Dec. 23, 2019
This structure was, and I could very well be mistaken, the parsonage at one time for the Assembly of God Church.
Friday, December 27, 2019
Parsonage?
Dec. 23, 2019
This structure was, and I could very well be mistaken, the parsonage at one time for the Assembly of God Church.
Pickleball Court
This part of Beerbower Park was first developed as a tennis/badminton court. Yes, as if enough McCleary people in the late 1950s/early 1960s were going to actually go out and spend energy playing these sports. What were the planners thinking?
So in short order the area became kind of a weird nothing spot. I took my daughter there when she was first learning to ride a bike with training wheels as it was a safe area from cars. For a spell there was an effort to turn it into a skateboard park.
Today it has been made into a court for pickleball, which has become a fast-growing sport across the country. I do see folks playing there now and then and it looks fun!
McCleary City Band Bandstand
Dec. 23, 2019
Around the area of this corner, Maple and Third, there used to be a bandstand for the McCleary City Band. Yes, such a group actually existed. The story goes someone ordered a ton of musical instruments and then they were handed out to interested and no doubt bored out of their mind workers, many of whom had not the slightest idea of how to play any instrument or read music.
So the bandstand was built and uniforms were issued. For short time the muddy metropolis of McCleary had a city band. It must have been a hoot to hear. The placement of the bandstand would indicate this was considered close to the center of the action at that time, more so than it is today.
After the probably merciful short life span of the band, the bandstand was enclosed as a small building and served as the office for a dentist for a brief time.
The current McCleary City Hall is in the background and a sandwich sign for an espresso stand in the foreground attempts to divert coffee addicted Washingtonians. It still amazes me that McCleary has not had a tavern for several years yet we have not one but two, two drive-thru coffee stands.
When future historians write about McCleary's creeping gentrification, this switch from alcohol to caffeine will be an early indicator. Not making a judgment here, just an observation.
After the floods
Dec. 22, 2019
This town was built on a cedar swamp and sometimes the branches of Wildcat Creek like to get out and stretch a bit. Over 100 years ago Jake Anderson, who owned the west half of town, used to pole through what is now the Maple Street area in his little skiff.
In modern times First Street is especially bad. In 1990 the street was a raging river as I recall. Cars in the Rainbow Park lot off of First were in the water up to their door handles. Beerbower Park was a lake. The little pedestrian bridge between the Park and Mommsen washed out. Actually it was almost gone as a result of the high water and a couple kids rocked it away, finishing the job. I saw it happen.
The 1990 flood happened right after Simpson clearcut a hill on the southeast corner of town. Following the flood Simpson turned the property into a housing development and after having cut all the trees comically named it "Evergreen Heights." Although too late for the 1990 victims, they did install a retention pond.
Another place that used to flood was near the intersection of Summit Road and what is now Buck Street out in the new development north of the railroad tracks the McCleary Grange lost due to some unfortunate financial decisions from what I understand. Anyway, I see they have a retention pond there now.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Dumpster display
Dec. 14, 2019
No need for dumpster diving when things are set next to it in a fine display. Rainbow Park.
Friday, December 13, 2019
Horseshoe Globe
Dec. 13, 2019
Visited the Westport Winery today and saw this great art piece by McCleary's own Tyler Hansen.
The Death of Newspapers
Dec. 10, 2019
Newspaper boxes at Cheemas turned introvert. First we saw pay phones vanish from McCleary. Newspaper boxes are next.
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Monday, November 25, 2019
Urban logging
Nov. 25, 2019
That guy up there who is removing a 50 year-old Doug fir in a residential neighborhood has a lot more guts than I do.
Whether in the woods or in the town, logger work is dangerous, risky, and those who perform it have my total respect.
As I approached this worksite I saw a lot of raccoons and squirrels fanning out away from the tree-cutting. They were running through the neighborhood with little suitcases.
Soggy work zone
Nov. 24, 2019
Dollar General construction site. The impact of this place on traffic, the residential neighbors, rain runoff, and possible competition with local business will be interesting to watch. Hopefully most of their employees will be McCleary area residents.
Dollar General swimming pool?
