Former Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts looks back over her career, as she accepts civic award

In 1990, Barbara Roberts became the first woman elected governor of Oregon. She began her political career as a member of the Parkrose school board and then the board of Mount Hood Community College. She was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1980 and was chosen by her colleagues to be the House majority leader two years later. Two years after that, she became Oregon’s secretary of state, before going on to the top office. We spoke to Roberts in front of an audience at the Civics Learning Project’s Legal Citizen of the Year award ceremony.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 1990, Barbara Roberts made history as the first woman elected governor of Oregon. It was the culmination of a seemingly rocket-propelled climb up the state’s political ladder. After beginning her electoral career as a member of the Parkrose School Board and the Mt. Hood Community College Board, she was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1980. Two years later, she was chosen by her colleagues to be the House majority leader. Two years after that, she was elected to statewide office, Oregon Secretary of State. And then after one-and-a-half terms, she was Oregon’s chief executive.

Throughout her career, Barbara Roberts focused on issues that sound like they could be ripped from today’s headlines: access to health care, equity in education, and affordable housing. We talked to Oregon governor Barbara Roberts last week at the Civics Learning Project’s Legal Citizen of the Year event presented by Underdog Law Office, with a number of civically engaged high schoolers in the audience.

Miller [interviewing Roberts]: I was looking back at your autobiography recently, and you start one of your chapters with this sentence with an exclamation point: “I loved high school!” It’s not something that a lot of people write or experience. What did you love about it?

Barbara Roberts: I think I loved most of all in high school that I saw a world beyond high school.

Miller: That’s not a ringing endorsement for the institution of high school.

Roberts: But I began to understand that I was experiencing things in the classroom. I worked in the principal’s office a couple of terms when I was a senior, and I began to talk to people on the phone that I’ve never talked to before, business owners and political leaders in my little community. I grew up in Yamhill County in a very big town called Sheridan. And so I was seeing new kinds of people, talking to new kinds of people, and I had classmates who were beginning to plan their life. And there was something about being in an atmosphere where a whole class of seniors were starting to think about their life past high school. I spent a lot of time talking to my classmates about what they were going to do, what they planned to do.

Generally, in today’s world, if someone is a senior in high school, they already know what they plan to do. They have already picked college, they may be going to another country or another state. And that was not the way it was. People in my high school, as a senior in my class, were planning for moving to Portland and getting a job. They were planning a wedding.

Miller: Didn’t you get married in December of your senior year of high school?

Roberts: I did.

Miller: You didn’t just have to plan it, you did it.

Roberts: I just didn’t talk about it, but I did it.

I think the thing that excited me about that year was just watching all these young people figure out what they were gonna do. By today’s standards, there was not a lot of wisdom in some of the choices they made. And I can certainly look back and say that’s true. But it was still fun to watch. It was fun to talk to people who were thinking about things they never thought about. Moving to another state was a very big deal, moving out of their parents’ home was an even bigger deal. And so it was at that time I began to have the feeling as a high school senior that there was something on the other side. I think that’s the thing that I liked, that’s what excited me.

Miller: I wanna hear more about those years, but I think we have a question from one of the students in our audience.

Audience Member: Good evening Governor Roberts, my name is Alexandra Coltman, and I’m a senior from Lincoln High School participating in mock trial. So my question to you is how did your education shape you as a person and inform your advocacy for educational rights?

Roberts: Well, it’s very hard to say this in this room. I do not have a college degree. I got all my education in little bits and pieces. Some of it in colleges, some of it in the classroom where I was the teacher and not the student. I taught at Harvard University for five years. And I taught for four years at Portland State University.

I kept looking for places to learn. I was a mom for a long time with two children, divorced with no child support. And I kept finding ways to get back in the classroom, or something equivalent. My 10 years on the Parkrose School Board was something equivalent. I learned so much about education in that 10 years, I can’t tell you. And to walk into a community college board and start hearing people talking about the varieties of things that are available to students in that institution, things I’d never heard of before, things I didn’t know anything about. But it’s amazing how much expertise you can get sitting on a school board, listening to a faculty member (talk on and on), and have that faculty member bring students from their classroom in front of the school board.

