Rhs_newsletter_10_2001

“History is happening in Redmond!” October 2001 Vol. III. No. 8 In This Issue… Doctor, Doctor ............... 1

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

Hanscom Oral History ... 2 Walk’g Tour Brochures . 2

Newsworthy Notes

Good News for RHS ...... 3 Office Volunteers ........... 3

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Next Speaker .................. 3 Elections......................... 4 Redmond Reporter ......... 5 Thank You’s................... 5 Remembering ................. 5 …and much, much more!

Next Meeting: October 13th 10:30 am Our meeting this month will feature Dick Shinstrom, whose father, Clayton Arthur Shinstrom, was one of Redmond’s founding fathers. Dick brings our history to life. You won’t want to miss this fascinating speaker. 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 [email protected]

Doctor, Doctor – By Naomi Hardy

We were honored when Doctors James and Elizabeth Moore recently visited the Redmond Historical Society office in the Redmond Schoolhouse. Betty, her brother Keith, and her sister Phyllis, also a doctor, were the children of Dr. George A. Davis, Redmond’s first resident doctor. Dr. Davis was a genuine oldfashioned country doctor. He never sent out bills, but often gave money to his needy patients. Betty and Jim met in 1944 when they were both medical interns in Chicago. “We met in January, were engaged in February, and married in May,” Jim said with a twinkle in his eye, pointing to an old Sammamish Valley News article displayed in the hallway outside our office. In 1951 Montesano’s only doctor passed away, and the couple was recruited to replace him, much as Dr. John Way was recruited by Woody Reid for the town of Redmond, when Dr. Davis died in 1945. In Montesano, Jim and Betty built a clinic without any steps, recognizing ahead of the mainstream, the need for handicap access. During construction, the Moore’s six children cleaned used brick from an old bakery on the building site, and in 1961, the family buried a time capsule which was found and opened in 2000 by a local teenager who undoubtedly viewed 39 years as two lifetimes. For Montesano’s 1983 centennial, the Friends of the Library placed historical plaques on local buildings, including Moore’s clinic. Now retired some 20 years, they still reside in Montesano where they are active in the Methodist Church and Friends of the Library. On their way out of town, the good doctors must surely have paused at what was once the

- Correction Lester Olson of Happy Valley gives us the correct spelling of Hans Ramin who was mentioned in our last issue as one of the Redmond High School football players who also served as a "bus pilot" after school, transporting fellow students home in the wooden buses built in Jud Orr's Manual Training classes in Anderson Park. We apologize for any inconvenience this error may have caused.

Redmond Recorder - Quotable Quotes -

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town square, to view the flag flying above Redmond’s smallest park – in honor of Betty’s father, Dr. George A. Davis.

- Dorothy White Hanscom Oral History Completed At our general meeting on September 8, Margy Rockenbeck presented us with finished copies of transcripts of the oral history of Dorothy White Hanscom. It was the culmination of a Redmond Historical Society project several years in the making. Our first interview was conducted in August, 1999, by oral historian Amanda Cooke. When Ms. Cooke was unable to complete the project, Margy volunteered to finish it. She did several interviews, from April through June of 2001. The results are on our shelves and in our files for us, and others in the future, to enjoy.

"The old people have gone and have taken a lot of the truth out of the world with them." - Ronald Blythe Author

“He lives doubly who also enjoys the past.” - Marcus Martial

“The strength of our country is the strength of its religious convictions.” - Calvin Coolidge, President

