Let me say this about that

April 6, 2001

GLENN E. (PAT) RANDALL of Springfield added Labor's Hall of Fame to his list of achievements when the sponsoring Northwest Oregon Labor Retirees Council cloaked him with membership in the honorary chamber.

Randall, now 74, was the administrative secretary-treasurer of the Oregon AFL-CIO in Salem from 1967 until 1981. Before that he was financial secretary and business agent of Carpenters Local 1273, serving the Eugene-Springfield area and the rest of Lane County.

Randall left the state labor federation post upon losing his bid for re-election by fewer than a thousand votes at the 1981 convention in Springfield. At a testimonial dinner in his honor in December of that year, Randall was given credit for having played a major lobbying role toward the establishment by the 1977 Oregon Legislature of the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Some 200 well-wishers from labor, management, academia and government, including Democratic and Republican state officials, attended the testimonial event in Eugene.

"I THINK ONE of the lasting benefits of Pat Randall's leadership will be in the establishment of LERC," said one of the testimonial event's speakers, Ed Czarnecki of Washington, D.C., assistant director of the national AFL-CIO's Department of Education. The AFL-CIO official graded LERC as "one of the finest labor education programs in the United States."

Czarnecki's tribute was echoed by the president of the U of O, Paul Olum, and LERC's director, Dr. Emory Via, who also praised Randall for his chairmanship of the LERC labor advisory committee. The current UO president, Dave Frohnmayer, attended the testimonial as the state attorney general.

In addition to his lobbying work for LERC, Randall was also saluted for his lobbying on behalf of higher benefits for injured and unemployed workers and for widows and children of workers killed on the job.

"I'VE SEEN HIM fight for everything working men and women hold dear," said another testimonial speaker, Grattan Kerans, a Eugene Democrat who served in both the House and Senate at Salem.

After leaving the state labor federation, Randall served on the Oregon Employment Appeals Board by appointment of Governor Vic Atiyeh. That panel reviews decisions by hearings officers in contested unemployment insurance claims cases.

A milestone Randall reached in the 20 years since his retirement from the AFL-CIO was to receive a 50-year membership card in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC).

HE JOINED the UBC affiliate, the Lumber and Sawmill Workers, which is now the Western Council of Industrial Workers, while working in Lane County sawmills and plywood mills as a young man. He transferred into a UBC construction local, #1273, upon taking a job to help build the Weyerhaeuser mill in Springfield.

Randall's life illustrates the axiom about the acorn not falling far from the tree. He was born in Lane County and still lives there. Life for him began Dec. 10, 1926 in McGlynn, a logging camp he said has disappeared from the maps of Oregon. His father, who'd moved to Oregon from Kansas, worked as a logger. The nickname "Pat" was pinned on him as a baby by his father, making his son a namesake of a pal back in the Sunflower State.

"I grew up in logging camps and sawmill towns," Randall told the NW Labor Press. He graduated from Oakridge High School and attended the University of Oregon for a year, with the intent of becoming a lawyer, before deciding to pursue a career in the carpentry trade.

RANDALL AND HIS WIFE, the former Loretta Osborne, were married in 1946. They have two daughters and a son, and four grandchildren.

For the past 15 years, Pat and Loretta have spent most of their winters at Port Isabel on the southernmost point of Texas. In addition to fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, the Randalls enjoy driving across the Texas border into Mexico. "We have a lot of friends in a little Mexican border town," said Randall. To better converse with them, Randall has been taking Spanish language classes at Lane County Community College. His teacher is Harland Wilhelms, an 84-year-old retired union printer who'd worked at the Eugene Register-Guard.

In addition to studying Spanish, Randall keeps busy tending to his oversized Springfield yard and doing maintenance work on rental houses he and Loretta own. Only recently, he climbed and cut down, section by section, an 85-foot-tall tree that needed to be removed from his yard.

To all his old friends and colleagues in the labor movement, Randall sends his best regards.