by day and attended court-reporting school at night. When he qualified, Multnomah County would not send out its only Black reporter for fear, he was told, of losing the account.

Judge Solomon sent for him in the mid-1960s and told him to come and “be among your friends.” Harris was hired permanently in 1965 and reported this court for thirty-two years, retiring in 1997 — the year the court left the building. He traveled with Solomon and his secretary to New York, Hawaii and Miami, and remembered the judge telling new citizens at naturalization ceremonies not to import their prejudices, because “we've got enough of our own homegrown racism and bigotry.”

He died in 2011.

Burns began in this building as Judge Solomon's courtroom bailiff and rose to run the clerk's office. He did not stay a court officer: he went on to lead the successful 1964 campaign to abolish Oregon's death penalty, served as pro bono counsel to the NAACP, sat in the state senate, ran Governor Bob Straub's office, and was president of the Oregon State Bar in 1987–88.

He died in 2007.

The United States Commissioner set bail, issued warrants and heard preliminary matters — the office abolished in 1971 and replaced by the federal magistrate judge. In 1962 the commissioner in this building was a woman, listed as “Mrs. Claire Mundorff, 512 US Court House.”

Beyond that directory line, almost nothing about her appears anywhere online. She is the most conspicuous gap in this page, and one of the reasons the research files list her first among the names to chase in the archives.

Elliott graduated from Northwestern School of Law in 1935, in the depths of the Depression, and was hired in 1936 as the first assistant to Estes Snedecor, the bankruptcy referee whose office sat on the third floor of this building.

There were no rules to work from. Snedecor invented forms and local practice as cases came, and referees were paid per petition until Congress put them on salary in 1946. Elliott remembered him disposing of a case with: “I can't see anything wrong with this guy. Let's discharge him.” She was found alive at ninety-one in 1999 and brought to the courthouse for a portrait ceremony.

The public business of the sixth floor was largely transacted by women. Ward ran the naturalization office in room 605 across both directories; Davis was deputy in charge of the bankruptcy and record room in 606; Nowell and then Graham ran the passport office in 603.

If you became an American citizen in Portland in those years, or needed your file, or wanted to leave the country, you dealt with one of them.

Christ ran the clerk's office for nineteen years and served four chief judges, through the period when the Ninth Circuit and the bankruptcy court moved out and the post office closed. He recorded an oral history in 1990, interviewed by Jack Collins, and died in 2019.

Looney spent his career in the probation office and left the best surviving portrait of Judge James Burns, who visited federal prisons wearing coveralls with “James the Just” stenciled across the back, and who once instructed the marshal to arrest a visiting prosecutor if that proved necessary.

Lezak ran federal prosecution in Oregon for twenty-one years, longer than anyone else in the country by the time he retired. For his first three he was only the acting United States Attorney, because Senator Maurine Neuberger blocked his confirmation — from her own office in room 326 of the same building, five floors below him.

His recollections are the closest thing the building has to a memoir. At its most crowded his office held some eighteen assistants and two dozen law clerks “jammed into every nook and cranny that we could find in the Courthouse.” His clerks shared a library with the judges' clerks until someone left beer cans in it and Solomon shut the arrangement down. During the trial of the pyramid-scheme promoter Glenn W. Turner, spectators arrived “with thousand dollar bills tied to their hair” and tucked in their hatbands. When a Vietnam-era protester tried to pull down the courthouse flag, Judge Kilkenny was enraged and Lezak declined to prosecute, on the ground that the attempt had failed.

He called Solomon the “paternoster of the courthouse.” After the Saturday Night Massacre he turned Nixon's portrait to the wall. He resigned from the Portland City Club in 1972 over its exclusion of women, and died in 2006.

Walker was the first Black prosecutor appointed to the federal bar in this district, hired during Lezak's tenure, and later became an administrative law judge in California. The record of his appointment comes from Lezak's own account.

Neal was the first woman appointed as an assistant prosecutor in the district, also under Lezak — who noted a possible short-lived predecessor in the 1940s whom no one has yet identified.

Turner prosecuted the Rajneeshee cases from this building. In 1985 followers of the commune plotted to kill him and surveilled the parking space reserved for him; two of the conspirators were tried and convicted here ten years later. He also drew a gauntlet of American Indian Movement supporters after arguing an appeal in the Loud Hawk prosecution.

Bagley grew up Black in rural Oregon, joined the marshals service as a deputy in 1976 and became supervisory deputy in 1981. His office handled the logistics of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's arrest and arraignment in 1985. In 1993 he was appointed United States Marshal for the Virgin Islands.

He recorded a five-tape oral history in 1993; the 108-page transcript is at the Oregon Historical Society.