Over the years, Dorothy has been interviewed many times by various news media. Our oral history thus covers some territory that will be familiar to long-time Redmondites, and some new areas as well. Margy plans to add to the basic oral history with an index as time permits. Dorothy Hanscom, who recently turned 98, is the granddaughter of pioneer Redmond cofounder and namesake Luke McRedmond, and the daughter of William White, a Civil War veteran who became the first Chief Justice of the supreme court of the state of Washington. Her father and mother, Emma McRedmond White, owned a hotel that was a major center of interaction in historic Redmond. The building is now known as the “Justice White House” and is still a landmark near Redmond Town Center today. Dorothy grew up and was educated in Seattle and Redmond. She taught school for several years after graduating from the University of Washington, and then she began a whole new career, modeling and learning fashion merchandising in New York City. After marrying and moving back to Washington with her husband, Robert C. Hanscom, she opened a women’s sportswear store in Seattle, but her heart was always in Redmond. When they were able to, Dorothy and Bob moved to their Redmond home, Valley Stream Ranch, on Conrad Olsen Road (NE 95th Street), where they continue to be astute observers of the Redmond scene.

- Walking Tour Brochures Lots of us are awaiting a second printing of the self-guided walking tour brochures of historic downtown Redmond. The first printing of 500 brochures disappeared quickly, and a much larger second printing is now in progress, according to Debra MoonanChurchill of Redmond Parks. The new brochures will be available at the downtown O’Leary Park kiosk, from Redmond Historical Society, Redmond Library and Redmond Chamber of Commerce. For further information, contact Debra at 425-556-2356 or [email protected]. This second printing includes a few changes in text, most notable being the year Washington became a state [1889], an error resulting from our railway experts correcting our date for Redmond’s train depot opening [1888]. An astounding number of Redmonites quickly spotted this mistake, Roy Buckley’s note being the first to cross our desk. What well-educated, historically aware citizens we have!

Redmond Recorder - More Good News for RHS -

Page 3 - Dick Shinstrom at Next RHS Meeting -

by Miguel Llanos

The Redmond Arts Commission has awarded RHS a $750 grant that we'll use for a fundraiser built around Dorisjean Colvin, whose sketches of Redmond are well known around town. Dorisjean will create three new sketches, which we'll then be able to use for notecards and prints that we can sell to the public. Our thanks to the commission and the City for its continued support! In addition to the great news above, a sister society, Issaquah Historical, has voted to donate a spare horsedrawn sickle bar mowing machine. We hope to let the Parks Dept. use it at Farrell McWhirter Park, where the farm display is being renovated with our help. Many thanks to Eric Erickson of Issaquah Historical Society for making this happen!

"History is happening in the Redmond area.” The Redmond Historical Society will meet on Saturday, October 13, 2001, 10:30 a.m., at The Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center, 16600 NE 80 Street, Room 104, Redmond, WA. The special speaker will be Dick Shinstrom whose father, Clayton Arthur Shinstrom, was one of Redmond's founding fathers. The elder Shinstrom was our first City Treasurer in 1913, and also a founder of our town's first bank in 1911. Dick brings our history to life with his personal recollections of his father and other town founders. Please join us, and find out what the heck are Dickie Balls, anyway? To receive the monthly newsletter, please contact Naomi Hardy, president, Redmond Historical Society, The Old Redmond Schoolhouse, 16600 NE 80 Street, Room 106, Redmond, WA 98052, telephone 425-885-2919, or [email protected]

- Office Volunteers by Jo Ann Potter

AKCHO! Bless You! By Margy Rockenbeck

Marion Neal will be our new "regular" on Tuesdays in the office. Stop by and welcome her. We can always use office volunteers on a regular or substitute basis. Computer skills are not required but if you have them, we might just use them. If you want to spend a delightful, historical afternoon chatting with visitors and answering phones, call Jo Ann Potter, 425-822-3322. We appreciate Margy Rockenbeck who has been coming in on BOTH Tuesday and Thursday for the past year. She will be giving her time to some other projects within RHS. Thanks, Margy. - Do You Remember? When the worst thing you could do at school was smoke in the bathrooms, flunk a test or chew gum? When a '57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...to cruise, peel out, lay rubber and watch drag races? When being sent to the principal’s office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited a misbehaving student at home? Didn’t that feel good, just to go back and say, “Yeah, I remember that!” And was it really that long ago?

The Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) is sponsoring a major event at the convention center in Seattle in November to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of Seattle. To raise money for this worthy cause, they are hoping to sell 5000 raffle tickets for $1 each. The raffle prize is a three-volume 1929 history of King County. These would be wonderful books to have on our RHS library shelves, if the lucky winner happened to want to give them to us in exchange for a $300 tax deduction. It would be great if the winner were from Redmond, but in any case, the raffle supports a good cause. In addition, AKCHO is offering an incentive to encourage us to buy or sell as many tickets as possible. They will give 25% of the total raffle proceeds to the historical organization that sells the winning ticket. This donation from AKCHO could improve the, er, Gesundheit of our RHS treasury. We will offer tickets for sale again at our October general meeting, or you can buy one or more at the RHS office, Mondays through Fridays, 1:00 to 4:00. Did You Know? October is National Archaeology Month!

Redmond Recorder - Your Chance to Make History Happen by Naomi Hardy

When that first exuberant group threw in together two years ago to create a historical society for Redmond, no one asked why we needed an organization focusing on our city’s history. Interestingly however, many folks weren’t previously aware that Redmond lacked its own historical group, some assuming that Marymoor Museum, located in the County park of the same name, was focused on Redmond. Since its inception, the museum’s collection came from all Eastside communities, and without their remarkable volunteers from different cities and towns, many items of value from Redmond and other communities east of Lake Washington would be scattered. Marymoor Museum and the Bellevue Historical Society have now merged into a single organization called Eastside Heritage Center. Eventually they’ll both be located under one roof in Bellevue. We look forward to learning about their combined Missions, perhaps at one of our upcoming general meetings. While our group’s founders deeply appreciated Marymoor’s work on the Eastside, we saw that a focused, immediate, aggressive effort was needed specifically for Redmond. We saw our historic sites and structures disappearing from our landscape without photographic documentation, encountered old street and place names that few remember anymore, found little written of our logging and farming industries, or of our cultural and ethnic heritages, and saddest of all, we continue to witness the loss of our old-timers who carry our history in their heads, a history largely unrecorded. The many joys of my term as Society president have been so rewarding, that when thanked for my work, I often feel unworthy, because doing local history always profits me intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, far in excess of what I contribute. My personal list of thankyou’s extends from our Mayor and the City Council members supportive of our work, to every single one of our older residents who’ve shared their wisdom about the general condition of man, by sharing their specific knowledge of life in Redmond this last century. Per our Bylaws, in November we’ll elect next year’s officers. Thus far, the slate of nominees for 2002: Miguel Llanos as President; Naomi Hardy as Vice-President; Margaret Evers Wiese as Corresponding Secretary, Phil Roe as Treasurer. This leaves only two empty

Page 4 chairs, and here’s an unpaid advertisement for those seats: Our group is fun, our work is rewarding, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll be laid off! Second VP: Don Watts [known affectionately as our token Perrigo] has been one of our two Vice-Presidents for two years, during which time he’s moved from Redmond to Everett. We ask especially for those members with old Redmond family links to consider sitting in the comfortable VP’s chair Don’s vacating. A creative part of our strength and balance is derived from an eclectic Board with diverse roots. Please contact Don for more info: 425-353-8876 [email protected], or any current Board member. Recording Secretary: Originally, our founding Secretary Margaret Evers Wiese , did everything secretarial. As we’ve grown dramatically, we’ve divided her job into two elected Board positions: Recording and Corresponding Secretaries. The Recording Secretary takes minutes during the nine months we meet. The Corresponding Secretary does everything else, and we are extremely grateful that Mew will continue to serve in this “everything else” capacity. What we need now is a Recording Secretary to take very simple, basic meeting minutes. We haven’t had this for a year, so any man or woman willing to take some minutes must be prepared to be assisted and appreciated beyond what might seem commensurate to the task. Interested? Contact Margaret 425746-0472 [email protected] . One upcoming Board of Directors appointment which we’re exceedingly proud to announce is that of Judy Aries Lang who has been an office staff volunteer since we first opened our office at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse. Two Board members whose appointments are ending are Jo Ann Potter and Margaret Doman, both of whom have been invaluable to our Mission, and who both continue to contribute to our community in the true pioneering spirit. Per our Bylaws, the other Board positions are filled by presidential appointment, so anyone wanting more information about being on our Board of Directors, please contact Miguel Llanos 425-869-9806 [email protected]. Be a part of making tomorrow’s history happy, join us by nominating yourself or a respected friend.

