Harold Snodgrass

My Last Byline By Harold R. Snodgrass Excerpts from memoirs with some notes by wife Carol Ann To my dear friends, former students and family, By the time you read this I’ll have made my way beyond the pearly gates. I died of a brain aneurism on Saturday, December 13 with my wife Carol Ann by my side. Having Franciscan hospice to guide her allowed me to die at home as I wanted. She says that if any song exemplified me and my life it is Frank Sinatra’s My Way. I thought you might like to read a re-cap of my life or as referred to in the poem The Dash by Linda Ellis – what did you do with your allotted days to walk this planet in that space between when you were born and when you died. Let’s see…my life began on a wheat ranch in Spokane County, August 6, 1926. I’m the oldest child of Clarence and Millie Snodgrass. About every two and a half years thereafter, they presented me with a new brother or sister to play with. Alice (Blattner) came first. Then, Glen (he was killed in a house fire rescuing his children), then Betty Jean (Savov) and Dale was the last of The Snodgrass Kids. Mom ran a boarding house while my dad finished college to become a teacher. She told me I was such a pest as a “Terrible Two year old” to her student boarders that they hung me up on the clothesline by my overhaul suspenders. I learned to read before I went to school and was known quite well by the local librarian. While I was in grade school I read all of my fathers set of the S. S. Van Dyne Mystery books. Little did anyone in my family realize that my love of reading would set the stage for my later becoming an English and journalism teacher. When I turned 12 I joined Boy Scout Troop 6 which met in the Edison Elementary School gymnasium (the basement had basketball hoops and passed as a gym in those days) on Monday evenings. Al Hughes was the scoutmaster and Wes Owens was his assistant. I finished my Boy Scout career with 28 merit badges and an Eagle Scout badge. My father died when I was young during the depression. Mom and I were both thrilled when Henry Hoskins knocked on our door and asked if I’d like to become a paper boy for the Tacoma News Tribune. My first paper route started with 45 customers. With a lot of door knocking I soon had the route up to 100 customers. Back in those days the TNT had a policy of loaning newspaper carriers the money to purchase a bicycle. I got a $35 Schwinn balloon tired bike with a basket in front. With the $5-6 a week I was able to make I was able to pay my new possession off in a couple months. Henry Hoskins came to me and asked me to add another route which I built up as well. I must have gotten printers ink from my hands into my blood and into my heart those years because most of my future was spent in one capacity or another related to journalism. I have always blessed my friend Henry Hoskins for giving me that first opportunity to work when every penny helped in a household of six with no father during depression times! In those early years I worked at anything I could get and as WWII progressed there was plenty of work for teenagers who wanted to work as the men were off to war. I set pins in a bowling alley on S. Tacoma Way, tried working in the shipyards on a gang of rust scrapers. The pay was good but the working conditions horrid in the bottoms of the double hulled ships under construction. I believe it must also have been the most boring job ever created! Finally I went to work for South Tacoma Chevrolet. After school I was a “parts gofer” for the busy mechanics, then after they closed for the night I swept out. One of the mechanics at South Tacoma Chevrolet got drafted and put his 1934 Model B Ford coupe up for sale. I was sure glad I’d been thrifty and was able to give him $150 as well as pay off his debt of $150 at Gamer and Waterhouse for the new engine he’d put into the car. I didn’t have a driver’s license – in those days if you could get to work and say you were 16 no one cared as long as you did your work! In the summer of 1942 Henry Hoskins tracked me down and offered me another job, conditional on my getting a driver’s license and auto insurance when I turned 16. He was now assistant circulation manager and had sold William Lyness, on the idea of creating a night crew to insure customer satisfaction. We were called Kick Chasers. Each of us owned a vehicle. It was our job to deliver missed newspapers if a carrier missed someone. This job taught us how to find unusual addresses in Tacoma. We could tell taxi drivers how to find unusual streets. This and other jobs I had through my lifetime helped me become a good tour guide for visiting friends and relatives (a gift my wife Carol Ann really appreciated!) Some kids dropped out of high school to earn big money in the shipyards. Others came to school half asleep after working a swing or graveyard shift. I chose to stay with the circulation department through high school. Before long I was designated chief night clerk as we added new “kick chasers”. As “Chief” my main additional duty was making out the weekly work roster. Juggling the schedules to keep as many as eight crew members happy wasn’t easy. I think we were all dating which tended to complicate Friday and Saturday nights especially. 1944 found me graduating from Lincoln High School. I got three lines with my senior picture in the 1944 Lincolnian, the yearbook of Lincoln High School. They read: Snodgrass, Harold--Spanish, history. Editor of Lincoln News, Lincolnian associate editor, Student Council, Quill and Scroll, Choir, "Arsenic and Old Lace," "Don’t Take My Penny." I could have added to that: Dated Naydene Miller three years, worked at the Tacoma News Tribune two years, named master of ceremonies for a cappella choir banquet, selected by faculty as master of ceremonies for senior brunch, sang in more than 100 a cappella choir concerts, but never quite lived up to expectations academically. When I signed up for boys’ glee club as a sophomore, my still developing bass voice apparently stood out and within two weeks the vocal teacher, Mrs. Goheen, invited me to sign up for the a cappella choir. I was already carrying five subjects in an era when only four were required, but I was overjoyed at the opportunity to get out of my only study hall. The 68-member Lincoln A Capella Choir had an excellent reputation and was in demand. That year we sang 55 concerts. We sang concerts for the public, sometimes filling the 1,000 seat auditorium on Friday nights. We sang at a cemetery on Easter Sunrise, and we sang for the graduating seniors of 1942 at their baccalaureate ceremony. Perhaps the highlight of the year was the choir’s appearance with Paul Robeson. Let me quote from the 1942 Lincolnian: Choir appears with Robeson maintaining their unusually high record of musical excellence among high school choral societies, the Lincoln High School a capella Choir, under the capable direction of Mrs. Margaret Goheen, carried out a successful season of approximately 50 concerts. The highlight of the year’s activities came November 19, when the choir was