For many the transition starts on the long, dark ride from Portland International Airport to Forest Grove.

“We pick them up at the airport,” says Auntie Edna Gehring, the soon-to-be retired director of Pacific University’s Hawaii Outreach and Programming Office. “And as they are passing the cornfields at night, you can see it on their faces: ‘What did I get myself into?’

“They’re fresh and young and away from home for the very first time,” says Gehring. “They come as babies and walk away learning to be adults.”

And for untold many of those young freshmen from Hawaii who over the last 35 years have left home to attend Pacific University in Oregon, what happens in those precious, precarious years in between has been guided, directed, buffered, mediated and remediated by Gehring herself.

The Honolulu-born, Pacific University-educated Gehring has, among many other things in her four-decade career at the university, served as adviser to Na Haumana o Hawaii, the campus’ 300-member-strong Hawaii club since 1983. To generations of Pacific students from Hawaii, she has been the difference between going home at Christmas and never coming back and earning a four-year degree at a Northwest home-away-from-home. She’s the one who answers the phone in the middle of the night when some poor student is stuck miles away from campus with a flat tire, the one who patiently counsels Hawaii kids on how to speak and show respect to people who don’t share their island origins, the one who brings the tough love when no other kind will do.

“We believe in ohana over everything,” Gehring says. “It really does take a whole village to raise good haumana (students) and respectful adults. That’s my job. As ‘auntie’ I can pull ears.”

Gehring, nee Doar, grew up in Kalihi and Ainakoa and graduated from Kalani High School. After high school she followed her older brother Bill to Forest Grove, where he was a pitcher on the baseball team. At Pacific she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and a master’s in secondary education.

It was just after she completed her master’s that she married Hans Gehring, who was completing his bachelor’s degree.

“My students told me that I’m a ‘cougar,’” Edna Gehring says, cackling.

After a year of teaching in Oregon, Gehring returned to Honolulu with her husband and spent the next 10 years teaching and coaching at Mililani High School. While there she started the College and Career Center, which assists students in post-high school planning.

In 1983 the family, which now included a daughter, returned to Oregon, and Gehring took a job at Pacific’s admissions office helping to recruit students from Hawaii.

The school has enjoyed a strong relationship with the state. Over time the Hawaii students have left their own mark on the school, from language and dress to chicken katsu on the cafeteria menu. Today students from Hawaii make up nearly 20 percent of the student population, Gehring says.

Gehring took over as Na Haumana o Hawaii adviser shortly after her return to the school.

The club hosts an annual luau. In a typical year the luau will draw 1,200 guests for dinner, some 1,800 for the post-dinner show and a few hundred for the after-party. This year’s event, held April 14, was Gehring’s 36th and final luau before her scheduled retirement at the end of the semester.

In Gehring’s honor the school is establishing an endowed scholarship in her name to support members of Na Haumana o Hawaii, specifically undergraduate juniors and seniors who “actively promote the NHOH mission and participate in activities and events.”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.