“Flour Power!”
Dorothy and Hurtis Hadley’s Milwaukie Pastry Kitchen Five Decades of Craft, Community and Legacy
As mere children aged 6, Dororthy Jean Bishop (b. 1942, Tillar, Arkansas) and Hurtis Mixon Hadley (b. 1942, Neveda County, Arkansas) survived the devasting flooding of Vanport, Oregon. The disaster nudged their families’ migration into the city of Portland, where they have settled since. However, the flood was hardly the final test of survival shaping their childhoods – Hurtis continues to look back on growing up in the “projects,” to how they established a name for their family and community; not in spite of their early upbringing impacted by economic precarity gentrification, but because of it.
A graduate of Portland’s Jefferson High School, Hurtis Hadley found his passion for baking as a teenager working as a busboy and waiter at Meier & Frank. The pantry chef was short-handed one day and needed an assistant; Hadley accepted the job. A year later, he found himself at the Bohemian Restaurant and Bakery in downtown Portland yet was stifled of opportunities for advancement. After five years at Bohemian, Hadley applied to Albertsons, becoming the first African American to be accepted into Oregon’s three-year baker apprenticeship program. Owing to his prior professional expertise, Hadley completed the program in two years, making him the first African American in the state of Oregon to be state certified as a journeyman baker.
Dorothy Hadley earned her cosmetology license from the Hollywood College of Beauty, Portland, but was offered few worthwhile roles. Instead, her infectious personality allowed her to join events, conventions and stores as a public-facing “demo girl.” The couple knew firsthand, how discriminatory thinking in their majority-white city posed hurdles in their career and family growth. Hurtis was unable to gain the position of district manager at Albertsons’ Oregon store, as he was told at the time, “Oregonians aren’t ready for a Black man in that position [of authority].” This is partly what swayed the couple to bet on their own selves and purchase the Milwaukie Bakery Kitchen. With Dorothy’s customer service training and Hurtis’s baking prowess, they opened the business at 10607 Southeast Main, creating history in 1977, as the first Black-owned business in the City of Milwaukie and the first Black-owned bakery in the State of Oregon.
The Hadleys were prepared for most of their potential customers to be white. "Not everyone was pleased to have an accomplished black couple in their midst at the time,” Hurtis now reflects, “or black people at all in the mostly white town." But once the bakery opened, Milwaukie welcomed them. On “day one we’re in the shop and got all these flowers,” until the bouquets exceeded the amount of pastries and goodies! “Different businesses throughout the community had sent them to…welcome us to the community, and lo and behold, we had instant business.”
Milwaukie Pastry Kitchen was a full line bakery that offered specialty breads, assorted pastries, and creative birthday and wedding cakes. Hurtis, with his children as helpers, ran the kitchen and Dorothy managed the front of the store and coordinated the catering service. The shop’s slogan was fittingly, “Put a little Soul in your Roll.”
While the road was challenging at every turn, the Hadleys remind Milwaukie that those who do not intend to make history are all the more deserving of its recognition. In celebrating their 64th wedding anniversary, Dorothy and Hurtis Hadley proudly call themselves adoring grandparents, trailblazing former union members of Bakers Local 114, and dedicated entrepreneurs. Their commitments, resilience, and above all else, joy is integral to every pastry they bake, recipe their invent, and kitchen they stand in. Through a curated collection of equipment from their Milwaukie Pastry Kitchen, personal photographs, and ephemera, their journey breathes life back into the very place that began a significant chapter for the Hadleys – Milwaukie, Oregon.
