Hector Macpherson, Jr.

Hector "Huck" Macpherson Jr. (September 18, 1918 – March 21, 2015) was an American dairy farmer and politician in the state of Oregon. Macpherson was a member of the Oregon State Senate from 1971 to 1974 and is best remembered as a primary author of the seminal 1973 Land Conservation and Development Act (SB 100) which established the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission and statewide land use planning regulation.

As the navigator aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress during World War II, Macpherson flew 50 combat missions and was the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Bronze Star Medal for his service, leaving the United States Army Air Corps in 1945 with the rank of Major. Following the war Macpherson took over the family dairy farm and became involved with the politics of land use planning over concerns with encroaching urban development of farmland.

Macpherson was the son of former Oregon state representative Hector Macpherson Sr. and the father of former Oregon state representative Greg Macpherson.

Biography

Early years The Oregon-born Hector Macpherson Jr. was the youngest of three siblings.

Hector Macpherson Jr., known to family and personal friends from his earliest years by the nickname "Huck," was born September 19, 1918, in Corvallis, Oregon. He was the third of three children of the Canadian-born Hector Macpherson Sr., a professor of agricultural economics at Oregon Agricultural College (today known as Oregon State University) and his Chicago-born wife, the former Margaret Buchanan Dupee. His father, an academic expert on the cooperative movement, resigned his academic position in 1926 to dedicate his time to politics. His father was elected in 1926, 1928, and 1938 as a progressive Republican member the Oregon Legislative Assembly and was instrumental in a controversial high-profile initiative campaign for education reform in Oregon. Although nominally Presbyterian, the family was skeptical towards Biblical literalism and both parents were believers in the doctrine of evolution.

Elementary school was attended in the small rural school at Oakville, Oregon, from which Macpherson graduated 8th grade in May 1932 — a member of a graduating class of seven students. Macpherson's youthful academic history was unremarkable, and he was neither the valedictorian or salutatorian in his tiny graduating class. He began his collegiate career in the sciences but switched majors to the OSC's School of Agriculture after two years of study, graduating with a Bachelor's degree in 1940. He was a member of the U.S. Army's Reserve Officers' Training Corps throughout his collegiate years, initially training for potential assignment in the infantry.

Military years Capt. Hector Macpherson Jr. receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross from Maj. Gen. Nathan Farragut Twining, summer 1944

Following graduation, Macpherson applied for a teaching fellowship at Washington State College in Pullman, Washington. He trained as a pilot at the new Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Maria, California, but was scrubbed from the pilot program following a rough landing during training. He was instead stationed as a 2nd Lieutenant of the Army Air Corps at Albrook Field, located near Panama City, Panama, where he was placed in charge of the base photo laboratory.

In 1943, now a 1st Lieutenant, Macpherson was enrolled in Navigation School at Selman Field in Monroe, Louisiana, where he was trained as a navigator for high-altitude bombers. Prior to assignment abroad he took time to get married in May 1943 to Katharine Brownell Smith of New York, whom he had met in 1941 and corresponded with for two years. His military training would be completed during the summer of 1943 and he was dispatched to Casablanca in Northern Africa aboard a so-called Liberty Ship. There he was assigned to the 416 squadron of the 99th Bombardment Group, for which he began flying missions from Tunis late in October 1943.

In December 1943 Macpherson and the rest of his crew were transferred to Italy, from which they continued to fly frequent bombing missions aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress. He was one of a group of a dozen navigators selected for training in H2X radar, a new form of radar navigation system developed by the British Royal Air Force, and returned stateside for instruction to Boca Raton, Florida, in January 1944. Training was completed in the middle of March 1944 and Macpherson was again transported to Northern Africa, where he became a member of a 7-man crew aboard a B-17.

By early August 1944 Macpherson had recorded his 50th mission as a bomber flight navigator, ending his stint in that capacity. Promoted to the rank of Captain later that month, Macpherson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service.

Macpherson was then assigned to desk duty at Air Force Headquarters in Bari, Italy. There he was assigned the task of writing a manual on the use and combat applications of HX2 "Pathfinder" radar, which he completed along with two other experienced navigators.

A final promotion to the rank of Major followed, just in time for his return to the United States in May 1945, just one day ahead of V-E Day.

Post-war career

Following his discharge from the military, Macpherson returned to Oregon where his father, Hector Macpherson Sr., operated a dairy farm in rural Linn County, Oregon. The idea of farming held an appeal to the returning flight navigator and father and son entered into a business partnership in the fall of 1945. Funds accumulated during the war years were plowed into the business. At the end of a pre-arranged one-year partnership, his father sold son Huck the 180-acre homestead for a modest sum.

