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There was a lot of shouting that day.

I wonder if Paul Trullinger noticed. He was accustomed to loud voices in the Selling Building. He was a dentist, after all, in the days before Novocain replaced screaming as the preferred method for handling dental pain.

However, he might have taken an interest in the decibel level of the brouhaha breaking out a couple of flights below his eighth-floor office that day in 1912. His wife was in the thick of it.

Louise Trullinger would later become rather famous, eventually played in a movie by Diane Keaton. That day, however, she was a member of the Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association engaged in what the Oregon Journal described as a 鈥渄iscourtesy鈥� escalating into a 鈥渞ow.鈥�

Today, the Selling Building, at the corner Southwest Sixth Avenue and Alder Street, houses assorted offices and a Rite Aid store. Yet the building has a truly radical story to tell anyone interested in listening to the ghosts and following their footsteps.

A lot of what Portland is now it owes to those times. The 鈥淧ortlandia鈥� song is right. The dream of the 鈥�90s is alive in Portland. It just may be the dream of the 1890s 鈥� and 1920s.

Abigail Scott Duniway, now the undisputed leader of the Oregon suffrage movement, was not so undisputed in 1912. Various factions battled it out at the association鈥檚 headquarters in the Selling Building. The dispute boiled down to whether the venerable Mrs. Duniway was getting her 鈥減ropers.鈥�

Mrs. Paul A. Trullinger was little more than a local activist at the time.

She would soon become much more. She ditched her dentist husband, took back her maiden name (Louise Bryant) and hooked up with John Reed 鈥� a Portland-born journalist who had become a major voice of American radicalism.

Reed and Bryant were the subjects of Warren Beatty鈥檚 1980 movie 鈥淩eds,鈥� which told the tale of their coverage of the Russian Revolution.

I feel sorry for Paul Trullinger. He comes across as a major stiff in the movie. Yet he must have been quite the progressive in his own right. He not only married Bryant, but he and Reed had colorful mutual friends, including Oregonian columnist Dean Collins. The house where Trullinger and Bryant lived still stands at 11801 S.W. Riverwood Road.

During her time in Portland, Bryant also kept her own studio in the Murlark Building at Northwest 23rd Avenue and Burnside Street. (World Market and other businesses dominate the intersection today.)

She also wrote for the Spectator, a weekly newspaper located in what was the Chamber of Commerce building on the north side of Southwest Stark Street between Third and Fourth avenues. The building was torn down in 1934.

Reed (who didn鈥檛 look a thing like Beatty, by the way) was born to an affluent family, but all that鈥檚 left of that estate is part of its driveways that are now Southwest Cedar Street and Cactus Drive.

However, concrete steps on the adjacent Southwest Green Avenue probably once led to the estate鈥檚 stables northeast of the main house.

Reed spent most of his early childhood in a Queen Anne-style home at 119 N.W. 21st Ave. at Davis Street. The house was demolished in the late 1960s; now, a pet food store occupies the site.

The family moved in 1896 when Reed was 9 years old to Southwest Jefferson Street and 14th Avenue. Reed became a member of the Fourteenth Street Gang. Today, the site is a parking lot next to Lincoln High School.

A final move took the family to a house at 233 Stout St. (what is now Southwest 20th Avenue). The site later became the Hadley House apartments on Salmon Street.

Anyone who has seen the movie 鈥淩eds鈥� knows how this story turns out. Reed died of typhus in 1920 at age 32 and is buried at Red Square in Moscow. Bryant died of a brain hemorrhage at age 50.

However, it鈥檚 interesting to visit the places where Reed grew up and Bryant transformed from a dentist鈥檚 wife into a radical.

The bumper stickers ask us to keep Portland weird. These people helped make it weird in the first place.

鈥淏uilding Curiosity鈥� investigates intriguing, historical and obscure tidbits of the built environment. Tom Henderson is a reporter for the Daily Journal of Commerce. Contact him at 503-802-7226 or [email protected].