McCleary Musings

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?

Nov. 24, 2019

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?

Tim Bear's Gangrene

Nov. 17, 2019

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.

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.