This interesting swimming pool-sized excavation at the Dollar General construction site has me puzzled. Wouldn't it be great if it was going to be a public indoor swimming pool, y'know, for kids?
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Tim Bear's Gangrene
Hard to see in this photo, but the moss on Tim Bear is growing so thick it makes the poor thing look like it has a severe case of gangrene.
Friday, November 15, 2019
Rain Country Christmas Tree
Nov. 15, 2019
I am so tempted to put a wrapped present under that thing.
Dial phones
Nov. 13, 2019
Remember these?
First off, I am not a hoarder. In fact I am minimalist. But for some reason I felt compelled to fish this dial phone out of the trash bin at the McCleary Community Center in 1978 when some family member decided it was worthless during the sale of my grandmother's estate. She was born in Centralia in 1891 and died at St. Pete's in 1978.
Every now and then I will dial the extinct line just to hear that old clickety-click of the rotary dial, and remember.
McCleary was ahead of the rest of Grays Harbor County when the town was the first to have rotary phones. The downside was that after 2 or 3 minutes (I cannot recall which) a polite tonal interruption would intrude and say that time is up. Only long distance calls had unlimited time. Local calls, many of them on party lines, had only whispy windows of times to communicate.
McCleary at that time had it's own phone company and the local phone book was so thin that even Caspar Milquetoaste could rip it in half.
Nick Rillakis
Nov. 12, 2019
The McCleary HealthMart Pharmacy currently has a portrait of Nick Rillakis on display.
Rillakis had a store called Rhodes Grocery which basically stood on the very spot his portrait is on display. It was built in the 1920s and heralded as the first concrete structure in town. In the final years of this building it was festooned with murals by James Abbott and served as a storage unit place as it fell into increasing neglect and disrepair. In the 1980s-1990s Abbott's work was all over the place but is now more difficult to locate.
Anyway Nick was part of the Greek wave of workers who came to McCleary when old Henry lured foreign workers here who were not likely to unionize and would be prone to demand to be treated like human beings instead of the slaves they became. Unlike the Italians who came here, the Greeks were economically better off from their point of origin. Those who were not killed in the woods or died from other causes and landed in the McCleary Cemetery just made their wad of dough and went back home. But a few Greeks hung around and the last ones survived into the 1970s.
Some of the Greeks ran a gambling house and bordello in the building that later served as The Pines restaurant and tavern. The Greeks also hosted some of the earliest meetings for the workers to unionize there. The space is now the big empty lot on Main and Maple.
I recall Nick as a rotund, bald, gregarious and bombastic fellow. The most notable part of his store was an old timey giant wheel of cheese close to the entrance where customers could select the size of their slice. Going into his store was sort of like making a trip back in time. But that describes a lot of McCleary in the 1960s.
Angelo Pellegrini
The McCleary HealthMart Pharmacy has recently placed a number of McCleary historical items on display. This one regarding Angelo Pellegrini has stirred some memories.
Angelo arrived in McCleary at the age of 9 in 1913 from northern Italy with his family. Henry McCleary was notoriously anti-union and in an effort to control his employees he hired many foreign workers who were far from their family support and not likely to organize as long as he owned their homes and paid them in company script.
The guys who worked in the woods were generally likely to be Scandinavian while the mill and door plant workers were Greek and Italian or from other Mediterranean countries. The railroad workers were Japanese and were not allowed to live in town and according to lore lived in a camp in the western portion of Mohney's Prairie. Yes, McCleary does have a racist streak in it's history.
Many of the northern Italian families who moved here came from a poverty so extreme that this muddy hamlet in the middle of Nowhere seemed like Paradise and they settled in and carved out a home here with no intention of going back. Surnames like Bicchieri, Lencioni, Birindelli, Tincani, Fornelli, Pellegrini and many more are an important part of the McCleary story. Notice these are all names ending the letter "i" indicating a northern Italian heritage.
The Pellegrini family lived in a house on the northeast corner of First and Mommsen which still stands in a section of town dubbed "Little Italy" at one time. Angelo not only learned how to speak English, he mastered it and became a respected author and academic with a distinguished career at the University of Washington.
