The Spoils of Toil

Fairview senior looks back on years of construction, family life

By Shannon Wells

The Gresham Outlook, Dec 1, 2009, Updated Dec 1, 2009

Jim Clark / Gresham Outlook

Bob Fowler's formidable construction career includes work in Alaska, Washington and projects like the Troutdale RV park by the Sandy River. He's also collected motorcycles and has 18 vintage clocks in his house.

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When asked who’s been his favorite U.S. president, Bob Fowler doesn’t hesitate for a second.

“Franklin D. Roosevelt,” replies the 82-year-old Fairview resident from his living room. “He brought us out of a bad recession by starting the WPA. He put people to work. I don’t see that this president has done that much to put people to work.”

Fowler is referring to the Works Progress Administration, a Roosevelt “New Deal” program that put thousands of young Americans to work on public construction projects.

Too young to be part of that undertaking, as a journeyman contractor specializing in steel and masonry, Fowler has nonetheless left a significant mark — in projects large, small, obvious and subtle — on Pacific Northwest infrastructure.

Now 20 years’ retired, the calmly gregarious Fowler looks back fondly on a varied career that utilized his wits, instinct and physical skills in equal measure.

Industrious hands

“I’ve had the opportunity to do so many things,” he says. “I’ve been all over the Northwest here, building towers and things like that. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods with the animals.”

He was master mason for a steel-based bridge built across Beaver Creek to the Sandy River Front RV Park in Troutdale. He built up the understructure that supports buildings in the Northside Redevelopment Project, which transformed Troutdale’s downtown business district in the 1990s.

As head of the fabricating division at American Timber & Trading Co., he worked on the Baker Dam spillway, as well as on bridges in Montana and Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle.

In Oregon as well as Washington, Fowler worked on a number of fire lookout towers, including an “experimental” tower at Stevens Pass: It was built square, rather than tapered, from the ground up.

“That’s me at the top,” he says, poking at a scrapbook photo in his cluttered-but-cozy living room. “It was the first one in the U.S. that went up square. All the parts are the same all the way up the line. In a tapered tower, everything is different sizes.”

Innovations

In addition to large, public projects, Fowler has worked on quirkier endeavors for individuals. These including an amazingly elaborate wooden deck — built to accommodate electric wheelchairs — at an Orcas Island cabin, and a prototype three-wheeler vehicle with a beer keg for a gas tank. His son eventually towed the vehicle to his home in Kentucky.

“It had a Pontiac V-6 with a Pontiac rear end,” he says. “It was just something we decided to build.”