I learned more in front of my school boards than I probably did in most of my classrooms. So that was another place that I could educate. And you weren’t thinking of me being an educator. I was a school board member.

Miller: You prefaced what you just said there by saying that it’s a hard thing to say in front of this audience, of lawyers and judges and elected officials. After everything you’ve accomplished in your life, your resume is way longer than most elected officials’ resumes, let alone people who weren’t the chief executive of a state. It’s still hard to say, “I didn’t get a college degree”?

Roberts: Yes. It’s the one thing I look back on my life, and if I had done things differently… I helped put a husband through college, worked well for him. And I married a college professor! I tried every route in! And I spent time in classrooms. But I never was in a position that I could free myself up. I had a handicapped child, I had another child besides that, I had a very busy life which got busier and busier. And I never could seem to get myself free to give myself the thing I wanted, which was a full time educational opportunity.

Miller: You said that what was exciting about high school was seeing all these other people and seeing their dreams for their lives. But what was your dream? When you were 18, what did you see for yourself?

Roberts: When I was 18, I married in my senior year. My new husband was a member of the United States Air Force. And he came home on leave, and we married during the Christmas holiday. Very romantic, but not probably very wise.

And so for the next three years after I finished high school, I had a different kind of learning experience. I lived in Texas for three years. It wasn’t my dream. But I learned a lot about people from other cultures, people from other kinds of communities, from other kinds of backgrounds. And so I spent three years in Texas. I had two children. I returned home to Oregon, and that was part of my dream.

Miller: Returning home?

Roberts: Returning home to Oregon. I really love the state, and I really missed the people and the communities that I knew in Oregon. And coming back home to Oregon really meant a great deal to me. I tell this funny story sometimes, it’s not really humorous. But I loved Oregon and I didn’t quite understand why I loved it so much. I found out when I was an adult that my family came to the state on the Oregon Trail. I was a pioneer family. And it became very important to me as I grew older after I found out that my family had made the sacrifice they made to come to the state on the Oregon Trail. And I just loved every part of the state. The older I got, the more I love other parts of the state. And it’s always been that way for me, it still is.

And so I think something about that coming home, for me, was really a coming home. It wasn’t just to my community or just back to where I used to live. As I found out over the years, it’s because my heritage was here.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name? What’s your question?

Audience Member: My name is Adelaide Bracewell-Stokes, I’m a senior at Cleveland High School. I participated in the We The People competition. The question I have for you Governor Roberts is, as the first woman to hold many positions of power, what women were inspiring to you?

Roberts: Well, there were a lot of them, a few of them in this room right now. But one of the things that happened in that period of history was that the world, at least the United States part of the world, was changing for women dramatically. At that time, women were being elected to office. Women were becoming business owners, they weren’t the nurse in every operating room, they were the doctor in many. And I was lucky enough to be here and participate in not only watching that and reading that and listening to women on television. I can remember the first few times I saw a woman leader from Washington DC on television. It was just unheard of. And I think that being a woman, with desires to accomplish something in my life and wanting to try new things, I couldn’t have been alive in a more interesting time in history for the women of this country, and eventually other countries.

So I think if I had to say what inspired me, it was timing. I was at the right place at the right time. And I was being inspired by women who were trying things women had never done in this country. And I got to watch them. I got to learn from them. Some of them were my mentors, and eventually I was a mentor to some of them.

Miller: Let’s take another question.

Audience Member: Hi, Governor Roberts. My name is Ezra Greenhill, I’m a senior at Cleveland High School and a student mentor on constitution team. And I’d like to know what types of reactions did you face when you had the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus perform at your 1984 inauguration?

Roberts: Well, you’ve picked one of my favorite subjects. Maybe it was one of the things that happened to me that affected my life and my thinking, was when I began to do what I just described, watching women do things they’ve never done before, going public with ideas they’ve never spoken aloud before, trying new ways of earning a living. It was all around me. And at the same time that change was happening in our culture, visibly and openly, the gay community began to be open and visible, seen and heard.