In the 1930s he briefly joined the Communist Party USA but quit after a year realizing it was a cult with naive followers. In the postwar era he was hauled before the Canwell Committee but refused to rat out his comrades. Somehow he kept his job.
He was one of McCleary's most famous former residents and he described this place in his books in eloquent terms as no one else could. I'm told one of the Mommsen girls visited his office at the UW in the 1960s and when she introduced herself as a McCleary girl he wept.
During my college years I got used to people making fun of me for being from a hick town called McCleary. But during my graduation ceremony guess who the speaker was? Angelo! I knew there were only two people who were part of this shindig who were from McCleary, me and him. I felt so proud and vindicated. The ceremony was outside and the wind blew the papers for his speech off the podium and he declared loudly in the microphone, "Well, Goddammit!!!" After the papers were gathered he gave a speech not about political correctness or saving the world but instead how to enjoy and celebrate life. At the conclusion he produced a bottle of wine and began guzzling it. He was my kind of graduation speaker. And very McCleary.
Bonus to this post which seems fitting--
Henry McCleary was running sort of an under-the-radar operation when it came to the xenophobic immigration policies of the era. Here's an article from the McCleary Museum Newsletter v. 11, issue 3 (Sept. 2001). Obviously Henry's motives had nothing to do with altruistic notions of the brotherhood of man but rather the worship of the coin of the realm, since foreigners were more vulnerable to his feudal notions of wage slavery.
According to conventional wisdom, Henry McCleary sold his entire operation to Simpson in the last hours of Dec. 1941 due to several factors: his age, the fact that his timber was played out, the unions were closing in, and the start of another war economy. Sam Lanning quoted Henry in Jan. 1942, “Sam, I am old and I have had enough. The whole world business has gone to war and production for war needs. I have closed out and bought 22,000 acres of grazing land stocked with cattle, quite a distance from town and prefer raising beef to making bombs.”
But there was another, more subtle, reason for Henry’s departure. One of his chief business clients, Japan, was now our enemy. Since Henry was a man of action, leaving very little in the way of written thoughts, we can only guess what was going through his mind in Dec. 1941. Pearl Harbor has never been mentioned as one of the reasons for his selling out, but one cannot look at the McCleary-Japan relationship without concluding Henry must have felt some sense of betrayal.
Japanese Railroad Workers
We have no photographs of them. They never figure in written or oral recollections of our area. Newspaper accounts of them are few and far between. Yet the McCleary region was home to over two dozen Japanese railroad workers for the better part of two decades. It is believed they lived in an encampment northwest of town, on the far western end of Mohney’s Prairie.
McCleary’s preference for foreign labor was well known. They were inexpensive and not likely to unionize. The early community was multinational, with a considerable number of Scandinavians, Greeks, and Italians. It was a melting pot– almost.
How the Japanese came to be hired by Henry is not known, but we do have an account of their arrival. The July 23, 1904 Elma Chronicle made a note that McCleary had hired Japanese workers, “as men are very scarce.” And the Elma newspaper also noted, “On the 2:13 train, Friday, there were several Japanese workmen, brought here by the Henry McCleary Lumber Co. They were met at the depot here, compelled to re-board the train, and to go on to the next station. It is reported that arrests are to be made on the charge of intimidation.”
There was no shortage of work for these workers. Henry McCleary’s empire would rapidly expand during the next 25 years, and his logging railroad would grow with it. It would seem almost impossible that anyone living in McCleary during this period would not see them. But trying to uncover information about this group is very difficult.
The Japanese somehow managed to avoid being listed in the 1910 McCleary census. Fortunately, some dutiful listmaker must have taken great pains to phonetically sound out the names of the workers recorded in the 1920 McCleary census. There are 28 workers, plus the wife of the section boss, and their 4 month old daughter, apparently born in McCleary in the fall of 1919. This was in a year when Grays Harbor County had only 155 Japanese total. As low as this number seems, it was actually the high-water mark for Japanese here in the first half of the 20th century. The 1930 census counted only 29 Japanese. This was partly due to the Johnson Immigration Act. More on that later.
