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Memorial Day: The Story of Eddie, Bobby, and Al
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Memorial Day: The Story of Eddie, Bobby, and Al
By Hans Zeiger
Puyallup Rotary
May 26, 2010
With Memorial Day weekend coming up, I wanted to share with you a story that I have been learning over the course of the past few years. It’s a story about three farmkids who grew up near the intersection of Fruitland and Pioneer more than 70 years ago, and as young men, made tremendous sacrifices so that you and I can live in a free land. Their names were Albert Tresch, Eddie Myers, and Bobby Bigelow.
Al Tresch was the son of a Swiss immigrant dairy farmer, a hard worker who saved up money from odd jobs in Tacoma to buy a big dairy farm in the valley. Their farm ran from Pioneer on the south to 17th on the east and the Experiment Station on the west to the railroad tracks on the north. Now of course you’ll find some of the nicer homes in the valley there. The Tresch family’s little modest farmhouse sat where the Methodist Church stands today. There were three brothers, Albert, Robert, and Jim. Albert was the mischievous one in the family, and I’ll say more on that in a minute…
Bobby Bigelow grew up in a wonderful house on ten wooded acres across Pioneer from the Tresches, and across Fruitland from the Washington State College Experiment Station. His father was a farmer at the Station. He was a well-educated farmer, because he had a full bachelor of arts from Carroll College in Iowa. The Bigelows were a prominent family in the community. Bobby’s Aunt Tot was for many years the personal secretary to the great berry entrepreneur, Fair executive, and politician William Paulhamus, as well as Fair treasurer and city treasurer.
And Eddie grew up on the grounds of the Experiment Station, where his father worked as the foreman. His mother had two daughters from a previous marriage, one who was much older and the other, Marian, who was five or six years older than Eddie. Next door to the Myerses were the Kinseys. Essey Kinsey and Eddie were the same age, so they grew up together. Since there were no boys in the Kinsey family, Essey told me that “Eddie was like a brother.” In the evenings after school at Maplewood Elementary, Essey and Eddie, along with Ruthie and Bobby Bigelow and a few other neighborhood kids, played games in the fields.
And in their generation growing up in this little community, each of these kids from the corner of Fruitland and Pioneer had a distinct role to play. Eddie was the most popular kid in school. Everybody liked him because he had a way of making everybody feel welcome. He wasn’t a genius, and he repeated the first grade at Maplewood. But people liked him because he was the most joyful and the most caring guy you could find.
In the summers, Eddie went to YMCA camp on an island in Lake Tapps, in the days before Lake Tapps was surrounded by homes. In his first year at camp, Eddie was assigned to the same cabin with Frank Hanawalt and six others who were all slightly older. Despite Eddie’s junior status, Hanawalt told me, “He was the person that added life to our cabin. He was so funny.”
A few years later, Hanawalt would sit in the stands at Viking Field, surrounded by his classmates and most of the town, as Eddie Myers grabbed hold of the punts from fourth down. “I remember the determination with which he would grab that punt and tuck it away and take off.” Eddie was only 145 pounds, but as his teammate and friend Don Henderson told me, “Eddie Myers was fearless.”
Most mornings, Eddie walked along Pioneer to Puyallup High School, and most afternoons he walked home. On the mornings when Eddie didn’t walk, he and Essey met at the bus stop and sat together on the ride up Pioneer to the high school. Essey and Eddie shared their deepest secrets and consulted each other about their boyfriends and girlfriends.
When Manford Hogman moved with his family from Illinois to join the Puyallup Class of 1940 in its sophomore year, it was Eddie, along with Ray Glaser who later died in a wartime plane crash, and Glenn Todd, who made him feel welcome. The Class voted Eddie “Friendliest Guy” (Essey was “Friendliest Girl”).
Bobby was a quiet kid who spent much of his childhood exploring the DeCoursey woods and learning the local trees and flowers. He joined Boy Scout troop 65 in 1933. He loved to be outdoors. Not many people remember Bobby, because he was just so quiet. He kept to himself. But he was a good and loving brother to his two sisters, one who was older and one who was younger. I talked with both sisters about their brother. The younger sister, Ruth, told me that one early memory defines her brother. She was out in the big yard one day playing dolls and she called to her older sister to come out and play. Hector, the older one, was a tomboy, and she refused. And then Bobby came out and he said, “I’ll play with you.” And that small childhood gesture, which was repeated in other ways as they grew up, has stuck with her down through the years.
As for Al, he is well-remembered for all the wrong reasons. He was the dropout, the troubled teen, the overweight kid, the town bully. He dropped out of the fifth grade at Maplewood Elementary in the 1930s and became the town bully. If you talk to the old-timers around here, they’ll tell you that Al Tresch was a terror in town. He weighed over 300 pounds by the time he should have been in high school. They called him “Fat Tresch.”
Don Henderson, who passed away last month, was the greatest storyteller of his generation in Puyallup, and he shared with me his memories of Fat Tresch. “My father in law, Fred DeBon, had a vegetable market called the Queen City Market. My father in law was a guy who had everything perfect. I used to work on Sunday mornings and Fat Tresch would come in there and pull an orange out of the bottom. When you do that the whole pile falls. I’d had enough. I picked up a tomato and let it fly. He was madder than a hornet. He chased me into the alley and fell down. I sat on him and when I sat on him he couldn’t get up. My friend Rudvelt came by and I asked him to sit on him while I got the police. Everybody was afraid of him.”
Jim Riley, PHS class of 1936, shared a Fat Tresch story as well. Jim was working as a ticket-taker at the Liberty Theater, and he was a little guy and frail from serious asthma. One night, Fat Tresch walked into the theater lobby. He demanded to get in without a ticket. He said that he always got in free. Jim says, “Not with me you don’t.” “Oh yeah?” Al says, “Well I’ll beat you up.” And Jim looked at him right in the groin and said, “I’ll get in one blow before you do.” And as Jim told it, “He walked away and never came back.”
Eddie graduated 70 years ago in June of 1940 and left for Washington State College. He was a couple years into his education when he entered the Army. He began officer training in 1943, moving on for infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Eddie was a natural leader, and he personified the motto of the infantry—“Follow me.” Assigned to the 417th Infantry Regiment, 76th Division, Lt. Myers met up with his men at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. He was made a rifle platoon leader, which meant that he led a rifle squad of nine men, alongside two other rifle squads and a weapons squad. Through the spring and summer and into the fall of 1944, the 417th trained for the liberation of Europe.
