Rhs Newsletter 04 2001

“History is happening in Redmond!” April 2001 Vol. III. No. 4

In This Issue… History Hero................... 1

The

Redmond Recorder The Redmond Historical Society Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center 16600 NE 80th St., Room 106, Redmond, WA. 98052 425-885-2919 [email protected]

Quotable Quotes............. 2 Members in the News .... 2

Newsworthy Notes

Earthquake Memories .... 2 Walking Tour ................. 3 RHS is ‗Mail Friendly‘ .. 3 Next Speaker .................. 3 Like to Know More ........ 3 Remembering ................. 4 Redmond Reads ............. 5 …and much, much more!

We will have an arresting meeting this month as our speaker will be Bob Sollitto, Redmond‘s Chief of Police under two administrations. Please come and join us to meet and hear his story. See you there! Submissions If you have an article, news item or memory that you would like to share with our members, please send it to: Walt Buchman 10323 162nd Place NE Redmond, WA 98052 or [email protected]

- History Hero: Bob Anderson Bob Anderson, owner of Edwardian Antiques in Redmond, has given the Society and the community a priceless gift: the original old pot-bellied stove that stood in the Redmond Trading Company. When the Redmond Trading Company was built in 1908, the stove which heated it was a central gathering place for folks to visit while they warmed their hands or read their mail. Frederick A. Reil, then the postmaster and part-owner of the 2-story general store, changed hats to wait on his dry goods customers, then conduct post office business. Today, Half-Priced Books occupies the landmark building on Leary Way. When William Howell closed the Redmond Trading Company c.1955, the stove was sold to the Slocums who owned Center Hardware in the Quackenbush Building. Then, Bob Anderson opened his first Redmond antiques store which was located in the Bill Brown Building, and having no heat in his shop, he bought the old stove, and brought it back to Leary Way. About 1974 Bob bought the historic Odd Fellows Hall, and he took the coal-burning stove with him— this time, as an antique! The stove may actually pre-date the 1908 Redmond Trading Company building, as there was a commercial building standing on the site which was demolished to clear the lot for the Trading Company. A newspaper account states that most of the fixtures in the previous building were used in the new Trading Company, and the stove may have been among them. Parks Department‘s Phyllis Blower is working with the Society to create a permanent home in the Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center for this valuable artifact. We welcome any help on dating this stove from its foundry markings, and we‘d love to hear your memories about the old stove. To Bob Anderson from Redmond Historical Society and the entire Redmond Community: Thank you for your splendid generosity!

The Redmond Recorder - Quotable Quotes -

This month‘s quotes are from some RHS members recalling their thoughts on the recent earthquake: “Home. Getting out of a chair. Figured it was my good old legs saying „good-bye‟”. - Bob Sollitto “I was at work in Bothell at our Eddie Bauer Call Center. We left all the people hanging on the phones as we waited. Then we left the building.” - Chris Himes “Filling out form at the doctor‟s office. I had just answered the question, „How much stress do you have in your life?‟”. - Margy Rockenbeck “Paying for gas at a gas station. As I watched the pavement roll and the lampposts sway, I became very nervous and uneasy about being on top of all that gasoline.” - Judy Gilbert Turner

Page 2 - Members Appreciation -

Our members are in the news this month because of the unending dedication and effort that they constantly give to the Redmond Historical Society. This month we would like to thank the following members:  Ilya Smirnov for setting up our computer works;  Dale Potter who installed a mail slot in our office door;  Jerry Torell for books and ongoing surprises;  Ray Haines for corrrespondence;  Marge Mann for office supplies;  Everyone who helped at the Crossroads Roots Fair: Jerry Hardy, Natalie Fisher, Rose Weiss, Jerry Torell, Miguel Llanos, Barb Joyce, Pat Jovag, Margy Rockenbeck, Margaret Wiese;  Author Lois Phillips Hudson for copies of her books for our library;  Charles Payton for his invaluable advice and support of our Mission;  Roy Buckley whose clippings and memorabilia add to our knowledge;  Norma Tosh Schmidt, Dottie Copeland & Marg Knapp for Lake Washington Saddle Club By-laws and yearbooks 1950-1974;  And finally, Jerry Hardy, who has supported us in so many ways – financially, storing our stuff in his garage, moving us into our new office, taking his pickup wherever RHS needed, and sharing his wife, our President, many, many hours every week. Thanks to all of you! - Earthquake Memories Come and be part of our first ever Memory Book Project! We‘re creating a Memory Book on earthquakes and we invite you to share your personal earthquake experiences from the 1949, 1965 and 2001 quakes. Where were you when each of the quakes happened? What went through your mind? What did you do? Pick up a questionnaire at the April 14 meeting. Can‘t be there? We‘ll send you one. Please contact Rondinne Hills at (425) 492-2356 or Margaret Evers Wiese at [email protected]. Join in the fun and share your stories. We will make history together! - Potpourri Jan Foreman, who graduated in 1950, remembers when missing the school bus meant walking four miles, and hitching a ride was difficult when cars were as infrequent as one per hour on Avondale Road. Parks Department‘s Prentiss Hallman verifies that Flagpole Plaza is the smallest City park in Redmond‘s history, at only .11 acres. It is located in the center of what old-timers call the Town Square, which is really a triangle where 164th Ave. NE meets Redmond Way.