Business Partners
Henry’s employment of workers from Japan was apparently highly unpopular among some elements of Grays Harbor County. But Henry kept them on. Of Ada McCleary, John Anderson wrote, “Mrs. McCleary didn’t care what nationality anyone was, be they Greek, Italian, Irish or Swede. As far as she was concerned one could learn from every culture. Indeed all these cultures made McCleary the great place it was to live.” Unlike Ada, her husband was not known as a social activist. He had a business to run, and business being business, he followed the money. If that meant taking the risk of hiring Japanese railroad workers, so be it. It also meant trading with that strange and frightening land on the other side of the Pacific, Japan itself.
Mr. McCleary, always the economic risk-taker, was rewarded for his willingness to do business with a country most others feared and misunderstood. Here’s a sample: according to McCleary’s car sales book, if I’m reading it right, he grossed over $2 million between Sept. 1925-Jan. 1926 from loading up Japanese ships at his Westside Olympia mill. The ships were the Clyde Maru, Milan Maru, Malta Maru, and Tasmania Maru. The Milan Maru visited twice during that slice of time. They were bound for Osaka and Kobe. As a side note, all four ships became casualties of World War II in the Pacific.
The Apr. 4, 1929 Elma Chronicle told the readers, “Henry McCleary, president of the McCleary Timber Co., left last Saturday for Japan accompanied by his son Charles of Olympia and his nephew Jack, of McCleary, sailing from Victoria on the Empress of Russia. They plan to be gone about thirty days. Most of the time in Japan will be spent at Kobi with visits to other parts of the country also included.” As another side note, the Empress of Russia was noted in future McCleary businessman Al Fleming’s diary when he was stationed in Vladivostok, May 18, 1919: “… The largest ship that had ever been in this port. She is a beauty. Couldn’t dock as the water wasn’t deep enough.” The Empress was used by the Allies in the Atlantic, survived the war, but burned in drydock, Sept. 8, 1945.
A photograph of the McCleary entourage in Japan, taken by a Tokyo photographer probably during his 1929 trip, shows each man accompanied by a geisha girl. All the businessmen look very happy, except for Henry, who appears somewhat perplexed.
Even in hard times Henry kept up his ties to Japan. The very same railroad that had been laid by Japanese workers was, during the Depression, torn out. According to Kramer Adams, “Like many another operator, Henry McCleary sold his rails to Japan for conversion into steel.”
The Sept. 28, 1934 McCleary Observer reported, “The next few weeks will see the end of the McCleary railroad. A crew is taking up the rails and loading them on cars for shipment to Olympia where they will be transferred to a boat destined for Japan.”
By this time, of course, militarists had gained control of Japan’s political system. The steel no doubt went into their imperialistic expansion. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, McClearyite Lauren Bruner would survive being burned and shot while in the crow’s nest of the Arizona. One has to ponder how much the McCleary rails contributed to that attack. Henry McCleary probably wondered too. And he probably felt betrayed.
In yet another of the growing ironies in this case, after Simpson acquired McCleary’s operations, they dismantled the mill where the present Beerbower Park now sits. As the Elma Chronicle for Apr. 30, 1942 reported, “Now that the Simpson Company is dismantling the long idle mill its metal salvage is going into war production. Already some carloads have been shipped to the smelters at Cleveland …”
Madison Grant and Albert Johnson, the Aristocrat and the Redneck
The weirdest part of this story is yet to come. Madison Grant (1865-1937), a Yale-educated lawyer and promoter of Eugenics, wrote The Passing of the Great White Race in 1916, a book the Holocaust Study Center considers, “A major text of the American racist movement from 1916 until 1925.” Hitler himself personally wrote Grant and thanked him for writing this work, probably due to passages like this: “[Sterilization could] be applied to an ever widening group of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”
Substitute Grant’s use of “Nordic” with Hitler’s “Aryan,” and it is indeed difficult to tell the two philosophies apart. Grant had Nazi ties, including Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief scientific advisor and leading German Eugenicist. Grant’s later work, Conquest of a Continent, earned this preface in the 1937 German edition: “No one has as much reason to note the work of this man [Grant] with the keenest of attention as does a German of today in a time when the racial idea has become one of the chief foundations of National Socialist States population policies.”
