Sketching a legacy in green and yellow
Story by Korrin Bishop, BS ’11 (planning, public policy and management); Photos and video by Andy Nelson
When Claudine Lundgren was 13, she asked her family to go on a trip to Walt Disney Studios. Living in Los Angeles at the time, she couldn’t have known how that visit would echo decades later at the University of Oregon.
“I didn’t just read all of the Disney comic books when I was a child, I studied them,” she recalls. “I was hooked on how they could create so much emotion with so few lines, and I wanted to be able to do that."
This was before Disneyland’s gates opened, when the studio itself was the magic. Her mother took her to watch artists breathe life into Lady and the Tramp—pencils scratching across paper, drawings flickering into motion. She met the animators, saw the process unfold, and felt her world tilt.
“It was life-changing for me,” she says. From that day forward, she was in love with cartooning and art.
Today, at 84, Lundgren sits in her Marcola, Oregon, farmhouse where she’s lived since 1972. Yellow-and-green Donald Duck earrings dangle from her ears as vintage screenprints and Pellon test samples spill across the table. Many are still marked with scribbled handwritten notes about paint colors, layout tweaks, and other tiny adjustments that brought each design to life.
“I’m so totally a Duck because this work gave us so much fun,” she says, reflecting on her time as the first artist licensed to draw a likeness of Disney’s Donald Duck for UO T-shirts. “Having walked the halls as a student and also contributing as a promoter, I became a solid Duck for sure.”
Claudine Lundgren looks at some of the many designs she created while working at Oh SHIRT! Shop owner Trish Kaminski came up with ideas and Lundgren brought them to life. Lundgren’s designs were then taken by Kaminski to the UO, which faxed them to Disney for approval before printing began.
Photo by Andy Nelson/Advancement Communications
Finding a home in Oregon
After earning scholarships to the Los Angeles County Art Institute as a teenager, Lundgren moved north to McMinnville, Oregon, graduating from Linfield College (now known as Linfield University) in 1963 with a bachelor of science. In those four years, she fell in love with Oregon’s landscapes and way of life, so much so that after graduation, she convinced her family to move up from California to join her in Eugene.
Not long after, she joined the Peace Corps in Chile, where she sharpened her Spanish. Returning home, she earned a teacher certification from the UO’s College of Education in 1967 and launched into a decade at North Eugene High School. During that time, she continued post-graduate studies in Spanish through the UO and a partner institution in Mexico and secured a grant to establish a language immersion program in Eugene. That program proved so successful that its model still shapes local schools today.
However, around 1975, Lundgren needed a change. So, she and a fellow teacher left the classroom to open AtLund Press, a lithography shop just off Garfield Street in Eugene—which is how Lane County resident and businesswoman Trish Kaminski walked into her life.
Trish Kaminski, right, was the owner of Oh SHIRT! and created a thriving business which supplied multiple universities with designs.
Photo by Andy Nelson/Advancement Communications
Meeting Trish Kaminski
“One day, Trish Kaminski walked in the door, and she says, ‘I’m opening a shop, I want to call it Oh SHIRT!, and I need your help to make the screens,’” Lundgren remembers.
She agreed, helping Kaminski launch her T-shirt business with clients across Oregon. The shop quickly gained traction, and soon Lundgren was immersed in the craft. She was busy preparing screens with stenciled designs, pressing each layer of color through the mesh, then heat-curing the prints to last.
“Finally, I said, ‘You know, Trish, I just can’t keep up with this,’” she recalls. “And she says, ‘Well, I’m going to give you an offer you can’t refuse. You’re going to be my art director, because we’re going wholesale.’”
By the late 1970s, Lundgren was on board full time. “I could cartoon all day long and just enjoy myself,” she shares. Kaminski, meanwhile, kept the orders flowing with her trademark charisma, a quality that still brings a wistful look to Lundgren’s face.
Claudine Lundgren is surrounded by her work at Oh SHIRT! For more than 15 years, Lundgren crafted University of Oregon designs that adorned apparel, posters, and other media including keychains and pins.
Photo courtesy of Claudine Lundgren
“I would get orders from her where she would draw them on a napkin from a bar that she met somebody at, and she’d go, ‘Okay, here’s another 24 shirts, do this,’” Lundgren laughs. “That’s just the way she was. She was so good at sales. It was just incredible.”
Before long, Oh SHIRT! was supplying designs to 72 universities from 15 states, but the clear favorite was always the hometown team.
Owner Trish Kaminski created Oh SHIRT! and was the force behind the business until her death in 1987.
