By Michael Howell
What do quilts and trains have in common? Well, they go together like Barbara and Bob Reutlinger.
The way it works for the Corvallis couple is they have a line drawn down the middle of their basement “hobby room.” Her side is festooned with ribbons and awards she has earned for her quilting over the years. His side consists of a bustling model railroad community big enough to get lost in once you start looking around.
Bob is will turn 95 years of age on August 8. It’s a little bit hard to believe, but I’ll take his word for it. After all, he was able to rattle off his life history in a half hour or so without a memory glitch. Better than a lot of us that are 30 years younger could do. Physically, I’d say he’s a little more spry than a lot of us youngsters as well. You should see him duck under the table to pop up inside the command and control center of his model railroad town.
Bob grew up in Grand Island, Nebraska and graduated from high school there in 1940. He attended Kemper Military Academy in Boonville, Missouri for a couple of years when the Second World War broke out. He graduated from the academy. He took a civil pilot training program and thought he would join the Navy and become a pilot. He was rejected, however, for one physical problem. He was red and green color-blind.
According to Bob, “They said go try the Army, so I did. But they rejected me too, for the same reason.”
Not to be deterred, Bob talked to two of his younger brothers who served in the Navy at the time as pharmacist mates. He got hold of the Navy’s color-blind book and tests and spent two months memorizing the answers. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in Des Moines, Iowa and passed the eye test with flying colors. He finished college in La Grande, Oregon and went to Santa Ana, California for pre-flight training.
“At that point,” said Bob, “you were either assigned to be a pilot, a bombardier or a navigator. I was assigned to be a pilot.” He went to flight school in Oxnard, CA. He learned to fly Douglas A’s and B-25s. He said he really wanted to fly a Douglas A-26 but was told he had to train in the B-26 first. He finished that training in Del Rio, Texas. Then he was sent to Randolph air base in San Antonio and trained to be an instructor. He returned to Del Rio and taught B-26 pilots.
Although he asked to be sent into action, Bob was kept on instructor status and worked for the Air Transport Command flying planes to the “pickling fields.” That’s what they called the airfields where all the old planes being ‘”mothballed” were taken and stored.
In 1947, he considered three options. He could stay on in the Army Corps with a permanent rank of Lieutenant and serve in the regular Air Force, or he could go stay with his uncle, who worked for United Airlines and become a private pilot. Or he could go back to school and finish college. He chose the latter and got a degree in Forestry from the University of California at Berkeley.
His first job was working for the Oregon State Board of Forestry in Portland and that’s where he met his wife to be, Barbara. She grew up in the rural area around Portland.
Then Bob got a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and went to work on the Colville Reservation in Washington. Later he worked on the Spokane Reservation and eventually he spent a year in Washington D.C. in the Department of the Interior before returning to the Colville Reservation, and then at Warm Springs. He retired from the BIA when the Indian Preference Act was passed in 1982.
Some time before retiring, while still working on the Spokane Reservation, he and Barbara took advantage of the two-week summer vacation policy that he had helped initiate at the office and they took a trip to the South Seas, visiting Australia, American Samoa, Samoa, the Cook Islands, the Fiji Islands and New Zealand. They liked the area so much that they purchased a 25-year lease on an acre of beachfront property on the island of
Moorea about 14 miles from Tahiti in French Polynesia. They paid $1,500 for the lease and then built a little house. They didn’t return home for five years.
But when his mother and her father had passed away they decided to return to the States to be nearer their still living parents. But two years later they got a call from their former neighbors on the island who were moving and asked them to come and babysit their home on the island until it sold. They sold their house, furniture and car and took off. They spent another two and half years on the island before the house sold for $2.5 million.
“We came back to the States with nothing,” said Bob. They stayed with Barb’s mother in Washington.
They would visit their sons in Pocatello, Idaho and Sat Lake City, Utah by driving to Missoula and down through the Bitterroot Valley over into Idaho. When they were finally ready to leave Washington, the Bitterroot Valley seemed like the place to be. So they had a log home built in the hills west of Corvallis in 1992. They got themselves an RV and still indulge their travel lust for three to six months every year, traveling across the United States, mostly in the south.
Barbara was born in rural western Oregon in 1933 in the depths of the Great Depression. She said almost anything would grow in that part of Washington so the kids all went to work in the fields to pay for school clothes. She remembers earning a total of $21.75 one season and buying a bicycle. When Bob got his job on the Colville Reservation, Barbara followed her interest in journalism and went to work for the Spokane Tribe’s Rawhide Press where she served as editor for 10 years. Under her direction the paper grew significantly that decade. She continued to write freelance articles for local newspapers wherever they moved and even served as an AP reporter for a while in her district.
Another interest she pursued and still does in a major way is quilting. She started quilting when she was about 20 years old, learning from many women on the reservation and from natives in the South Pacific. She is a member of both the Hamilton and Stevensville Quilters Guilds. You can’t see the walls in her half of the “hobby room” because they are covered with ribbons and awards for her quilting.
On the way out she showed me one of her prized possessions, given her by a friend, two Civil War era quilts that arrived in Montana in a covered wagon from Missouri. She had borrowed them to put them in a historical exhibition and, when she went to return them, her friend said he would just put them back in a duffel bag and in a closet and they would be better off with her. He was right.