And so the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus here in the Portland area was one of those examples. It wasn’t that they were just singing with five guys in a bar. They formed this professional chorus. And we knew when we went to a concert that we were looking at gay men singing. Lots of gay men singing. And professionally and personally, that became one of my issues of concern and leadership. I can’t tell you how many Gay Men’s Chorus concerts I’ve heard, it’s probably embarrassing.

Miller: Why though? Why was it that this became a professional focus, gay rights?

Roberts: It was about equality. It was about fairness about everybody getting their chance to do what they want to do, and could do. Somebody said to me today about his husband, he described their wedding to me, after Oregon had a law that permitted gays and lesbians to marry. My late husband, Frank Roberts, was one of the leaders on that law. And I got to tag along and help make it the law of the state of Oregon. It just became so important to me. And I think it was, more than the women’s movement, more than other things I did, it was one of those places where I stood up, made myself heard, and worked to give people equality. It’s stayed with me every day since, it’s there now.

And after I had a child with a serious disability, I went to the legislature as an unpaid part-time lobbyist, and we got the first law passed in the United States of America that required special education for kids other than those who are blind and deaf. I told the legislators when I went down there with no skills to lobby but a heart full of readiness, I told them “We have had a deaf school in this state for children who don’t hear for 100 years. We have had a school for the blind children in our state for almost 100 years. And my child, who is autistic, can’t even go to the first grade in my local school district. That is not right.” When we got that law passed and the governor signed it. I found that I had a potentially new aim in life. I wanted to be where I could make laws, change laws, and change a culture, because I had stepped forward and made my voice heard.

Miller: I have to say with respect, I don’t believe that you had no skills as a lobbyist at that time. That seems impossible to believe.

Roberts: We all think of a lobbyist sort of talking too much. I had that.

Miller: Your time in state government preceded social media, which has become such a dominant force in so many aspects of our life, including political life. So that’s a change between the ‘80s and ‘90s, and now. What do you think has not changed? When you look at the negotiations, the brawls, the conversations of politics itself, what do you think is the same?

Roberts: Unfortunately, not how it’s done, but what is done… the hatred is the same. The anger is the same, worse right now I think. And people’s willingness to leave others behind, I don’t think that’s changed so much. It’s not about can I get famous? Can I get wealthy? It’s about who are you gonna help on the way? I don’t think that’s changed nearly enough. When I look at our culture, so many technical things have changed. But so much has not changed. And I think it’s going downhill right now.

I am so afraid for my country. I am so afraid for my culture. I’m so afraid for the future. I don’t feel the kind of hope that I once felt about my country, and about my people in this country.

Miller: When you say my people, who do you mean?

Roberts: Citizens in Oregon, citizens in New York, citizens in Alabama. Every place in the country.

Audience Member: Good evening Governor Roberts, My name is Julian Bosley. I’m a senior at Grant High School and a member of the school’s constitution team. And my question for you tonight is what are two skills that you would consider essential for public service?

Roberts: Ethics and honesty are one. That’s a single thing. I think learning to be a good listener. Learning how to be an analytical listener, a respectful listener, a listener who is a student at listening. I think political people and public service, that’s a critical part of their being successful, both successful in what they accomplish, and successful in what they can do for others, is learning to listen.

Miller: How did you learn to listen?

Roberts: Maybe it was part of not spending enough time in classrooms. And because I spent less time than I should have and would like to have spent in classrooms, listening became a tool for me.

Miller: Because you felt you were afraid of being behind?

Roberts: I looked for ways to learn. And I listened to people who were intelligent and thoughtful and kind and giving. I learned so much from other people. But you can’t learn if you’re not listening. We tend to speak before somebody finishes the sentence. I heard somebody say to someone here tonight “where did you grow up?” And before the person could say where they grew up, the person who had asked the question was already talking about something else. How can you learn that way?

Remember about the three years I spent in Texas? What I learned was how different cultures are from place to place. I think that’s the most important thing I learned there, people are different because their culture is different, because they care about different things or they don’t care about different things. And for me, I think my learning to listen, a good listener, a thoughtful listener, respectful listener, was a great part of my personal education.

Miller: You came of age politically in the decades when Oregon was seen as a kind of policy pioneer. the Bottle Bill, the Beach Bill, land use planning, eventually Death With Dignity which you were a big champion of. Looking back now, what do you think animated Oregon in that time?