Redmond Recorder - Welcome to Town, Redmond Reporter by Naomi Hardy

This September, some 28,000 of us were delighted to find a new Redmond newspaper in our mailboxes. History is happening in Redmond, and a newspaper focused on Redmond is a valuable tool for chronicling our history as it happens. At our last monthly meeting, Lois Phillips Hudson shared her hilarious and enlightening experiences as an 18-year old editor of the Redmond Recorder, a weekly newspaper owned by Lowell King who also owned the Kirkland News Advertiser. In 1945 when Bob Bailie came to town and started the Sammamish Valley News, the Redmond Recorder soon folded. For the next 35 years, the SVN was the only paper focusing on Redmond while our population grew from 550 to over 23,000. Sadly, only 7 years worth of issues have been preserved from these decades. Bob sold the SVN in 1980 to Jack Sogenfrei, and during the next 16 years, an additional 11 years were preserved. All 18 years worth are at the Redmond Library. Our Society is actively searching for any copies or clippings from the missing years. Before it folded six years ago, the paper underwent another change of ownership and a name change, adding the word “Redmond” to the mast. This last year, Redmond Historical Society named this monthly newsletter Redmond Recorder, not actually honoring the SVN’s old competitor, but because an e-mail consensus was simply that we liked the alliteration of it. The Redmond Reporter is published by King County Journal Newspapers, which also publishes the Eastside Journal. Its publisher Denis Law was formerly the publisher of the Sammamish Valley News 1992-1994, and is warmly welcomed back to our community. For years now, the Redmond community has had no newspaper to chronicle its amazing, rapid changes, and often the sentiment has been expressed that we deserve our own paper. We hope that this now-monthly periodical will soon become a weekly. We not only deserve our own paper, we need one to record today’s news, tomorrow’s history. Welcome, Redmond Reporter!

Page 5 - Thank-You’s to…  Jerry Torell for his recent additions to our library of several Seattle books which celebrate our rich, local racial heritage.  Marion Neal who is joining our office staff of volunteers.  All the caring folks like Betty Anderson & Roy Buckley who organize Redmond High School’s Golden Alumni Reunion each year, and to the indispensable Patsy Cook Rosenbach who honors our seniors with her volunteer efforts.  And a special thank you to John N. Anderson of Kirkland, son of Albert “Andy” Anderson for whom the city’s first park was named, for his substantial monetary donation supporting our mission.  Betty Anderson [no relation to the Andersons above] for the donation of her husband Leslie Anderson’s Redmond High School letterman’s sweater.  Hazel Sheldon Johnson for “On the Ways” newspapers from the Lake Washington Shipyard 1942 & 1945, and for the old Bike Derby Program.

- Remembering Lampaerts’ Oral History The following are just a few excerpts from Roy & Glenn Lampaert’s oral history which KUOW reporter Cathy Duchamp conducted for the Redmond Historical Society. At our general membership meeting October 13th, copies of the written transcripts will be presented to the brothers who were both born in Redmond, Roy in 1911, Glenn in 1922. This 100-page-plus history is equally a must read for those who remember Redmond’s gentle golden days, and those who never knew they existed. Here are some tidbits, in no particular order: ROY: My dad came here in 1905 from Belgium. He came with a man by the name of Jules Maes who started a tavern and restaurant in Georgetown. He told me that they had a special train that they ran from Seattle to Redmond that they tried to entice people to come out this way, and it was right about this time that he came. He was just a young man when and he came to Washington, and worked at Sumner in the beet fields for awhile, and finally he bought a horse and a wagon. He was a butcher. He bought a little meat market in Redmond. Continued on next page…

