Portland International Raceway Rose Cup Half a century ago in the spring of 1961, something amazing happened in Portland, Oregon that changed the course of the city’s history as a racing and automotive town.  And it takes a little history lesson to really get what happened. When World War II came to America in December of 1941, the country suddenly needed a lot more ships than they had been producing. Portland was identified as a good safe place to build ships – it was 60 miles from the coast, and yet had good access to the Columbia River. So in just 6 months, Henry J. Kaiser built a city on a bunch of swampy floodplain at the north end of town. That new city, called Vanport (a mashup of Vancouver and Portland) produced ships all the way through the war, and provided both employment and housing to its workers. When the war ended, the shipyards shut down and the workers dispersed into Portland – the housing at the yards was not built to last and started falling apart into a slum. Then in 1948, Mother Nature did some urban...