The following weekend, after enjoying the Blues Festival in the gorge, I went to the Gresham Saturday Market (GSM) at Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) in Gresham. The GSM is a summertime event and has been around for years. And it’s where my friends and former neighbors make much of their yearly income, because they operate a booth where Kathy sells homemade dipping sauces from her grandmother’s recipes. The venue is very pretty there on the NW parking lot of the college. Lots of tall pines give welcome shade.
My ex wife and I both attended MHCC back in the ’70’s, she to get an office management type degree, me to get my ABA (Associate in Business Administration). To go along with my AAS (Associate in Applied Science – Electronics) degree. It was great fun going there. It was interesting going to college with my wife, and because we averaged 10 years older than most of the the student body, we got respect. I took 200 series Physics and Chemistry because I fully intended to get my electronics engineering degree someday. Along with any other science, computer programming, or technology course I could squeeze into my schedule. Had to work pretty hard. Lots of studying and homework. That damn required accounting though…two years of accounting classes and all I learned was that it’s so dry and boring. I got A’s and B’s but I’ll be damned if a year after I graduated I could have told you much of anything about that class.
But, I did learn some stuff that helped years later when I started my own Electrical, electronic design, and computer consulting business.
So, I have some friends that set up a booth up at the GSM and they collect my mail for me so I went up to visit and pick it up. While there, I wandered around campus and took some pictures.
And there the GSM is, across the street from where I parked. Lots of trees all around the venue.
This is a look back down Kane. When we first went to MHCC, the right side was an empty field with trees. The owner tried to sell the property for a fast food franchise on the corner of Kane and Stark but for some reason, many students opposed it. They occupied the property to prevent clearing the land. Huh? I never did understand their objections about that so I sort of stayed out of it. Yeah, there were some big beautiful pine trees, and open meadow that students took their lunch on, but really, the purposed fast food joint would have been handy. Though I loved our cafeteria, sometimes change can be fun and interesting. The owner was a good sport about the protests, maybe it was MHCC that owned it and they’re sensitive about community perceptions of their behavior? Anyway, the owner shelved the idea for a couple years until that particular group of students had moved on, and objections to development had faded, then they developed the land. Now it has a large theater, a bar and grill, a huge parking lot, and a Jack-in-the-Box on that parcel.
On the left side of the street in this picture is the MHCC campus.
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