Lt. Howard Randall from Texas joined the 76th as a rifle platoon leader in June. Since he was new to the platoon, he was at a disadvantage in relating to the men, but he quickly observed that Lt. Myers had won them over. Eddie made himself available to the GIs to assist them with personal troubles or to reassure them about the stresses of war. As he had done on the island in Lake Tapps as a kid, he made camp life humane. He was a counselor and friend. Some men in the platoon were illiterate, so Eddie took time to transcribe their letters home. I interviewed Howard Randall, and he told me this: “He was better than the rest of us lieutenants. The rest of us went to town and had beers. Whenever we went into town he stayed back with his platoon.”
On Thanksgiving Day, 1944, the 76th boarded the troop transport USS Brazil out of Boston. The ship docked at Southampton a week and a half later, then the 76th marched through the New Forest to Bournemouth on the southern coast. As Christmas approached, Eddie was like a father, helping the illiterate men to write letters home and entertaining them with his wit. As at Camp McCoy, there were opportunities to go out with the officers. But as Randall recalls, “Even when some regimental girls in England put on a dance, he stayed back.”
Just before Christmas, the troops at Bournemouth learned that the Germans had gone back on the offensive at the Ardennes Forest on the Western Front. The 76th was ordered to meet up with General Patton’s Third Army as it fought to keep its ground. They would rendezvous in Luxembourg, between France and Germany.
It was the middle of January when the 76th embarked for France in armada. Snow was falling on Bournemouth as a hundred troop transports pushed out. The boats plied the waves at about 11 knots per hour because of the U-boat danger.
Across the channel, the 76th marched from Limesy to Luxembourg in less than two weeks through the snow, arriving in Junglinster on January 26. Even without the impending crossfire, the winter was deadly. Snow blanketed the ground. Inadequately booted and clothed, the men struggled to survive.
In the Luxembourg winter of 1945, Lt. Myers was almost, as his football teammate Don Henderson had known him at Viking Field in the good years, “fearless.” But as Howard Randall remembers, “We were all afraid that we were going to get killed or wounded in combat. After seeing the figures from Omaha Beach, we knew that it was pretty bad. We also knew that their tanks were better, and their 88-mm gun was better. They were a veteran-trained army, most had been fighting for five or six years, and we were brand new. We hadn’t been in combat at all.”
Infantrymen were a minority of servicemen and a majority of casualties. The rifle infantry accounted for 83 percent of casualties. By war’s end, three of six officers in Eddie’s company had been killed. The other three were wounded. One wounded officer became mentally unstable.
The first officer in Eddie’s company to be severely wounded in the Battle of the Bulge was the company commander. Then the executive officer was killed. With no time to mourn the dead, Eddie took over as company commander.
In mid-February, several hundred men of the 76th penetrated the Ziegfried Line. They crossed the Zauer River through German-occupied territory. On the other side, Lt. Myers led his men as they climbed about 450 feet up a mine-laden escarpment. At the top was an obstacle course like no other. Stretching 1,000 yards across and three and a half miles into the distance were 144 German pillboxes. Inch by inch, pillbox by pillbox, the infantrymen made their way through. Despite their insufficient clothing and shoes, the 76th had a fighting advantage over the Germans, whose force had been weakened by Russian assaults on the Eastern front.
It was after two days of rest beyond the Ziegfried line that the 76th began an assault on the town of Welshbillag. Two-hundred fifty men charged into the town.
Two German tanks fired rounds of 88-mm rifle shells into the advancing Americans. Some men were killed instantly. A shell landed beside Lt. Randall; it was a dud. Lt. Myers was hit in the stomach. He was losing blood quickly. Some of his men helped him into a barn. Most of the platoon continued on, fighting through the night. Eddy sat up in the barn in agonizing pain. Eddie was 21.
That same month that Eddie was killed, Bobby was in hard combat in the Philippines.
After high school, Bobby went off to Oregon State to study forestry. And it was there that Bobby was drafted for the Army. He went to Basic Training in Texas. In basic training, he formed a strong friendship with a quiet young Japanese-American man named Frank Yano. They had similar personalities, similar interests. After boot camp, Bobby went on for cavalry training at Fort Bliss, Kansas with the 1st Cavalry, 5th Regiment. Frank was assigned to the segregated all-Japanese American 442nd Infantry Regiment, training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi.
And before Frank was to depart for service in Europe unit, he asked Bobby to be the best man in his wedding.
By the summer of 1944, Frank was in Europe, where he and his two brothers in the 442nd saw some of the toughest fighting in Europe. Frank earned the Bronze Star for helping to rescue wounded comrades. Bobby was with the 1st Cavalry as they took back the Admiralty Islands, and then they waited there for the invasion of the Phillipines.
Bobby was in the fifth assault wave into the Philippines. “I guess by now you have read all about us in the paper,” he wrote home to his mother on November 6. “It’s quite a place, we traded stuff and got chickens several times so have had fried chicken. Lots of sweet potatoes and corn too. The people here are sure glad to see us come and are a great help to us.” On Thanksgiving Day, as the Army fought its way through the Philippines, a dinner of roast turkey and three fresh eggs was sent out to the men on the lines.
From a foxhole, he wrote to his mother on December 4. The Army, he said, was “doing a swell job” as it pushed its way to Manila. “Right now I’ve got three inches growth of whiskers and haven’t washed in just about that length of time.”
But the road to Manila was hard. They fought at Leyte and Luzon. Bobby’s high school classmate Del Martinson was in the infantry, and he described for me the nightmare of a Japanese ambush in the Philippines, dropping to the ground and laying there absolutely helpless with bullets whizzing just above his head. And he described the sensation of wanting to get up and run away but somehow being unable to move. I remember how he put it: “The Lord was pushing me down.” Martinson’s squad leader was killed in that ambush.
