Neighbors: Sherry & Willie Prihar
There are good neighbors and great neighbors. And then there are Sherry & Willie Prihar. They were the best neigbors in our 42 years of married life. For our first 15 years in the Pacific Northwest, we lived next door to the Prihar sisters. They owned the house at 4243 NE Wistaria Drive in Portland, Oregon. This duo was among the matriarchs of the neighborhood and we always had a cordial relationship. The stories of their generosity to our neighbors were more than local legend; these two ladies from Minnesota earned great respect from everyone in greater Portland. And they were incredibly generous with me.
Although it does not take much more than good soil and some TLC to grow a garden in Portland, Sherry and Willie were master gardeners. When they heard that I loved plants, they would often leave an empty bulk coffee tin can full of flowers on our front doormat. The can had the note “extras from our backyard” taped to the side. When the sisters heard that I was interested in learning from them, they said to Tracy, “We have been waiting for years for him…” What we heard from the Prihars were stories of previous owners of our home. They appreciated that I knew the difference between a rare specimen and a “common rhody.” What we did not know was that the last two neighbors, who had owned our house, were purveyors of bad gardening. Sherry explained, “the last owner was a dentist and he did not want to get any dirt under his fingernails, so he ingnored the flowers, planting only St. John’s Wort and English Ivy; and the owner before that thought that spraying noxious weeds with Round-Up made for better gardens,” although not a healthy environment.
Yet master gardening was among a long list of passions and commitments that the Prihar sisters made to Portland.
The Prihar Sisters in Oregon
Rose Frances Prihar, known as “Sherry,” and her older sister, Wilma, nicknamed “Willie,” were special neighbors who welcomed us to Northeast Portland. Their years of residence on our block were fortuitous for the everyone in the neighborhood.
Growing up in Moorhead, Minnesota, the sisters were the youngest two of eight Prihar children born to George and Maria Prihar. Over time, starting with an older brother, one-by-one all eight of the Prihar siblings moved from Minnesota to Oregon. One older brother, Aleck, served in the US Army in WWII and later in the US Air Force during the Korean Conflict. He married in Alameda, California and moved his family to Portland between his times in the service. A graduate of the Univ. of Portland (BA ’49), Aleck Prihar worked for the City of Portland, after retiring from the military. All of the Prihar family members had religious convictions. Aleck, for example, was a member of the St. Pius X Catholic Church, where his wife, children and he were regular parishioners.[1]
Another brother, George Prihar, Jr. was an engineer in Portland who raised his family on NE Thompson in the Irvington neighborhood.
When Sherry & Willie moved to Portland, they bought a house together on Ainsworth Avenue in Portland. Sherry worked for the IRS and Willie worked for Concordia College and the City of Portland. They moved to a home on Wistaria in the late 1950s, where they had more room for their animals and gardens. And they laid the bricks for the terraces that transformed the back hillside into a gardening paradise.
One Sunday afternoon, we invited Sherry and Willie to inspect our garden to see how their “extras from our backyard” were flourishing in our garden. Sherry, spry and nimble, walked up our brick garden stairs quickly. Willie, using a cane, took it one step at a time. I thought she might pass out! Then in one slow move, Willie balanced on one foot and leaned over into a Warrior III yoga pose. With her free hand she yanked up two weeds, then slowly lowered her elevated foot and returned to her cane and two foot stance saying, “Garden’s are always in need of pruning, don’t you agree?“
Sherry and Willie were enmeshed in the Portland social scene. First and foremost, as master gardeners, they were proud members of the Portland Garden Club. In addition Sherry and Willie were serious collectors. And their collections were legendary: dolls, vintage clothing, porcelain, ivory, books and antiques.[1]
Over the years the sisters staged vintage-fashion shows for churches, schools, non-profits hospitals where they gave all of the proceeds as donations. Sherry came over to our house one weekend and asked if Tracy and our three daughters would serve as models for one of their vintage-fashion shows at a Presbyterian Church in the Rose City. I showed up in a tuxedo to escort the women up the stairs to the stage and down. Our daughters and Tracy joined five other women who modeled dresses designed in decades from the late 1800s to mid 1900s. It was transformative to see my family in such finery; they acted more courteous and effusive. The guests were treated with refreshments and dessert, which the Prihars had prepared. When we asked Sherry how she and Willie had all of these dresses, she said, “We started collecting the dresses to make clothes for our dolls; we cut out the patterns for the dolls and realized we had some nice vintage dresses that should be preserved in their own right.”
There were several organizations that owe their creation and their survival to the Prihar sisters. One was the Pittock Mansion Society of Portland (where they were the founding members). Other organizations included the St. Vincent de Paul Society (which provides emergency assistance and charitable services to individuals in need of food, clothing and human dignity) and the Albertina Kerr Center (which empowers people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and mental health challenges to lead self-determined lives in Portland).
Because of their care and knowledge, Sherry and Willie were beloved members of The Portland Oregon Doll Club. In their wills they promised to donate all of the dolls to Doernbecker Children’s Hospital for their permanent collection. Yet again, another example of their generosity for the commonweal of greater Portland.
One day, when they were in a downsizing moment, the Prihars hired an appraiser to look at their collections. The Prihar house was a museum with some fine Portland antiques. Appraiser Kevin Bowers told us, “I have been a professional estate evaluator for many years and the Prihar sisters are master collectors of art, furniture, dolls, china, crystal and silver.” Sherry invited us over to meet Kevin Bowers one weekend. She invited us to place first dibs on some of the Prihar stemwear, steak knives, and sterling silver flatwear from their collections. They seemed so excited to know that their lightly-used treasures were going to neighbors they loved.
