Walter Milroy visits Snoqualmie 87 years after he left

Published 8:30 am Friday, August 5, 2016

After 87 years, former Snoqualmie resident Walter Milroy returned to the Valley to see how things had changed since the 1920s. Milroy, a former high school coach in the Seattle school system, returned to Snoqualmie June 22 with his three children as a way to reconnect with his family history.

“It’s an anniversary of sorts,” Milroy said. “I met my wife 70 years ago on this date so it was kind of a memorable day and I wanted the kids to go through the different homes I lived in and the places I visited here and it’s going to be interesting to see.”

His daughter, Laurie Hardman, added that they were scouting the area to find a spot for his ashes.

“We are going to have my wife and my ashes go over the falls here,” Milroy said. “So we are going to dump them off the bridge in Meadowbrook.”

Born on Feb. 10, 1920, Milroy moved with his family to Snoqualmie in 1921 after his father passed away. He spent his childhood years living in Snoqualmie just off of I-90, which Milroy said was just a gravel road at the time.

“We had two different houses that were on I-90, but I-90 was a gravel road with a wagon and horses (going) by, and not too often a car,” he said.

Milroy recalled his days playing down by the falls with his brother and the day he first saw a “talking picture” at the Brook Theater located on the corner of Meadowbrook Way and Park Street.

On Dec. 31, 1929, the family left Snoqualmie and moved to Seattle after Milroy’s mother decided that she didn’t want her children working in the lumber mills in the area.

“The outlook when you graduated from high school is you could go to work in the mill or you could become a logger and my mother was insistent that we do better than become mill workers,” Milroy said.

Milroy went to Roosevelt High School in Seattle, and then moved on to the University of Washington which he left after two years to enlist in the Navy. When he returned after four years of service, he went back to UW to get his degree.

Milroy went on to pursue coaching and over his 32-year career he coached high school football, basketball and baseball in Seattle.

He mentioned one of his most notable teams from his career was the undefeated 1969 Ingraham High School basketball team, which included the future Governor Jay Inslee.

“We were invited to Olympia as a team and he was impressed with that, so as Governor, he has invited down champions, too,” Milroy said about Inslee.

“He had me come down and meet them. It was a nice affair. He still had a picture in his office of his old championship team.”

After 12 years coaching at Queen Anne High School and another 20 at Ingraham, Milroy retired. However he was quickly pulled back into coaching as a volunteer at Lakeside High School and volunteered there until 1990.

Milroy was added to the Washington Interscholastic Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 1996.

While in Snoqualmie, Milroy looked for the houses he used to live in but found they had all been taken down.

“One block in off the main highway, we had a big home built in 1925 or ’26 and I was stunned to find it gone,” he said. “The last time I was here, it was still there … I hadn’t been up for 10 to 15 years. That surprised me.”

Overall, Milroy was impressed that the town was still recognizable to him all these years later.

“Snoqualmie itself has very limited changes. Of course things are gone, but the replacements are right in the same places,” he said. “I’m 96 and it was good to go. A lot of nostalgia.”