Auden Yurman | 2025 AmeriCorps Member

In 1997, Arthur Hooper, then a student at Clark College in Vancouver, WA, designed a pin for the local chapter of American Red Cross. The pin is a small rectangle featuring Mt. Hood peeking out from behind Fort Vancouver and a stream of swimming salmon. It reads “Clark County Chapter” and “Fort Vancouver Washington” across the bottom, with the American Red Cross logo at the top. 

I came across this pin around the end of April, sitting in a bowl of odd pins and other Red Cross mementos in the Cascades region historical archives, a small space on the second floor of a warehouse piled with carboard boxes and plastic bins. It was the beginning of a three-month organizing and cataloging project that I was undertaking with Logan, one of my fellow AmeriCorps members at the Red Cross, as part of our program’s capstone requirement. I work out of the Southwest Washington chapter, and when I found the pin, I sent a picture to my supervisor, excited to find something close to home. 

Nearly three months later, I talked to Arthur Hooper on the phone. It was an odd and unfortunate set of events that led me to him — a fire at the Vancouver apartment building Arthur lived in. “Twenty-five years I lived in that apartment,” he told me.  

The Red Cross responded to the fire, offering immediate recovery support to residents, including Arthur, who told me that the Red Cross helped him replace medicine damaged by smoke. “I’m very pleased that they were able to help me with that,” Arthur said. “You know, right now, it’s a little tough, it’s a little tight, because we have to a find a new place to live in, and everything else.”  

I was excited too — after months cataloging regional Red Cross artifacts and sorting out pins, clothes and papers from the last hundred years, this was a chance to talk to someone who contributed directly to the history Logan and I are working to explore. In 1997, Arthur designed a pin for the Red Cross. In 2025, when the Red Cross found its way back to Arthur’s life, his pin still exists, sitting in the archives in Portland, hanging on the wall in Vancouver.  

At the time he designed the pin, Arthur was a student, the ad manager who “basically ran” the student newspaper and a single father to four kids: “I never got to do my schoolwork ‘till they went to bed.” Even so, he made time for the pin. “It was just something I’d like to do,” he said. “And I come from an artistic family.” 

He was working at the paper when someone from the Red Cross stopped by to run an ad and ended up commissioning him to design a pin for the local chapter. “And because I had the graphic background, I said sure, and I sat down and I made something up for her,” Arthur said. “She took it in, got it approved and got it all made.”  

According to an article by Laura McGuire, Regional Communications Manager in the American Red Cross Wisconsin Region, “The Red Cross pin culture dates as far back as the early 1900s. The organization bestowed pins on financial donors as a token of appreciation, nurses for their service — even giving pins for people who completed Red Cross water safety classes. The tradition continues today, with people earning pins for years of service, important projects, noteworthy achievements, national large-scale disaster deployments and blood donations.” 

“It’s like Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts,” Arthur said. “You know, go around and trade pins with each other.” 

Arthur’s pin started out as an illustration that he created from scratch, pulling together distinctive elements of Southwest Washington — like Fort Vancouver, salmon in the river, and the presence of Mt. Hood in the background — together into a digital collage. He used design experience from school and the newspaper: “Back then, it was still the old style printing, but it was going to digital at that time, so we were learning on Photoshop and stuff like that. You know, old version of Photoshop, so it was little bit harder than it is today.” He told me that he was “part of the first team that made Clark College’s website,” and that he still does design today, but “programs are a lot easier now.”  

Arthur didn’t get to see the pin before it was made and he was never paid for the design, but the Red Crosser who commissioned him — who he remembers as “a wonderful lady” — brought one back for him to keep. “I did get the pin,” he told me, “and I was happy as a clam for that…I was just happy to see something like that.”  

Arthur hasn’t had much connection to the Red Cross in the last few decades, but he remembers his pin, and the process of creating it, fondly. He said he’s glad he was offered “the opportunity to do it,” and that if anyone needs another, just to let him know. 

“When I did that,” he told me, “that was an important part of my life, because I was going to college, working, and I had four kids. I was a single dad, and I’m doing all that at one time, and I was still able to do that. That was a very important time in my life, but now I’ve been married for 25 years, so I’m doing good now. All my kids are grown up, and I’ve got 11 grandkids.”