RIVER GUARDIANS.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - In the Hollywood version of this tale, no one would ever cast John and Robin Jaqua in the starring role.

This is, after all, a story about a couple taking on a major corporation, and Hollywood likes to cast little guys for that part.

Now meet the Jaquas: John, a prominent retired lawyer with roots in one of the best-known corporations in history, and Robin, a Jungian psychologist with her own small movie production company. Both 84 years old and gracious to the point of courtliness, they are, by most conventional measures, very much a part of the establishment.

He's a former board member of Nike - the meeting between one-time University of Oregon runner Phil Knight and UO track coaching legend Bill Bowerman that led to the founding of Nike was in the Jaquas' living room. He is a one-time president of the Oregon State Bar. In 1994, he was named Eugene's First Citizen by the Eugene Chamber of Commerce. The John E. Jaqua Law Library at the University of Oregon honors the couple's generosity.

And yet it's the Jaquas who have mounted the most serious challenge to PeaceHealth's ambitious plan to build a $380 million regional medical center on undeveloped riverfront land across the McKenzie River from the property where they've lived and ranched for more than 50 years.

"The McKenzie is a world-famous river," says Robin Jaqua, a willowy gray-haired woman who said she fell in love with the riverside property decades ago because it made her think of fairies. "It runs 72 miles from the high Cascades down to the Willamette. And I think it should be preserved as a river for the people of Oregon."

The Jaquas have proven worthy adversaries for the hospital proposal. They won a solid enough victory at the state Court of Appeals last spring that Springfield and PeaceHealth have had to start part of the application process over again. The city and the corporation are now attempting to change land use rules that the Jaquas claimed - and the court agreed - the hospital proposal violated.

Springfield Mayor Sid Leiken declined to discuss the impact that the Jaquas have had on the PeaceHealth project, which Springfield city leaders have enthusiastically endorsed.

"Because of counsel from (City Attorney) Joe Leahy, it's better that we do not speak about this," he said. "But I find them to be two of the nicest and most charming people I've ever met. They are very nice folks."

The Jaquas, too, are careful not to discuss the legal side of their dispute, instead handing a reporter a four-page statement of questions and answers on the issue and referring other questions to their lawyer, Allen Johnson, who once clerked in Jaqua's law office.

(Says 60-year-old Johnson, who has made a reputation as one of the best land use lawyers in the state: "John Jaqua gave me my first job, ever. Now I'm back, sitting at the same table, and feeling the same sense of awe.")

Beyond the complicated legalities of their case, the Jaquas prove to be a good-humored and articulate couple who have enjoyed their life on about 2,000 acres of property stretching from the Coburg Hills down to the northern banks of the McKenzie.

John Jaqua is a thin, angular man, with a soft voice and easy manner. He was captain of his football team at Pomona College in Southern California, where he met and married a psychology student named Rosamond Robinson, who went by the nickname Robin.

John interrupted his college studies to fly torpedo bombers and dive bombers for the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II. He and a friend enlisted after Pearl Harbor, hoping to become pilots. They did, and Jaqua fought in the battles of Guadalcanal and Okinawa.

The friend was killed on a night bombing raid they flew together. Jaqua survived the war unscathed and came home with the Distinguished Flying Cross.

He and Robin came to Oregon, where his father had a dairy, to settle down. John went to law school at the UO. Robin worked as a nursery school teacher.

By the time he got his law degree, the couple had four children.

In 1952, they bought a failed hop farm on the banks of the McKenzie. "It was a mess," she recalls. "They had burned down the hop drier, and there were dead sheep everywhere."

The couple rolled up their sleeves and went to work, tearing down scores of sheds and shanties used by seasonal hop pickers. Now, a half-century later, the Jaquas' ranch is a pristine setting with tidy orchards and two well-maintained old houses. They are working with the Nature Conservancy to preserve about 1,400 acres of their undeveloped upland property.

Robin Jaqua has battled to protect the river once before. In the 1950s and '60s she helped lead a long but successful campaign to force Weyerhaeuser to stop dumping mill effluent into the river.

"When we moved here that river was so smelly!" she says. "It would wake me up at night with the smell. It was all scummy. It took 10 years, but I finally got them to clean it up."

Not until the kids were all in college did Robin decide she wanted to go back to school; she got a master's degree and then a doctoral degree in psychology, and later went to the Carl G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, for four years, getting her certification as a Jungian analyst in 1983.

Robin Jaqua says Jung, who posited archetypes shared by all humankind, would have understood the Jaquas' primal attachment to their land and their need to defend the river.

"He felt we all share the same psyche," she said.

"It is our cerebral egos that get in the way of our natural selves."

The Jaquas are known for their generosity, both public and private.

Years ago, John Jaqua bought a small painting he saw at a sporting goods store by Creswell artist Don Prechtel, who is now quite successful as a painter but then was virtually unknown. Jaqua called Prechtel to ask him about framing, and soon found out the artist was having a hard time making ends meet.

The lawyer sent the artist a paycheck, Prechtel says, every month for three years - and later declined repayment when Prechtel got on his feet financially. "Go out and do the same thing for somebody else," the artist was told. The painting still hangs in Jaqua's office.

More publicly, the Jaquas were honored in 1999 with Presidential Medals by UO President Dave Frohnmayer, who noted the couple's generosity during a half-century to the university and its community - particularly helping to raise $15.5 million for the new law school.

Among the many community boards on which Jaqua has sat is that of Sacred Heart Medical Center, run by PeaceHealth.

That's what made it rankle when they first heard - by reading in the newspaper - of the corporation's plans to build a medical center on the banks of the McKenzie.

The Jaquas say they don't, in fact, object to putting the medical complex at the RiverBend site, so long as it is pulled back from the river's edge and reduced to a less obtrusive height.

"From the very first we have communicated to PeaceHealth that if they would simply lower their building to something reasonable, move it back off the river a bit farther and buffer the area between the building and the river, they would not harm the river community," they wrote. "Unfortunately, this information has had no impact on their plans."

The Jaquas' battle has come at a cost, both financial and personal.

They decline to say how much money they've spent fighting PeaceHealth. But Rob Zako, a staffer with 1,000 Friends of Oregon, which joined them in their lawsuit, guesses the couple has spent more than $100,000 of their own money on legal bills and consultants.

Perhaps more keenly felt, though, is the pressure of fighting an intense public battle at a time of life when most people would like to sit back and enjoy themselves.

"It costs her a lot," John Jaqua says of his wife. "And it costs me a lot, listening to it every day! It really isn't anything we want to do, being this public. I've already fought for 40 years, for a living. I'm tired of fighting."

CAPTION(S):

John and Robin Jaqua walk on their ranch, which sits across the McKenzie River from undeveloped land where PeaceHealth plans to build a $380 million regional medical center. They are fighting to buffer the area between the proposed building and the river. "I find them to be two of the nicest and most charming people I've ever met." - SID LEIKEN, MAYOR OF SPRINGFIELD "From the very first we have communicated to PeaceHealth that if they would simply lower their building to something reasonable, move it back off the river a bit farther and buffer the area between the building and the river, they would not harm the river community. Unfortunately, this information has had no impact on their plans." JOHN AND ROBIN JAQUA