A Duck and His Dad
Oregon plays in a stadium named after an Oregon State alumnus, which is a good theoretical window into the intersection of family relationships and college football rivalries.
Oregon hosts what projects to be one of the 2024 college football season’s most high-profile games on Oct. 12, when Ohio State travels to Eugene to play the Ducks. It’s not the first time these two teams have met – Oregon won the 2021 matchup in Columbus, and the Buckeyes claimed their most recent football national championship after a 2014 defeat of the Ducks in Arlington, Texas – but it will be the first game these two teams have played in Eugene since 1967.
That was also the first year the Ducks played in their current home, Autzen Stadium. (Sorry, if you thought I was about to preview Oregon and Ohio State football this year, you might be looking for Split Zone Duo.) We’ve already covered how college football stadiums aren’t always named after people who went to that school, but Autzen’s even more interesting because it honors a graduate of Oregon State.
The Autzen in question was Thomas J. Autzen, a Portland lumber millionaire who passed away in 1958, nearly eight years before this naming announcement. His son, Thomas E. Autzen, graduated from Oregon in the 1940s, and had played a prominent role in his father’s philanthropic organization, the Autzen Foundation, before Thomas J. died.
The story goes that, because the Autzen Foundation provided a significant chunk of money for the construction of Oregon’s stadium, the state Board of Higher Education signed off on naming the venue in honor of the elder Autzen. They even changed their rules to do so. Previously, to get your name on a state building, you had to provide 100 percent of that building’s funds, not just “a whole lot.”
If you would like to stop here and simply enjoy this unusual but heartwarming fact about an Oregon grad getting the stadium named after his Oregon State dad, you are absolutely free to do so. Congrats on this small conversational tidbit you will now be able to deploy in almost any social situation where college football comes up!
If instead, you would like to follow me down the research rabbit hole, come along.
The Autzen Foundation, which is still around today, was formed in 1951 and dabbled in various charitable efforts. In 1956, it started a scholarship for outstanding students majoring in forestry at Oregon State, and soon after the foundation spun up another for students at Oregon’s business school. The Autzen Foundation supported Portland State and the University of Portland, provided funding for a Forest Service campground near Mt. Hood, and donated money to send the Oregon State band and rally squad to Louisville when the Beavers made the men’s Final Four in 1963.
Most of those gifts were modest in size. The scholarships amounted to a few hundred dollars each (which was pretty helpful considering how much a state school education cost on average at the time), and the Foundation contributed $1,000 towards the Final Four trip. The biggest reported donation I found from the Autzen Foundation before the stadium project didn’t have anything to do with sports or higher education at all.
In 1963, the Japanese Garden Society of Oregon received a gift of more than $13,000. The Portland Japanese Garden opened to the public four years later, just a few months before the first game at Autzen Stadium.
Reviewing newspaper reports of the Autzen Foundation’s activities introduced me to one other piece of Thomas J. Autzen’s background. He wasn’t just an alumnus of Oregon State (which was known as Oregon Agricultural College while he was there), but he also served as student-body president.
And Thomas E. cheered for the Ducks during one of the most Beaver-friendly stretches in the rivalry; from 1936 to 1953, Oregon State won 14 of the 17 games they played against Oregon.
We’re talking about a rivalry where Oregon students caught “raiding” Oregon State in 1954 were captured and had their heads shaved and painted orange. Thomas J. and Thomas E. were on opposite sides of it, and, well, it feels to me a little too tidy that the friction between these schools just didn’t matter when it came time to name Oregon’s new stadium.
Thomas J. died well before construction even started on the building that would bear his name, and Thomas E. passed away in 1997 (though the Associated Press story about his death incorrectly said Autzen Stadium was named after him). Neither of them can comment on the theory I’d like to offer, which is based more on how I think of football rivalries than any insight I have into either of the Toms Autzen.
But here goes all the same.
If I had been Thomas E. Autzen, Oregon supporter, and I had the opportunity to name my alma mater’s brand new stadium after my late father, one of the most accomplished graduates of Oregon State, I might view that as a very enticing way to firmly stamp the family name on one side of the rivalry for good. It’s not a move anyone would question, since naming a new building in memory of a parent just seems like a loving tribute. But I’d get to have a little fun in the process, and every time the Ducks hosted (and hopefully beat) the Beavers, I’d have a little friendly chuckle about how annoyed my Oregon State dad would have been.
Just as it had before the stadium, the Autzen Foundation supported schools beyond Oregon afterward. Oregon State got $28,000 to install an elevator to the press box in their football stadium at the end of the 1967 season, and two smaller schools in the state, Linfield College and Lewis & Clark College received funds to update their outdoor track facilities. Local arts organizations, environmental efforts, and the humanities department at Oregon State have all benefited from the Foundation’s wealth. Still, Autzen Stadium stands out as the best-known of the Foundation’s recipients, thanks to the rise of Oregon football over the last three decades.
Again, maybe I’m the problem here, taking a touching act between a son and his late father and breathing imagined mischief into it. I just can’t assume anything backdropped by a fierce rivalry like Oregon-Oregon State would ever lack any mischief whatsoever.