Interview with Russell Hendricks

Posted on 07/03/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Russell Hendricks of Port Townsend conducted by Patience Rogge at the Fort Worden History Center on March 31, 2011.  Mr. Hendricks has been Facilities Manager at Fort Worden State Park Conference Center since 2001.  Here he describes his meeting with Louis Gossett, jr., who received an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film Officer and a Gentleman.  The movie was made at Fort Worden:

“ In 2007, Lou Gossett came here to do a trailer for the 25th anniversary of the movie.  I met him  at seven o’clock at the back door of the Park Office Building and let him in.  He went up to the Blue Room (now the Jean Dunbar Room) and they set up and did an interview with him there.  Then I went around with him probably three or four hours, just going to different places where they’d filmed during the movie.  He was talking about what happened here and what happened there and the film crew was with him.  We went to the Balloon Hangar (now McCurdy Pavilion) where the fight scene took place, and then in front of Building 204.  I said, ‘Do you remember at the end of the movie when you saluted Richard Gere on the stairs?  That was right here.’  He said, ‘I remember that.’  Gossett’s son was with him.  Lou went up to the head of the stairs, and the film crew got it all set up. He said that when one of these guys graduated from Officer Candidate School, he had to give a silver dollar to the first enlisted person he saw, and the enlisted person would give him his first salute as an officer. I asked, ’A silver dollar?’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s in the movie.  They all handed me a silver dollar and I tucked it in my waistband.’ I carry a silver dollar in my watch pocket just for good luck.  So I pulled it out and said, ‘Like this?’ He said, ‘Yeah! Can we have it?’  Of course, I agreed.  So, if you see the trailer, you’ll see his son go up the stairs and Gossett gives him his first salute, then the son hands Lou my silver dollar. It was kind of neat.  Lou Gossett is probably the highlight of people I’ve met here.”

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Interview With Steven R. Ballou

Posted on 06/26/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Steven R. Ballou of Port Townsend conducted by Wendy Los at the Fort Worden History Center on October 26, 2004.  He worked as production manager for Centrum from April 1996 to  November 1999, and then became a State Parks employee.  At the time of the interview, Mr. Ballou was working as a caretaker at Fort Worden.  Here he relates how he met and married Nathalie, his wife:

“In 1992 I went to Portsmouth, Virginia to purchase a sailboat.  It need much work, so I sailed it down to North Carolina and put it in a dry storage yard and then in the summertime I would come back to Poulsbo, Washington and work on a house my dad and I were building for my folks.  In 1993 we completed the house, so I went back to North Carolina to finish up the boat and launch it. My plan was to sail it back to Washington, I calculated it would take about a year and a half to get it back here.  I went to the Laundromat to do my laundry for what I considered to be the last time in North Carolina.  I was launching the boat in two days and I was on my way. While I was there, I met this young woman from France.  We talked and talked and talked and come to find out she had just left the Gifford Pinchot National Forest right by the Columbia River.  So we talked and decided to meet and have coffee and we did and we became friends.  She was much younger than I.  It turned into quite a friendship. She was a forester who was on an exchange program from France, and when the time came for her to return to France her airplane ticket was from Seattle. So I decided to make an adventure out of it and drive her back to Seattle. Then she flew off and went back to France.  I was ready to go back to the east coast to continue my journey when I got a message from her that her brother, who had a grocery store, invited me to come to France for the summer.  He could employ me in his store and I would have a place to live, and she would show me France and Germany and whatever else we could see. So I did that and during that time a romance developed and we decided we would get married. First I came back to the United States and we decided that we’d start our life together in North Carolina.  We married there, and after the better part of a year I sold the sailboat and we moved to Washington.”

A surprising story about the boat:

“About three years ago I was on my way to come to work from where I live.  I was driving by Boat Haven and I saw this boat.  There weren’t 30 of them made in the whole world and the only place to find them is on the east coast because that’s where they were built.  That’s why I had gone there to buy this specific boat, and I’m driving by the Boat Haven and I look there in the yard and I see a boat like the one I had. I went, ’This is incredible, a boat like this isn’t even here.’ So after work I went into the Boat Haven to look at the boat and it was indeed the boat I had sold on the east coast.  I got to meet the people and talk to them.  They’d spent five years getting the boat from North Carolina to Port Townsend.  I had been going to spend a year and a half, because that was the money I had allotted for the trip.  They had done exactly the trip I had in mind. It was like that boat was made to get here and it did.”

