As an attorney in Roseburg for almost 45 years, the late Gordon Carlson represented many clients who had been hit hard by the downturn in the lumbering industry in the early 1980s.
Now, in his honor and memory, Carlson's widow, Helen Scott Carlson, is endowing a scholarship at the College of Forestry that may help students from families that have experienced such a loss.
The Gordon G. Carlson Scholarship and Graduate Fellowship Fund was started last year with a $50,000 gift to the OSU Foundation. This together with future gifts and a bequest will bring Mrs. Carlson's total gift to $500,000.
Both undergraduate and graduate OSU Forestry students will be eligible for the Carlson scholarships. Preference will be given to students from Douglas County, an area of Oregon that has suffered more than most from the decline of the timber economy. Eligible students will have career objectives in a broad range of forestry disciplines, including forest management, science, engineering, products, and recreation.
Carlson Scholarships and Fellowships will be awarded on the basis of industry need--that is, whether the student is in a program from which the wood products industry is aggressively recruiting graduates. Other criteria are good character, commitment to forestry, work experience in a forestry setting, financial need, and scholastic achievement.
Swanson family names labs
Members of the Swanson family and company leaders visited Richardson Hall to take a look at two laboratories named in honor of Swanson gifts, and to pose for a family-Forestry photo. Swanson-Superior Forest Products, Inc., and Superior Lumber Company each made a $100,000 gift to support laboratory facilities in the new building. The computer-aided manufacturing laboratory was named in honor of Rodney G. Swanson, and the wood physics and moisture relations laboratory was named in honor of V. Dean Swanson. The men are cofounders and executives of both companies.