engaged to present the "Ballad for Americans" with the famed Negro concert star, Paul Robeson. Although I was involved in other activities I enjoyed my work as editor of the Lincoln News and working with Homer Post. Below is what he wrote in my year book. Dear Harold: You can put up the aspirin bottle now. The Old Crab has quit crabbing and the paper has been put to bed for the year. It has been a fine year and you and your loyal group of co-workers have again turned out a Pacemaker paper. I have enjoyed the year immensely and the satisfaction of our achievements is only equal to that of working with so fine an editor and staff. May you be a Pacemaker throughout life. Yours, Homer A. Post I had the privilege of writing Homer’s obituary. Later Homer and I were to write the "News in Print" high school journalism textbook. How much Homer’s enthusiasm for teaching kids to write affected me is still something I can’t quite explain. I had learned a few things from the Comp. III teacher, Wilma Zimmerman, but it was Homer’s zeal for rewriting that gave me an edge in college and throughout my teaching, journalistic and PR careers. Many times Homer made suggestions about editorial topics; sometimes others on the Student Council would have an idea. Usually by late Friday I would have a pocketful of notes. Then on Sunday afternoons after finishing my shift in the circulation department of the TNT I would sit down at a typewriter to write my editorials for the week. It was important to have something for Ed Rickert to begin setting on Monday mornings. He was the only typesetter left and we had to meet his deadlines. I would drop my copy through the mail slot at the Star on my way to Naydene’s place. "Seven Carry On Pacemaker Tradition". Morry Beebe wrote it, perhaps with a bit of help from Homer Post. I can’t seem to find the original article Homer wrote so this will have to do. Relax, staff member! It’s Friday now, the Lincoln News is out and you can settle back in your chair and read the columns of your own publication without worrying about typographical errors, unbalanced headlines, or copy deadlines! Yes it is worry and work to put out a full-size, four-page newspaper. This fact is wholeheartedly agreed upon by Editor-in-Chief Harold Snodgrass and every budding writer in the journalism classes who is gaining a little practical experience in reporting, rewriting or headline writing by working Wednesdays and Thursdays at the print shop of the South Tacoma Star where the News is published "Seven Carry On Pacemaker Tradition"--Fitting indeed is the title of the request article written by Adviser Homer A. Post for Scholastic Editor, official magazine of the National Scholastic Press Association, in which he described the behind-the-scenes story of how a very small, very green, but very determined staff began work in the fall. The Lincoln News is not just a student weekly. It is not a plaything for the enjoyment of the students but is printed on a professional basis, and as such Lincoln may take pride in it when year after year it has been awarded national top honors. Homer always got the last word with his commercial about a professional high school newspaper. I have to admit I had the same views when I was teaching high school journalism. I can definitely say that June, 1944, was memorable for many reasons. First, I officially graduated from Lincoln High School. I had also been hired as a copy boy for the summer by the city editor of the Tacoma News Tribune, Frank Lockerby. I went to work in the city room on the morning of June 6, 1944, with a smile on my face and the knowledge that the duties of a copy boy, while ill-defined, would be easy stuff for me. Check to make sure the paste pots were filled. Make sure there were adequate numbers of carbon sets--four sheets of paper with three sheets of carbon paper. Every reporter would be required to use a carbon set for each story; some stories would require multiple sets. Empty the hell box, that box underneath the city box which was basically a very large wastebasket. Check with the Associated Press correspondent periodically--transfer the lengthy rolls of paper coming off the wires...the chattering teletypes kept producing news from all over the world. Occasionally I was called on to be a "gopher"--go to the pressroom and bring back copies of the early edition for one thing. Instead of what I expected, I found myself moved to the copy desk with instructions to write headlines for fillers. The Allies had invaded the European continent...the wires were coming through with the D-Day story. The events were being updated every few minutes and I was not needed to bring the teletype sheets to the copy desk...the copy desk chief, Paul Harvey, was running back and forth himself. That summer was a special summer. D-Day still flashes back in my memories, that day when a copyboy got the thrill of working with professionals on a copydesk putting out a newspaper on D-Day. If that sentence seems redundant, just take it as another indication of how much that day is emblazoned in my memory. Some events of that summer did not turn out as I had anticipated. First, I was still working in the circulation department, though fewer hours because of my full-time job as a copy boy. Then I was asked (and I take it as a compliment to this day) to take over the graveyard shift for the Associated Press correspondent while he took a three-week vacation. Basically, that meant keeping the teletype rolls full, clipping and hanging the AP stories on hooks as they came in, and occasionally keyboarding something the Tacoma News Tribune wanted on the AP network, something local that might be of interest nationwide. For three weeks I worked almost literally around the clock. Even a 17-year-old needs some sleep so I carried an alarm clock with me to work. If I didn’t have time to go home for a nap I could catch a snooze on a couch in the ladies room. I gave up a few of my shifts in the circulation department during the week, but I kept my 8-hour shifts on weekends. Most of what I gave up was dating Naydene. I saw her a few times that summer, mostly weekends. I can remember that the house mother always kept us waiting in the lobby...we were never allowed on the floors where the girls lived. We had to wait until each girl finished powdering her nose and then came down to meet us. By the time I turned 18 on August 6, I had made a decision to start college; I applied for and was accepted at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma. I had already checked with my draft board chairman; it happened to be Fred Ludwig of Ludwig’s Drug Store. I asked him point-blank if I would be drafted soon or if I should start college. Go ahead and start college, he told me. Great. I had time to pay my tuition, go through the freshman ceremonies, start classes for a week in mid-September...and ask for a refund. I had received my draft notice with instructions to report at Fort Lewis on Oct. 4, 1944. So the summer of 1944 ended with my swearing in to the U.S Army on Oct. 4, 1944. Soon after I reported