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Interview With Kate Burke

Posted on 06/26/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Kate Burke of Port Townsend conducted by Patience Rogge at the Fort Worden History Center on April 12, 2010.  Ms. Burke was Park Manager at Fort Worden from 2003 to 2012.  Here she describes the  process that led to her hiring:

“The State Parks had put out a national broadcast for anybody interested in this position.  So I submitted, along with I’m sure a variety of other people, and was selected as a finalist.  I was really surprised I was selected because I thought it was an unbelievable place.  They had it narrowed down to six candidates. I interviewed.  It was the most grueling interview I had ever been through in my life.  They had me come out from Indianapolis and I spent two and a half days here.  The first day was spent touring the park with staff, and that’s when I met Susan Thomas, who works in the customer service office.  Then I had an interview with a panel of six people, there were people from the Fort Warden Advisory Committee, Russ Hendricks, Mike Zimmerman from Fort Flagler, Carol Shiffman who was head of Centrum at that time, Wayne McLaughlin, and Tim Caldwell from the Chamber.  The next day I had to interview with the staff and volunteers.  All six of us got up in front and took questions from the staff and volunteers.  In the evening we had to do a public forum where the public was able to ask all six of us questions, and we answered.  The next day was when I actually started eating again. So, it was a very long process.  I was just sure that Jack Hartt, who had been here as a ranger and is such a fluid and articulate speaker, was the obvious candidate.  I was very surprised when they offered me the job.”

In answer to the questions about challenges she faced as the only non-ranger Park Manager in Washington and the unique character of Fort Worden:

“There have been issues coming up along the way because there is law enforcement involved.  I relied heavily on Todd Jensen, who is the chief law enforcement officer.  Even though I supervise Todd, I really give him the latitude to supervise all of the law enforcement because he has the background and training.  I am very aware of what the rangers do.  I’ve gone through the defensive tactics training, the phys ed training, and their law enforcement training, just so I’d have a better understanding of their jobs.  As for other challenges, it is much like any other government system.  You have to work through a lot of different policies and procedures that are different with every government agency.  State agencies are much different from the city of Indianapolis and the county metropolitan system that I had worked for, because each of them has different governance.  Here it means getting acclimated to understanding the policies and procedures, which do change year to year.  You have to keep up to date, it’s not static and you can’t say ‘I’ve looked at it once when I started and that’s that.’ You have to continuously review the laws and the administrative code that goes along with the job.  I think this job is not the typical state parks job.  Go to many of the state parks and they are campgrounds, recreational areas, and maybe some hiking trails.  Here, it is housing for a variety of not only vacationers and tourists, but we also have the concept of the conference center and the various partners that are housed at the park. I think that’s again quite unique.  None of the other parks have this many differing organizations—we have both state organizations and private businesses as well as non-profit businesses.  So, it is a different animal in that you’re not just dealing with the state and its issues but you are dealing with a variety of different businesses that rely on you. Also, we’re reliant on them to help us with bringing people here.  Then you also have the variety of people who come here—people who come through the gates every year guarantee that there’s going to be a lot of interactions that you just are never going to know what’s going to happen.”

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Interview With John Palmer

Posted on 06/14/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with John Palmer of Moraga, CA conducted by Wendy Los by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on July 12, 2011.  Mr. Palmer is the son of Captain Rodney Isom Palmer, M.D. (1919-2009) who was the post surgeon at Fort Worden in 1952-53.  Here he shares memories of life on Officers Row:

“I was about seven years old.  Because the Army was closing the fort, they didn’t have much Garrison there.  I lived in what they called the Nurses’ Quarters, the brick building on Officers Row, in 16A.  There was another kid who lived on Officers Row in one of the old Victorians.  We used to sneak into this kid’s basement because his father had a whole bunch of K rations stored there.  Inside K rations there were juicy treats wrapped in cellophane. We ate all those things out of the K rations.  I can remember looking out the front and seeing my father walk home from the hospital for lunch and seeing the enlisted people all salute him as he walked across the parade field.  There was a chain link fence around the balloon hangar, and I remember some vehicles parked in front of it.  It was off limits but three of us kids used to sneak under the fence and go play in the hangar.  I remember climbing all over the batteries down on the beach.  The upper batteries were closed, they may have still had munitions in the magazines, but just as we were ready to leave they opened those batteries up and my father and I went up and climbed on them.  We used to play on the beach a lot.  Once my father took me fishing out on the pier.  It was the only time I ever remember seeing MPs, they came and kicked us off the pier and said it was off limits and we couldn’t be there.

I went to school at the old red schoolhouse up on the hill (Lincoln School).  We’d catch the bus on the corner by the tennis courts and that’s where they dropped us off at the end of the day.  It was a good time for our family because the Korean War was winding down and they were closing the fort, so there was not a lot for my father to do.  He’d go over to the hospital and make his rounds and occasionally do things there, but he had a lot of time off.  Quite often, he’d pick me up from school and we’d go fishing out at Lake Leland.

There was an older house on the hill to the south, and there was a story that a witch lived there.  All the kids were sneaking up the hill to see if we could see the witch.  Some other things I remember—they used to have liaison aircraft that would come from over the trees and over the blimp hangar and land in the middle of the parade field.  That was pretty exciting to watch.  I remember going to movies in the theatre.  Something else that was kind of the highlight for the kids was Retreat every day.  There was a little box up on Artillery Hill where the gun used to be, where they’d fire ‘Retreat.’ We’d all go out and listen to the guy playing the trumpet.  He’d play and they would lower the flag  and fire the gun.  It was probably a five inch gun, the fire would charge out across the Sound.  Everybody would stop and salute as they lowered the flag.”