And in the midst of things like this, Bobby provided medical aid to countless men along the way. By the first week of February, the 1st Cavalry was in Manila. They participated in the liberation of 3,000 civilian POWs at the University of Santo Tomas. And then in combat on the Jones Bridge over the Pasig River, Bobby went out to aid a wounded soldier. And as he bent down to help, he too was shot. He died shortly after that. And so, when I see the Veteran’s Memorial in Pioneer Park, with the soldier bending down and reaching out to help, I think first of Pvt. Robert Bigelow.
Somebody else who thought first of Bobby was his best friend Frank Yano. And a few months before he was killed, Bobby learned by letter that Frank’s wife had given birth to a girl. And in honor of Bobby, the girl’s name was Roberta.
Well, what about Albert Tresch, the town bully? He ran away and joined the Army in 1939. He was in the Philippines by 1941, and then he was fighting to defend Coreggidor as the Japanese took over more and more of the island. And in the final days there, Albert Tresch and another young soldier put their lives at risk. There was a Japanese machine gun nest that got in the way of the soldiers, and Albert volunteered to go around with a grenade to take out the nest. Well, they succeeded, and for that he was awarded the Silver Star.
But it would be years before Albert Tresch saw Puyallup again. As you know, Coreggidor fell, and the survivors of that battle were taken prisoner by Japan. For the next four years, Albert struggled to survive, first along the trail that became known as the Bataan Death March, and then in a hellish place called Fukuoka not far from Nagasaki, where he spent those dark days trying to survive. Most of the men in those camps, and along that Death March, never made it.
Most of what I know about the Bataan Death March comes from a survivor I knew named Bryce Lilly, who grew up in Tacoma and just passed away last year. Mr. Lilly told about the horrors of Coreggidor, where he was shot in the head, bandaged up, and fought on. He recalled being fed nothing but a handful of rice and a cup of water as they marched 70 miles in 100 degree heat. He recalled being packed into a transport ship with dead and dying men. In Japan, he worked as a slave laborer in a steel mill. Before the war, Mr. Lilly was 175 pounds. When the war was over, he was down to 70 pounds.
Like Bryce Lilly, Albert Tresch struggled to survive. He knew that freedom was waiting on the other side.
To him, home meant something special. To Pvt. Albert Tresch, freedom was a place called Puyallup, Washington.
And he finally made it home that fall of 1945. Not long after Albert had stepped through the farmhouse door at the dairy farm on Pioneer, he asked his brother Jim to take him up for an airplane ride. Jim had just gotten out of the Army Air Corps, and Albert had never been in an airplane before. After years of confinement, he longed to see Puyallup from the sky. Jim and Albert drove across town to the little airfield beside the river. Jim arranged to rent a plane for the afternoon, and in a few minutes the brothers were airborne.
Below them, returned soldiers made their catch. Little cars drove along the Levee Road, and up and down Meridian, bearing neighbors on their way back to the hope of a normal life.
But after all the hardships of what Al had experienced, there must be some indestructible playfulness about the human spirit, to do what Jim and Al did there in the sky that fall afternoon.
Jim came in low over downtown, over Pioneer Park, over Puyallup High School, and then they flew low over Pioneer Street, disturbing more than a few residents unaccustomed to an airplane among the local traffic. A few dutiful citizens, conditioned by an era of blackouts and night watches, phoned the police.
But the Tresch brothers had taken to the airspace of their parents’ dairy farm, circling round the cows as they grazed in the pasture, startling them into a desperate trot. Near the fleeing cows stood their strong old Swiss dairyman father, his fist raised to the heavens as the plane swooped up to avoid the old growth cedar tree in the middle of the pasture. But they were too close, for the wing clipped off the top of the tree, and as the cedar boughs came in for a landing amid the riled bovines, mother Tresch was out on the back porch, hands on hips, rejoicing silently in the homecoming of her sons, also hoping that they would come home alive for dinner. Al was completely thrilled. That, to Al Tresch, the hero of Bataan, was freedom.
By the time they landed at the airstrip, every police car in town was waiting at the end of the runway. Out stepped the daredevil flier and the prodigal town bully. Jim rolled up his sleeve to present the cops with his ruptured duck tattoo. They let him off. Obeying the speed limits, Jim and Al drove home for dinner.
In the years after the war, life moved on, and many in that generation tried to forget the pain of the war. When somebody asked Al if he would share his experiences about the war at the Puyallup Kiwanis, he declined. Al died a number of years ago, and Jim Tresch passed away earlier this month.
Frank Yano became a postal carrier but he said little about the war. In the 1960s, Roberta Yano made a weeklong visit to Puyallup to meet Bobby Bigelow’s family, and she and her father kept in touch with them over the years. Bobby’s best friend Frank Yano died in 2008.
And about 20 years ago, Howard Randall traveled with Bill Moyers of PBS to visit a Luxembourg cemetery, the cemetery in which General George Patton is buried. Randall guided Moyers to a special part of the cemetery. Randall stopped in front of a white cross and pointed at the name: Edward J. Myers. And finally through tears he told of the man he and many others came to love. He recalled how he was a good man, how he was like a father to his men, and how Eddie hailed from a place called Puyallup, Washington.
Next month will mark the 70th Puyallup High School commencement after Eddie Myers’ class of 1940 graduated. Few of that generation are with us any longer. But we can honor those who sacrificed by learning and telling the story of that greatest generation. I hope that my story about Bobby, Eddie, and Al does some justice to their memory. Thanks for letting me share it with you.
Superintendents Who Built Washington
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Superintendents Who Built Puyallup
By Hans Zeiger
Daffodil Kiwanis
Mrs. Turner’s Restaurant, May 5, 2010
Thank you for having me. Charlie and Clarence are the ones to blame for the invitation.
I’ve been talking at the various service clubs in the area lately about great men and women in our local history. I was thinking about what aspect of our community’s history I could discuss this morning. I’ve been to this club enough times in the past to know that there are a few school administrators who show up here. That means that I have to be on my best behavior this morning—even if you’re not on your best behavior.
Puyallup is an education community, and many of you have had a big role in that. So I decided it might be worth talking about a couple of the great superintendents who built the Puyallup School District, E.B. Walker and Paul Hanawalt. These two men laid the groundwork for this school district to be one of the great districts in the State of Washington. They shared Indiana roots, a passion for kids, and a positive vision for the future.
