If you've lived in Clark County for a while, you know that the area is associated with many famous names. Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant rode through Fourth Plain on horseback. George C. Marshall commanded Vancouver Barracks before developing the plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. His DB Cooper, a skyjacker, probably stopped by as well. Some of his loot was found near Frenchman's Bar.
Here are six other famous names associated with Vancouver and Clark County. Some of them you may not be aware of.
Sam Elliott
Before Sam Elliott brought his unique voice and chiseled good looks to the film industry, he was on stage at Clark University. In a 2017 interview with Columbia's Scott Hewitt, Elliott said he moved to Portland with his parents as a teenager and attended Clark University after graduating from David Douglas High School.
“I thought it was a great school. My memory is pretty clear. I just loved it,” Elliott said. “The theater club there was great. But I wanted to be a movie actor. I grew up in Sacramento (California) and saw too many movies, too many movie theaters. I didn't want to do stage work. I wanted film.”
So, after graduating from Clark University in 1965, he went to Hollywood and landed his first movie role in 1967. According to entertainment website IMDB.com, Elliott has produced more than 100 films and television shows, often playing cowboy roles and doing voice work. . In 2019, he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the remake of A Star Is Born. Elliott currently lends his voice to the Fox animated series “The Family Guy” and has other projects in the works.
Tonya Harding
Tonya Harding grew up in Oregon and used to skate at Clackamas Town Center when there was an ice rink in the middle of the food court. Despite her tough upbringing, she was very good. She won her first of her two U.S. Women's Figure Skating Championships in 1991 and became the first U.S. woman to successfully complete a triple axel in competition in the same year. She represented the United States at the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics.
But her reputation was forever tarnished in 1994 when her ex-husband hired a team of thugs to break the right knee of America's biggest rival, Nancy Kerrigan. Harding was never criminally charged for the assault, but she was later stripped of her title and banned from U.S. figure skating.
She returned to Portland and settled in Clark County, where she made headlines for several years with stories of drunken brawls, car accidents, and late rent payments. She pursues a career in professional boxing and reality TV, and is sometimes seen doing her side hustle.
In recent years, she has lived a much quieter life. She remarried in 2010 and had a son with her second husband the following year. Locals spotted her skating at Mountain View Ice Arena in east Vancouver. Public records show she and her family live on a rural property near Yacolt.
Willie Nelson
If you're a longtime Columbia reader, you've probably read this story several times, but country music legend Willie Nelson, 90, has a long journey through Vancouver's KVAN-AM radio studios. It continued.
In a 1997 article by Dave Jewett in the Columbia newspaper, Nelson was struggling to make a living with small singing and radio jobs in Fort Worth, Texas, so he decided to try his luck elsewhere. His mother in Portland sent money for Willie, his wife and young daughter to fly there. (Her second daughter was born at Vancouver Memorial Hospital on January 10, 1957, in the middle of a snowstorm.)
“Things started to look up for me,” Nelson wrote in his autobiography. “I got a good job as a disc jockey in Vancouver. My show was all country music from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. In that time slot I was up against Arthur Godfrey. , started getting good reviews. I was a very successful disc jockey in Vancouver. There were radio personalities like Shortly the Hired Hand and Cactus Ken. I was Wee Willie Nelson.
“In the fall of that year, I made my first record,” he writes. “We cut it using radio station equipment. Side A was “No Place for Me,'' written by W. Nelson, produced by W. Nelson, and performed by the W. Nelson Band for Willie Nelson Records. was. ”
Nelson, 24, was happy with his career in Vancouver, but the visitors quickly changed everything. Songwriter and agent Mae Axton was in the Northwest promoting singer Hank Snow's tour. She stopped by KVAN, where she was interviewed by Nelson. Axton was famous for writing “Heartbreak Hotel'' for Elvis Presley, so after her broadcast, Nelson asked her for career advice.
According to Nelson's autobiography, “She told me to quit Dodge.” So he went to his boss's office and asked for a $100 a week raise. “I said, 'Pay me what I'm worth or I'll go hiking.'
“He told me not to hit my butt with the doorknob when I went out.”
Nelson went first to Texas and then to Nashville, Tennessee, where he became a star. In 2007, the country music legend returned to perform live at his fair in Clark County.
bill gates and paul allen
Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen were software geeks long before their seminal product, Microsoft Windows, changed the world. In 1973, they worked at the Bonneville Power Administration's Ross Complex in Hazel Dell. According to a 2018 Columbia article, they were hired for $165 a week to monitor the northwest power grid at BPA's Real-Time Operations Dispatch and Scheduling System (RODS), Dittmer Control Center. Worked on early computerized systems that were in use.
Bonneville had hired another company, TRW, to build the system. Allen and Gates helped him debug the program that would become RODS while he worked at TRW.
Allen recalled in his memoirs: “Bill and I got into his orange 1967 Mustang convertible and headed south to Vancouver, Washington, a strip mall, car wash, and vintage A&W root beer drive-in stand. We became regulars.''
In a post on BPA's Facebook page, Jack Leach, a former network specialist at the company, recalled his memories of Gates and Allen's time at the plant.
“They (TRW) learned of two men in the Seattle area who had developed a reputation as 'go-getters' around the University of Washington Computer Center, where they often hung out to get free computer time. . TRW didn't know they were teenagers when they contacted them, but they interviewed them and liked what they saw, giving them a short-term offer to come to Vancouver and work on the Dittmar project. I offered him a job,” Leach wrote.
“As you can imagine, we (the “computer experts” already working at Dittmar) were somewhat skeptical and amused by the arrival of these young people, but we were surprised to find out what they were. Word quickly spread that he knew what he was doing. ”
Allen and Gates began working on the RODS project in January 1973 and remained on the debug team until school started in the fall.
According to another biography, “Gates: How the Microsoft Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself America's Richest Man,” Gates and Allen owned the Brandywine Apartments, more recently known as the Green Tree Apartments. (6405 NE Hazel Dell Ave.). With my third roommate, Rick Weiland.
Gates later recalled that the men “were having a contest to see who could stay in the building for three or four days in a row.” Some sane people say, “Go home and take a bath.'' We were just feverishly writing code. ”
Apparently they took a few days off. That summer, Gates broke his leg while water skiing on Lacamas Lake.
monica lewinsky
Monica Lewinsky was a young woman who had a sexual relationship with an older, more powerful, married man. However, this man did not work in the White House. He worked at the Vancouver College of Art.
Theater technician Andy Breiler met Lewinsky in the late 1980s when they were students at the high school in Beverly Hills, Calif., where she worked. From September 1993 to June 1995, Lewinsky attended Lewis & Clark College in Portland and babysat for the Breilers. Her former classmates later said Lewinsky openly talked about her affair with a married man, but it didn't come to light until Lewinsky became a White House intern in the Clinton administration. .
As the world now knows, Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton had multiple sexual encounters during an internship in 1995-1996, including one that was later revealed in Lewinsky's blue dress. This includes one that resulted in the discovery of the president's DNA. Mr. Clinton was impeached. The Senate acquitted him.
Ms. Bleiler later confessed to having a five-year sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, but said the relationship did not end until 1997, when she finished her White House internship. By that time, so was his career with Vancouver Public Schools.
