In 1918, when Roger Ash was born in Elk City, Oklahoma, his native state was still a place where people went to, rather than from. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl changed that when his father's oil distribution business failed. By 1930 they were living on a farm in Washita County. A few years later his parents packed the family and headed west to California, where they settled in Pomona.
The Ash family arrived to California's rich mix of agriculture in its valleys, technology in its airplane factories, and diversion in its motion pictures, a heady combination for the people who came there in search of the American dream.
Roger Ash's older brother went to work in a Los Angeles aircraft factory. Roger himself, who died in Portland last week, found his particular slice of the American dream as an auctioneer, starting as an employee of Milton Wershow (1910-1980), who had married Roger's sister. Mr. Wershow (who deserves a post of his own for his connections to one of the Beach Boys, the Sportsways brand of diving gear, a famous gold mine, and Bob Hope) had come from Michigan to California, where he established his auctioneering firm, Milton J. Wershow & Co. (later Wershow-Ash-Lewis Auctioneers), becoming prominent in industrial auctions first in California, then along the west coast, then then eastward as far as South Carolina.
Mr. Ash also developed a special expertise in auctioning sawmills, for which he traveled to so many small towns that he bought an airplane (he had learned to fly in college). He gave up his license in his mid-sixties, telling friends that he didn't want to discover the hard way that he'd lost his flying touch.
On one of his trips to Oregon nearly fifty years ago he came across a struggling mobile home park in Wilsonville that the developer needed to sell. He bought the park, upgraded it,and made it a sort of gem in the mobile home park industry, with so many trees that it was one of the few for which the word "park" was an accurate description. The park, called Thunderbird, was rural when it opened, but the city has grown up around it. A few years ago the demand for industrial land was so high that Mr. Ash announced that he would close the park and offer the land for sale for redevelopment. A court battle between Mr. Ash and the City of Wilsonville ensued (and is still going on), the residents left, the land became vacant, and the market for industrial land evaporated. Today the park looks as if the residents abandoned it for greener pastures, rather like the farms that Oklahomans abandoned eighty years ago when they went to California to search for their pieces of the American dream.