Edmund Burton Walker was born the same week the Civil War began in April of 1861. He was born on a farm across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky on the Indiana side, near a little town called New Albany. Of course Kentucky was a slave state and Indiana was a free state. So as Edmund grew up in New Albany during the Civil War and Reconstruction, he was aware of the country’s deep divisions and inequalities.
He also would have come to know that education might have an equalizing effect. Horace Mann had talked about education as the great equalizer. Edmund attended a rural grade school, and then went on to the high school in New Albany. And there was a unique thing about that high school that must have shaped Edmund’s views of education powerfully, and that was that New Albany High School was the first public high school in the State of Indiana.
Edmund Walker received a good education there, and after graduating he worked his way through college at DePauw University north in Greencastle by taking summer school and correspondence courses. He received his teaching credentials and taught in New Albany for the next two decades. He spent most of his years there as principal at East Spring Street Elementary School. He married a former student named Nancy Jane Young in 1885.
By 1903, Walker’s brother had gone west to Tacoma where he started a hardware store. So Edmund and Nancy Jane and their three kids and Edmund’s parents decided that they would all go west too. That summer of 1903, they packed up their belongings, boarded a train, and almost didn’t make it out of the Midwest. The train nearly derailed as it passed out of Illinois where the Mississippi River was flooding and endangering the railway. The train stopped, and the conductor came through to organize the passengers according to weight in order to keep the train in balance.
In Tacoma, Walker figured out that he wasn’t cut out for the hardware business, so he left his brother to run the store while he went over to Central School to take the Washington State teaching exam. His score on the math section was perfect.
The Puyallup School District needed a principal at Spinning Elementary, and Walker showed up just in time for the start of the 1903 school year. Walker’s daughter Maude recalled moving to Puyallup in a profile of her father in 1975. She wrote, “Puyallup in 1903-’04 was a small community with many churches. During the summer there were many Indian hop-pickers and seasonal workers roaming the streets. Every member of families went out to berry fields and hop fields in those days. I have visions yet of picking hops and carefully emptying many small containers into the big hop box. Our church friends introduced us to harvesting crops and we met many friendly people there. I especially remember our lunches of applesauce and jelly sandwiches – a happy time even if the yellow jacked buzzed around us as they were hungry too!”
Walker only lasted one school year at Spinning before he was hired by the Auburn School District to be their superintendent. He worked there from 1904 to 1908, and then the Puyallup School District wanted him back, so E.B. and Nancy Jane Walker came back in 1908 and moved into a big house on Pioneer.
E.B. Walker had several principles that he tried to impart to Puyallup’s teachers. His daughter listed four of them:
1. Be firm but fair—always kind
2. Keep a keen sense of humor.
3. Look for the good in every pupil.
4. Guard against raising your voice when provoked.
E.B. Walker had three great achievements during his 12 years as Puyallup’s education leader. First, he opened Puyallup High School in 1910. The class of 1910 graduated from Puyallup Central School, and the class of 1911 was able to enjoy the impressive new building. It was built at a cost of less than $35,000, which would be about $800,000 in today’s dollars. That was 100 years ago.
Second, Walker became the leading advocate for a public library in Puyallup. He chaired the library board that began raising money for a library. There’s a photo on the first page of Lori Price and Ruth Anderson’s history of Puyallup of women loaded into cars to raise money for the library. And the idea for the fundraiser was that they would cruise town with the authorization to impose fines on miscreants. They raised $425 that day. Finally, Walker wrote the grant requests that led to the Carnegie Foundation’s major gift to establish Puyallup’s first library in 1912.
And Walker’s third great achievement was selecting the junior high model for the Puyallup School District. He opened the Puyallup Junior High on the high school campus in 1919.
Sadly, the same school year that Walker opened the junior high, he contracted cancer, and he stepped down as superintendent in 1920 and died the following year. As the community mourned his passing, a local banker named C.M. Case donated a silver cup to Puyallup High School in honor of E.B. Walker. To this day, the cup is presented to a graduating senior who has demonstrated qualities of character, citizenship, personality, and scholarship. Now, the Walker Cup is duplicated for Rogers and Emerald Ridge as well, and the district’s fourth high school, the alternative school, was named E.B. Walker High School. There’s also a plaque in memory of Walker outside the old junior high entrance on the high school. So the Walker legacy continues.
One of Walker’s hires for the new junior high was a young man who had grown up in Tacoma, graduated from the College of Puget Sound just before World War I and then joined the Navy. When he returned from the war, he put in an application to Walker. So E.B. Walker hired Paul Hanawalt in the fall of 1919 to teach math in the junior high.
Hanawalt worked for the Puyallup School District for the next 41 years. Hanawalt had an extraordinary personality. He was always positive, always cheerful, and what people remember the most is that he was always whistling. Ruth Brackman Martinson, student body president at PHS in 1941-1942 and then the school’s secretary, told me that Hanawalt was “always loving and kindly. He could whistle like birds—he could make them sound like the bird was right in the room. That was what enthralled kids.”
Paul Hanawalt was born in 1896 in Greencastle, Indiana, the same place where E.B. Walker had gone for his college education. Hanawalt moved to Tacoma as a child when his father was hired as professor of math at the College of Puget Sound. Hanawalt graduated from Stadium High School. Then at CPS, he played basketball, was elected class president, and met his wife Alice. They would have a son Frank and a daughter Ruth. Frank passed away recently, but I had the privilege of interviewing him a couple years ago. He was a great educator in his own right, principal of Garfield High School, philanthropic leader, and civil rights activist in Seattle.
Paul Hanawalt quickly rose from Junior High principal to High School principal during the 1920s. He coached track and basketball.
When Hanawalt took the superintendent’s office in 1930, the school district budget was in trouble. His first task was to resolve the district’s serious warrant debt. In 1932, he cut teacher salaries by 5 percent in order to keep the district in balance and avoid layoffs. “He was successful,” his son Frank told me. None of the teachers “ever got a check that had problems. He had a good business mind as well as being an outstanding educator.”
