Join us on Friday, May 31 at noon at the Red Lion Hotel when we will be joined by award winning journalist Pat Wilkins.
More about our speaker:
Patrick Clifton Wilkins was born in a “soddy” in the sand hills of western Nebraska on a December night in 1927, but Oregon has been his home since 1935, the year his parents moved away from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl to find a new life for their eight children.
In his forty-year career in radio and television, Wilkins has been a news director, an anchor, and a reporter, becoming a familiar face to Northwesterners. But he is best known for the on-the-road feature reports he did for many years for TV station KATU in Portland. “Kind of like Charles Kuralt,” he says, “but with a smaller territory.”
Since retirement in 1990, Wilkins has created two award-winning documentaries about environmental issues in the Northwest, worked as a freelance radio reporter and newspaper writer, and written five popular books.
Somewhere in Oregon
Somewhere in the Northwest
Somewhere in Eastern Oregon
Somewhere in Oregon: Gems of State Histor
Perfect Dog Tales: And Stories of other Remarkable Animals
In addition, Wilkins is currently a regular columnist and book critic for the West Side Newspaper in Salem.
Among awards held by Wilkins are those bestowed by the Freedoms Foundation, the Oregon Medical Association, the Oregon Federation of Teachers, and the Society of Professional Journalists. In addition, he is an honorary member of the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, as well as the Confederated Tribes of Colville, Washington, and an honorary chief of the Chief Joseph band of the Nez Perce.
Pat lives with his wife Gayle in Salem, Oregon. He has six children, ten grandchildren, and a great-grandson, all but a few within easy reach of home.