Redmond Recorder Continued from previous page… I wouldn’t think there was any competition. There were only 400 people in Redmond, even when I was a young man He owned most of Redmond, 180 acres right in Redmond. It was a cattle ranch. The first 60 acres he bought from a man by the name of James Morse.. GLENN: I remember the first car I owned was a Model A Ford…we went to Georgetown and there was no bridges at that time. I had to drive the Model A Ford around through Renton to Seattle. I remember driving home with my mother. It was a foggy night, and my mother was very worried, but I don’t think we met another car on the road, that’s how light the traffic was in those days. ROY: It was a wonderful time for kids. The Sammamish River had a pool, a swimming hole where Bear Creek joins the slough. The Sammamish River, right by Redmond Center there, that’s where the swimmin’ hole was. They were all skinny dipping there in the nude, a whole bunch of boys, with a bon fire going to keep warm. I would walk along the Sammamish River and look for bass, and …then I’d catch a little fish called a bullhead. I’d hook that onto my hook, throw it in front of those big old bass, and I’d reel in a four-pound bass. Yeah it was a lot of fun for kids. And then, we had horses to ride. GLENN: Mother was always giving me heck for wearing my knees out playing marbles while walking around on my knees. And then, we’d have just plain old fern fights. There were wild ferns growing all over the place, sword ferns. We could pull them up, and they worked just like a spear. More in upcoming issues…

Page 6 The Editor’s Corner It seems that just about everyone is writing something about the events that happened only a few short weeks ago. We have all read the accounts, watched the videos over and over again, and shared in the horror and shock of the tremendous loss of life in just a few short hours. And then, when it seemed like we were in our darkest hour, something uniquely American started: politicians usually at odds with each other sang “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps; the Red Cross didn’t know what to do with the thousands upon thousands of volunteers who lined up to wait three to four hours to donate blood. You could feel the spirit of America, that glorious sense of raw, unadulterated patriotism, rise to the top of the heap of debris and shout, “I may be hurt, but I’m not dead!” For two weeks you could not buy a flag – they were all sold out. Cars, trucks, even bikers on their Harleys mounted flags on their vehicles and proudly displayed them as they drove down the street. And I started thinking, although we in Redmond have not had a disaster such as the one that struck New York, we display our colors every day. There is still, after all these years, that sense of unity, patriotism, and caring for one another that sets our town apart from many others. America will live to see another day, in spite of what the future may bring. And Redmond will see that day right along beside her. See you next meeting, October 13th at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse, Room 104. - Walt Buchman

Redmond Historical Society – General Membership Meeting September 8, 2001 Attendance Margo Marr Alexander, Betty Buckley Anderson, Nancy L. Bauer, Dusty Watts Blair, Thelma Brashears, Wayne Brashears, Kay Nichols Brulé, Lynne Rosenthal Bryan, Walt Buchman, Richard Cole, Violet Cook Elduen, Cindi Korsmo Ford, Audrey Gorlick, Charlotte Everson Hahnlen, Jerry Hardy, Naomi Hardy, Chris Himes, Larry Hoger, Lois Phillips Hudson, Pat Weiss Jovag, Barbara Weiss Joyce, Roy Lampaert, Judy Aries Lang, Norma Leicester, Bill Marr, Clare Marr, Carl Marrs, Pat Marrs, Daryl Martin, Doris Hebner McFarland, Marion Little Neal, Robin Perrigo Norton, Holly Plackett, Dale Potter, Jo Ann Potter, Margy Rockenbeck, Patsy Cook Rosenbach, Fred Rutledge, Irma Rutledge, Bob Sollitto, Don Stark, Aisha M. Strange, Charlene Johnston Sugden, Jerry Torell, Kristine Underhill, Arlyn Bjerke Vallene, Jo Ann Watkins, Rose Weiss, and Margaret Evers Wiese.