The former director of the Tulsa Port of Catoosa, Bob Portiss will be one of two individuals to be inducted into the Claremore Hall of Fame for 2019.
The other is the late decorated Navy Adm. James “Jocko” Clark.
“This year’s inductees have had a tremendous impact on thousands of lives,” said J.M. Davis Arms & Historical Museum Commission Chairman William Higgins.
The inductions will take place Thursday evening.
Portiss went to work at the Port of Catoosa in 1973 as manager of traffic and sales and assistant secretary of the facilities authority. He was a Navy veteran who worked for a year at Catoosa before leaving to manage commercial industrial properties in Arizona and New Orleans.
But Portiss returned to Catoosa in 1977 and by 1984 was named port director. He retired in 2017.
During his leadership, the Port of Catoosa went from 2,000 acres of pastureland to an inland port handling more than 2 million tons of waterborne commerce.
Adm. Clark was born in Indian Territory in 1893 and become the first Native American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy.
In his career, he taught at the Naval Academy and became a naval aviator in 1925 who was considered instrumental in development of naval air power. Clark was on the carrier Yorktown when World War II began. In 1944, he was promoted to rear admiral and assigned to the new carrier Hornet.
Clark gained the nickname “Patton of the Pacific” as the Hornet was involved in raids on the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, the Marianas Islands and Iwo Jima.
During the Korean War, he was in command of the Navy’s 7th Fleet. Clark retired in 1953 as a four-star admiral and died in 1971.