to Fort Lewis on Oct. 4, 1944 I participated in a swearing-in ceremony with about 50 others and lined up for a haircut and for lunch. A few days later we were loaded on buses (by now there were about 150 in the group) and then onto a troop train headed for California. Camp Roberts was an infantry training center near Paso Robles, California. Each week a new battalion was formed from inductees arriving, mostly from Washington State, but some from Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. I was assigned to Company B, 92nd Heavy Weapons Training Battalion. Now the fun began. Fun? Not much. We learned drill formations. Each rookie was issued an M-1 rifle. Each of us quickly learned to disassemble it, clean it and reassemble it. Within a few weeks most of us could do it blindfolded. The 50-mm water-cooled machine guns and the 81-mm mortars were our heavy weapons. Heavy weapons? You bet your life they were! It took three to carry a machine gun, barrel, tripod base and belts of ammunition; four to carry the base plate, tripod, barrel and ammunition for a mortar. We dug foxholes and learned how to crawl under live machine-gun fire. If you didn’t keep your butt down you wound up in the hospital on your stomach. We were scheduled for bayonet drills, but then I got an opportunity. My experience driving a panel truck for Scotty’s Speedy Service qualified me for three weeks of truck driver training. About 20 of us were trained to drive 2- 1/2-ton trucks. I had had a record as a safe driver in high school, but those three weeks turned me into a defensive driver for life. We could volunteer for tests. I took the radio operator test thinking my knowledge of Morse code would help me. I didn’t even get close to qualifying. But I did 65 words per minute on a typing test. And I had come up with a pretty good score on the AGCT, the Army General Classification Test. It wasn’t supposed to be an I.Q. test but that’s how it was used. The scores were duly entered on my Form 20. Each man got an MOS eventually. I think MOS stood for military occupation specialty. At the end of basic training mine was heavy weapons infantryman. In December the Allies were advancing in France, but the German counter offensive that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge changed our training schedule. Every battalion was "accelerated" and four battalions ahead of us were shipped to Europe as replacements for wounded or dead or captured infantrymen. Had the battle lasted another week or so the 92nd would have been shipped out. As it was our 17-week program was "accelerated" as the army preferred to call the situation. I think we were supposed to have three field training operations called "bivouacs"; we had two. Instead of 17 weeks we completed 13. In mid-January we were given 10-day leaves and orders to report to the Army Ground Forces Replacement Depot at Fort Ord, California. I took the train home and managed a few hours with Naydene. Her intensive training schedule, with five or six hours of classes each day, plus working a full shift on various hospital units, had to come first. My mother cried when I left for the train station. She stood on the porch of the little house on Lawrence St. and when we looked back we could only surmise that she felt I might never return. Too many of her friends were already Gold Star mothers. Fort Ord was a well-organized madhouse. Because we were reporting in individually from Camp Roberts and other training centers each of us had to go through lengthy lines before we were assigned a barracks and given a chance to rest. No marching. No drills. Just waiting for our assignment to a ship that would take us to the South Pacific. Sunday morning I slept in. About 9 a.m. the company clerk found me, shook me awake and told me I was to report to Major Burns in Bldg. 2015. In my foggy state ( I think I had found a ping-pong partner and played until after midnight in one of the dayrooms) I wondered what infraction I was guilty of. I could not imagine what I had done to warrant examination by a major. "Private Snodgrass reporting, SIR!" The major looked at me for a moment and said, "At ease." He was looking down at some papers on his desk, then looked up and asked, "How would you like to work for me?" Now my mind is perfectly clear on that moment; I am sure I responded, "Doing what, SIR?" What the major was offering me was an assignment to a position in the officers classification section at Fort Ord. I would be a clerk-typist. I would not be sent overseas. I would stay at Fort Ord. Gradually I got it through my head. To this day I am not really sure of how we concluded that conversation. Was I in shock? Yes, to be sure. Did my blood pressure go up 50 points? Probably. I couldn’t wait to find a telephone so I could call Naydene. He promised that orders to transfer me to the Fort Ord cadre would be cut on Monday, but that regardless of the progress on the orders I should report to M/Sgt. Edgar the next morning. The spring of 1945 is a blur. Type passenger lists for those officers going overseas. Enter data on the officer’s 66-1s and 201 files. Assemble the multiple copies of the passenger lists for the escort officers who were usually over-age-in grade or retired colonels pulled out of retirement. Burns promoted me immediately to Technician 5th Grade, a two-striper. On May 8 the war in Europe was over and the table of organization at Fort Ord and throughout most of the army was frozen. I was never to get another promotion. As the war in Europe ended we got some extra help. Whole divisions, including the 92nd, were out to sea in mid-August when the war ended with Japan. Some of those divisions were diverted to Fort Ord. Now we had a new duty. Many of us were reassigned to discharge centers. I was converted (and it’s on my Form 20) to an occupational counselor MOS. Now let’s not be too funny. I am barely 19 years old and I am asked to counsel men who have spent four or five or even six years in the army of World War II. My job requires that I ask the questions on the sheet and record the answers. Okay. What are your plans for the future? If they said they wanted to wash windows on the Empire State Building I wrote it down, stamped their papers, and said NEXT! If they said they wanted to be rodeo announcers I did not blink. If they said they wanted to run a house of ill repute (I have refined their language) I did not blink. I filled out the forms, stamped their discharge papers. By Christmas the discharge center was being closed down, and I went back to my job at the officers classification section. Now the activity was staffing the Army of Occupation in Japan and rotating officers who had been on islands in the Pacific or in Alaska. But at some point in February we got the word that the replacement depot at Fort Ord would be closed down, and we would have the option of transferring to one of the staging areas. Camp Anza was already being closed. That left two options, the staging area at Fort Stoneman near San Francisco or the staging area at Fort Lawton in Seattle. I was the only one