By the mid-1930s, Hanawalt pursued federal funding for school construction, which he used in the construction of the new Maplewood Elementary, his first major project. A number of other milestones occurred over the course of Hanawalt’s long tenure. The Puyallup Heights School merged with the District in 1944, Firgrove merged in 1946, and Waller Road was consolidated in 1950. Hanawalt introduced driver’s ed courses to the school district in 1946. He led the drive for a $185,000 bond measure to expand Meeker and Maplewood in 1947. He oversaw the construction of Karshner Elementary in 1952, East Junior High in 1956, and the consolidation of Woodland School in 1956.
In all of this, kids came first. Hanawalt had faith in his students and faith in the community. He patiently encouraged kids to work hard in school and succeed. “The ceiling is unlimited,” he often said in his speeches around town. He was a big proponent of character education.
Hanawalt had high moral standards for himself and his teachers. My Grandpa tells me that according to the superintendent’s rules, “you didn’t buy liquor or beer in the local stores, and you didn’t go to the taverns.” Somebody once brought a case of Pabst to his office, and when he was moving offices years later, they found the beer unopened. Hanawalt also disapproved of teachers smoking cigarettes. Furthermore, he told the district faculty that “you need to live in the community.”
Hanawalt worked with a number of school board members over his long service, but the ones who served longest and most notably are Fred DeBon (1939-1947), Charles Aylen (1931-1942), and Eileen Kalles (1952-1965).
During the difficult years of the Depression and the War, Hanawalt was a man with a social conscience. He made at least one public gesture of support for Japanese-American students who were evacuated to the Puyallup Fairgrounds in the spring of 1942.
Hanawalt went to the relocation authorities and requested a brief leave for several Japanese-American students of Puyallup High School who were to graduate with the Class of 1942. His request was approved. On graduation day in June, the superintendent drove to the gates of the Fairgrounds, where he picked up Rosie Takemura and Yukio Takeuchi and took them to the high school auditorium to walk with their class.
When the exercises had finished, Rosie and Yukio made their way back out to Mr. Hanawalt’s car, which he would drive back to the Fairgrounds. But first, he made a detour up Pioneer and stopped at Martin’s Confectionary. There, he treated the new Viking alums to Mr. Martin’s homemade ice cream. We should not forget such moments in the history of our community.
Several years later, my own family story would intersect with the legend of Paul Hanawalt. Hanawalt hired my Grandpa Ed to teach Fifth Grade at Maplewood Elementary in 1952. My grandpa had a choice among three school districts, and he chose Puyallup, I’m sure in no small part because of Hanawalt’s leadership. In 1958, my great grandparents moved to Puyallup as well, and great grandpa Ernest taught science at West Junior High while great grandpa Leata taught kindergarten at Meeker.
Hanawalt had fun with his staff. My grandpa tells the story of the annual faculty picnic softball game in which Hanawalt was thrown a softball—or the cover of a softball filled with flour. “Boy did he lay into that thing.”
Of course, as you know, Paul Hanawalt was a Kiwanian, and he had a 33-year perfect attendance record. He was also involved with the American Legion, Chamber, and served for a time as chairman of the State Teachers Retirement System.
Hanawalt’s name is preserved on the gymnasium of Puyallup High School, appropriate since he was an enthusiast for Puyallup athletics. In his three decades as superintendent, he was a reliable presence in the stands of Viking Field and the bleachers of the high school gym. So Hanawalt’s legacy lives on.
Paul Hanawalt and E.B. Walker—these two men exemplify something about our community that is noble, and that has endured through over a century and a half as thousands of students have come through this school district. There is a certain greatness about those who give their lives to the education of the young. E.B. Walker and Paul Hanawalt were great men.
Campaign Kickoff Speech
Filed under News
Hans Zeiger May 6, 2010 – Zeiger Elementary School, Puyallup
Thank you Bruce Dammeier. Thak you for your example of statesmanship and your service to the 25th District. There could be no better mentor and future seatmate than Rep. Bruce Dammeier.
I should point out some Zeigers who are here: my aunt Mary and uncle Ernie, my uncle Karl, my aunt Sally Zeiger Hanson, my aunt Kay and uncle Jerry Buccola and cousins Jenny and Molly Buccola, my brother Ross and sister Lisa, my parents Kim and Walt—they’re the ones to blame—my grandma Virginia Nisker and Dave Christianson, my uncle Bill Zeiger, and the man who says he had to pay a lot to get this school named after him, my grandpa Ed Zeiger.
When they dedicated this building 14 years ago, somebody said that there were so many Zeigers in Puyallup that they had to start a whole new school just to accommodate them.
You know, Zeiger means “Pointer,” like the pointer on a compass. So the mascot of this school is the Explorer, the Zeiger Explorers. But I understand there’s an older meaning of the name in Germany that has to do with one who dwells near a signboard, in other words a homeless person who sits by a sign outside of an inn begging for food. I once thought of living up to my name, but there are lower depths to which a human being may fall, and so, you see, I have turned to politics. I ask for your forbearance.
For 56 years, starting in 1932, this was a Democrat district. In 1932, State Senator Nifty Garrett celebrated his Democrat victory in the 25th District by calling his friends down to Olympia and riding up the steps of the state capitol on a donkey. Well, when we win this year, I will ride an elephant up the steps of the state capitol. You’re all invited to come down to celebrate. The trouble with that is that elephants make messes, and nobody will know how to deal with that in Olympia.
If this was once a Democrat district, conventional wisdom says that it is a swing district today. But this year, the voters are going to demonstrate that the 25th District is a Republican district.
All of us are aware of the real challenges to the future of our families, our schools, our businesses, and our community. A new generation of Americans is discovering that economic prosperity doesn’t last forever. Our generation must be tested on the question that has faced every generation of Americans since our founding. It is the question of self-government—whether you and I can govern ourselves without the rule of a tyrant or a bureaucrat, whether we can take responsibility for our families and jobs, whether we can make something of the opportunities that God has given to us.
Too often, government has assumed that you and I aren’t capable of much on our own. More and more, individual initiative, voluntary cooperation, free enterprise, and community spirit have given way to a belief that bureaucracies can solve our deepest needs. And today, despite its long and dismal record of ineptitude, government promises grander visions than ever before.
At the same time, in this economy, our resources have run low. And so the task before us is the business of setting priorities.
In the next few minutes I want to talk about the priorities that I’ll choose if I’m elected to serve this district in Olympia. My sense of what is important is so powerfully informed by the lessons that many of you have taught me over the years, lessons that echo through the generations.