Photo courtesy of Claudine Lundgren
The heyday of Oh SHIRT! in Eugene
Lundgren and Kaminski created spirit tees and quirky Duck designs for the UO’s students and fans. When they learned the university held a Disney license to use a likeness of Donald Duck, Lundgren’s childhood love of the cartoon kingpin came full circle. She started by suggesting small tweaks to the classic “Charging Duck” that Disney had provided the school before sketching her own mascot illustrations.
One of her early hits was the “Hugga Duck,” a cutesy baby duck in a yellow onesie with a green “O,” wearing Oregon’s signature green sailor hat and holding a daisy. Today, vintage Hugga Duck shirts fetch more than $100 on resale sites.
"For me, sitting there doodling was just inspiration finding a way out,” Lundgren shares. “And then Trish came up with ‘Qwak Attack,’ ‘Gang Green,’ all these wild ideas, and we would make designs to fit her brainiac ideas. They all sold. So, we just kept going.”
Lundgren created hundreds of drawings that adorned T-shirts for Duck fans.
The process was a true collaboration: Kaminski gave feedback, then took Lundgren’s designs to the UO, which faxed them to Disney for approval before printing began. Competitors tried to muscle in, but the UO stuck with Oh SHIRT! and its modest warehouse in Springfield, which squeezed in three presses and a pair of long-belt dryers. Oh SHIRT! even became the first company to copyright a mascot T-shirt.
"Others thought we were this business with 25 people doing artwork in this huge corporation, but there was just me!” Lundgren chuckles.
She believes the designs helped Duck fans forge a stronger identity and have even more fun at games.
"There was a group of customers that all got shirts to match that said, ‘East End Zone Zanies,’” Lundgren remembers. “They were wild people! There were maybe 30 of them and they would take over the east end zone of the football field.”
She and Kaminski often joined their tailgate parties in the parking lot, complete with chili cookoffs and boundless laughter.
The idea for Hugga Duck came out of the blue to Claudine Lundgren. “I was just doodling and I was just playing with this, and before I knew it, I had a head. Okay, let's see where this goes. And then it just appeared,” Lundgren said.
Photo by Andy Nelson/Advancement Communications
The end of an era
After years of fun, creativity, and camaraderie at Oh SHIRT!, Kaminski passed away from cancer in 1987. Lundgren and a new sales team did their best to keep the business alive into the early 1990s, but without Kaminski’s drive and personal touch, it was never quite the same.
“All of us had to go through a huge grieving process because it was such a high time for us,” Lundgren reflects. “We were on the top of that industry, and to have it close was a tragedy. I wrote my life story, and one chapter is dedicated to Trish and how I had to deal with losing her as a boss. She was just so fun to watch in action.”
In that difficult season, Lundgren found solace on backpacking trips and eventually returned to the UO for further studies before heading back to the classroom. She considered herself fortunate to still have a passion for teaching, first at Lane Community College and later finishing her career at Pleasant Hill High School.
Lundgren’s original drawing shows the changes Trish Kaminski made to the design of the hat and color scheme. The beanie was an important touch since it more closely represented what students wore historically on campus.
Photo by Andy Nelson/Advancement Communications
An enduring legacy
Decades later, Lundgren hasn’t lost her touch with drawing the Duck. Sitting at her kitchen table in Marcola, she picks up a pencil and lets muscle memory guide her hand.
“You work with the shapes first, not an outline, and every line was important to Disney,” she explains, as a beanie-topped student Duck begins to emerge on the page, its sailor outfit coming to life once again.
She smiles as she points out her initials hidden in several designs.
“This is really entertaining for me because I haven’t gotten to look at these for so long, and it was such a fun time,” she says. “I miss doing this kind of thing.”
Even now, when she steps into certain local businesses, owners still call out: “Hey! It’s Oh SHIRT!” And she’s been delighted to see her designs resurface in the recent wave of nostalgia for vintage gear.
“I didn’t really think about it being lasting,” she admits. “I just thought about it meeting the demand at the moment. But I still see people carrying around key chains with the Hugga Duck on there, and that just makes me grin, especially when they don’t know I did it. It makes me feel like I know a secret.”
Lundgren still watches every Ducks game. “It’s just a part of your blood,” she says.
And as her designs now mingle with modern fan gear in today’s crowds, she’s humbled by how her work from so many years ago has given her a chance to touch the future. These pieces will have a life beyond her as part of the storied, silkscreened fabric of what it means to be a Duck.