Roberts: I think part of it was, there were some people in those times who spoke out about things that were not generally part of the average discussion. If you look at our environmental laws during that time, we cut down a lot of trees and we were a forestry state and that was fine if you knew that you had to replant. And I think one of the things that happened in that period is there were some leaders who spoke on new subjects that we hadn’t listened to before, whether it was environmental, civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights, they were talking about things that had not previously been part of our conversations.

We began to have a more diverse population in Oregon during that time. You saw more African Americans, you saw more Asians, you saw all kinds of people, much different than Oregon had basically been as an all-white state. And we talked about law tonight. I think we had some of the most brilliant lawyers during that period of time that the state had ever had. And they raised questions and legal issues in ways we’ve never heard them before. And I think we were very fortunate as a state to have that.

Pride is so dangerous, but one of my proudest things I’ve done in my life was during my governorship, I appointed 54 judges in one term. And there were women in that list. There were gays and lesbians in that list. There were People of Color in that list. There was talent, an incredible thoughtfulness in the way they worked and lived and ruled. I can’t tell you how proud I am of that opportunity.

Miller: Let’s take another question from one of the students in our audience. What’s your name? And what’s your question?

Audience Member: Good evening, my name is Tobias Schwab, I am a junior from Lincoln High School participating in mock trial. My question for you is are there any particular initiatives or legislation from your time in office where you believe the effects can still be seen today?

Roberts: I think if I answered this question accurately, I would say that some of the legislation I worked on not as governor, but as a citizen, as a spouse working with a talented legislator, working with groups of people who were working on big issues at that time, like the women’s movement, I think some of the biggest, most important pieces of legislation I worked on that were successful came more from those other places than they came from my leadership as a governor.

Miller: One of the things that happened, in the same election that put you into the governor’s office was Oregonians passed the first property tax limit, Measure 5. In your time as governor, you tried repeatedly to reform the tax system, including introducing a sales tax, you were not alone and not being able to do that. Here we are in 2024 with basically the same tax system, tons of volatility in revenue, a record setting kicker. If you were going to champion an overhaul of Oregon revenue now, what would you want to see?

Roberts: I spent so much time as governor trying to fix our tax structure in Oregon, trying to get people to look with a more open mind at our tax structure. If someone said “sales tax” in Oregon back then, they might be shot. There were things that were just not acceptable even to talk about. We had, I think, too little knowledge among legislators at that time about how the tax structure could work, did work, and might work. And people were opinionated without factual knowledge. If you looked at how much money a given tax structure would raise, that’s one of the questions you ask. Will it raise enough money to fund our schools and build our highways? You gotta know if it’s enough to do the job.

And who will pay that tax? You have to know that. Will it be all working class people? Will it be our millionaires? Will it be businesses? Who’s gonna pay? You gotta know how that works, or you can’t build a fair tax structure. It’s almost like Tinker toys, you remember that? You probably don’t remember that, you’re so young. But when you build something structurally and add something and take something away, the tax structure is like that. You have to know the facts, you have to know the factors. And then you have to figure out how to explain it.

And we did that. We toured the state showing people what different options did. So did we explain poorly? Were our citizens not wise enough to understand? Had we no good ideas to present?

Miller: Do you have answers to these questions?

Roberts: Yes, I do. I think the thing is, when we’re looking at civic education, we have to teach our students the basics of tax structure. We were talking to people who no one had ever talked to them about any of the technical part of building a tax structure. And it wasn’t their fault they didn’t have that knowledge. Was it the school’s fault? Was it the court’s fault? Whose fault was it that our citizenry literally did not have the wherewithal to help us build that conversation? I can’t tell you how many times I repeated a sentence that I thought was simple. But I’d been working on taxes by then and tax structure for maybe 15 years. My audience hadn’t. It wasn’t their fault.

We had failed to teach part of citizenry to our citizens. And that’s, how do you fund government? How do you fund communities? How do you fund services? And I think until we can teach our population, through grade school and high school - there are opportunities all the time. They start building a new street in your neighborhood, take the kids down there and show them how a street is built. And then have someone tell them how much it costs to build a mile of that street. I just think there are so many opportunities to teach the practicality of taxes. And we don’t do it.

