EUGENE, Ore. — The older Herb Yamanaka gets, the more his stories are told.



Those around Oregon know well about his wooden bowls, handcrafted by the 84-year-old associate athletic director in his garage. Recently, one of Yamanaka’s bowls, made from the wood of one of the trees felled around Hayward Field, was presented to Phil Knight.



“The good part of trading bowls is you can never buy it,” Yamanaka says after lunch at Eugene Country Club. “It can only be given away.”



Much of Yamanaka’s seven decades in Eugene have followed a similar pattern of giving and dedication. He came to Oregon from Kona, Hawaii, as a biology student in 1952, paying $55 a semester for tuition. During the summers, he fought fires in Alaska because his grandmother said he couldn’t return to the island without a diploma.



But once he was hired at Oregon in 1959, he found a new home here, and over the course of a 59-year career at...