Grant found a kindred spirit in the person of U.S. Congressman Albert Johnson (1869-1957), a Republican who served in Congress from 1913-1933. Johnson was a midwest transplant who was publisher of Hoquiam’s Grays Harbor Washingtonian. He was elected as a crusader against “radicalism” and he favored immigration restriction. In his first campaign, Johnson stated, “The greatest menace to the Republic today is the open door it affords to the ignorant hordes from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose lawlessness flourishes and civilization is ebbing into barbarism.” In 1913, Johnson proposed a “Panaryan Association” to unite the “white race.” As Johnson was making pronouncements of this kind, Henry McCleary was offering employment and home for the very people the congressman despised, right in Johnson’s district.
Johnson became the Chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. In 1923, through his connection with Grant, he was elected the President of the Eugenics Research Association, based at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. This was, as one writer put it, “An incident that deserves at least one chapter in any full length biography of Johnson. Its title would probably be something like ‘New York Aristocrat Courts Pacific Northwest Redneck,’ as the ‘chemistry’ that brought together the patrician Madison Grant and the backwoods Congressman needs considerable explanation.”
Johnson made his big move in 1924 as co-sponsor of the Johnson-Reed Act (with Sen. David Aiken Reed, R-PA), also known as the Japanese Exclusion Act. This placed quotas on immigration, rolling them back to 1890. This placed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and eliminated Japanese immigration entirely. Said Johnson, “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed … The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.” He was especially applauded by the KKK.
The long-range effect of the Johnson-Reed Act is that tens of thousands of Europeans attempting to escape Nazi or Stalinist oppression were denied entry to the U.S., leaving a large percentage of them to perish. That is the legacy of Albert Johnson.
Henry McCleary’s Kingdom
We must wonder what Henry McCleary thought about Albert Johnson and his “Panaryan” concepts. Surely Henry knew Johnson. They were both Republicans in the same district. Henry was a delegate for Coolidge at the 1924 GOP National Convention.
But in those days, as now, East County and Aberdeen/Hoquiam were worlds apart. McCleary’s camp was his own kingdom, and the antics of politicians probably didn’t concern him as long as they left him alone. Henry seemed content to let fellow executive Mark Reed be the political voice for the timber industry. We don’t know the circumstances of the Japanese departure from McCleary, but if it was due to the Johnson-Reed Act, Henry must have had some conflicts concerning political party loyalty.
McCleary’s Japanese workers, having arrived in 1904, predate the coming of the Italians and the Greeks. By McCleary standards, they are pioneers. Being here as early as they were, it is safe to say they were part of the foundation upon which McCleary built his empire. They deserve to be recognized for their contribution to the history of our town.
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
The Third Munchkin
Nov. 5, 2019
Not the clearest photo I admit but it will do for the purposes of my post. It was taken with my trusty flip cellphone of an image I created by hitting the "Pause" button on the remote for my VCR. Yes, by today's standards I am a Luddite.
When I was child one of the big television events of the year was the apparently annual showing of The Wizard of Oz. In the days before home VHS videorecordings we couldn't just watch any movie when we felt like it. In those pre-cable days we were at the mercy of three national networks and a couple local independent stations. If you were a young movie freak like I was, you would plan your week around the schedule of films as listed in the TV Guide.
Since most families, including mine, owned grainy black and white televisions in the Ike-JFK-LBJ era, we kids were informed by our parents when The Wizard of Oz used the technique of switching from B&W to color as Dorothy first arrives in Munchkinland. I believe I was a teenager before I ever saw this cinematic classic in color.
Anyway, here's the deal with McCleary and The Wizard of Oz film. Right before the Mayor of Munchkinland shows up, his appearance is heralded by three trumpeteers. The third trumpeteer, as shown in this photo, was none other than McCleary's own Clarence Chesterfield Howerton, who had the circus name of "Major Mite." Pretty neat, huh?
As a bit of trivia, when I was in college I once split the rent on an apartment with the grandson of E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, who wrote the lyrics to the songs in the movie.
