by Diane Dietz of The Register Guard
New census figures shed some light on why Eugene is, well, so Eugene.
They help explain why every July for three decades the town’s otherwise responsible citizenry – executives, probation officers, ex-state lawmakers – cast off their suits, ties, pumps and hose for a weekend of revelry at the Oregon Country Fair.
The census suggests why a Eugene garbage hauler would refer to Zen meditation in its advertising, why the town has so many nurseries it takes a book to list them all and why the City Council takes so long to make a decision.
Are you ready?
Eugene is run – some might say overrun – by baby boomers.
Baby boomers are ruling the roost in Eugene households: One-quarter of the city’s families are headed by people ages 45 to 54, the census shows.
Elsewhere, boomer influence is waning slightly.
Nationally, the death rate has outpaced the immigration rate in the boomer age range, so – for the first time – the gargantuan generation is shrinking, according to a Census Bureau report.
In Oregon, the prevalent family type is younger than in Eugene. A slightly larger share of families statewide are headed by householders ages 34 to 45.
In Springfield and Creswell, the difference is marked. More householders fall into the 34-to-45 group, and close on their heels are families headed by 25- to 34-year-olds.
But Eugene is where the baby boomers come, and Eugene is where they’re making their mark.
“That boomer group is the largest arbiter or creator of the current culture,” said David Funk, the creative director of the regional marketing firm Funk & Associates in Eugene. “It’s no accident why things like the Country Fair and the Saturday Market are successful here.”
The University Factor
The reasons Eugene has an extra-large population of baby boomers probably is related to the University of Oregon, say the marketers and sociologists who make a living studying the behaviors and attitudes of various demographic groups.
Boomers came to Eugene as young men and women in the pioneering years of the environmental movement. They compared what they saw with what they knew back home, said Funk, who has studied Eugene for three decades.
To a young Gary Trendler, who came to Eugene for college, the drinking water in his hometown outside Chicago tasted like a chemical dump, compared with the pristine cupfuls he drew from his tap here.
Before Trendler finished school, he hooked up with a woman, Meg, who he met in a magic realism literature class. They spent the next seven years – in rental houses around Eugene – trying to improve on American life.
They read Mother Earth News, cooked everything they ate on a woodstove and rode bicycles as a political act.
They made it to the Oregon Country Fair most years. “It was a really free time to figure out who we were and where we wanted to go,” Meg Trendler said.
Then, one day they knew:
“I looked around, and I said, ‘I want to have kids and put them on bicycles and take them to these parks and send them to these schools,’ “ Gary Trendler said.
The pair set to work – she in retail, he in radio – bought a Craftsman-style house in the Friendly Street neighborhood and raised two children, a girl and a boy. Today, Gary is 49 and Meg is 48.
Under the pressure of family, bicycles gave way to a station wagon, which gave way to a Nissan Quest, which could be considered – to Meg’s chagrin – a sport utility vehicle.
With boomers, so it goes.
Educated and Active
These baby boom families give Eugene its distinctive politics, and that goes beyond the city’s long-enduring liberal bent, according to marketing studies that reveal consumer values and lifestyles.
“What you have is a very educated community,” Funk said. “There are smart people on both sides of the political fence.”
Eugene enjoys an active – some would say hyperactive – body politic, thanks to the preponderance of baby boomers. Seven of the eight Eugene city councilors and the majority of Eugene School Board members fall in the 45-to-54 range.
Because of the boomers, Eugene has a larger-than-average demographic of people willing to study the issues and then organize when they see a need, according to the ongoing values and lifestyles study by SRI Consulting Business Intelligence based in Menlo Park, Calif.
“If they aren’t writing to their congressmen or the editor, they’re attending public meetings,” said SRI consultant Keith Schloemer.
“They tend to be active because they feel they should be,” he said. “They use the words ‘should’ and ‘ought’ more than other portions of the population.”
A larger than average share of the baby boom population has a voracious hunger for information, Schloemer said. They don’t make a decision without combing the Internet. They’re constantly forming and reforming their ideas about how things work.
“They’d say, ‘What about genomics? What about modified foods?’ “ Schloemer said. “They’re interested in this because this is new ground.”
Their mode is unhurried examination, he said. Their methods would include forming committees on committees and holding public hearing after public hearing – both hallmarks of Eugene politics.
People in this demographic tend to be interested in divergent view-points as fodder for their own evolving thought, Schloemer said.
They’re critical consumers of advertising and other media, he said. “They’re very sophisticated and complex, creative and curious,” he said. “They don’t listen to a marketer and say, ‘Oh, I agree.’ “
Eugene has a history of tolerating – and sometimes embracing – dissenting viewpoints. During the Vietnam War, for instance, then – Mayor Les Anderson publicly sympathized with the anti-Vietnam War protesters.
Today, anarchists who use property destruction to make their political points are presenting a challenge to boomer ideals. Still, by and large, many boomers maintain a tolerant tone.
The Trendlers, who identify themselves as liberal Democrats, said they can understand the anarchists’ frustration with corporate domination and environmental degradation – even while opposing their methods.
“The issues haven’t change. Nothing’s been done,” Gary Trendler said.
