FOREST GROVE -- At her 100th birthday party Sunday, Barbara Peck wrested the microphone from her 73-year-old son.
Don Peck tried to tie a neat bow on his mother's party at a Forest Grove senior center with his own send-off. Barbara Peck, as she's done since 1909, would have the last word."My children," she told a standing-room crowd gathered to see her gleam in a green dress, "ought to know that I would like to say something."
Barbara Peck turns 100 today after volunteering for 55 years at the Red Cross, helping found what's now Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District in Washington County and, along with her late husband, pledging hundreds of thousands of dollars to Oregon State University.
Her most visible feat -- at least for generations of Oregonians -- was saving the Pittock Mansion from an almost certain death sentence in 1964.
She never worked a day, yet she worked every day.
"I took part in every organization that I thought enriched the community," Peck told her friends and grandchildren, too many even for her family to count. "We don't have to be employed to be an important part of our community."
Peck lived in Beaverton just off Southwest Canyon Road and had never even visited Pittock Mansion when she read a newspaper story on it in the 1960s.
Georgiana and Henry Pittock, publisher of The Oregonian, built the home above West Burnside Road in 1914. But the 16,000-square-foot beauty was in disrepair. The Oregon Graduate Center for Study and Research, according to news reports, considered the estate for a campus in the early 1960s. Developers were certain to come calling, too.
That's when Peck went to work.
Her eyes and ears aren't what they used to be, but her memory is clear. She leans in close, then waves her hand as she retells the story. "The city decided they did not want it saved," Peck says. "They wanted to make the money from apartments."
As "Queen Barbara," she led the Delphian Society women's group to raise money to save the Pittock Mansion. The city fathers gave the women 30 days to raise $100,000 and forbade them from soliciting businesses. "But we had husbands," Peck says with a smile. Hers, Norton Peck, worked in the steel business.
She became co-chairwoman of the Pittock Acres Retention Committee, organized coffees and teas and collected quarters from paperboys.
News reports said their fundraising came up short of the $100,000 goal. But the City Council approved the purchase anyway.
Beaverton was still wheat fields when she became president of the council that created the new park district. Not everyone supported her work. "People said, 'All we have is open spaces,'" Sue Hall, her daughter, recalls. To which her mother replied: "That won't always be the case."
She was right.
Peck got a home economics degree from Oregon State University but couldn't get a teaching license. "They did not want young impressionable girls corrupted by married women," Don Peck says.
On Sunday, Barbara Peck finally got her teaching license from Tammy Bray, the dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University.
After Peck's party ended and about 25 miles to the east, the Pittock Mansion closed for the day. The mansion clings proudly to the hillside and looks onto the city from South Waterfront to the shipyards. On Sunday afternoon, the birds chirp and a rainbow arches on the horizon, connecting one side of the city to the other.
-- Ryan Frank; ryanfrank@news.oregonian.com