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Historic Downtown Walking Tour Taking Shape

Bob Sollito to Speak at Next RHS Meeting

Miguel Llanos and Margaret Doman are collecting photos to be used in the Historic Downtown walking tour brochure that they‘re compiling. Here are some gems we‘ll all be able to enjoy in the brochure:

Our speaker for April will be Robert "Bob" Sollitto.

Redmond Public Works‘ Tom Fix is sharing photos he took of carver Dudley Carter at Haida House. Tom is our city‘s drinking water analyst, and happened on Carter at age 99 one day while walking by the County owned residence, camera in hand. Roy Lampaert is providing a photo taken c. 1914 from his family collection: the Lampaert Meat Market on Leary Way. Born in 1911, Roy is pictured about age 3 in front of the market with his mother, Rachel Vienne Lampaert, and a hired man for whom we have only a first name: René. An interesting photograph is from Arlyn Bjerke Vallene who inherited it from her mother, Hilda Rosford [1898-1966] of Avondale. It‘s a picture of the Redmond Meat Market on the west side of Leary Way c.1890, in which the horse-drawn delivery wagon belonging to proprietor W. R. Rose is parked in the muddy street in front of the woodframe market. Carl Jeppesen has loaned us his photo of Redmond‘s last blacksmith‘s shop. The shop on Redmond Way was owned by Ben Askew. - RHS Office Now “Mail-Friendly” We now have a mail slot in our office door. The ever-handy and capable Dale Potter bought and installed it yesterday for us! The Parks Dept. approved the proposal very readily, as they don't want to be our message and package service at the front desk. And this convenience is especially appreciated by those of us (like Miguel and Naomi) who've had to make special trips to ORSCC outside of office hours to meet people who just wanted to leave paperwork. Thank you, Dale, from all of us at RHS.

Bob was born in Brooklyn, NY. His father and grandfather both were policemen in Brooklyn. His father died when Bob was an infant and the family then moved to Harrison, New York in West Chester County. After Bob and Frances were married in 1947 they came to Seattle to visit friends and to check out the housing situation. Bob explained that housing was in very short supply right after World War II. His friend took him fishing at Westport where Bob caught a 25-pound King salmon and then he was "hooked" on the West Coast! Bob joined the Bellevue police force in 1954. In 1957 he became police chief at Normandy Park. In 1963 Mayor Gary Graep hired Bob as Redmond's police chief out of a list of 17 applicants. He served under two mayors, Gary Graep and Selwyn L. "Bud" Young, and retired in 1980. Come and join us for what will be a very interesting and educational program! We’d like to know more about… …Leary Way‘s namesake. A 1950 newspaper carries an obituary for a Jeremiah O’Leary from Redmond. Is there a connection? By the way, we‘ve been told O‘Leary Park wasn‘t named for a person, that before Parks Department began soliciting citizens‘ input on naming, Parks employees selected names, and they decided to name the park after the street it was on [Leary], then decided O‘Leary had a nicer ring. So, it‘s the namesake of the street we seek. … Roy W. Buckley is seeking information about a William Orr Farmer who lived in Kirkland early last century. He was possibly a teacher in our school district. His daughter was Margaret Farmer, Frank‘s first wife. Phone Frank: 425885-1198

