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James A. Redden SR #1245 United States District Court Oral History Project November 30, 1994 - January 14, 2002 JR: James Redden MO: Michael O’Rourke Tape 1, Side 1 1994 November 30 MO: This is Michael O’Rourke with the Oregon Historical Society. The date is November 30, 1994, and this is the beginning of an oral history with James Redden. Today’s interview is in his chambers at the courthouse. As I said, today I’d like to talk about your earliest memories. Maybe we could start off by having you tell me a little bit about your mother and father and who they were, maybe starting with your father. JR: My father had the same name, James A. Redden; he was the first, I’m the second, and my son, James A. Redden III, of course lives here in Portland. My father was born at the turn of the century, one of eleven children of Eugene Redden and Ellen Tyrone McQuade Redden. His family came from Ireland. I believe it would be my great-great-great-grandfather, and maybe great-great-great-great-grandfather—I’ve got some records of that at home, and I’ll try to clarify that for you—but he came from Ireland as they say before the potato famine; that is, there was a relatively large group of Irish that moved over here before the potato famine, many of them artisans, as was he. He was a coppersmith and then moved to Albany, New York. Then I believe it was my great-grandfather that moved from Albany to Springfield, Massachusetts, and my grandfathers were a series of Eugene Reddens, which was my grand- father’s name. I don’t remember him at all. He died before my memory, but after I was born. My grandfather was a businessman, successful for the times, and an inventor of sorts, and he had eleven children; I think it was five sons and six daughters, and all of them very successful people. All the sons went to high school, some college. My uncle Joseph was a dentist, as my dad was. I had an uncle, Harold Redden, Bud Redden, who was one of the very prominent members and movers and shakers in the American Legion for many years. They are all deceased now—ten of the eleven children are deceased. My dad was a dentist. He practiced in Springfield from the end of World War I until his death in 1960. MO: Let me just back you up for a second. You said your grandfather was a businessman; what was his business? JR: Generally he had the Redden—a company named after him that was a manufacturing company of sorts, and as I indicated, he was also somewhat of an inventor. He invented a tire which should by all rights have made the family forever millionaires. He made what was called the “Redden Resilient Tire,” and this was after the invention of the automobile, when they were driving around on hard solid rubber tires, and he devised a tire—and I’ve seen as a youth the advertisements for it—that had cubes of hard rubber floating inside soft rubber inside the hard rubber casing, which was a remarkable improvement in the ride, I’m told—but they went on the market immediately before the pneumatic tire, which was even more popular. MO: That’s not the best timing, is it? JR: Right. But by all accounts he was quite a character himself and very well respected and liked, as was my father. MO: Well, we got back to the idea of all-rubber tires more recently with the spares they give you now. James A. Redden, 2 JR: That’s right. Maybe I’d better check and see if they’re Redden’s Resilient Tires. My father was a dentist and practiced—oh, I can recall he had offices in what we called “The Park,” he had offices in a suburb of Springfield; you didn’t call them that then, but a little town outside of Springfield called Indian Orchard, and he had an office there, as well as one in downtown Springfield. MO: So he would commute between the two offices as necessary for his appointments? JR: Right. He kept, as I recall, his evening hours in Indian Orchard, and daytime hours in Springfield. Of course, my memory is during the Depression, so everybody was scrambling pretty much, and I remember his office in Indian Orchard—Indian Orchard was a town that was populated primarily by Polish immigrants, and they were first generation, for the most part. Many times his fees were paid in Polish hams, and that’s one of my fondest memories. They were just absolutely delicious. These were canned hams, and I can still remember them; they had Polish printing on the tins, big tinned hams. Before World War II started, why, these folks had relatives in Poland who would send them these tinned hams, and we ate a lot of those because a lot of those people during the Depression had no money to pay for their dental care, and this worked out pretty well. I’m sure the statute’s run on it as far as the IRS is concerned, but I don’t know that he ever reported those Polish hams. But he had that office there for many years in Springfield. Then in 1938, I think it was, he closed both of those offices, and we moved from Forest Park to the North End, where he had an office in our home on Chestnut Street. It was a big old house that was built at the turn of the century which had a remarkable history in and of itself. Some Italians owned it, and they had imported Italian craftsmen from Italy who did some leather work and also painted murals on the walls, and after they were completed, why, they were sent back to Italy. It was just a grand house. The last time I saw it, it looked bad enough to make me cry, which was a couple years ago, because it’s now in a really tough section of town, with freeways looping around it, and it’s a shame because it was a marvelous house in a very lower middle-class, I guess, neighborhood. MO: And the house is still standing? James A. Redden, 3 JR: The house is still standing, but it sure looks terrible. But it was a house that years before passed into the hands of some bootleggers, and the bootleggers dug a tunnel between this big house, underneath the back yard and into the barn in the back. It was a big old barn, and they used to smuggle their booze into the garage, unload it and bring it through the tunnel and bring it into the house. When we moved in, all the neighborhood kids told us about this great history, and we asked our parents and of course they absolutely denied any such terrible thing, and we went down to the basement and found where the tunnel went. It was all boarded up. So it was interesting. MO: Did you explore this tunnel at all? JR: No, we couldn’t get in. We tried. It came out in the garage, and we could see where it came up in a floor and the cement breaking because the tunnel had been filled with sand, and of course the sand kept shifting, and the cement floors would keep breaking, and we kept boarding them over and so forth. But it obviously was true, as was the story that there had been a murder in the driveway, one of these gangster killings, years before we moved into the house. Well, it couldn’t have been too many; probably ten years before we did. We never knew whether these stories were true or not, until many years later when I worked with a guy at the post office, when I had a job at the post office, and his cousins lived in that house and were involved in all this business, and he confirmed for me indeed, there had been a murder in that driveway and much smuggling of booze went on. Anyway, it was a great old house, and it was the gathering place for the kids for miles around. That was their place as we grew up. My parents were always very friendly and enjoyed having the other kids. MO: Your house was a popular house, then? JR: That was sort of the headquarters, yes. Besides, I had a couple of very beautiful sisters. I think that helped attract the crowd. James A. Redden, 4 It was a tough neighborhood, but it was a good time to grow up in Springfield, which is sort of a dismal city now. Like a lot of those Eastern cities, it got old in a hurry; it seems to me, anyway. While I’ve been getting old slowly. MO: So your father, I guess, was involved in politics, too? JR: Yes. He ran—and this would have been in probably the late ‘20s—for County Commissioner. I don’t have any recollection of that except hearing about it later. He was unsuccessful in that bid, and then he ran for mayor twice, and I recall those campaigns, and that of course really got me interested in politics, in the competitiveness of it and the campaigns and the excitement. In those days, why, races for mayor, or even city council, were very exciting events, with big parades and— MO: About how old were you then? JR: Oh, boy, I think his last campaign was ‘36, which would have made me seven.

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