who elected to transfer to Fort Lawton. After a few days of leave I had to find a way to my assignment at Fort Lawton. I must have been living right. I took a bus to 24th and Pacific, then started walking along old Route 99 toward Seattle, posing occasionally with my thumb up. Yes, there was a lot of hitch-hiking in World War II and for a few years after. Today I no longer remember his name but he was a 1st Lieutenant with a supply company and he invited me to ride with him on a permanent basis...permanent, that is as long as we were both stationed there. That turned out to be less than four months. At Fort Lawton I checked in with Major Fitzgerald, commandant of the Officers’ School, and found I had been assigned a desk in an adjoining building. The filing cabinet I had packed at Fort Ord had arrived in good shape, and I managed to cadge a few office supplies, paper, paper clips, rubber bands, etc. and a typewriter. The assignment would be the same as at Fort Ord, processing the 201 and 66-1 files for officers going to Japan, islands in the Pacific or Alaska. The difference: I was the only one running the section! There wasn’t much activity the first few days as I settled in, but then the workload began to increase. As I checked daily I realized that we would need not four or five ships but more than a dozen to accommodate all the officers who would be passing through. The army had offered its World War II contingent of AUS (Army of the United States) officers some options. I think Option 3 allowed them to serve until the end of 1946 before being discharged. Most of those who chose this option were to serve in the Army of Occupation in Japan, provided that they would be shipped out by July 1, 1946. The last ship sailed from Seattle just before July 1, and I had a long weekend to rest up. Then on Monday morning I was a few minutes late getting to my desk. In my chair was a full colonel. I thought to myself, "I hope he hasn’t waited very long." I gave him a snappy salute and said, "What can I do for you, sir?" The real ending to this story is that during my last two weeks at Fort Lawton I got to train my successors. I don’t know what the brigadier general did for sure; what I do know is that I turned over the section to a captain, a 1st lieutenant, a master sergeant and a tech sergeant. How I wished they had been around for the ride in May and June! My discharge is dated August 1, 1946. My 22 months in the army turned out to be golden. The GI bill gave me a college education and eventually a home loan with an interest rate of 4.5 percent, and I acquired more experience in working with people. A few days before my 20th birthday I became a civilian. I earned a bachelor of arts (B.A.) and a bachelor of education (B.Ed.) from the College of Puget Sound in June, 1949. That it was 1949 and not 1950 takes a bit of explanation. After being discharged from the army on Aug. 1, 1946, I got my job back at the Tacoma News Tribune and within weeks signed up for classes. I had decided to major in English. I was getting the munificent sum of $90 per month on the GI bill. I had gotten by in high school without really putting out a lot of effort except for journalism. I think my two years (well, 22 months to be more exact) of experience in the army had given me the maturity to put in the effort that was needed. Plus what I had learned in journalism gave me a big head start when it came to writing term papers. I started a string of A’s and B’s and wound up with a 3.5 GPA. By the end of the second semester in 1947 I had earned six As and five Bs. Quite an improvement on the 2.99 at Lincoln. Most professors required you to buy a textbook but the required research papers meant that hundreds of books were put on reserve and you had to stand in line to get the ones you needed. And you could not take home books on reserve. So my hours in the library were golden. Copying notes on 3x5 cards after scanning each book took time. That was the drudgery part. The fun part was sitting down to my typewriter, fanning out the 3x5s and starting to write. I found I could do a five or six page draft in about two hours. With a minimum of editing I could produce a clean double-spaced copy that might run eight or ten pages. What I am not sure of is whether I paid for my 1946 Royal portable typewriter or whether the GI bill did. I still have that little machine. I used it constantly until 1981 when I got my first computer. CPS had hired Professor Hugh Tudor to teach political science courses. I liked him and his no-nonsense attitudes about politics so I decided to minor in the field. Some of his tests were intelligent, too. In one course he gave us a list of 25 essay questions and announced that he would draw on that list for any and all exams in the course. Some of us got together about once a week to brainstorm our ideas and research. It was a useful collaboration. I think all of us could have written reams on any of the 25 questions. And we did. But Tudor gave me an opportunity to undertake a special project the summer of 1947. No classes to attend, just a comparative review of the existing charter of the City of Tacoma and an occasional meeting with him to discuss my progress. In that era Tacoma was governed by five elected commissioners, each of whom ran his own fiefdom. The five were public finance, public safety (police and firemen), public utilities, public welfare and public works. I was to compare each item in the city charter with the strong mayor/council type of government and with the city manager-weak mayor/council type. My three-column comparative analysis ran nearly 60 pages. I earned three semester hours with a B grade. I always felt it should have been an A. Hugh Tudor had a mission. My paper was duplicated and used in the campaign to oust the commissioners and institute something else. Many community leaders had become disgusted with the venality, horse trading and outright corruption under the commissioner system. By 1952, with Tudor providing the arguments for and against the options, the city leaders won an election which established the city manager form of government which exists today. I took a course in professional writing from Murray Morgan which earned me an A. As it turned out I was much better at teaching fiction than writing it. Teaching candidates were required to take a course in Washington State History. Professor Brewster opened the 1948 summer school course by announcing that his definition of Washington State History was anything that happened west of the Mississippi after 1800. His reading list ran three single-spaced pages. And I got a message from someone who had taken his course earlier. "Watch out for the Chief Joseph question," I was warned. If he gives you an essay question reading, "Who was Chief Joseph?" he wants you to write everything you know about the Indians and the Indian wars, not just about the man who led his tribe in an attempt to escape being put on a reservation. I only got a B in the course, but I think that was the only grade he gave. No one admitted to an A or a