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Remembering - Rex C. Swan 1895 – 1993 In 1982 John Couch and Elaine Kandel met to record an interview with Rex Swan. The recording was donated to Redmond Historical Society by Barbara Lucas and was transcribed by Doris Schaible. John had good news for Rex that day. Four years earlier, the Redmond Chamber of Commerce had begun giving Citizen of the Year awards, the first award going to Selwyn Young. ―The Chamber just selected and announced their 1982 award,‖ John told Rex, ―and you‘re the award winner.‖ ―Don‘t tell me!‖ said Rex. ―Why, I‘m a has-been!‖ The following are a few tidbits from Rex Swan during this informal conversation of twenty years ago. The full transcript is available at our Old Schoolhouse office. ―I‘ve never been an activist and I haven‘t set the world on fire.‖ ―My parents both died before I reached high school and my sisters and my brother and myself moved down to Grinnell, Iowa…and I went to Grinnell College after that, and my sisters kept house. I did have a fling at farming, but it didn‘t pan out very good. I discovered that to be a successful farmer you had to have a good, husky wife and two or three skookum sons…Well, I was unmarried. We tried many different things: hiring a man and his wife, or hiring a man, or hiring just a housekeeper. Anyway, it didn‘t work out…‖ ―I landed in South Bend. I was a bookkeeper and what-have-you for a shingle mill… in 1927 my brother-in-law (Fred M. Roberts) and Clayton Shinstrom…purchased the two Kirkland banks and combined them into one National Bank and I was offered the cashiership of the Redmond bank and that‘s where I was until I retired in 1975.‖

―I didn‘t think it (Redmond) was particularly rowdy, but it consisted mostly of loggers. The industry around was mostly logging: loggers, dairy farms and poultry farms. And only Campbell Mill and Weber Shingle Mill were operating…I suppose most of my social life was through the church…It was known as a Community Church. Originally it wasn‘t even under the Methodists.‖ ―Some of us fellows wanted something to do and so we started a basketball team and our druggist, E.R. Bechtol…was a great sportsman too…we were known as the Redmond Owls and all the surrounding towns had basketball teams, but we could take them all on….I don‘t believe a one of them is living now. Dick Sherwood came over from Kirkland and was a member of our team and played. His father was a prominent doctor over there, and his brother acted as a Redmond physician for quite a while. Junior Bratnober (John Bratnober, Jr.)…he and his folks lived out at Marymoor…his folks had that farm at that time.‖ ‗When I was on the school board we lost our independent school and joined the lake Washington consolidated schools and that was a blow to the community and the board wasn‘t too popular, but we had submitted what we thought was needed to run our local schools and they voted it down and right about that time they were consolidating so we decided the best thing from our school‘s standpoint was to join with the others and have a real good school, but, like I say, it was quite a blow to the community not to have their school.‖ ―So I ran for Treasurer (for City of Redmond) and was elected in 1936. That‘s when my term began and I was Treasurer until 1973 when the office was terminated and there was no longer an elected Treasurer…I don‘t recall one single person, when it came up for election, who ran against me.‖

The Redmond Recorder - Redmond Reads David Harder’s 1994 autobiography, Echoes of a Country Fire Chief, exemplifies the multi-branching roots so many of us share, growing up in one town, moving to another, working in yet another community—all on the Eastside. While David‘s life has been spent largely in Duvall, his ties to Redmond are many and deep. His father “Tony” Harder rented the Marymoor Farm and owned another farm on the east side of Willows Road. He attended high school in Redmond, and married a Redmond-grown girl, Diane Hollingsworth, for whom David‘s praise is boundless. He worked for his father-in-law, A.W. Hollingsworth, at Center Hardware on Redmond Way, and draws a harsh portrait of the man that stays with the reader long after the book is closed. This is an astoundingly honest book. David had his first fire experience at the age of six when his own home burned down. In his 32 years as both Duvall‘s volunteer and paid fire chief, David answered 12,000 emergency calls. This fast-paced book is an excellent way to sample a fireman‘s life, the incredible stress, the camaraderie of fellow firefighters, the deep sorrow and equally deep joy of individuals central to life-death crises in the community. It‘s also an excellent sampling of small town characters and the inter-connectedness of lives in a rural community. It isn‘t often one reads a personal history so rich with everyday details selectively chosen to illustrate a life and time, and yet so satisfying to historians. Names, dates and places: David Harder records them. And provides them a context. And examines what they meant to him, and to the lives around him. One excerpt chosen at this newsletter‘s deadline, selected by chance as the book falls open: ―Just to let you know, hypothetically, if we went to a wreck, say with a three year old, a seventy year old, and an eight year old, the one we are trained to work on first is the three year old. If we happened to be alone, this is what we would do. In war it‘s the same.‖