In the century after our nation’s founding, the first pioneers came to the Northwest to seek opportunity in places like Puyallup. Puyallup means “The Generous People,” and I like to think that we live up to our name. Of course, I don’t think that Ezra Meeker was thinking about our generosity with our tax dollars when he named the place.
When I’ve spoken to groups these past few months, I’ve talked about the generous men and women in the history of this community who have made it an exceptional place. I’ve talked about the Populist governor John Rogers, the berry entrepreneur and Progressive state senator William Paulhamus, the budget cutting public intellectual Warner Karshner, the education statesman Buster Brouillet.
I’ve also talked about our heroes in war—about an overweight town bully named Albert Tresch who earned a Silver Star for his bravery at the fall of Coreggidor and survived the Bataan Death March. Lt. Eddie Myers, the Viking quarterback and class president who was like a father to his men as they liberated Europe, who died in a barn in the middle of the night in a little place on the western front called Welshbillig.
These past couple years I got to know Bob Mizukami, who passed away last week. Bob and his brother Bill served in the all-Japanese American 442nd Infantry Regiment, which saw some of the most difficult service in the European theatre. Bill was killed. Bob came home to be the first mayor of Fife. The week before Bob died, I called him to talk about our campaign. He said that he was proud of what we are doing.
Others I knew as heroes growing up. I should mention a few who are here tonight. My second grade teacher Mary Wiley Langdon is here. She was a wonderful teacher. Bob Tate was here earlier. Bob is the father of Randy Tate, who was a young guy when he decided to take on a powerful Democrat in 1988, worked hard, and won. One who couldn’t make it tonight is Cameron Lefler, who grew up in Boy Scout troop 174, where he was mentored by my grandpa and others. He served in the Marine Corps, and then he became a King County Sheriff’s Deputy. After September 11, he reenlisted in the Marine Corps and served two tours in Iraq as an infantry squad leader. He earned a purple heart during a firefight in Fallujah. Last year, back with the Sheriff’s Department, he rescued a drowning man from the Green River and carried him half a mile to safety.
These past few months I have fallen more deeply in love with this place called Puyallup than ever before. I have met people who sat in my great grandpa’s science class at Aylen or in my great grandma’s kindergarten class at Meeker, or who taught with grandpa Ed at Wildwood, who watched my dad run the ball at Sparks Stadium years ago, or who volunteered in PTA with my mom. And then I sat on Conrad Thiede’s front porch in Northwest Puyallup for an hour and a half as he explained to me sixty years of history in the neighborhood where I grew up. Today I know better than ever why my grandpa Ed always says that it’s the people who make a community. And every person matters.
Everyday I go out door to door, I meet people from every walk of life and every point of view who wake up every day and live their lives as best they can. I hear stories about the daily struggles of good men and women. I talked to a woman in Edgewood whose family business can’t make it in this state’s business climate, and she’s thinking of starting over in Idaho. She’s not the only one. Last week I got a call from a business owner in downtown Puyallup who’s about had it with our state’s bureaucracy and wonders whether he can make his next house payment. His family farmed in the Valley for generations, but he too mentioned Idaho.
I’m fascinated by these people as they go about their lives, their “course of human events.” They carry within them this great drive to live with purpose. They struggle each day to provide for their families, to serve their neighbors, to make some little mark on this world.
These are the generous people.
And these are the kinds of people in whom our state’s founders placed all of their confidence when they wrote the first Article of our State Constitution. They wrote, “All political power is inherent in the people, and governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and are established to protect and maintain individual rights.”
Isn’t that beautiful?
And isn’t it a shame that our lawmakers in Olympia have forgotten that?
They voted to overturn Initiative 960, which said that two thirds is required to pass a tax increase. So they raised our taxes by $800 million and passed a budget that is silly. But they did not and never will repeal Article I of our state Constitution. Because government still derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that means that the people of the 25th District will have a choice in this year’s election.
I believe that government should live within its means, just as you and I have to live within ours.
I believe that we can set priorities in state government in order to fund our most important public needs: public safety, K-12 education, and care for the most vulnerable. I am convinced that we can do that without raising taxes. And I believe that we can do it without sacrificing other public priorities.
I believe that we can fully fund K-12 education while introducing some badly needed reforms to make our schools more competitive. I believe that we can protect our environment through public and private conservation without further stifling our economy under burdensome regulations. I believe that we can secure affordable health care for more people without a centralized federal model, but with reforms at the state level like rolling back mandates and limiting costly lawsuits. These are a few of the things that I’ll advocate in Olympia.
I’ll take the work seriously, but I’m counting on you to never let me take it too seriously. Psalm 2 says that God looks down from heaven at the rulers of the earth and laughs. I can’t imagine anything funnier than Olympia, Washington when the legislature is in session.
And we should never lose our awareness that the really serious stuff is what happens in families, small businesses, churches, community organizations. Those institutions form the substance of liberty. And I happen to believe that those institutions are a heck of a lot better at caring for people than any bureaucracy ever was.
Liberty and generosity go hand in hand. On one hand, we must give of our fortunes, and sometimes of our lives, to have that precious thing called liberty. On the other hand, we must be free to love and to give—to serve our families and our communities, as it is only possible to do when you are not forced to do so by the tax collector.
Liberty runs in our blood around here. One summer day, ninety-five years ago, the headline on the Puyallup Valley Tribune announced that a special train was coming. Word spread around town. And that afternoon, everyone in Puyallup dropped what they were doing. The schools were out, and the shops closed early, and the people made their way downtown to see a train—a train carrying the Liberty Bell. Why did that bell mean so much to those people? What about it drew them out along the railway to see it and join their neighbors in celebrating it?
Well, the Liberty Bell stood for an idea. It’s an idea that each generation must affirm, the idea contained in the Declaration of Independence and echoed in our state constitution, that all human beings are created equal and that we must give our consent to be ruled. It’s a message that needs to be spread, just like word spread around town that day 95 years ago that the Liberty Bell was coming. The Liberty Bell itself tells us that there is a message to spread, in the words of Scripture: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
This evening, I am thankful to God that the land in which I have chosen to stand for public office is a free one. I pledge to you my best efforts to help keep it that way. And I thank you all for your support.