In addition to life on the farm, Macpherson pursued outside interests, including activity in the local Community Club and telephone cooperative. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Linn-Benton Dairy Breeders and Corvallis Milk Producers organizations, and was elected president of each. Around the country residential housing was beginning to encroach upon established farm land, driving up land values and making agricultural production uneconomic. In California an alternative had been conceived in the form of special farm zones, which would protect farmers from this escalating problem. This rate of growth would increase in the subsequent decade, with Oregon's population expanding by another 26% during the 1970s. SB 10 originated in the powerful Senate Agriculture Committee with farmland preservation in clear view and was firmly supported by Tom McCall, the state's progressive Republican governor, for whom environmental and livability issues were matters of primary importance. The passage of this legislation made Oregon the first state in the union to universally require local zoning ordinances and the second to mandate comprehensive planning. Himself a progressive Republican, Macpherson was unwilling and unable to challenge the incumbent Republican state representative in his district, but saw a potential opening in the race for Oregon State Senate for a seat held by two-term conservative Democrat Glenn Huston of Lebanon.

After a bitter campaign during which he spent between $5,000 and $6,000, Macpherson managed to unseat the incumbent by a bare 200 votes. The Republican Macpherson's election had the effect of splitting the 30-member State Senate exactly down the middle in terms of party representation, 15-15. A two-week fight for the position of Senate President — and the inevitable repercussions it would have over committee assignments — ensued before Republicans finally acquiesced to the election of Condon Democrat John Burns and a split of committee chairs. As a member of the Environment Committee Macpherson attempted to navigate a centrist course between those seeking to eliminate and those seeking to preserve agricultural field burning. Macpherson helped scuttle an effort to speedily phase out the contentious practice but was instrumental in adding a per acre fee to fund research of burning alternatives to legislation establishing a permit system for the regulation of field burning.

As a member of the 5-member Consumer Affairs Committee, Macpherson found himself the swing vote in support of the landmark Oregon Bottle Bill, which established a 5-cent deposit on containers for beer and carbonated drinks.

Land Conservation and Development Act of 1973

Macpherson's signature legislative achievement would come in the 1973 biennial session of the Oregon Legislature with the passage of the Land Conservation and Development Act, Senate Bill 100. Already in the summer of 1971 Macpherson was driven by an interest in expanding and solidifying state land use planning regulations and he sought the establishment of an official legislative body called an "interim committee" to develop a new round of legislation on the topic. Senate President John Burns declined to fulfill an earlier verbal commitment to establish such a body, however, and in November Macpherson angrily broke with the Senate leader to establish a non-governmental committee of his own creation for this purpose. The former group would work to create a central administrative body to coordinate and regulate land use planning on a statewide basis; the latter would study the specific question of farmland preservation and the regulation of construction of subdivisions.

These committees launched their work with a kickoff meeting in Salem in January 1972.

According to Henry Richmond, former director of the land use watchdog group 1000 Friends of Oregon, rather than liberal anti-growth activists it was Hector Macpherson and a "small group of conservative Republican farmer-legislators" who proved decisive in the battle for the passage of Senate Bill 100:

Poignant testimony and persuasive speaking is not what passes legislation, however; political compromise, arm-twisting, and parliamentary creativity are what is necessary to get a bill signed into law. The Senate Environmental and Land Use Committee, of which Macpherson was a member but not the chair, stood as an obstacle to passage, with only a minority of 3 of its 7 members supportive of SB 100. All efforts to clear compromise legislation through the committee failed. Within the populous Willamette Valley, support for the measure was high, with legislators voting by a margin of 5-to-1 in favor of the bill. Outside of the 9 valley counties, conservative legislators opposed passage of SB 100 by a ratio of more than 2-to-1.

Electoral defeat

Macpherson declared his candidacy for reelection in 1974 and would find himself facing a young and well-spoken high school teacher named John Powell in the November election. The year was not a good one for Republicans, with the election coming on the heels of the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in connection with the Watergate scandal. Moreover, the centrist Macpherson's prominent work on the issue of land-use planning, anathema to many conservative rural voters, undermined his potential base of support, enabling his more liberal Democratic challenger to defeat him at the polls.

Death and legacy

Hector Macpherson Jr. died March 21, 2015, in Corvallis, Oregon. He was 96 years old at the time of his death.

Prior to assignment abroad in May 1943 Macpherson married Katharine "Kitty" Smith (1921–2016), with whom he would have five children – two daughters and three sons. One of the boys, Greg Macpherson, would follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and father as an elected member of the Oregon Legislature, in which he served from 2003 to 2009.

At his public funeral, held April 9, 2015, Macpherson was eulogized by Henry Richmond, longtime executive director of state land use watchdog group 1000 Friends of Oregon. He was also remembered as an energetic and enthusiastic hiker and mountaineer who had in his lifetime climbed nearly all the peaks of the Cascade Mountain Range from Mount Rainier in Washington to Mount Shasta in California. His ashes were interred at Oakville Cemetery in Shedd, Oregon.