Miller: When you were governor as a Democrat, Republicans held majorities in the State House. That’s not the case now, Democrats have had a lock on almost every statewide office for years in both legislative chambers. The last few legislative sessions have led to record breaking Republican walkouts. What’s gone through your mind in recent years when you’ve seen those walkouts?

Roberts: I wanna be careful how I answer this. I don’t want to put on my partisan hat.

I don’t understand why anyone would go through an election, raise the money, put out the brochures, walk door to door, give speeches, do all the things you have to do to get in office, and then get there and not participate. I’ll be damned if I get that.

Miller: I feel like I understand it. The way I understand it is that Republicans have said “we can’t affect policy changes, Democrats won’t listen to us enough, and the only lever we have is to withdraw the quorum and walk out as a way to thwart Democratic policies.” To me, it’s a rational political decision, if you see no other way to exercise power. What I wonder about that though, almost philosophically, but I’d love to get your take on it, is what you think the majority – in this case a Democratic majority but it needn’t be that, in other states it’s not – but what a majority owes the minority?

Because maybe without saying but I’ll say it anyway, that Democrats respond “Oregonians, a majority of them, put us into office saying we want you to enact these policies.” They say this is the way democracy works and elections have consequences. What do you think a majority owes to the minority in our society?

Roberts: Well, the first thing the majority owes to the minority is to stop, look, and listen, so to speak. And say “Wait a minute, are we treating our minority party fairly? Are we being good landlords? Are we giving them the space they need, the voice they need, the place they need, the opportunity they need to share their ideas?” I think you absolutely have to be able to look at yourself first and say “are we being fair with the partisanship issue?”

I remember when everybody in Salem in the legislature, in every statewide office, as you mentioned, were all Republicans. I don’t remember ever seeing a walkout on the part of the minority party at that time.

Miller: There were walkouts in Oregon history, but nothing like what we’ve seen in recent years.

Roberts: We did, we left the bar early. Sometimes you had your best caucuses while you were having a cocktail. You left the building and you were so frustrated when you were in the minority because you couldn’t get anything done. And you did your best work sometimes with a group of people over a beer. And I don’t think that’s really a practical way to run government.

But I think you do have to evaluate yourself first. And if you can look at yourself as the majority party, and say that you’re being fair and equal and giving people a voice, then there’s no excuse for anyone to walk out of a meeting. None.

Miller: How, at this point, have you come to think about policy making or lawmaking by voters? I’m thinking specifically about a very Oregon, very west coast world of citizen initiatives. It seems almost explicitly anti-democratic to say that you’re not for them. But I’ve also gotten the sense talking to many lawmakers over the years that a lot of lawmakers or governors think “leave complicated policy making to us, we’re the professionals, you’re just gonna muck things up.” They rarely say that in such explicit terms, but sometimes it seems like they’re getting close. How do you view citizen initiatives now?

Roberts: Well, Oregon has had an initiative petition system longer than any state in the nation. I believe in citizen’s voice. And I’ve seldom ever seen an initiative petition that started in somebody’s living room without any professional help on the way to the ballot. You’ve always got somebody, their brother’s a lawyer and he’ll help them draft it. You always have people there who will help you deal with the technicality of that initiative. And it doesn’t mean every initiative is good. It doesn’t mean every initiative should pass. But our citizens in this state have done a damn good job of making a law.

Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name? And what’s your question?

Audience Member: Hi, I’m Hildi Harrington from Lincoln High School. And my question was, as you grew up in a small town, how did that influence your political beliefs? And how did those change throughout your life?

Roberts: Well, I think one of the things that was good about growing up in a small town is that you knew all kinds of people. You knew your grocer and you knew the guy who pumped your gas at the service station and you knew the people down at the corner that you helped mow their lawn. You just have such close contact with people. And I think that’s a good thing, I think it’s good to know different kind of people and learn about different kind of people.