C. Okay, that in a nutshell is my college career. By carrying 16 or 17 semester hours and by going to summer school in 1947 and 1948 I got both my degrees, a B.A., and my fifth year B.Ed. in June, 1949. By that time I had an offer of a job teaching English and journalism in Wapato. Perhaps I was motivated to accelerate my program by the feeling that I had missed two years of college while in the army. More likely is the fact that the GI bill was written with a one for one clause; one month in the army earned you one month in college regardless of the class load. Fortunately they counted class days, not calendar months. Later I still had enough eligibility to work for two summers on a master’s degree at the Univ. of Washington. I had to pay for a third summer in 1953 but by that time I had been teaching for four years and could afford it. Naydene sent me off to work at the News Tribune that morning; classes had not yet started at CPS. Within 20 minutes after opening my cash drawer she called. Come get me...it’s time. So it was that Kirby Lee was born on Sept. 13, 1948, late one morning. That fall of 1948 I drew a student teaching assignment at Stadium High School. The class was an early afternoon group of juniors who had been selected for this class because they had signed up for a foreign language course. Some were shy, but there were no dullards. Our objective, I was told, was to insure that they had a solid grounding in the basics of the English language. The assumption was that they needed to understand the mechanics of their own language in order to learn a foreign language. I got to observe for a few days, then Miss Ohlin told me to take over the class. By the end of the second week she had even abandoned her seat at her desk; she would use the hour to work on papers from her other classes. I didn’t dare neglect any of my other classes at CPS; I think I cut down on my hours at the News Tribune a little, but there were many late nights at Grandmother Cummings dining room table with term papers to write and student papers to correct. But I kept up with the grind and I must have impressed Miss Ohlin because I got an A in student teaching. In my last semester we were reading Goethe in Warren Tomlinson’s third year German class. Naydene bought a good wrist-watch for my graduation present in June, 1949. I still have that watch although I stopped wearing it in favor of a digital watch in the 1970s. My English papers were good enough to get the attention of the two professors, Coolidge O. Chapman and Julius P. Jaeger. Both encouraged me to go to graduate school, get a PhD and become a college professor. Chapman even told me he could get me a scholarship to his alma mater, Cornell Univ. By mid-April I started sending out applications through the college placement program. The college produced a small booklet with each teaching candidate’s photograph and a brief resume. That booklet, as I remember, was sent to every district placement office in the state. I listed my two majors and three minors on my credentials. I could teach English, history (based on my political science minor) German or speech and drama. I added journalism, drama coach and tennis coach for good measure. I think I even offered to be an assistant baseball coach. But my aspiration was to find an English and journalism assignment. There were two positions that offered promise, Port Townsend and Wapato. Naydene and I combined a weekend vacation with an interview in Port Townsend. But my friend and competitor among the English majors, Bill Sullivan, got that job. So when I got an offer from Superintendent Kramer in Wapato to fill their English and journalism opening, I accepted. When we moved in Wapato in mid-August it was to a small prefab house at 901 Satus Street. I borrowed an ammunition carrier left over from World War II to transport what few things we needed, mostly clothing and borrowed cooking utensils. I signed a contract offered by Superintendent Kramer in the spring of 1949 to teach English and journalism in Wapato High School. The bottom line was a salary of $2,900. The assignment would be two classes of sophomore English, two classes of junior English, one journalism class to produce the school's weekly newspaper, and the sixth period study hall. The Wapato School District is 12 miles south of Yakima in central Washington and covers several hundred square miles of farmland and orchards. Most of it is part of an Indian reservation. The students would be a few town kids, the sons and daughters of the businessmen and professional people. Then there would be the sons and daughters of the farmers, the sons and daughters of the migrant workers, and a smattering of Indians, blacks and Filipinos. Supt. Kramer had some interesting ideas about education. He truly believed in the notion that you should take the student wherever he or she was at whatever level of skill and maturity and try to work with each one individually to help them reach their potential. He also dealt with a tight budget and their were few textbooks. Oddly enough, that turned out to be an advantage when I realized what kind of lesson plans I would have to concoct. I also discovered on arrival that ninth graders who could pass a standardized English test at the national median or above were allowed to take such optional classes as creative writing, dramatics, journalism or yearbook production. I would get the rest...those who scored below the national median. What it meant was that I had sophomore classes of 35 to 40 students. The junior classes were somewhat smaller because the sophomores could take the standardized test at the end of each semester again; if they passed at the median they too could opt out of my classes. I had experienced a highly selected, very talented group of students at Stadium High School during my student teaching in the fall of 1948. I had little or no real preparation for what was ahead of me. To complicate matters further the children of migrant workers would enroll in September but by November most of them were gone as the families went south to seek work in California and Arizona. They would return in the spring planting season but the faces would be different. By the end of the first year my grade book was full; in one class there were more than 75 names. I believed that the most important thing I could do for any individual was to teach the skills of writing. I don't mean just a knowledge of vocabulary and grammar and spelling; I mean actually have the tools to write letters, construct documents, write reports for an employer and possibly even reach a level of journalistic skills that would make them employable as writers. Was I idealistic to believe this...of course I was. What it meant was that I made composition assignments constantly...demanding paragraphs and essays and reports which I dutifully took home and read and marked up for rewriting. How many red pencils I went through in the two years I taught in Wapato I do not know. How much real progress my students made was difficult to evaluate, though my memory recalls some