Dorothy Glena
Teuber Adkins

Born on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1923 in tiny Chapman, Oregon, Dorothy has had a lot to be thankful for. She knew in her heart someday, somehow, she would leave the farm and set out to see the world. That was a tall order for a little girl growing up in a three-room log cabin handbuilt by her father and occupied by twelve family members. The cabin never did get electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. Everything was cooked on a wood stove that also served as their heat source.

Charles Frank Teuber (1864–1936) emigrated from Frankfurt, Germany to Wisconsin. He fell in love with and married Mary Wagner Gregor (1884–1947) from Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1902. They moved to North Dakota and began to raise a family. In 1919 with seven children in tow, they decided to come out west to Oregon. They bought forty acres of forestland along the Pisgah Home Road in Chapman, a small rural community in Columbia County, nine miles outside of Scappoose, Oregon. With high hopes, Charles, with the help of his growing children, built their cabin, dug a well, and started a life of farming.

Dorothy’s mother was a homemaker, but she quickly learned to run the farm after her husband had to find work on the railroad repairing tracks to supplement the family income. During the Depression the farm didn’t always bring in enough money to support the growing family. Mary bore eleven children, ten survived. Mary and the children worked hard on the farm raising rabbits, chickens, and dairy cows. Milk and cream was sold to a dairy cooperative that picked the dairy products up from the farm. They grew fruit and vegetables for their own food and had enough acreage to run a U-Pick strawberry business. They also had apple and fruit orchards. Dorothy worked hard alongside the rest of the family and managed to finish grades one through eight at the Chapman Country School. 

In 1936 when Dorothy was thirteen, her father died of a heart attack. Dorothy’s mother married Mr. Carver (1872–1959) around 1938. He worked for the WPA as a general worker. Her brother George sold the farm in 1939 and they all moved to Newburg looking for new opportunities. George bought a fruit farm. For a while they lived in a tent and the family got jobs working in hay and picking berries. They had six acres of prunes that they picked and sold to a cooperative. The family still grew most of their own food. They also picked and sold cherries, plums, filberts, and walnuts. By now the older boys were working in logging camps in the coast range around Jewel, Mist, and Elsie. Dorothy graduated from Newberg High School in 1943 and left home to move to Portland. She worked in the dairy offices of Holly Dairy and Farmer’s Dairy. The Farmer’s Dairy building still stands on what is now Martin Luther King Blvd. near Knott.

Dorothy caught the eye of Jack Wesley Adkins at a western music dance. Dorothy was cute, petite at only five foot one inch, and an agile swing dancer. They were married February 2, 1947. Jack played stand up bass in a popular western band. Because of poor eyesight Jack was kept out of the war but he had a broadcasting license and worked at different radio stations all around the Willamette Valley. With his velvet voice and interest in swing music, he was a popular engineer and DJ from Medford to Portland.

Jack started playing with Arkie and His Jolly Cowboys out at the Division Street Corral, located around 190th and Powell near Gresham and at Cedarville. The band also had a popular Saturday noontime program on KEX radio where they played Western swing music live.

In 1956 someone from the government came through looking for people to work in the Washington D.C. office of the U.S. Information Agency and Voice of America so the couple moved east. In 1958 Dorothy’s dream to travel the world came true when she and Jack moved to Germany. They traveled throughout Germany working on teletype repair. During holidays and vacations, they saw most of Europe. One poignant trip was to Italy to visit the Florence American Cemetery to see the grave of her youngest and closest brother, Frank, who was killed in 1945 during WWII. Another brother who survived WWII was killed in Oregon in a 1956 logging accident. While building logging roads three miles east of Arch Cape on the coast, vibrations from his jackhammer set off a landslide burying him under several tons of earth.

Around 1960, with three boys in tow, Dorothy and Jack moved to Nairobi, Africa where Jack worked for Voice of America as an engineer and broadcaster. In those days all of the wives belonged to the Foreign Service Association. They sewed for charities and were hostesses for their husbands. Dorothy had the luxury of a houseboy and a cook. She took her young boys to game parks to see wild animals. She collected quite a few pieces of African art, many of them given to her by people she met. They traveled around East Africa and North Central Africa monitoring stations for government news and to see how much “jamming” was being done by Russia. Jack played in a Dixieland band, even playing on TV with the Sunshine 7 when Nairobi got TV.

In 1963 they moved to Liberia. In 1965 Jack worked as a monitor of the African Games, a major sports event in the Congo. Mistaken for a spy because he was recording and using teletype to broadcast the event, he was taken from his hotel room in the middle of the night, thrown in jail, and interrogated without notification to the U.S. Embassy.

After that they moved back to the states, living in Maryland. When Jack retired in 1977 they moved to Gresham, Oregon. They were active on two bowling teams and enjoyed spending time with their family. Jack did odd jobs in a mobile home park in Clackamas, Oregon. After Jack died of leukemia in 1990 Dorothy became manager, enjoying her duties there until moving to a retirement center in Portland. 

In 2002 Dorothy met Harold Prickett at a dance. A year later the octogenarians agreed to share their golden years together. So Dorothy is still country western dancing and traveling. She has been to Alaska three times and goes on frequent road trips with Harold. She has two surviving sons, a daughter, and two stepsons. She has seven surviving grandchildren and a great-grandson. The photograph of Dorothy was taken in Portland, Oregon around 1960.

Dorothy says when she was growing up her parents were not strict. Her parents wanted their kids to be what they wanted to be. Dorothy feels she did just that. At age eighty-four she still has wanderlust in her heart, saying she has seen a lot of the world and there is still more to see and that she would like to visit Brazil.

Written by her sons: Jack Allan Adkins, Jerry Wayne Adkins Mambretti, Kent Curtis Adkins (in fond memory of, 1954–1980, Marc Wesley Adkins, and Rand Joseph Adkins