July 4th Fireworks
The street we lived on, Wistaria Drive, was heavily shaded in the summer by Elm trees, that were planted on both sides of the drive. One spot was not shaded by the trees — our front lawn. Each 4th of July, we blocked off the streets for a holiday pot-luck meal, with everyone bringing their family finest dishes. Sherry and Willie proved the chairs and tables, which we all set up for the meal. The evening ended with fireworks. In order to have some of the best pyrotechnics in NE Portland, Sherry would slip our neighbor, Brian Thompson, a $100 dollar bill and encourage him to drive to Vancouver: “You know they have the best fireworks in the NW at seasonal booths across the Columbia!“
At dusk, when the music calmed down and dinner was ending, the fireworks would begin. Sparklers all around, a few flairs and some above the trees dazzlers. One year the central fireworks stand tipped on its side, after the fuses were lit. Suddenly a rocket came barreling out sideways, heading straight for Willie and Sherry Prihar. It just missed Willie’s arm and landed in their yard. That errant mortar could have wiped out the Prihar family with one hazardous shot. Tragedy averted, we made sure for safety-sake not to have any more fireworks with propulsion to lift it above the tree canopy.
The Importance of Christmas
Everyone on Wistaria Drive was encouraged to celebrate Christmas with house decorations and lawn art. Sherry and Willie set a high bar, by all the festive inside decorations they had in their living room and dining room. The neighbors on our other side, the Settlemeirs, were really into it. Steve Settlemeir tried to have the best seasonal blow-up reindeer, Santa, and snowmen on their roof. We put candles in the windows, lights on our Christmas tree, and a wreath on the doors and called it a day. Steve scolded us, but we held steady, not wanting to “keep up with the neighbors” with lawn or roof displays.
More important to the Prihars than the outside lights was the enormous generosity they felt about Christmas Eve gatherings in their home. With eight Prihar families in town and dozens of nieces, nephews, cousins and other relatives, they had a lot of people to fête every year. As one of Sherry and Willie’s nieces described it: “Attending those Christmas Eve dinners were anywhere between 35 and 50 people. The dinner was around 10-15 courses and they always had entertainment: a magician, a story teller, singers…. It was amazing! They shunned all offers of help with meal prep or cleanup.”
Elaborating further, she told the story: “One year, there was a big ice storm in late December and quite a few of the relatives had called to say that if the weather did not warm up, they didn’t feel safe making the trip to dinner. Aunt Sherry called me a couple days before and asked (c’mon you know better by now, flat out told me) that if relatives were unable to come, I should go to the Portland airport and find people who were stranded because of the weather and ferry them over to their house. It had never even occurred to me that there could be people stranded at the airport, but it did to Sherry, and she was going to do something about it. Fortunately, the weather warmed and the ice melted and I didn’t have to wreck my car in the ice with a load of strangers inside. But I would have. That’s because I was never ever going to let Aunt Sherry down.“[2]
What should we know about Sherry and Willie from the Christmas dinner story? It is clear evidence of their love of humanity and desire to reach out to everyone in God’s kingdom. Like the parable of the Great Banquet found in Luke’s Gospel 14:15-24. In that passage, the banquet host was insistent that the feast should be open to everyone. (“Find people who were stranded at the airport because of the weather and ferry them over to their house.”) Sherry and Willie Prihar were busy doing God’s work, always.
As a longtime admirer of Willie, Don Kranich ’56, wrote in the Concordia Connection magazine: “Willie was beloved in the Concordia community as a cook and campus mother for her gormet cooking, generous spirit and caring heart…For those students who lived too far away to go home over the Thanksgiving Break, each year Willie would cook a special Thanksgiving and the half dozen or so of us would get to eat at the Faculty Table. She made us feel like family….Many a time, when students had an abundance of exuberance and ripped the seam on a pair of pants, they would take them to Willie, who would sew them up to be as good as new.“[3]
Sherry was “One Smart Cookie!”
As an epitaph for Sherry, one niece wrote:
“She was many things: philanthropist, world traveler, art historian, collector of antiquities, master gardener, and senior IRS tax auditor. In the house she was a keeper of pheasants and peacocks, and big slobbery Saint Bernards, a brick layer (while in her 70’s!!) and God knows what else. But at her core, she was simply, a “doer.” As many who read this could probably attest, she was not afraid to ask for help and, once hooked, she had zero qualms about putting you to work. In fact, I may have misstated, “asking for help.” I don’t recall ever being asked for help, it was more akin to being “notified.” But she was never one to sit on the sidelines away from the action. If something needed to be done, she was going to figure out a way to do it.”
“For most of her life she, along with her sister, Willie, collected. They collected dolls, ivory, porcelain, silverwear, crystal, cultery, china, paintings, furniture, books, curios and vintage clothing. If you talked to Sherry about any of these collections, she would quickly tell you that she was not an expert in any of it and they just collected items that appealed to them. That statement was, as typical of Sherry, humble and unassuming. It was also dead wrong. It may have been a function of her years as an agent with the IRS but she could do research like nobody’s business. She became an expert in anything and everything she took an interest in. She was one smart cookie.”
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References:
[1] Rose Frances Prihar obituary
Henry E. Hooper 