students who made it out of my classes into the options. I had hope that what I had taught them made it possible. In the truest sense most of what journalism teachers do in high school is teach how to read a newspaper. I knew that but I also dreamed that some of what I could teach would prepare my students to make it in this competitive world because they could write. That's what Homer Post did for me. So I demanded a higher level of writing. I remembered the many hours I spent rewriting in high school. I did not enter our efforts in the national judging contests but I did send in a few issues for evaluation. Living in Wapato was another challenge. There was little housing for schoolteachers. The standing joke was that about one-third of the staff stayed one year, another one-third stayed two years and the other one-third were mostly elementary teachers who were wives of the businessmen and the doctors and lawyers. The autumn of 1949 came and went quickly. Naydene had acquired a few cookbooks and both of us had novels and biographies to read. When the chill of winter came we turned up the oil heater in the living room. We went home at Thanksgiving and Christmas, of course, and a few members of our families visited, although we had no guest room. Most of them slept on the couch in the living room; others brought sleeping bags. As January came we were alerted to the weather reports of snow on the way. On a Friday afternoon I walked home from the high school at about 5 p.m. as the snow began to fall. I got a broom and began sweeping the sidewalk, thinking that keeping it at least partly clear would make the task easier in the morning. Within 15 or 20 minutes I realized the snow was falling faster than I could sweep. I could also feel the temperature dropping. We had a car, a well-used 1936 Chevrolet. I had the sense to take the battery out of the car and put it in a partly-warmed enclosed back porch. I had on my old army field jacket; I carelessly got some battery acid on the jacket. Later it was still wearable but the pattern of holes looked as if someone wearing it had been hit by machine-gun fire. The blizzard of Jan. 13, 1950, is in the record books as one of the strongest, most terrifying and most damaging of blizzards in the 20th Century. Much of Oregon and Washington suffered. Trees were downed by the winds. Boats were swept up on shore, turned on their sides and beaten into kindling. Telephone lines and poles went down, cutting communication. In Wapato that Friday night we could hear rifle shots all night. Or what sounded like rifle shots. What we heard was actually what was happening to the fruit trees on Parker Heights as the sap froze and split the limbs and trunks. Next year's peach crop would be non-existent. The temperature dropped to 26 below zero. It would not get above zero for the next three weeks. But the school buses were armed with chains and school continued on Monday; no snow vacations in Eastern Washington. Now we had a controversy. The Wapato School Board policy prohibited girls from wearing slacks or pants. The dress code called for dresses. Now they were faced with angry mothers whose daughters were coming home with frozen kneecaps and legs after waiting for their bus. It did not take long for the policy to be reversed. I think I noted more than one girl with long pants that might have come out of her father's closet and been quickly cut down to fit. Moreover I think both boys and girls were wearing long johns under their slacks. (Note from Carol Ann:) After teaching in Wapato, Hal took a job with the Puyallup school district where he taught for seven years. He always spoke fondly of those years in the classroom. The Great Depression of the 1930s had more than one effect on my life. One was quite direct because my mother raised five children on $50 per month she got from the state through a program called Aid for Dependent Children. The other was a law passed during the Depression to protect farmers and homeowners who were losing their property because they could not pay their taxes. The Tacoma School District hired a new school superintendent in 1956. His name was Angelo Giaudrone. Some people pronounced his name Gee-a-drone-ee but Italians said Zha-droni. In 1957 the voters did not approve a special levy and while the school board liked Giaudrone's overall performance his evaluation called for improvement in his communication with the public, especially the voting public. In the summer of 1958 one of the other News Tribune reporters suggested I go see Giaudrone about a job. I followed through. I got an appointment with Angelo, had a nice conversation, then went home and wrote a three-page letter explaining my experiences, including the two years I spent on the Washington Education Association's public relations committee, the second year as committee chairman. I outlined what I thought a basic school public relations program might look like. A few days later Angelo called to offer me the job. Years later I learned why he had to wait. He had already offered the job to Roger Loschen, whom he had known a few years earlier. Roger had been editor of the newspaper in Sunnyside, WA. when Angelo was superintendent in the school district there. He had to call Roger to retract the offer. Now I had to call my superintendent, Paul Hanawalt, and ask to be released from the teaching contract I had signed for the 1958-59 school year in Puyallup. It was mid-August and Hanawalt's answer was no. I notified Angelo of the problem. Angelo already was acquainted with Hanawalt and tried to persuade him to release me. I wish I had been in on that conversation. What Hanawalt said I only got second hand. Essentially what he said was that I could not be replaced at that time in August. I was advisor of both the school newspaper and the school yearbook, and had assumed the duties of business advisor to both publications I had been replaced by two officers and two sergeants when I left the army. When I did leave the teaching job in Puyallup in 1959 four different teachers assumed the four tasks I listed. But Angelo wanted me badly enough that he offered me $200 per month just to come in after school and help get a program started in September, 1958. As it turned out much of the after school efforts were devoted to helping principals and PTA leaders plan dedication programs for the new schools or additions that had been built and were opening in the fall of 1958. The brand new ones included Woodrow Wilson High School, Meeker Junior High and Hunt Junior High. I believe there were five new elementaries and additions to six elementaries. The post-war baby boom had hit Tacoma and most of the needs for expansion were in the lower grades in that era. I more than earned my $200 per month by meeting with planning committees multiple times, writing and printing dedication program handouts and doing news releases announcing the programs. But I also began writing small features while continuing my Saturday stints with the Tacoma News Tribune. And in odd moments my mind would begin mapping out the