When Tim Tran arrived in Forest Grove in 1979, a plastic sack held all his earthly possessions. Pirates had taken everything, down to his glasses and his last pair of pants.

His friend, Roberta "Bobbi" Nickels, greeted him at the car.

"I travel light," he quipped.

She began to cry.

Five years had passed since they last saw each other at the campus of Pacific University in Forest Grove. Tran had come to the U.S. on a college scholarship and returned to South Vietnam in 1974. Months later, the government collapsed.

In the following five years, friends at his alma mater never stopped trying to help him and his family. He remembered that kindness as he worked his way from penniless refugee to successful businessman to university benefactor.

Last month, Nickels was an honored guest as Tran stood in front of the university library newly named in his honor.

"Coming here today and attending this dedication is the completion of a long journey of 38 years and more than 10,000 miles," he told the crowd. "I'm glad it ended right here."

Khiem and Thuy Tran, who now go by Tim and Cathy, first met while competing for the same scholarship from the U.S. government's Agency for International Development. They were the top male and female candidates from South Vietnam, and both were selected in 1970 to study at Pacific University.

Pacific was a small campus and they made friends easily. Tim joined the Gamma Sigma fraternity. Cathy became a Theta Nu Alpha.

"Like sponges, they wanted to know everything there was to know about American culture and American literature," said George Evans, who taught them literature and writing at Pacific. "By the time they left, they knew more than most Americans."

Nickels met Tran as a fellow teacher with Upward Bound, a federally funded program that provided summer tutoring for at-risk youth.

Tim and Cathy studied at Pacific for two years, then he transferred to University of California Berkeley to study accounting and finance, while Cathy completed her bachelor's in finance at the University of Oregon.

Still, their strong connections to Pacific remained, and Tran returned every summer to work for Upward Bound.

"Berkeley gave me an excellent education," he said. "Pacific molded me into a better man."

As graduation neared in 1974, Tran's friends urged him not to return to South Vietnam. He was accepted into a master's program at the University of British Columbia.

"I thought long and hard about that, and I came to the final conclusion that, well, returning is not that bad," he said. "Plus, I owe the American government and the South Vietnamese government a lot for my education. Fleeing to Canada didn't seem, at the time, an honorable decision.

"And then I had plenty of time to regret that."

After a final summer with Upward Bound, Tran returned to Saigon in September 1974. But by January 1975, as the North Vietnamese took control of the province just 60 miles from the city, he asked his American friends for help.

"In 1975, things with the war got pretty grim," Nickels said. She and the director of Upward Bound, Paul Hebb, went to the American embassy trying to sponsor Tim and his family.

"It was just a horror of timing," she said. "They got the papers, but the embassy was flying helicopters out."

That was April 1975, when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army and the Americans pulled out of the country. In the chaos, one of Tran's younger sisters, Thao Tran, managed to board a boat by herself and escape.

Though she knew little English, she had heard her brother's stories and she wrote from a refugee camp a letter addressed to "Paul Hebb, Pacific University, Oregon."

Miraculously, with no address or zip code, the letter arrived, and Nickels sponsored her arrival to the U.S. The young women moved in together and Thao received a scholarship to study mathematics at Pacific.

Meanwhile, her brother continued to plot escape attempts.

"Every waking moment I was thinking about how do I get out," he said.

He and Cathy married a month after the fall of Saigon, on May 30, 1975, in a small, family-only affair. Tran, who had gotten work at Shell Oil upon moving home, was laid off when the company was nationalized by the new regime. He held a slew of small jobs over the next few years while continuing to write to Nickels.

"One of the coded messages I wrote to my friends over here is 'Tim will try to visit Uncle Sam, could you help?'" he said. "Of course, I didn't spell it S-A-M, I put in some Vietnamese name, but they understood that."

Nickels had formed "Friends of Khiem" and raised money in several failed attempts to pay for his way out. She even flew to visit an uncle in Hong Kong, where she attempted to negotiate their passage on a boat.

The Trans would eventually escape Vietnam on their own in 1979. They packed onto a fishing boat with some 350 refugees to cross the Gulf of Thailand into Malaysia.

"I paid five ounces of gold for the passage," Tran said. "On a dark, rainy night we boarded the boat and left quietly without fanfare and we were successful. That was a blessing."

But the blessing ended there.

Over seven days, he said, they were attacked by seven groups of pirates. They took everything of value - watches, rings, gold. Each successive group found fewer items to pilfer. The fifth group stripped Tran of his Levi's jeans at knife-point. The seventh group took his glasses before destroying the boat's water jugs in the search for valuables.

They survived the last two days of their journey without food or water. When they spied the Malaysian shore, they waited until nightfall to approach, then slammed the boat into the rocks, destroying it before police could tow them back to sea.

At the refugee camp, Tran was employed as an interpreter and press liaison. That winter, he was granted asylum in the United States and arrived in Oregon, where Cathy soon joined him.

Between 1975 and 1995, the United States would take in more than 424,000 Vietnamese refugees, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.

Tran was among them, arriving with a six-year-old degree, no work history and no money. He and Cathy adopted their Americanized names and began applying for jobs. He borrowed $300 from Nickels -- paid back with interest -- and had friends co-sign for an apartment.

"It was hard, but in a way strengthened my determination to be successful," Tran said.

In 1980, he received an entry level accounting job with Portland-based Johnstone Supply, a distributor of heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment. He moved up the corporate ladder, retiring in 2003 as chief financial officer.

Cathy had a successful career, too, spending 18 years with US Bank and 15 years at Standard Insurance. She retired from the company in 2015 as tax manager.

The couple, who never had children, decided to share part of their success with the school that made so much of their lives possible.

With an undisclosed amount of money, they established an endowment to fund operations for the Pacific University library system. Earlier this month, the 2005-built library at the Forest Grove campus was renamed the Tim and Cathy Tran Library in their honor.

The library houses two plaques dedicated to the "refuge, support and opportunity" Nickels and Evans gave the Trans during their time as students and in their escape from Vietnam.

Nickels was honored by the recognition.

"I've been grateful many times in my life that they instilled in me the will to do the right thing when the time comes," she said.

Evans recently watched the documentary series, "The Vietnam War" by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, saying it was painful to relive those days.

"What I remember most is all the horrible, horrible things we did, and that is part of our story and we forget it at our peril," he said.

"But on the other hand, there's another story, and that's the story of two Vietnamese young people, coming to this country, falling in love with it, and remembering us and then returning that love in this magnificent gift. That's the other side of the story, and we need to remember both sides I think."

-- Samantha Swindler

@editorswindler / 503-294-4031

sswindler@oregonian.com