Three Great Education Statesmen from Puyallup
Filed under News
South Hill Sunrisers Kiwanis
February 10, 2010
My family’s story in the Puyallup area starts back in 1952, when young Ed Zeiger showed up in town and started teaching at Maplewood Elementary and eventually populated a good part of the town with his own kids and grandkids, of which I am one. My mom took her first job teaching fourth grade at Wildwood Park Elementary School 31 years ago. Ed Zeiger was the principal there, and before long he had played matchmaker for Miss Nisker and his third son Walt. I am the son, grandson, and great grandson of Puyallup teachers… I am a proud graduate of Puyallup High School. So when it comes to public schools, as you might guess, I’m against them (Just kidding).
This morning I want to talk about three great education statesmen in our community’s history. They came from different points of view, but they shared one thing in common, and that was their advocacy for our public schools. One was a conservative Republican, one was a liberal Democrat, and one was a Populist. All three of them have schools named after them.
The first education statesman was John Rogers. John Rogers was born in Brunswick, Maine in 1838 and became a professional wanderer who worked at various times as a farmer, teacher, pharmacist, drugstore manager, newspaper editor, and political organizer in the states of Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Illinois, and Kansas. He was an endlessly curious and restless man who could never stay put. It was late in life when he finally found what he had been searching for all those years. He found a place and a calling. The place was Puyallup, and the calling was the leader of the Populist movement in Washington State. He had been the editor of a Populist newspaper in Kansas, and his son had moved up to the Northwest and started a newspaper of his own in Puyallup. So the elder Rogers went up to join his son. They worked on the Populist newspaper just as the People’s Party and the national movement for free silver and land reform was picking up steam. He was a tireless writer of pamphlets and books. And within a couple years, Rogers had been elected to the State Senate from the Puyallup area.
He is best remembered because he is the man who first took the words of the State Constitution seriously in working to implement them. Our Constitution says that education is the “paramount duty of the state.” That was based on an old tradition in America. One of the four organic documents of our nation’s founding was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which set out the purposes for the new territories, and the Congress zoned the territory to have townships where a certain area would be set aside for schools. And in that Northwest Ordinance, they wrote this, “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of instruction shall be encouraged in these territories.” And so education spread from coast to coast. And Washington Territory took education very seriously; our first territorial governor Isaac Stevens said that every child should have the equal opportunity to receive an education.
So State Senator Rogers introduced what has become known as the Barefoot Schoolboy Bill in 1893. It proposed that there should be adequate funding for the Basic Education of every child in the state. And that was a radical thing, because it meant that if you lived in the Valley and went to Maplewood School you had just the same right to a basic education as if you lived in the Woodland area and went to Woodland School. And it was to say that all of us together have an interest in the education of the young, even the Barefoot Schoolboys and Schoolgirls. And that was actually a hard sell with the big cities at the time, because that meant they would have to pay more taxes to cover the poorer rural areas. So Rogers lost his first attempt to get that bill in the Senate. But he was a persistent man. He introduced the bill again, and it failed, and then again. His persistence paid off, because he was also a persuasive man. And in the very final days of the 1893 session, the Rogers Barefoot Schoolboy Bill passed.
Guess how much the per pupil state cost of basic education was for one year? $6.
There was a reward for Rogers’s persistence, and it isn’t just that they named a school in Puyallup after him. People in this state have always loved education, and if you are a champion of it, you can become a hero. Rogers suddenly became a sensation, and in the 1896 election, he was elected governor.
Of course, Rogers had his critics. Some accused him of being the political agent of Ezra Meeker, who the editor of the Olympia Standard John Murphy referred to as “the antiquated fraud.” Murphy had a nickname for Rogers also: “His accidency.” Murphy and others suspected that Rogers was trying to move the state capitol to the so-called “hop yard” known as Puyallup. And Rogers ended up vetoing a bill on his desk to finance the completion of a state capitol, though he suggested moving into the Thurston County courthouse as an alternative. Rogers was known for his vetoes and threats of vetoes which kept spending to a minimum in a time of economic difficulty. In fact, the state budget was $3 million in the biennium before Rogers took office, and as a result of Rogers’s veto power and influence, he was able to get the budget down to about $1.2 million for the 1897-1899 biennium. He died shortly after leaving the governor’s mansion.
And by the way, John Rogers is the only former governor in the history of our state to have a statue in his honor. It stands outside the State Education Building in Olympia, where one of the other three men I’ll talk about would eventually work.
The second Puyallup education statesman was Dr. Warner Karshner, who has become one of my personal heroes, and not just because I attended Karshner Elementary as a kid. Karshner was born in Ohio in 1880 and came out here from the Midwest to study medicine at the University of Washington. After graduating, he and his wife Ella settled in Puyallup where he began his medical practice. He delivered hundreds of Puyallup babies, performed major surgeries with great skill, and conducted the first successful stomach cancer surgery in Pierce County. He was a poet, an author, a newspaper columnist, a world traveler, a public philosopher, a scientist, and a civic booster. Everytime there was an event in town where some group needed a speaker, Karshner was the go-to man, because he always had something brilliant and insightful to say. He was the commencement speaker at Puyallup High School year after year. He served on the School Board and advocated a modern high school building in the early 1900s. Then he was elected to the State Senate as a Republican in 1916, beating William Chamberlain who was one of the Fair founders by a vote of 4,544 to 2,845.
After he won the Puyallup Valley Tribune wrote that he was “a man of courage, ability, and unswerving integrity. There will be few men in the next legislature so highly trained in mind and by habits of industry. He is at once a student and a thinker; alert, active, purposeful. He delves for the facts himself. If the truth is there he finds it … He can’t be led or fooled.”
Well Dr. Karshner was the leading conservative Republican of the State Senate in his time. He was so conservative on social issues that he not only wanted Prohibition but he wanted Prohibition on communion wine. And he was a limited government conservative. The News Tribune once wrote, “Senator Karshner … has from the very first fought for a program of economy, even to the point of raising the ire of other legislators by his determined stand for lower taxes.” He was frequently calling for tax cuts and spending cuts. Just 20 years after John Rogers was dealing with $1 million to $3 million budgets, the general budget had risen to $50 million. And that was too much for Karshner, who sat on the Appropriations Committee. “Out of a general budget of something like $50,000,000, less than half is of special interest to the general taxpayer.” Dr. Karshner was outspokenly opposed to the public power lobby. Karshner voted against funding for the Centralia Normal School, the Spokane Women’s Clinic, the Northwest Tourist Fund, an Orthopedic program, and others. He said that these were “measures which I feel have no standing in law.” And when the economy was tough around the time of World War I, Senator Karshner said that it would be wrong to raise taxes.
