PLSO May June 2019

4 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 42, No. 3 From the PLSO Chairman Shawn Kampmann, PLS Chairman of the Board MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRMAN He served mankind well—being interested in others and loving his family and friends. He was forever teaching his great-grandchildren and very patiently learning from them as well. In fact, he was a friend wherever he went—he just loved people. This month’s Message from the Chairman will be in honor of founding member and PLSO’s first President, Clair Ernest Pense, who passed away on May 7 in Gresham. A s the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day . It certainly has a good origin story though. According to legend, Ancient Rome was founded by twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, who had been abandoned to die along the Tiber river before being rescued by a she-wolf. Eventually they were found and raised by a shepherd and his wife, often proving to be natural born lead- ers. As adults, the brothers resolved to found a city on the site where they met the wolf. However, they soon quarreled about the site of the city. While Romu- lus wanted to found the new city on the Palatine Hill, Remus preferred the Aventine Hill. As a result, Romulus mur- dered Remus and subsequently founded Rome, lending it his name. PLSO also has an origin story and it began with a man named Clair Ernest Pense. As Charter LifetimeMember Eugene DiLoreto said, “Clair was the founder of PLSO. He called the first meeting by notifying surveyors in the Portland area. The or- ganization was his sole idea. Bert Mason and I were quick to accept the concept, but the credit goes to Clair. As a county surveyor, he had contact with the profes- sionals working in Multnomah County.” The benefit of not being an ancient civi- lization is that you don’t have to rely on ancient legends involving warring Gods. So here, in his own words written for a speech in 1977, is a brief history about the beginning of PLSO. “The PLSO began in 1959 and, of course, there was a reason for that and here are some of them: The surveyors didn’t fit very well into the social and economic structure of society. Surveying did—as it always has since an- cient times—but surveyors didn’t! The licensing law for surveyors came into effect in 1943, 24 years after the engineers, and was a rather loose grandfather act. Just about anybody could get a license on his own declaration. I worked with one licensed surveyor who failed the instrumentman examination. Shoddy work at very cheap prices meant that competition was very keen, and it also meant that a true professional could not compete in the marketplace. I chained on one lot job where the surveyor charged $15.00 and the neighbor came out and the surveyor said, “I’ll do your lot for $5.00 so he did the two lots for $20.00. So, some standard of practice had to be set up to protect the surveyor. In 1957, Mr. George C. Bester, President of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, came to Portland and promoted an Oregon Section of ACSM (American Con- gress on Surveying andMapping, predecessor to The National Society of Professional Sur- veyors). We met in the Imperial Hotel. Soon after that the Oregon Section was founded with the late Fred Darby as President and the sometimes late, Al Givens as VP. ACSM was more of an intellectual and social or- ganization and shied away from gut issues like bread and butter and politics. A very commendable organization but too milk toast—so the vacuum remained. At the 1958 meeting of the Association of County Engineers & Surveyors, the Oregon Department of Labor presented a proposal