Days gone by: Residents of North Bend’s Red Oak senior apartments remember the good old times
Published 1:17 pm Tuesday, October 25, 2011
What’s it like to know that your birthplace, your childhood home, isn’t around any more?
For some of the Snoqualmie Falls Hospital babies now living at Red Oak Residence in North Bend, it’s just life. A lot of the things they grew up with are gone, now.
The hospital where Tom Thoreson, Kathleen Peterson and Rose Larson were born is only the first thing to disappear. The mill town, and the mill where Rose worked pulling lumber, Thorseon’s furniture store, and each of their respective high schools, have all disappeared or been replaced. It took a little longer for the accompanying high school rivalries to disappear.
“There was always a big rivalry between North Bend and Snoqualmie, and Fall City,” said Thoreson, who grew up in North Bend.
“And we were the best,” added Larson, a Snoqualmie girl all her life.
Peterson grew up in Fall City and was just happy to reminisce about the tennis victories that earned her a school letter. “We beat them, no, that’s not the right word, we overwhelmed them.”
Since the high schools all merged into Mount Si starting in the mid ’40s, that competitive spirit has faded, gradually.
“When we first opened Red Oak, we had people who wouldn’t sit at the same table, because they were from rival schools,” said Laure Anne Wilbert, director of the Red Oak assisted living complex.
Today, though, residents from the Upper Valley and even Carnation — Tolt, they corrected, it used to be called Tolt — gathered around the table to share their memories.
Larson was the only child in her family to go to work at the company town of Snoqualmie Falls, pulling the smaller pieces of lumber into the mill with a team of eight women, while the men handled the heaviest logs. Thoreson’s father was killed while working at the mill, so he was forebade to get a job there, which really cramped his earning ability
“When I was growing up, there was no other place to work!” he said.
Harold Erland Sr.,, a North Bend resident since age 4, agreed. “You were either a sliver-picker, or a stump-jumper.”
Like most area residents, though, Thoreson still enjoyed the dances and other community events at the company town. With its own school, store, and hospital, “Snoqualmie Falls was like a community center for the whole Valley,” he said. He grew up to be a businessman, attending the University of Washington, then opening Thoreson’s Furniture in North Bend.
Another UW student turned shopkeeper, Howard Miller, bought a variety store in Carnation, aka Tolt, in 1940 and turned it into a dry goods store. Millers Dry Goods supplied the area’s loggers with work clothes, along with all the other standard dry goods fare, for 44 years. He says he was “just crazy, I guess,” to start the store, but added, “If I didn’t have the store, I’d have to work.”
Clara Burnham left the area to find work, as a power sewing machine operator. She sewed airplane furnishings for Boeing, and clothing for Eddie Bauer, but eventually returned, because “I was born here, and I heard a lot about it. I wanted to come back.”
Erland worked at the sawmill, and left the area only once, to serve in the U.S. Air Force for five and a half years. His tour included Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, during the 1941 bombing. From about half a mile away, he said, “we watched the second set of bombs hit the Arizona.” He tried to hide in a latrine, which turned out to be a mistake, but he recovered from that and, when his service ended in 1947, he was happy to return to the Valley, his family, and the setting for most of his good memories.
“I haven’t found any place better than this one,” he said.
