Autobiography

As the children of immigrants, my parents were raised in Scandinavian Minnesota. My mother, Verna Ecklund, was a university student for only one year but my father, Thomas Peter Mortensen, graduated from the School of Forestry at the University of Minnesota in 1936. They were married shortly after and moved to Enterprise, Oregon, where I was born in 1939. Enterprise, located in the far northeastern corner of the state, was in cattle ranching country surrounded by one of the most beautiful mountain ranges in the U.S. In these mountains, my father began his career as a lookout officer for the U.S. Forest Service. In the war years, they migrated further west to the Portland area where Dad help build Liberty ships in Mr. Kaiser’s ship yards and Mom provided day care for the children of Rosy the Riveter. After the war, the family, which now included my brother Arne born in 1942, moved to the Hood River Valley 60 miles east of Portland where again my father returned to the practice of forestry. There my brothers and I, who included Irving born in 1947, were raised.