A.C. “Bud” Pasmore, a key founder of Clark County’s annual Inter-service Walk & Knock food drive, died Tuesday.
Archie Campbell Pasmore was 90 years old and died of natural causes after a time in hospice, according to his daughter, Mary Bailey.
A volunteer-powered, countywide food drive seemed a “crazy idea” in the early 1980s, according to the Walk & Knock website — but it took off quickly and grew to become the single largest annual food drive in the area, transforming Clark County’s charitable landscape with its highly visible and successful demonstration of people helping people.
“That’s a heavy duty loss,” said his partner in creating the tradition, Doug Rae. “Bud was a giant in the community when it came to Walk & Knock.”
Just last year, Walk & Knock celebrated its 25 anniversary and — despite a lingering economic downturn — set new records both for tons of food collected and for money donations as well. There were 162 tons of food and $50,000 in cash and checks.
Road builder
Daughter Bailey said Pasmore was a native of Canada who came to the U.S. when he was 20. He worked at Vancouver’s Alcoa aluminum plant during the early days of World War II. Then he went to work as a streetcar operator in Portland. He got tired of being asked why such an able-bodied young man wasn’t serving in the military, Bailey said — the answer was that he was not a U.S. citizen — and eventually got into the Navy.
The heavy equipment skills he learned there led to his eventual career as operations and maintenance manager for Clark County Public Works, a job he held from the late 1960s through 1989.
“He was a road builder for years,” Bailey said. So Walk & Knock may be Pasmore’s most celebrated contribution to the local scene — but Clark County citizens drive every day over the streets he helped build.
“He and I had a really close relationship,” Bailey said. “He only had a ninth-grade education, and he was really supportive of getting me into college.”
Trendsetter
Last year, reflecting on Walk & Knock’s 25th anniversary, Pasmore noted that current economic stresses aren’t terribly different than the ones dragging down the nation when his food drive was born. In the early 1980s, there was widespread unemployment, home foreclosures, homelessness — and hunger.
Pasmore said he’d been aware of myriad little food-collection drives and stations — barrels at banks, boxes at schools. But he and Rae figured more food would get collected if the collectors came to the donors rather than waiting for donors to make their own special efforts to give. Initial attempts to publicize the idea and then scour the streets over several days showed he was right — and promised even greater success with a bit more organization and focus.
Rae credited local Lions clubs and a “Help the Hungry” campaign sparked by Washington Gov. John Spellman in the early 1980s for getting the effort going. There were big planning meetings at Bill’s Chicken and Steak House in Rose Village, and then more brainstorms in Rae’s office, he remembered.
“Bud developed a passion for the project,” Rae said. “The more he got involved, the more passionate he became.”
Pasmore and Rae pulled together a number of service clubs and civic organizations — everyone from the Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs to staffers at Clark County and the city of Vancouver, in addition to their own Lions. Eventually, thousands of volunteers were mobilized and hundreds of thousands of pounds of food were collected — and a community tradition was born. Pasmore served as president of the organization for years.
“It just grew phenomenally,” Pasmore said last year. “It just boggles your mind, it’s grown far beyond anything we ever expected.”
According to its website, Walk & Knock has collected nearly 5.7 million pounds of food over 25 years, valued at just over $7.4 million.
Plus, said Rae, it has become a trendsetter. “A lot of other areas in the Northwest have looked at our program and how successful it has been, and taken things from it to put in their own food drives,” he said.
Walk & Knock is always the first Saturday in December. In the preceding days, The Columbian distributes donation bags to its readers. Then, on Saturday, thousands of volunteers fan out across the county to scoop up nonperishables that have been left on doorsteps and driveways. The donations are hauled back to several central locations for repacking and shipping to a warehouse donated by the Port of Vancouver. From there the food goes to the Clark County Food Bank’s “Stop Hunger” warehouse in Hazel Dell.
As huge as the tonnage is, organizers say, it’s always gone within a few months.
The next Walk & Knock event is set for Saturday, Dec. 4. To get involved, call 877-995-6625 or visit www.walkandknock.org.
Pasmore is survived by three children — Paul Pasmore of Longview and Richard Pasmore of Sunriver, Ore., and Mary Bailey of Hillsboro, Ore. He was preceded in death by his wife, Viola, in 1998. Bailey said there are five grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. A memorial service is set for 12:30 p.m. Oct. 16 at Evergreen Memorial Gardens Funeral Chapel.
“He always saw the glass as half full, never half empty,” said Bailey. “He always figured he could make it happen, rather than looking at reasons why it couldn’t happen.
Scott Hewitt: 360-735-4525 or scott.hewitt@columbian.com.