Saturday, November 2, 2019
Rain Country is for sale
Nov. 2, 2019
Yes, this fine dining establishment has been on the market for several months.
I admit I have a problem with people who wear sunglasses in general and those who perch them on top of their heads or dangle them from their collars in particular such as the real estate guy pictured here. To me that looks pretty silly and urban fad-following. But what do I know?
I'd love to see the place become an indoor miniature golf course.
Friday, November 1, 2019
Calling all royalty
Oct. 31, 2019
Former Mayor Ellsworth Curran (who lived to be 101) was one of the original 12 incorporators of the McCleary Second Growth Festival (later called McCleary Bear Festival). He told me that in the early years of the Fest the girls who were serving in the royalty were actually sent to charm school. One father instructed Ellsworth, "Well, I growed her up. Now you gotta make a lady outta her."
There was at least one Fest in the 1980s or early 1990s that didn't have any royalty.
My question is why the age limit? It seems rather unfair that those of us over the age of 15 cannot also serve as royalty in our own category. Perhaps there could be a Tsar and Tsarina involving those of more advanced years in our community?
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Every picture tells a story
The public restrooms on the left of the photo was about where Henry McCleary had his executive office when his sawmill was in current day Beerbower Park. The kitchen-picnic building behind that was constructed around the late 1980s or early 1990s to replace the original building that had been built in the early days of the McCleary Bear Festival as a place to cook the bear stew.
The current City Hall, constructed in the late 1950s, was originally the site of Henry McCleary's later headquarters. When President Roosevelt came through town in an open car in the 1930s, Henry instructed his employees to turn their backs. After McCleary sold the town to Simpson, he tried living in northern Nevada for a brief time, but that did not work out. In his final year or so even though he resided in Olympia he could occasionally be seen sitting outside of his old headquarters watching the world go by in a town he no longer controlled.
The crosswalk brings to mind this little tale. McCleary has had a long and colorful history of Chiefs of Police. In the 1950s the City hired a young photogenic fellow from Shelton for the job and he was the first person to institute the use of marked crosswalks on the main roads. Most of the residential streets were not paved until much later.
Anyway, after maybe a year the Chief vanished "between two days" as Norman Porter of the McCleary Stimulator put it, with part of the City treasury and someone else's wife. The law finally caught up with him in the Bay Area about a year later. So think of that next time you use a McCleary crosswalk.
The Square Corner
The corner of Simpson and Main used to be a sharp 90 degree corner back in the day when Main Street really was Main Street and the business center of town.
As time went by and the town's commercial activity shifted to the west, this corner was deemed a traffic hazard. If I am not mistaken, off the top of my head I think Chris Curtis of Shelton, who had once been implicated in the great McCleary alcohol distribution scandal of the 1920s which had taken down a few county and local law enforcement figures, owned that corner and very kindly gave it to the City around 1960 so it could be rounded off.
Weirdo-shaped parking strip
Oct. 26, 2019
What is with that weirdo-shaped parking strip between City Hall and the VFW Hall? As usual, there's a story there.
On the right hand of the photo is Beerbower Park. In the old days that chunk of land was Henry McCleary's original lumber mill, which was shut down in the 1930s.
On the left hand of the photo is the present Simpson door plant. In 1910 Henry McCleary bought the Chehalis Fir Door Company and moved the whole operation, including most of the workers to this camp. A giant clearing took place and a mountain of wood was burned to make space for his door plant. When it opened it was all electric and one of the largest and most modern door plants in the world. It also produced airplane and automobile parts when those industries used more wood in their product.
The two huge operations, sawmill and doorplant, were connected by a pedestrian skyway. Roughly about where the first tree in the line on the right sits there were two ugly buildings, big hulky two story cubes on either side of the road. A covered walkway on the second floor connected the twin structures.
For people arriving to town from the north, this gave the impression of entering through a Medieval gate during the feudal times, which in fact was not far off from reality This was Henry McCleary's Kingdom-- a one-man principality where you were paid in script, lived in company-owned homes, and God help you if you ever even entertained the very idea of forming a union.
