PENDLETON — The Pendleton Convention Center celebrates its 30th birthday Monday, Dec. 5, with an evening of hors d’oeuvres and festivities.
“Pendleton is a special place, it’s this confluence of history, culture, art, and fun-havers,” Pendleton Convention Center Manager Pat Beard said, looking back on his five years managing the center. “People come to Pendleton to have a good time and that’s what I want to help facilitate.”
Beard, who describes himself as an advocate for the convention center and Pendleton itself, explained, “Pendleton is long on hospitality, they welcome people, and that’s what we’re really good at. My goal is to boil it down to three things: great audio and video services, projection, sound, and anything that it takes to do a presentation.”
Add in great food from the center’s catering partner, Pendleton Catering, Beard said, and it equates to what the Pendleton Convention Center is all about.
“We’re in the customer service business,” he said.
The Pendleton Leather Show draws a crowd on it second day Nov. 4, 2022, in the Pendleton Convention Center. The city marks the convention center’s 30th anniversary Monday, Dec. 5.
Transition from armory to convention center
“When people come here they are concerned that their presentation or event is going to go well, we want to allay those things and let them know we’re on their team, and we know how to do this,” Beard continued. “We’ve done hundreds if not thousands of events and we’re going to be on your team the whole time. That’s what it’s about, then when someone walks in from Portland, Seattle or anywhere else, once they know those things are taken care of, it doesn’t matter where you’re at. There are larger, higher functioning places that don’t treat their customers as well, that’s one of the things we hang our hat on.”
The Pendleton Convention Center, formerly a National Guard armory, was built in 1956 and spent most of its early life as a National Guard training and storage facility.
“In the ‘80s at some point, there was a desire by the National Guard, which was primarily ground troop driven, they wanted to become an air wing, so they needed to be at the airport. At that time, Gen. Raymond Fred Rees, who was a local, was hoping to move the armory to the airport. There was a group in Pendleton, they saw it as an important piece of Pendleton’s future, they wanted to build an event center,” Beard explained.
As part of the process, Beard said, Happy Canyon and the convention center came together, beginning a relationship that goes on to this day.
A game of blackjack is underway at Goldies Bar at the Pendleton Convention Center after the Happy Canyon Night Show in Pendleton. The city celbreats the 30th anniversary of the convention center Monday, Dec. 5, 2022.
East Oregonian, File
“They were figuring out how to put the pieces together to acquire this and for the armory to move up to the airport,” Beard said. “At that time, Niel Goldschmidt was the governor of Oregon, and Mike Thorne, who was a local, was a state legislator. They worked with the National Guard to acquire the funding to match what it was going to take to build the new armory at the airport and then this became the property of the city. Then began the process of changing it from a National Guard training center to an event center.”
‘Pendleton lives on events’
“What we sell in Pendleton is our reputation, based on the Round-Up. The Round-Up is one week of the year, and you’re not going to have a convention that week anyway. They’re expecting sort of a Round-Up experience, that’s what we’re selling, but when the Round-Up is done we’re just Pendleton, Oregon. I had to develop a strategy to be selling the western experience even though we didn’t have anything that was western.” Pat Kennedy, former Pendleton Convention Center Manager explained.
Kennedy managed the Pendleton Convention Center for 20 years and oversaw a great deal of transformation bringing new events and constantly improving the space. Despite this, he emphasized, the Pendleton identity is core to what brings people to the convention center.
“You can’t sell the building, there are too many other really nice convention center buildings up and down the valley and so on. There’s no reason to drive out to Pendleton to attend a building. You’ve got to have more to attract people to come this far.”
Kennedy added that Pendleton’s central location in the Northwest works as an advantage, explaining he coined the phrase, “The Center of Attention,” as a play on the Convention Center’s name.
Beard praised the foresight of Pendleton and those who strove to found the convention center, saying that due to its location, being a three-hour drive from Portland, Boise and Spokane, the convention center is strategically located in the center of the Northwest.
“Pendleton lives on events, the largest and brightest spot in Pendleton’s economic future is events. Housing has always been a challenge, we are a town of 16,000, and the way that zoning is and everything else is it probably won’t get much bigger,” Beard said. “So we need to bring a new group of people here every week, introduce them to Pendleton, show them a great time, send them home, and then all the sudden in the back of their mind they think, “we have to go back to Pendleton sometime.’ I love that part of what I do.”
Students, family and friends gather June 9, 2022, at the Pendleton Convention Center to show their support for the Blue Mountain Community College Class of 2022. The city celebrates the convention center’s 30th anniversary Monday, Dec. 5, 2022.
Yasser Marte/East Oregonian
As part of the festivities, the convention center will be inviting multiple members of the community that have played a pivotal role in its development and continued success, Beard said.
“We’re just going to talk about the accomplishments of the people that had a vision for the convention center, and have seen it all come to fruition,” he said. “In 2019 when I came here we were doing about 195 events, and now we’re right at 400 events a year. That’s large and small and everything else, but the way that the convention center works the best is when we get out-of-town groups to come here for multi-days. Then they’re filling up motels, then restaurants, then shopping, and then hopefully building some sort of kinship with this community. Rather than just renting space, that’s what I see the convention center’s mission as.”
‘2A Basketball Tournament’
“When I became manager here there were two things I absolutely had to protect, one was Eastern Star, and the other was the 2A basketball tournament. We had a roof leak someplace that was causing our basketball floor to buckle and we couldn’t find it. We had to do something to protect the tournament,” Kennedy explained.
The Oregon State 2A basketball tournament has been held annually in Pendleton since the convention center was still the National Guard Armory.
“The state 2A basketball championship is such an important event because it’s been here since ‘57,” Beard said, illustrating how the tournament remains an important event today. “The community to a person just bails in. One of the things I’m very proud of is that there are team families and businesses that adopt teams that show up here. It’s a real welcoming sense that these kids from small towns that have never been to Pendleton, they show up here and someone says ‘hey, welcome to a Pendleton, we’re glad you’re here, we’re so proud of you,’ and they fix them meals, wash their uniforms, all kinds of things like that, I just love the way our community responds.”
There was a time when the future of the tournament could have been at risk, Kennedy explained, as early in his tenure, a mysterious leak was causing damage to the floors. Kennedy sought to remedy the problem by purchasing a portable basketball floor, which he’d soon acquire from the NBA franchise the Phoenix Suns. Exciting as the new floor was, its installation revealed a since-fixed problem with the hoop alignment that had existed since its original installation.
“When we got everything all laid out we discovered that the basket at the north end had been wrong forever by about two or three inches,” Kennedy said. “Two or three inches is a lot. You practice, and you practice, and you practice, and you get up there, you’re going to win or lose the game, you shoot the ball perfectly, and it bounces off the front edge. I often wondered about how many hearts have been broken because of those couple of unknown inches. All that practice.”