But the other side of that coin is there are things that just aren’t available. I never heard a symphony play. And it certainly wasn’t my high school band. There were so many things I never experienced either academically because they weren’t available, or because my community didn’t have them. There was no swimming pool in my town. I still can’t swim. That may not sound important. But boy would I like to be able to do that for exercise. There’s the good of a small town, and there’s the shortcomings of a small town.

But the most important thing I ever learned in a small town was people are always watching. And that’s not necessarily bad! When you’re a teenager, you could stand a few more eyes on your behavior. And as you get older, watching a senior citizen down the street when you could go there and help them unload their groceries out of the car. You always say, “may I help you?”

Miller: You were only 59 when you left office as governor. I had to do some math here, that’s about five years younger than the average age of the US Senate right now. The two major parties for president, unless something very surprising happens, are gonna be 77 and 81.

There’s a word that I had never heard before recent years, now I hear it all the time, gerontocracy, a form of rule where leaders are significantly older than the general population. That is much less so in Oregon, but certainly at the federal level, it is essentially what we are living under right now. As somebody who is now older yourself, how do you view both the aging of American leadership and the debate about it?

Roberts: Well, I live in a senior facility in Lake Oswego. There’s more brain power in that building than any place I’ve ever been. And more experience as well.

I do not worry about an aging leadership. I don’t want all my leadership to be in their eighties or nineties. But I want some of it to be there. I am less worried about whether you stumble on a stair coming off a plane, much less worried about that than if you’re going to the legislature and you can’t have a civil conversation with me about basic issues that are required to be a legislator. I think the bottom line is age is a piece of who you are. It’s not everything you are. Whether it’s a young person with talent and skills, and who went to this program and learned wonderful things, or a senior citizen who has lived a full life, had a good education, and been a person of service for that life.

I don’t think age is the factor. It’s the person. And you better know something about them if you’re going to vote for them, rather than vote just on the age issue. Either way, young or old, that’s not the factor that should decide who you vote for.

Miller: This is less about aging politicians and maybe just a broader question about aging, which we should all be so lucky to say that we are  aging, that we are still going. How do you think about staying curious, staying engaged, not letting your experience in life make you think that everything you’re gonna experience now is analogous to what you’ve already experienced? I asked this even for myself, I’m approaching 50 now, and I can just see the pathways in my brain getting settled in certain ways. It’s something that scares me. I want to stay engaged with the world.

Is this something that you have thought about as you’ve gotten older, is how to still stay open to new things, and to surprise?

Roberts: I mentioned living in a senior citizen facility. There are 250 seniors in my building. Once a month, we do a speech called Know Your Neighbor. Someone who lives there presents a speech about their life. Now they can tell you how many kids they’ve got and how many times they’ve been married and what they did for a living. But that’s never the speech you hear.

Yesterday, I listened to a man who was a CIA agent for many, many years in his life. He learned to speak Czech because they kept dropping him off over there with nobody to support him, nobody to help him, nobody to save him. But at that time in history, they had reasons to need to have somebody there to look. Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from someone who’s actually done it?

For me, I try to keep healthy. If your health is as good as you can make it, then likely your mind will be more than it would have been otherwise. So you gotta take care of yourself. You’ve got to be willing to listen to stuff you’ve never heard before. Oh God, some of it’s awful. But if you shut your mind and don’t get any expansion there, you never go to the symphony because you hate the symphony, you never go to movies because you hate movies, you hate football so you don’t go to the football game, pretty soon you have a whole list of things you don’t do. And you just can’t do that. You got to sit down with your brother-in-law who loves football and watch a damn game. You gotta keep being willing to go and do the things you don’t necessarily love. But somebody you love loves them.

And you got to be sure that you keep looking for somebody to love. It doesn’t have to be a wife or a spouse or a girlfriend or a boyfriend. It could be that little kid down the block whose dad works two jobs. It could be that little old lady who can’t get her groceries in the house. There’s so many people who need that exchange of affection. And we can all do that. But it does keep your brain healthy. It does, I swear to you, it does. We have to work at staying as young as we can, as smart as we can, as wise as we can and as healthy as we can. I’m 87 years old, and I’m up here doing this!

Miller: Governor Roberts, thank you very much.

That was former Oregon governor Barbara Roberts, in conversation last week at the Sentinel Hotel.

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