Page 5 - Farm With a New Future by Christine DuBois

The former Schiessl property has a new name: The South 47 Farm. FARM LLC, a group working to preserve farmland and promote sustainable farming in the Sammamish Valley, bought the property at the corner of NE 124th St. and the Woodinville-Redmond Rd. in November 1999. Drive by, and you‘ll see the hoop houses that are nurturing the first crop grown on this land in years--strawberries! Plans for The South 47 Farm include leasing sections to farmers for sustainable agriculture; planting fruit and nut trees; growing bamboo; and managing community ―P-patch‖ gardens. FARM LLC is also compiling a history of this parcel of land. If you have memories or photos you‘d be willing to share, we‘d like to talk with you. We‘ve learned that Mr. Schiessl ran a dairy farm here in the 1950s. And that a Mr. W. R. Scott bought the land around 1918 and that later Austin Griffith, Jr., lived here. We‘d love to have more details. What was it like here 20, 40, 60 or even 100 years ago? If you remember, please call Christine Dubois, FARM LLC Communications Director, at: 425483-4645. To learn more about FARM LLC, check the web site: www.farmllc.com. - John Heiser Born in 1915, John Heiser Jr. reminds us that when he was growing up, the downtown streets of Redmond bore no street signs, nor did folks refer to streets by name. We contacted John, an Oregon resident, while researching his grandfather Fred W. Walther’s hotels. Early in the century, John‘s grandmother Mary Heiser came to Redmond from Illinois and married Mr. Walther. About 1909 her

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son (John Heiser Sr) came west to join her. Upon his arrival he worked for the Redmond Trading Company as a deliveryman until 1925. It was while boarding at Judge White‘s Hotel across the railroad tracks from the Trading Company, that he met his wife Ethel, a waitress at the hotel. The senior John served two terms on the Redmond Town Council, one beginning in 1925 and another in 1947. For many years he worked with Robert Cotterill as a janitor at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse from which John Heiser Jr. graduated in 1932. Although John Jr. and his wife Eleanor Hardenbrook [deceased 1999] moved away from Redmond in 1936, John‘s Redmond links endure through his grandson Steve Karr who lives here with his wife Shannon, a local elementary school teacher.

The Editor’s Corner There oughta be a law…or should there? Just before last month‘s meeting, Naomi sent some of us an e-mail noting that some older houses near Lake Sammamish were being torn down to make room for newer housing. These were old mill houses that had been the homes of many people in Redmond for many years. Before the last one was bulldozed to the ground, Miguel Llanos went out there with his video camera and took a few pictures.

And while I was watching Miguel‘s video at the last meeting, I felt this indignation rising up within me. ―How dare they tear something like this down. Don‘t they know its historical importance?! There outta be a law that says they can‘t tear anything down that‘s older than 50 years, whether it is on the list of historic buildings or not!‖ After I cooled down a bit, I started thinking about the consequences of such a law and realized that about the last thing we need is another law. Because with each law, comes a loss of freedom to someone. It was just a few months ago when I was talking about the loss of someone‘s trees to preserve someone else‘s heritage. And I asked at that time, where do you draw the line? And yet, history is so very important. If not a law, then what? The ―what‖ is education. We need to start teaching others, especially the younger ones, about the history of Redmond and the rich heritage of this area. My two daughters love coming to our meetings to learn about history. And I‘ll bet so would other young ones (and older ones as well). Knowledge is the key to appreciation, and appreciation is the key to preservation. I‘ll see you at our next meeting on April 14th, 10:30 A.M. at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse, Room 104. - Walt Buchman Redmond Historical Society General Membership Meeting March 10, 2001 Attendance Betty Buckley Anderson, David Bark, Kay Nichols Brulé, Jennie Bryden, Angi Buchman, Rachel Buchman, Walt Buchman, Sally Campbell, Margaret Doman, Diane Patty Foreman, Jan Foreman, Kathy Fulton, Audrey Gorlick, Naomi Hardy, Rondinne Hills, Chris Himes, Pat Weiss Jovag, Barbara Weiss Joyce, Sharon Bryden Kent, Norma Leicester, Miguel Llanos, Frank Mann, Marge Mann, Bill Marr, Clare (Amo) Marr, Daryl Martin, Ward Martin, Eileen McCoskrie, Dale Potter, Jo Ann Potter, Jutta Rhinehart, Margy Rockenbeck, Phil Roe, Doris Schaible, Ilya Smirnov, Veronica Smirnov, Bob Sollitto, Charlene Sugden, Jerry Torell, Judy Gilbert Turner, Helen Usibelli, Rose Weiss, Margaret Evers Wiese, Colleen Perrigo Tosh Willis, Frank Willis and Marie Wood.