Period of Transition: Pauling in Corvallis

Corvallis, the home of Oregon State University, sits adjacent to the Willamette River in the central Willamette Valley. Nestled between Portland and Eugene, and a reasonable distance from both the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade mountain range, Corvallis offers close proximity to a large variety of outdoor activities and big city accommodations while maintaining the [...]

Remembrance

Fifteen years ago, on August 19, 1994, at around 7:20 PM PDT, Dr. Linus Pauling died at the age of 93, a victim of prostate cancer.
Pauling was cremated and, some eleven years later, his and Ava Helen’s ashes were interred at the Oswego Pioneer Cemetery, the final resting place of Pauling’s parents Herman and Belle, [...]

Checking in on Condon

Over time we have written with some frequency about Condon, Oregon, the small farming community where Linus Pauling spent much of his youth.  And though we have come know a fair amount about the history of this little town in Gilliam County, it was not until recently that the Blog had an opportunity to actually [...]

Lucile Pauling (1904-1992)

Less is known of the youngest Pauling sibling than is the case with Linus and Pauline Pauling. What can be said is that, of Herman and Belle Pauling’s children, Lucile—quiet, shy, and warmhearted—was the least hardheaded of the three. Always unsettled when trouble arose between family members, she often took on the role [...]

Pauline Pauling (1902-2003)

My name is Pauline Darling Pauling Stockton Ney Dunbar Emmett, and you can see I’ve had an interesting life…
-Pauline Pauling Emmett, 1994.
The sister of one distinguished scientist and later the wife of another, Pauline Darling Pauling, the second oldest of the Herman and Belle Pauling’s children, led a long and eventful life. Once a [...]

Working in Oregon: The Blue Collar Adolescence of Linus Pauling

Interviewer: Have you in the past, or do you now smoke?
LP: When I was about your age or younger, I thought that it was proper, something wrong if I didn’t smoke cigarettes; so I smoked a few cigarettes.  But fortunately I was so poor that I didn’t have money enough to buy them, so I [...]

Portland, OR: Pauling’s Teenage Years

“This activist loves Oregon more than he loves life.”
- Tom McCall
Portland, the largest city in Oregon, sits at the convergence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers on Oregon’s northern border. Known for its microbreweries, environmentalists, and growing nightlife, Portland is nationally recognized as an epicenter of West Coast progressive culture. However, a century [...]

William P. Murphy: Condon’s Other Nobel Prize Winner

Condon – as you are undoubtedly already aware if you are a regular reader of this blog – is a very small town in Gilliam County in North-Central Oregon. According to the 2000 census, the town’s population consisted of only 759 people, and in the early 1900s, when the Pauling family lived in Condon, the [...]

Herman Pauling’s Condon Pharmacy

Linus Pauling harbored many fond memories of his short time in the small town of Condon, Oregon. Of these memories, a number of them involve his father Herman and his drugstore.
Herman Pauling, born in 1876, began his career in pharmacy as the apprentice of an Oswego druggist. Before long, he was working his way through [...]

Happy (Almost) Birthday Linus Pauling!

Cross-posted at Ether Wave Propaganda
Linus Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon on February 28, 1901, meaning that this coming Saturday will mark the 108th anniversary of his birth. (He died on August 19, 1994 at the age of 93)
Over the years, one of our annual habits around here has been to reflect back upon [...]