This pedestrian skybridge did not exist for very long. The building on the west side where the door plant now resides was torn down first. The eastern building remained for some reason and just sat there like a wart. After Henry sold the entire town to Simpson on the last day of 1941 and the park was created by local people out of the ruins of the old mill, they had to work around that building and hence we have that elongated triangular parking strip.
When it was finally torn down maybe in the early 1950s a local newspaper commented that in the old days "they didn't build for pretty."
Sidewalk closed
Oct. 26, 2019
That sidewalk needed replacing anyway.
Until April 1949 that particular stretch of sidewalk was a wood construction walkway designed to rise above the sometimes swampy high water table and where this Dollar General store will be sitting. The 1949 date can be pinpointed to exactly the moment of the worst earthquake in living memory around here. One eyewitness told me the planks on the boardwalk popped out in a wave as the seismic shocks hit.
In the 1990s McCleary's Land Planning Commission (which no longer exists) denied a rezone for this parcel from multifamily to business. The thinking that having a central business core with concentric circles of zoning rather than strip enterprises was preferable. It would be interesting to see when and why the rezone eventually happened, indicating a changing of the municipal guard. Also, when and why we no longer have a Land Planning Commission.
McCleary Rock Harbor
Oct. 26, 2019
What was once the Assembly of God, then the Evergreen Christian Community-McCleary Branch, is now McCleary Rock Harbor, which also seems to be in the category of Protestant Evangelical.
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Ellis Food Market
If you had been standing at this location in the 1960s to 1970s, the view would have been much different.
To begin, where Gordon's Grocery is today was once, ca. 1960, the Ellis Food Market or a name that was close. For some reason the store downsized and in the early 1960s they moved across the street to the present location of Cheema's. Their building, which perhaps had previously been an auto mechanic garage, was a nondescript mostly windowless block of concrete, maybe cinderblock, with a half-quonset hut roof. The store occupied the NW part of the lot while the rest was a parking lot. The entrance was in the SE corner of the building, facing the Post Office.
The present building originally opened as Mike's in the first half of the 1980s.
Aircraft Warning Service Lookout Tower
Here's a view looking south on 4th with Maple as the cross street. During World War II McCleary had at least one, maybe more, lookout towers designed for the Aircraft Warning Service. This was a program where civilians, armed with little charts showing the shapes of Japanese military planes through the use of silhouettes, would voluntarily give their time to scan the skies for enemy aircraft.
In McCleary the location of one lookout tower I am pretty sure about was on the SW corner of 4th and Maple, on the right hand side of the photo where the brown duplex sits.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
McCleary ca. 1950
Oct. 22, 2019
This photo can be found on one of the pillars near the cash registers at Gordon's. It was taken from the SE corner of Simpson and 4th facing northwest. I estimate it was taken around 1950-1952.
Moving left from right in the photo--
Lumbermen's Mercantile is now the building housing Gordon's, built shortly after WWII I believe.
The buildings housing the next four establishments were constructed close in time about 1950 if I am not mistaken. Interesting that parking was head-in rather than parallel in those days. Simpson Ave. in 1950 was also Highway 410, the main road to Elma, Montesano, Aberdeen, and the Coast. Washington SR 9 (later renumbered 8) didn't exist yet.
The Olympic Cigar Store Tavern, run by D.I. George and Earl Nobach was already an institution in McCleary before they moved to this location from a block away. Nobach was the person who donated the land upon which Mark E. Reed Memorial Hospital was constructed a few years later. For several decades it operated under a variety of owners and names such as the Waterhole, Rounders, and was it Miss Kitty's or something like that. Today this is the location of the Mexican cuisine Al Carbon restaurant which is the first time that space has been anything other than a tavern.
Next is Billie's Cafe, run by Billie Stilwell. Her Cafe was also an institution before she relocated. I remember it had a big horseshoe shaped counter with booths along the east wall. It was there until sometime in the mid to late 1960s.
The old Billie's Cafe location later became the Bear Claw Bakery in the 1970s, operated by Gene and Muriel Mullin. After that it served as a series of short-lived restaurants with names like The Feed Bag, Bear Buns, Squatty's, and Rounders. The wall between the restaurant and tavern was opened up only some time in the last 20 years or so. In between all the culinary attempts, I do recall something about a worthy try at making the area a "Kid's Club" place so McCleary youth wouldn't go crazy with boredom in this metropolis.
