Phyllis was gracious and offered to rent me a room in her house in Hillsboro for one year while I finished grad school. We enjoyed some good times together. She shared with me the funny things she saw on the internet, and we watched House Hunters together and enjoyed watching her cat find his treats that were hidden for him every night. Phyllis was always gracious and kind, and I am blessed to have known her during my years living across the street and my year living in her house. I will miss you!

Posted by Laurie Juraszek on March 10, 2020

I miss you! We had so many good visits, trips to the doctors, the trip to California, or just talking niece and aunt. I am going to miss all of those times spent with you. However no one can take the memories away of our adventures. Love you!

Posted by Candi (Caputo)Malone on March 10, 2020

Phyllis was part of a 1955 Franklin High School ladies group who enjoyed luncheons at a classmate's home in Salem each summer and a Christmas luncheon in Tualatin. We often rode to these events together. Our conversations were always enjoyable. Phyllis recently helped me do a "save the date" mailing to classmates for our 65th class reunion in July. I will miss her.

Posted by MARYLOU LIDGREN SCHEIDT on March 10, 2020

Love and miss you Mom !!

Posted by Janice Thomas on March 9, 2020

This a woman who raised two incredible children, then had a career where she transform other people's children into better human beings for being being in her world will be missed. It was easy to see how and why people loved her.

Posted by Dan and Robin Machado on March 9, 2020

I remember Phyllis Martin as she was our Campfire leader from Blue birds on up thru Campfire. I will miss her alot. May she rest in peace.

Posted by Peggy Blazer on March 9, 2020

Remembering Phyllis Friends are encouraged to correct or amplify these memories. Phyllis Caputo and I met at Franklin High in Portland, Oregon, when she was a junior and I was a sophomore---or maybe we were a year younger? At any rate, it was in Mr. Shaffer’s theater class, a high-level seminar class focused on theater history rather than acting. We loved the class and, as I recall, spent lots of our time in it talking with each other. In the early fifties, we wrote with fountain pens. Everyone carried her own little bottle of dark blue or black ink to every class---except Phyllis. The color of her ink was turquoise! From the beginning, I was in awe of her daring and her creativity. Phyllis and I had a lot in common. We were both nerds, though we didn’t know it then because the word hadn’t been coined yet and the concept was just forming. We both took Latin, though not in the same class. We both really loved drama but never got parts. We were both avid readers and we both loved playing word games. Phyllis was a connoisseur of humor. She introduced me to Max Shulman’s Barefoot Boy with Cheek and many other humor classics. At one point, we spent hours emulating a now-forgotten writer who re-wrote classic tales using only sound-alike words, as in his tale of “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.” But I digress. (Bud eye dye grass.) You get the idea. Thanks to our unforgettable drama teacher, Jim Shaffer, we learned a lot about theater and spent countless hours on stage, doing various backstage theatrical chores. We were experts with props, costume changes, and, in my case, curtain pulling. As time passed, we accumulated enough points to be accepted into Masque and Gavel, the coveted (by us) drama club. There we made lifelong friends, among them Carlin Compton (Diamond), Rod Black, Mike Ryherd, Billy Stephens, and Jim Millington. Because of our theater class, Phyllis was able to meet at least two legends of theater. One was the actor Paul Douglas. I wish I could remember the details, but I think it involved Phyllis and Bill Stephens scooping us by going backstage and meeting him. The other legendary figure was Helen Hayes, considered at that time the grand dame of American theater. By appointment arranged by Mr. Shaffer, we attended a play starring Miss Hayes and then met her backstage for an interview. Phyllis found her to be extremely gracious to all of us. Several of my memories of Phyllis revolve around food. She invited me to join her on a family trip to Yakima, where some of her relatives were fruit growers. Our hostesses were up before sunrise, cooking gargantuan amounts of food. Most memorable was the thick, savory pizza---the first pizza I had ever eaten! (Pizza was not common in the early 50’s.) Another time, Phyllis’s mother was a chaperone for a co-educational Masque and Gavel weekend trip to the Oregon Coast. (Yes, in the early 50’s, parents and teachers trusted high school kids to stay out of trouble on overnights!) Mrs. Caputo’s spaghetti sauce with its secret ingredient, spinach, was the culinary hit of the weekend. Our most colorful experience with food began in Phyllis’s kitchen, one Saturday morning in early fall. Several of us girls and boys were planning to fulfill our Masque and Gavel community service obligation by visiting residents at a nearby “old folks home.” We gathered at Phyllis’s house, where it occurred to someone that it would be great to take a cake along on our mission of mercy. With Phyllis as our leader, we mixed and baked a chocolate layer cake and, while it cooled, began to make the frosting. That’s when things started to go wrong. Someone thought that blue would be a good color. That didn’t look quite right so we added more and more blue. We hoped it would look better once we spread it on the cake. It didn’t. Meantime, we were overdue for our visit, so we put our cake on a paper plate and started walking to the home, debating as we went whether we should give the ghastly-looking cake to the oldsters. Our argument ended when we noticed that we were walking past an elementary school that was having a bake sale…and right there on the sidewalk was a table filled with cakes! Whose idea was it to innocently slide the cake onto that table when the volunteer saleslady wasn’t looking? I can’t remember. Why did we all gather around the table, judging the merits of the different cakes? Who knows? Which kid was it that pointed to the blue cake and asked the lady, “Did you bake this cake?” Also can’t recall. But it was that lady who gasped, “No, I didn’t, and I don’t know who baked it, but I can sell it to you really cheap.” And that is why we came to buy back our own cake, and why we chose not to give it to the residents of the old folks home, and why by the time that afternoon football game ended, we were various shades of blue chocolate. It was all because of Phyllis’s kitchen. Phyllis graduated from Franklin a year before I did. I went to college in Texas for two years, but we wrote to each other often. Then we each married, moved away, had children, and lost touch until we reconnected via a Franklin High reunion about thirty years ago. What a gift it was to me to rediscover this dear old friend! I was so touched when she came to visit my terminally ill mother, as was my mother. Phyll welcomed me as an overnight guest several times, both in the “old” and the “new” homes. She hosted an unforgettable get-together of Franklin drama friends. She kept me up to date on mutual friends. She helped me reconnect with our mutual pal, Joan Fish, whom I first knew in third grade. Most recently, Phyllis drove herself and Joan from Portland to Spokane to help me celebrate my 80th birthday. I was overwhelmed. They had come all that way! I couldn’t know then that I would not see Phyllis again. How I wish she were here now to edit these memories. Thank you, dear friend, for all of the smiles, for all of your kindnesses, for all of the wordplay, and for that turquoise ink.

Posted by Judy Hyatt Bacon on March 9, 2020