Luckey prosecuted the wiretapping case against the Portland racketeer Jim Elkins, the trial at which Robert Kennedy appeared as a witness. He left in 1961 to become a bankruptcy referee in Eugene and was sworn in by Gus Solomon.

Kohlberg went east and helped invent the leveraged buyout; the first initial in KKR is his. Solomon, on tape thirty years later, explained the entire business model to his interviewer and noted with some interest that Kohlberg's firm had bought Fred Meyer using money from Oregon's public employee pension fund.

Pertschuk's next job was arranged inside this building. Solomon and his secretary, Helen Bradley, steered him onto the staff of Senator Maurine Neuberger, whose Portland office was in room 326 downstairs. His firm refused him the leave and he went anyway. He became general counsel of the Senate Commerce Committee and then chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.

Gillers became the country's leading scholar of legal ethics at NYU. Richmond founded 1000 Friends of Oregon, the organization that defended the state's land-use system. Emery litigated civil rights for the New York Civil Liberties Union. Wayne Outten built a career in employment rights; Delos Putz became a law dean; Chris Thomas became Portland's city attorney.

Solomon edited their drafts line by line — “nouns and verbs, the active rather than the passive, the short rather than the long.” At a reunion dinner in New York with eleven former clerks, he noted that more than half of the ACLU's national pamphlets had been written by people who had once worked in his chambers, and that nine of the eleven at the table were teaching law.

Althaus worked a day shift at a Troutdale aluminum plant and attended law school at night. She clerked for Judge Fee in this building, became the first woman associate at the firm that became Miller Nash, co-founded the Queen's Bench in 1948, and formed an all-woman firm in 1970.

Frye had been a schoolteacher required to resign when she became pregnant, and entered law school at thirty-two. Appointed under President Carter's pledge to name women to the bench, she was commissioned in February 1980 and kept chambers here until the court moved.

From this building she voided the incorporation of Rajneeshpuram, issued the injunctions that halted old-growth timber sales over the northern spotted owl, and heard the early stages of the thermal-imaging case that became a Fourth Amendment landmark in the Supreme Court. Asked later about leaving, she was blunt: the old courthouse “was a very wonderful building at one time, but it is — just antiquated!”

Haggerty was a Marine wounded in Vietnam and the first Black partner at a major Portland firm. He was appointed a magistrate judge in 1993 and commissioned as a district judge in March 1994, serving in this building until the court's departure.

Juba had been a prosecutor, an FBI agent in Denver, New Orleans and Biloxi, and a state judge before taking the new magistrate's post in 1971. He then did something the statute had not contemplated: he persuaded parties to consent to have him try their cases outright, years before consent jurisdiction existed anywhere in federal law. The practice was later written into the national rules.

He recorded his oral history in the spring of 2006 while dying of cancer, and died within weeks.

Olson clerked for Judge Burns in this building in 1973, prosecuted here for a decade under Lezak, and returned as United States Attorney in 1994 — the office she had joined twenty years earlier as a junior assistant.

Morse — the independent who opposed the Vietnam War from the Senate floor and cast one of two votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — kept his Portland office on the seventh floor of this building, along the corridor from the Ninth Circuit's courtroom. Constituents rode up past the district courtrooms to see him.

Neuberger took her late husband's Senate seat in 1960 and kept her Portland office on the third floor. She was the reason Sidney Lezak spent three years as merely the acting United States Attorney, five floors above her — and, through Solomon's intervention, the reason a young law clerk named Michael Pertschuk left Portland for a career in Washington.

The Bureau's Portland division worked out of the fourth floor for some twenty-three years. From these rooms agents ran the surveillance that led, in June 1951, to the capture near Beaverton of Thomas James Holden — the first name ever placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

The office moved out in 1971 with sixty agents and thirty-six support staff. D. B. Cooper jumped from a Boeing 727 that November, five months too late to be worked from this building.

The post office in the marble lobby was not Portland's main office — that was at 511 NW Broadway. This was “Federal Station,” the downtown retail and financial branch, and these two men ran it in turn.

Postal inspectors watched the workroom from a concealed gallery whose floor was laid in cork so their footsteps could not be heard.

The Secret Service kept its Portland office on the second floor for at least six years under the same agent, alongside the Bureau of Narcotics in room 228, Marine Corps recruiting in 208 and Coast Guard recruiting in 205.

The second floor held a working medical suite: an out-patient clinic under Dr. William Richards, a quarantine station that inspected arriving ships and crews, and — by 1962 — a dental clinic with a dentist on staff.

People came to this building to have their teeth looked at.