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Nov. 12, 2019.

McCleary HealthMart Pharmacy

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

Nov. 12, 2019

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.

Henry McCleary & the Land of the Rising Sun

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.