The House on Glisan Street

The Blanchet Boys, left to right: Joe Van Gulik, Pete Van Hoomissen ’50, Bob Wack ’43, Gene Feltz ’50, Tom Moore ’49, Jim O'Hanlon ’51, and Jack Moore ’50. Feltz, O’Hanlon, and Van Hoomissen are also proud alumni of Columbia Prep, the high school that shared The Bluff with the University until 1955. And on page 22, a beaming Kyle Schick ’09.

It started, seventy years ago, as a cheerful gang of University of Portland boys who totally believed Father Francis Kennard when Frank said that Christ wasn’t kidding when He said whatever we do for the least among us we do unto Him. They took the University’s blunt devotion to prayer in action seriously, those boys, and they scraped up money and teammates, and opened Blanchet House on Northwest Glisan Street in Portland, in 1952, and in the six decades since, the Christ in so many weary and ragged and holy people has been served some eighteen million hot meals, a million nights’ safe lodging, nearly a million items of clothing, and more than a hundred thousand small jobs that needed to be done and offered dignity along the way. And long ago Blanchet House lost count of how many free boxes of food quietly got to families in need, and how many small loans got made for job training, schools, tools, and whatever else might add up to a chance to tip a life back toward light and hope. More chances than could ever be counted, and is there a lovelier sentence than that?

Guests of Blanchet House, enjoying a hot meal.

Those cheerful headlong boys are elder chieftains of the clan now, and some have gone to speak to Christ face to face about what they did every Saturday of their adult lives and many hours extra, but, you know, in the 108 years of this University’s life, its intent passion to live its belief in Christ, to sing and celebrate the holy, to act and not just fulminate, maybe there’s never been a better, sweeter, crazier, more wonderful proof of the University’s mission in action than what those boys started one day on The Bluff. Blanchet House isn’t a place, really – it’s a verb. It happens every day, and every day its insistence on quiet action says something powerful about hope and holiness, and how we can and do and must change the world with our hands and hearts and brains and brawn.

Blanchet House sets off on a campaign this year to secure its future, to make sure no force can ever dissolve the creative energy that has done so much for so many. We celebrate those first boys – see below – and bow here in thanks for a terrific idea, executed daily for years with grace and salt and humor and humility. Amen, boys.

Well done.