Another boomer couple, Debbie and Ron Snook, who identify themselves as conservatives, don’t empathize with the anarchists’ issues. “I think the tree sitters are ding-dongs,” Debbie Snook said.
But the Snooks express a Eugene-style acceptance of divergent thought. “We don’t put people down for what they believe,” Debbie Snook said. “We respect that.”
Idealistic About Children
Another trait of baby boom families that marks Eugene: an abiding interest in children.
Baby boomers are “the most un-typical generation” when it comes to children, said Patricia Gwartney, director of the UO-based Oregon Survey Research Laboratory.
They made up the first generation with access to reliable birth control, and they used it to spread their child bearing across a 30-year span. “There are boomers with kids age 10 and under and boomers who are grandparents,” Gwartney said.
When the boomers got around to having kids, many were thoughtful and enthusiastic about them. Eugene developed a national reputation for child-rearing know-how.
Gerald Patterson and other researchers at the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene have performed groundbreaking studies on parenting for three decades.
Minalee Saks started the nationally known Birth To Three parenting program in Eugene two decades ago. Jean Phelps built the home-grown Relief Nursery therapeutic day care into a much-copied model for aiding parents and children in danger of abuse.
Six Eugene families started the Kidsports program with the motto of “all kids play” about a half century ago. Today, the organization signs up about 2,700 volunteer coaches each year, allowing 12,000 Eugene children to play.
And when children need money for something – anything – the Eugene voters are generous. Just look at the past three years:
Voters elected to spend $96 million on two new schools, four new high school stadiums, one new water playground, improvements to 33 parks and ballfields, a double-digit boost to the schools budget and a two-year after-school and summer recreation program.
“There’s a lot of us who started programs for kids in this community who come from that age group,” said Saks, 54. “We came from a time that was really idealistic. We wanted to change the world in a positive way.”
Boomers transformed birth from a medical procedure to a natural process, Saks said. The generation insisted on a role for the father, she said.
It also shifted the culture’s view of children from possessions to human beings – “the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself,” to quote a common boomer-era text, “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran.
Working Hard, Eating Out
Baby boomer leisure interests give Eugene its color and taste. This is a generation into gardening and home improvement, Funk said.
You can hear the cry of the boomer weekend warrior from every radio and television: “Better Head for Jerry’s.”
Their numbers support the 45 green-thumb businesses listed in Eugene author Ellen Schlesinger’s “Gaga Gardener’s Guide to Nearby Nurseries.”
They’ve installed hot tubs, hammocks, decks and arbors. They’ve planted orderly flower beds, natural woodlands and secret gardens laced with lush, leafy rooms.
Ron Snook, 51, finds this truth self-evident in his work and home life. He’s the lawn and garden buyer for Bi-Mart Corp. and the average age of his audience is 50 years old, he said.
At the end of the day, when he goes to his home in the west hills of Eugene, he’s most likely to find his wife, Debbie, 48, in the yard among her Asiatic lilies. “I come out in the yard and make up stuff to do so I can be out here,” she said.
She can tell you the flowers deer eat (azaleas and tulips) and don’t eat (daffodils and foxglove). She subscribes to Horticulture magazine and has applied for the 11-week master gardener class through the Lane County Extension Service.
The Snooks built their home from the ground up. He placed a dump truck full of stones in the six-tier rockery in front of their house. She painted the walls of their high-ceiling living room a deep smoky blue. “We learned how to wallpaper, and we learned not to wallpaper together again,” she said.
And as baby boomers age, marketers predict another trend:
Their leisure time will be even more precious to them, so they’ll – a little reluctantly – hire out some of the home repair and housekeeping work they used to do themselves, Funk said.
The boomers like to eat out and eat well, he said. “This is a group that doesn’t like to cook every night and doesn’t have to cook every night,” he said.
It’s their hunger for quality and novelty that brings forth the culinary delights emerging from high-end restaurants such as Soriah, Marché and Zenon.
“There’s such a hunk of us here,” Funk said. “And many of us have had time to accumulate wealth.”
“Stuck In The ‘60s”
But will the generation ever step aside and give younger people a chance?
Some young Eugeneans feel pinned in place by the baby boom monolith.
“You hear it all the time that Eugene is stuck in the ‘60s,” Funk said. “We have been, as a community, slower to change than other cities who’ve gone through styles or fads or fashions.”
Boomer families have caused congestion in Eugene’s housing stock. They’ve invested in their homes and they’re staying put – “aging in place,” Assistant City Manager Jim Carlson said.
“That’s true through all of central Eugene,” he said. Younger families are locked out.
But don’t expect relief any time soon. Boomers show no signs of retiring from their posts at the helm of Eugene’s boards and governing bodies. They’ve got another 15 to 20 years left in them, Funk said. “It’s our time.”
Do expect boomer nostalgia-fests like the Country Fair to thrive. “It’s just a period in their lives that they really appreciate,” Schloemer said. “It’s not something that’s holding them back.”
Might as well get used to it: Baby boomers still see themselves as immortal, Meg Trendler said.
“Our brains are still working: our bodies are still working; we’ve got more to give. Will we be willing to hand over the reins? I don’t know.”
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2003, The Register-Guard, www.registerguard.com.