reality of what one person could do to improve Angelo's communication with the public. The reality could be defined more specifically. You must pass the special levy. In the spring of 1959 I met a few times with the members of the Citizens' Committee for School Support, a gathering mostly composed of PTA leaders, school principals and some of the superintendent's staff. There were 11 area subcommittees formed around the 11 junior high schools and their feeder elementaries. The subcommittees would recruit the help needed to doorbell and telephone voters in each area. A publicity subcommittee was organized to contact radio and television stations as well as newspapers. Their assignment was to get favorable stories about the district's needs and editorial endorsements wherever possible. When anti-school tax items appeared in the letters to the editor column this committee would find someone to write a countering letter. Another committee was formed to nail yard signs together and get good locations on arterials. Television advertising was too expensive but some of the money donated to the Citizens' Committee for campaign purposes went to radio stations and a weekly newspaper. Quite a large sum was reserved for a signature ad in the Tacoma News Tribune that would run just before the election day, an ad that would say, "We are voting for schools". The names of many community leaders and hundreds of parents would appear. It was well organized and the special levy passed. But I had a lot of questions in my mind. My experience with the WEA public relations committee had given me an exposure to public opinion polls and some of the research on how people form opinions. I was making a maximum effort to continue doing a good job as a schoolteacher, moonlighting on Saturdays as a News Tribune reporter, begin building a public relations program, and working with Homer Post on "News in Print". I didn't have time to pursue my questions just then. In the fall of 1959 I gave up school teaching and newspaper reporting to concentrate on building the Tacoma PR program. I still had to find time to work with Homer on the book. Angelo submitted my name to the Tacoma School Board in August. I got a unanimous 5 to 0 vote confirming me as Director of Publications. Why not Public Relations? Too many people, it seemed, had doubts about the need for school public relations as a staff position. So Angelo had to find another job title. Most people knew it was fiction and the News Tribune story on my appointment was headlined, "School District Gets Publicity Aide." Regardless of the title it was time to start a full-time all out effort. I had identified staff communication as one essential key to building good public communication so I created a staff newsletter. After a few discussions with Angelo and others we gave it a name that could be a clever acronym. SCOPE said the banner at the top. Staff Communications on Public Education appeared in smaller type. Every school employee got a copy and PTA leaders in every building were given a copy each week. We built a mailing list of community leaders. By the end of the first year we were producing more than 5,000 copies of each issue on the school district's Multilith 1250. Ironically, no one had thought to create a job description for a Director of Publications. I had been plugging away for more than six months when Assistant Superintendent Les Hoar dropped by my office one day. His request: " Would you write your job description for the personnel files." It took me a couple of days to fudge one. Passing the special levy was not on the list. Incidentally Leslie Hoar had been vice-principal at Lincoln High School in the years 1941-44. I started designing a PR program in 1959 with two assumptions. One was that the most credible communication was between Tacoma school staff members and their friends and relatives. They needed to know as much as possible about their own school district. So I felt staff communication was a basic objective. The other assumption was that I needed to serve the editors and announcers by providing them with useful material. Then when we needed media support in the weeks preceding a special levy I could ask for their support and get it. My research had shown me that what school employees said to their neighbors had the most credibility of all sources of information. That is true of most other jobs, but it can become crucial when school districts must go to the polls for financial support. Newspaper articles and school district newsletters help inform but seldom persuade, I had learned. Still, there were some issues that demanded printed messages to voters and the general public. We designed another publication that we could mail directly to homes in Tacoma. We called it Education in Tacoma. I created a fictional couple to discuss the problems of understanding the school district's budget and finance problems. I quoted curriculum specialists when I covered new concepts of teaching history, science and mathematics as well as art and music. I remember one issue focused on issues relating to the teaching of handicapped students. Perhaps as many as a dozen issues of Education in Tacoma made it into homes during the first three years (1959-1962) but other demands began to take priority. At first I was too busy to seek answers to the question that kept nagging me. Finally I started stopping at the public library before I went home. Naydene got used to phone calls that began, "I'll be late for dinner tonight." I began digging through dozens, perhaps hundreds of articles, in the public relations journals. I was looking for some clues to how and why people form their opinions about public schools. Why do some vote yes on school budget needs and others vote no? Gradually a picture emerged that told me what I needed to know. The concept underlying previous special levy campaigns emphasized changing the NO votes to YES votes by logical persuasion, plus appealing to voter's emotions by describing children's classroom needs. But my research findings convinced me that no amount of appeal or persuasion was likely to change minds. Why? I will sum it up this way. As individuals grow up through childhood and become adults their friends, their families and their communities will help them establish basic values and beliefs. Those values and beliefs become the basis for forming opinions about issues throughout their lives. Moreover, an individual's personal experiences with education will also set their attitudes toward education and schooling. If their experiences are positive, if that individual is successful in school, they are likely to be supportive. Conversely, if they are unsuccessful, if they fail to enjoy learning, they may not only drop out of school, but they will establish negative attitudes toward schooling and education in general. They will vote no on school issues, and no amount of publicity will change their vote. The campaigns were designed to bring out all voters. I looked for a way of identifying and communicating with the YES voters. Now I needed help. I