CLACKAMAS — Had Richard Etulain graduated four years after he entered Northwest Nazarene College, he would have heard a 36-year-old Mark Hatfield speak at the commencement ceremony in May 1959.

But Etulain took an extra year to obtain a bachelor’s degree from what is now a university in Nampa, Idaho. He was pursuing an Oregon dairyman’s daughter who would later become his wife. So he did not hear Hatfield, then and now the youngest person ever elected governor of Oregon.

That changed during his six years in graduate work at the University of Oregon, where Etulain earned a master’s in American literature in 1962 and a doctorate in American literature and history in 1966. He was able to vote for Hatfield’s reelection as governor in 1962 and Hatfield’s nomination for U.S. senator in the 1996 Republican primary. But he left Oregon before Hatfield won the first of five terms in the Senate that fall.

Etulain, now 83, calls himself a lifelong Democrat.

“But I fell in love with Mark Hatfield’s style,” he said. “I saw him as a person who could work across the aisle.”

Etulain and his wife, Joyce, a retired children’s librarian, live in Clackamas. His academic career took him back to his alma mater, then Idaho State University, and the University of New Mexico, where he directed the Center for the American West. He is the author or editor of more than 60 books, including Abraham Lincoln and Civil War politics in the Northwest, and William S. U’Ren, father of the Oregon System of the initiative, referendum and recall.

Etulain also is the author of “Mark O. Hatfield: Oregon Statesman,” the first biography since the former Oregon governor and senator died in 2011 at the age of 89. It was published in 2021, but the impending centennial of Hatfield’s birth gives it more import.

The book focuses on Hatfield’s early years and the governorship — Hatfield was the first Oregon governor in the 20th century to serve two full terms, from 1959 until he became a senator in 1967 — but only summarizes (in 30 pages) his 30 years in the Senate.

Etulain said Hatfield’s Senate papers, which are housed in the library that bears his name at Willamette University in Salem, are scheduled to be open to researchers on the 100th anniversary of Hatfield’s birth on Tuesday, July 12.

Etulain does not gloss over Hatfield’s failings, but says his is “a sympathetic biography.”

“Even after I make allowance for his mistakes and where I disagree with his conclusions, I think him a role model for politicians,” he wrote in the preface.

Though Hatfield wrote a book a decade before his death — “Against the Grain: Confessions of a Rebel Republican,” published in 2001 — he also said he felt he was not the best judge of his place in history.

Other than his 93-year-old widow, Antoinette, most of those in Hatfield’s early political circle have died. The most recent on March 13 was Gerry Frank of Salem, the one-time department store owner who led Hatfield’s 1966 Senate campaign and was his Senate chief of staff and special assistant from 1967 to 1992. Frank was 98.

The centennial of Mark Hatfield’s birth will be observed in special events by the Oregon Historical Society.

One event is scheduled from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday, July 12, at the society, 1200 S.W. Park Ave., Portland. Two of Hatfield’s successors as governor, Democrats Barbara Roberts (1991-95) and Ted Kulongoski (2003-11) will be among those sharing their memories, and root beer floats — a Hatfield favorite — will be served.

The traveling exhibit, “The Call of Public Service: The Life and Legacy of Mark O. Hatfield,” also will be on display at the event.

The second event is the move of the exhibit to the Mark O. Hatfield Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University, 3251 S.W. Sam Jackson Park Road, Portland, for a showing between Aug. 1 and Oct. 2. As chairman and ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hatfield steered millions in federal grants to OHSU.

— Peter Wong