Although there is no signage, the third storefront was the US Post Office. I'm not sure if the Postmaster at the time would have been Leonard McCleary (Henry's youngest brother who lived in the house next door south of the McCleary Hotel) or Leon "Jinks" Boling. The PO resided there until 1963 when they removed to their present location. That location seems to have had the most economic struggle of these storefronts. In the 1980s it was a real estate management office. In the 1990s when KGY-FM found some radio airspace here in McCleary they briefly had an office there. So far as I know KGY does not send news reporters to cover McCleary government or happenings. In McCleary, the most popular radio station is the police scanner.
Anyway, this third storefront remains sort of a funky and mysterious place. Recently I found the key to the front door lying on the sidewalk and it looked like it had been there for awhile. I flagged down one of our Boys in Blue who just happened to be driving by and handed it to him.
The last storefront was the pharmacy run by Bud Davidson. During the 1920s McCleary lost their drug store, run by a Mr. Baisch, I think. A fellow named Chuck Heslep approached Henry McCleary about opening a new drug store in the early 1930s, since this town at that time was a one-man principality. According to Chuck, Henry's German shepherd did not growl at him durng their initial meeting and Henry took that as sign that Chuck was alright.
Heslep opened his first store on the one of retail outlets that was part of the Porter Hotel Annex, roughly where today's Police Station now resides. He later started an appliance store on Simpson that is now the parking lot of the clinic.
But I digress.
Eventually Heslep's pharmacy morphed into Davidson's outfit. And then, perhaps in the late 1950s or early 1960s, a gentleman named Bart Bloom took it over. The pharmacy also doubled as the State Liquor Store. In later years the storefront became a florist shop, and then a series of restaurants including the Rose Garden, a Mexican restaurant I cannot recall the name of, and presently for over a decade Rain Country, which is apparently for sale right now.
There's a lot of history in that one little photograph.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Grazing shovels
Oct. 16, 2019
Two giant shovels graze where deer used to play. Evidently it is going to be a wet and muddy construction season on Summit Road.
Thursday, October 10, 2019
This is the final edition of the East County News
"35th Year, No. Z --- Wednesday, October 9, 2019"
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Dating McCleary Photos
Sept. 30, 2019
This photo of an early sawmill currently on display in the Summit Pacific Clinic can be dated after Sept. 1902 but probably before 1910. The clue is in the background toothpicks that used to be trees.
The devastating 1902 fire wiped out the entire town of Rayville and most of what we call White Star. Rayville was an embryonic town that used to exist in the area where the Elma-Hicklin Road crosses the railroad tracks and joins the old 410 highway, now called the Elma-McCleary Road.
The flames headed east and in no time at all surrounded the new logging camp. But then the ring of fire just stopped rather mysteriously. So for years the burned trees just stood, shorn of their limbs by flame, baton noir. For some time the children would come home covered in soot after playing outside.
The 1902 fire was region-wide and later called The Big Burn or the Yacolt Burn, but actually was many individual forest fires that took place in a short span of time. My grandmother, who was 11 at the time and living in Centralia, said the smoke was so thick that daytime turned into night and some felt the End of the World had arrived.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Sunday, September 8, 2019
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
Sunday, September 1, 2019
The Welcome Bear
Apparently someone sat on the head of the concrete bear in front of City Hall at the SW corner of Anarchy Intersection during the Bear Festival parade and broke the head off. At some point in early August this little chain-saw carved Welcome Bear appeared as a replacement.
Goodbye to the McCleary Museum?
Avarice and fear have combined to force the McCleary Museum to probably leave their structure and thus evict and scatter the collection unless some creative solution is employed.
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Your Speed
July 16, 2019
A new gizmo planted at Simpson and 7th. It only has enough room for numbers with two digits.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Here Comes the Space Age
July 14, 2019
1959 Cadillac at the Bear Fest car show. The car and the Bear Fest were created in the same year.
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