got it from Maxine Myers who had been a president of the Tacoma Council of PTA's. As a past president she took the job of council public relations chairman. I described what I wanted her to do and why. I got a positive response immediately. She grasped the concept of the research and within weeks recruited and organized nearly two dozen PTA volunteers. Their task: to go to the County Auditor's office and record the yes and no votes in each voting precinct on special levies submitted in the previous four years. There were 300 precincts. I think we may have irritated the employees in the auditor's office. But we were asking for public records and they could not say No. One by one they dragged out the logs of each precinct. The PTA volunteers had to scan through every issue and every candidate in every election for those four years to find the data we needed. Nearly two months went by before we had the results and could begin the real study. First, a reading of the results confirmed one guess I had made. Precincts will tend to vote alike year after year. We could group precincts by those that were dramatically positive...every year they voted for school levies with an 80 percent yes vote or better. On the other end of the scale were some that never got to a 40 percent yes vote. The Tacoma School District at that time included precincts from five different legislative districts. We got multiple copies of the legislative district maps. Maxine bought a set of pencils with a variety of colors. Maxine started with Royal Purple for districts that had voted 80 percent yes or better. Blue for 70 percent. Green for 60 percent. Yellow for 50 per cent. Brown for 40 percent. Black for less than 40 percent. The pattern that emerged gave me the next clue. Most of the purple, blue and green was in the North End, the West End and the town of Fircrest. Most of the brown and black was in the south end and east side. Now I went to the census maps. The 1960 census was not yet complete and we had difficulty getting the data. Finally we were able to get preliminary data for the areas that covered the school district. The census districts did not match the legislative and precinct boundaries exactly but I began comparing the income level and educational level in each census district with our colored maps. Now I had the answer. I had confirmed what I had suspected. We had a high correlation...almost a perfect correlation between the purple and blue precincts and a high income. Ditto for a correlation with the amount of education. We were getting 70 and 80 percent yes votes in areas of college graduates making lots of money. At the other end were blue collar workers, and we concluded, those who struggled to even get a high school education. Those were the precincts that did not give us a 60 percent yes vote. Maxine and I had not been secretive about our project but we had not wanted to raise any particular fuss about what we were trying to do. I asked Superintendent Giaudrone for a few moments of time on his next Friday morning cabinet meeting. There were fewer than a dozen people in the room that morning. They included Angelo, Deputy Supt. Joe Lassoie, two assistant superintendents and several curriculum directors and me. I introduced Maxine. She had already posted our colored precinct maps. She took a few minutes to explain the process we had followed, gave credit to the PTA volunteers for their hard work, then dropped our bombshell. The next campaign would focus on communicating with those voters in purple, blue and green precincts. That would mean doing doorbelling with brochures and telephone reminders on the day before and if necessary the day of the election. We would deemphasize any communications to the general public. That we would make no effort to communicate with the No voters seemed heretic, unpatriotic and perhaps even illegal to some of the group in that room At least one of them predicted a backlash. Maxine assured them that we were not going to advertise our new campaign structure. There would still be a Citizens' Committee for School Support as a fund-raising group. I kept my mouth shut as much as possible in the discussion. But I had watched faces as Maxine talked and I could see a positive response from Angelo and Joe. I am not sure but that Maxine may have tipped them off as to what conclusions we had reached. There is much more to come. I became the front man, the spokesman, the contact with the media during that year. Ahead of us were some controversies. But I will jump ahead and tell you that the idea of focusing on the Yes voter worked. The Tacoma School District never lost another special levy. There were a few times when the high voter turnout after a president election meant that we did not validate with a 40 percent turnout the first time we submitted a levy to the voters. But fortunately, Washington State law permits a second submission of the same or similar proposal. We always made it the second time. There is another story on what happened after the two teacher strikes in 1974 and 1978. Public opinion seemed so negative after the strikes that few thought we could pass anything. We passed both times with a substantial margin. I retired in 1981. The Tacoma School District campaign planners have continued to use the basic concept of focusing on the Yes voter although some of the tactics have been changed as a majority of votes are cast by absentee ballot prior to the actual day of the election. The Tacoma News Tribune ran a nice editorial a year or two ago complimenting the electorate for approving school levy needs for 47 consecutive years. (Note from Carol Ann) Hal worked with the School Information and Research Service (SIRS) program for three years after retiring from the Tacoma School District. When his son Kirby Lee died in 1984 he retired from there and came home to be with Naydene. He took her on 13 cruises, 7 of which she was in a wheelchair. The house in Fircrest held too many memories of Kirby Lee and became a burden so they moved in the C complex at Tacoma Lutheran Home when it was built. Naydene’s parents had moved into an apartment at TLH so Hal jumped at the opportunity to “not have to mow that darned lawn anymore”. In total Hal lived in unit C-5 at Tacoma Lutheran Home Retirement Community for 23 years. He never finished this part of his memoirs. We married in 2000 and were busy having too much fun together. He loved playing golf with his school friends traveling far and wide to various golf courses. Later he joined the Highlands Golf Course Men’s Club and always said he hoped to die on the 9th hole. He missed his golfing friends when his back pain got so bad he could no longer swing a golf club. Another activity he loved his last few years was singing with the Normanna Men’s Chorus and going to Sangerfest in the summer. There will be no memorial service. If you wish to make a memorial gift in his name please do so to either The Tacoma Mission or the Alzheimer’s Association. Please sign the guestbook from Mountain View Memorial Gardens at www.mountainviewtacoma.com