There’s a cartoon of Dr. Karshner standing in front of a patient on the operating table and he’s raising a giant cleaver above his head. The patient has a name tag which says, “Appropriations.”
Karshner was a limited government conservative, but that wasn’t because he was opposed to worthy community efforts. He just happened to believe that there ought to be a wide sphere for private philanthropy in any community, and it’s best if the state can create policies to encourage that rather than trying to do what caring people in a community can do just as well themselves. And Karshner practiced what he preached. Good Samaritan Hospital is one of Karshner’s legacies. He led the fundraising drive for the Puyallup Valley Hospital in the early 1920s, and the money for the hospital was raised within the community. So Karshner called on people in Puyallup to give generously to the work of building Puyallup Valley Hospital at 4th and Meridian. They raised $150,000 for the building and equipment.
It wouldn’t surprise you that Kiwanis was heavily involved in that. In fact, when the hospital opened in 1922, Kiwanis sponsored a pie eating contest to see who could be the first patient in the new hospital. I propose that you should repeat that when the new building opens next year.
In addition to his work in health care, Karshner appreciated the value of education. As I said, he was the default commencement speaker at the high school, and in his commencement speech of 1915 he told the graduates that there was something expected of them in exchange for the public investment that was made for their school years. And that was that they were to “make good.” “Don’t hide your light under a bushel,” he told them. And this man was a great orator. You can just imagine Puyallup’s doctor there in that beautiful auditorium warning the graduates to “select their course ere the undertow of life drags them away from their moorings to perish in some Sargasso sea, or into some vortex strewn with human derelicts. Life is short … and there is much to do. The graduates were standing on the threshold of the world, with material to build a bridgeway to the stars, and he hoped none of them would be content to close their career by digging a dugout. All nature speaks to them, calling them to study and learn—to come up higher. ‘Will you come; will you come,’ impressively concluded the speaker.”
Dr. Karshner may have been for limited government, but that doesn’t mean that he was opposed to funding education. In the tradition of that other budget-cutter John Rogers, Senator Karshner believed that education was a public priority. The state’s number one tax cutter and spending limiter was also its biggest proponent for school funding. He once called for “a state tax sufficient to cover the educational load.” He was a proponent for levy equalization, and he thought that the state should fully fund basic education.
Of course, not only is a school named after Dr. Karshner, but he also donated thousands of items from his travels to the Puyallup School District in honor of his son who was a Puyallup High School student when he died in 1927. So the Karshner legacy lives on.
The third great education statesman from Puyallup was Frank Brouillet, who was born the year that Ezra Meeker died, 1928. Soon after he was born a lady saw him in his carriage and said that he was a cute little buster, so he became known as Buster. He was in the PHS class of 1946, captain of the football, basketball, and track teams, involved in student government and debate. He earned his BA from UPS and his Master’s from the University of Montana, served in Army Counter-intelligence, and came home in 1955 to take a teaching job at Puyallup High School. The next year he went doorbelling across the 25th District and won a seat in the State House of Representatives. He served there for sixteen years, chairing the Education Committee and rising to become Democratic Caucus Chair. He continued to teach and earned an Ed.D in education in 1965. And so he really specialized in education there and became the go-to man on that issue.
I’ve learned more about politics in this community from reading Buster Brouillet’s oral history in the state archives than I have from any political operative who claims to know how politics works. Buster understood this community and made it a better place through his advocacy in Olympia. He understood the importance of human relationships, and that getting to know people is the best way to build a coalition. He built a coalition for Puyallup in the legislature with Leonard Sawyer when he was Speaker of the House, and then he mentored a new generation of young Democrats, all in their 20s, Marc Gaspard, Dan Grimm, and George Walk, which formed a coalition that lasted for the next 20 years as those three rose into leadership. With Brouillet moving on to be State Superintendent in 1972, people started referring to the 25th District legislative delegation as the Puyallup Mafia. So Puyallup had a great influence in Olympia because of Buster Brouillet.
He served four terms as State Superintendent. And there were a few major things that Buster Brouillet accomplished for education in this state. He was asked about his biggest accomplishments, and he listed three things. One is that he really raised the standard for school funding, which we can argue about how well those dollars are spent, but Washington State has had a fairly strong level of overall funding for our schools. Second, Brouillet invested a lot of resources into educating people with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, and immigrant students. He said his goal was to bring them into the mainstream no matter what their background. And then third, something that he was particularly proud of, he began an exchange program with China, and he really raised the state’s consciousness about our place in the world and especially on the Pacific Rim.
He came home after that and launched Pierce College Puyallup, and then he headed up the education program at the University of Washington Tacoma before his death in 2001. And of course, the Brouillet family remains active both in education and in local politics. Marc Brouillet was my student government advisor at Puyallup High School and then went on to be principal at Ed Zeiger Elementary.
There are other Puyallup education statesmen and women who we could mention: Paul Hanawalt, Eileen Kalles, Vitt Ferrucci, Judith Billings. So we could go on, but I guess the moral of the story is that this is an education community, and that when it comes to education as a public priority, it needs to be #1. John Rogers, Warner Karshner, Buster Brouillet—three different political parties, three different backgrounds, three different personalities and ways of living, three different perspectives, but these three great men had one thing in common—I guess two things: they loved Puyallup, and they loved our schools. And I guess I’ll close by saying that I hope as a young person to whom much has been given that we can continue their legacy for generations to come.
And I should thank all of you for everything you’ve done to make that dream a reality. Thanks.
How to build a Northwest conservatism
Filed under News
Just over half a century ago, conventional wisdom declared that America was all liberal, with a few McCarthyites on one fringe and a handful of communists on the other. The liberal scholar Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, “nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Rather, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”
Much the same could be said for the Northwest these days. With the resounding defeat of Republicans in statewide and Congressional elections last month…
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