Editor’s note: Over a period of 12 years beginning in 1983, local historian Ken Munford wrote 561 columns for the Gazette-Times. As part of the city’s 150th anniversary, the newspaper will publish a selection of these columns each Saturday. This one was originally printed on Nov. 2, 1992.

Waldo Hall and Sackett Hall at Oregon State University bear the names of two women who had an impact as members of the governing board of the institution.

In the early 1900s, Clara A. Humason Waldo and her husband, John B. Waldo, a retired Oregon Supreme Court associate justice and former legislator, lived with their daughter in the Waldo Hills east of Salem. His father had settled in that area in 1843. She took an energetic interest in the betterment of farm life, especially through “education in the science of the home.”

She supported the study of household economy and hygeine, which Dr. Margaret C. Snell had introduced at Oregon Agricultural College in 1889. In 1905, Gov. G.E. Chamberlain appointed her the first female member of the Board of Regents of the college, an office she held from 1906 to 1919. She was on hand to support the establishment of the School of Home Economics. She later had a hand in having Ava B. Milam, a junior member of the faculty, appointed dean.

Urged on by Mrs. Waldo, the board laid plans for a 256-bed residence hall to replace the 30-student Alpha Hall. Normally a name does not go onto a building until after the person honored has died, but this one seems to have been called Waldo Hall from the start.

Clara Waldo had the unusual opportunity of seeing her building under construction. And what a sight it was! A woman who grew up near Albany once told me that when she was a child, her family’s favorite Sunday horse-and-buggy trip was to come to Corvallis and see the huge castle taking shape.

Clara’s husband died in 1907, the year the new building was completed. She turned her attention to the welfare of the girls in her hall, meeting with them periodically. She was appointed “Dean of Extension Work in Domestic Science,” a largely honorary title. She received no salary but had expenses paid as she ranged the state extolling the virtues of OAC at Granges, with demonstration trains, and in meetings with farm wives.

The 1916 Orange Yearbook was dedicated to her. In 1923, the college granted her an honorary doctor of science degree. She died in California in 1933.

Beatrice Walton Sackett

Beatrice Walton had a satisfying career before it became popular for women to have well-rounded lives, balancing a family and professional life.

She was born in Salem in 1898. She attended Salem schools and Willamette University and graduated from Mills College in California in 1920. She taught school in Astoria for two years before returning to Salem as a secretary to J.A. Churchill, state superintendent of public instruction. She assisted Hal Hoss, private secretary to Gov. I.L. Patterson.

When Hoss became secretary of state, Beatrice Walton became the governor’s executive secretary and continued in that position through the administration of Gov. A.W. Norblad. She went off on a long vacation trip to Europe. In London in December 1930, she received a cable from Gov.-elect Julius Meier, whom she had never met, inviting her to become his executive secretary. She cut the trip short and came home.

The next year, in December 1931 at age 33, she married Sheldon Sackett, 29, in the house in Salem in which she was born.

In 1934, Gov. Meier appointed Mrs. Sackett to the state Board of Higher Education. The next governor, C.H. Martin, asked her to be his secretary, but she chose to return to private life. With her daughter Marcia Anne and her husband she moved to Coos Bay, where he published the Coos Bay Times and other newspapers. Their son John Walton was born in 1938.

She was the only woman on the Board of Higher Education through the austere 1930s and war years and into the post-war boom. Much of the time, she was the board’s vice president. She had a hand in planning a residence hall of unique and graceful design to house 285 women at Jefferson Way and 30th Street.

As it neared completion, she died of cancer in Coos Bay on May 19, 1947. The board named it Beatrice Walton Sackett Hall in her memory.