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Interview With Marjorie Carpentier

Posted on 06/12/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Marjorie Carpentier  of Port Townsend conducted by Carter Huth at the Fort Worden History Center on April 15, 2004.  Ms. Carpentier is the daughter of L.P. Vane who served in the Coast Artillery in the early years of the last century at Fort Casey.  She grew up in Coupeville and  visited Fort Worden frequently as a child.  During World War II, she joined the Womens Army Corps and was a member of the Second Signal Corps Service Battalion. Here she discusses her work and life in that period:

“I joined the Army in March of 1943 and left in January 1946.  We were not allowed to talk about our work, but now it has been 58 years, so I think I can.  My unit was stationed at Two Rock Ranch in Petaluma, California.  That base is now headquarters for the Coast Guard. We were intercepting Japanese radio code.  We didn’t decipher it, we copied the code.  We had a katakana (Japanese syllabary)  so that we could type the messages.  It was quite interesting.  We received a Presidential Unit Citation from Franklin D. Roosevelt.  We did worry about the war a lot.  The war correspondents used to call on the short wave radio to give their reports to the particular papers or magazines that they worked for.  We could pick up their conversations on short wave.  We’d listen to their eye witness accounts of what was going on in the war zones.  It was really scary at times.  The Battle of the Bulge was an awful time.

When the war ended, I went back to Seattle and started taking classes for Western Union just to keep in contact with communications, which I did love. While I was still in school there in 1947, I talked to an Air Force recruiter.  Somehow they mixed up my MOS  (Military Occupational Specialty Code), and since I couldn’t talk about what we did in wartime, they thought it was for being a German interpreter.  They enlisted me and sent me to Wright-Patterson Air Base in Dayton, Ohio  to be an interpreter for captured German documents.  So, I was a clerk-typist along with some very highly paid civilians until I eventually got back into communications.  My rank was Staff Sergeant.  My roommate was a weather forecaster.  She talked about this really nice young officer, Joseph Carpentier, whom she wanted me to meet.  I didn’t realize that I already had met him some time before.  I had bought a car and it got stuck in the mud behind our women’s barracks.  Two young officers had come along and had helped push my car out of the mud so that I could go to work on the swing shift.  When we were introduced, he remembered me but I didn’t remember him but I did remember them pushing my car.  We were married in October 1948, just before he was sent to the Berlin Air Lift.”

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Interview with James T. Darrah jr.

Posted on 05/31/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with James T. Darrah jr. of Hattiesburg, MS conducted by phone by Wendy Los on July 21, 2011 from the Fort Worden History Center.  Mr. Darrah is the son of Colonel James T. Darrah  (1905-1988), who was stationed at Fort Worden with the 14th Coast Artillery in the early 1940’s.  The Darrah family at the time lived in house 4E on Officers Row, next door to the quarters of the Commanding Officer, General James H. Cunningham.  Here he describes a boyhood misadventure:

“I got into a little trouble while we lived in those quarters.  Living next door to the commanding general put my mother and father on pins and needles.  They had three stinky little boys who sure were a constant irritant to the commander.  I was the resident pyromaniac at the time.  Well, we had a black and white cocker spaniel named Cappy.  My job was to feed him every night.  The dog food came in wax impregnated cardboard containers shaped like a regular tin can.  Tin was getting to be in short supply.  Cappy ate half of one of these every night.  One night my parents were out somewhere on the post and I was in charge.  I was probably eight or nine.  I had emptied a container and I thought that it would make a nice flare.  So I cleaned it out and wadded up pieces of newspaper, took the heads off some matches, put candle wax and some other things in there.  I made quite a decent flare but I had to have a place to try it out.  It was dark, so nobody could see me.  Right next door there was a very convenient concrete pad that just happened to be behind the General’s garage and underneath his dining room window, and there wasn’t anyone back there.  It was well shielded from the street by a hedge and the garage.  I went back there and set my little flare on the concrete and lit it and admired it as it started to spew and sputter as the matches went off.  Satisfied, I went home and didn’t think anymore about it until the next day when the General’s aide came to call and asked my parents if they were aware of an attempt being made to burn down the General’s house the night before.  My flare had not exploded , just burned, but General and Mrs. Cunningham happened to notice it because they saw a flickering light out the dining room window, they could hardly miss it. My timing was bad.  Had they not been having supper at the time, they probably never would have noticed it.   I was in serious difficulties for a good while as a result of that episode.”

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Interview With Thatcher Bailey

Posted on 05/29/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Thatcher Bailey conducted by phone by Patience Rogge on January 26, 2012 from the Fort Worden History Center. Mr. Bailey worked for Centrum at several different times in different capacities. Here he describes how he came to the Port Townsend area and how he started with Centrum in its early days:

“My father, Phillip Bailey, bought a place in Port Townsend in 1946. He spent his first Christmas in the Northwest at Chevy Chase Inn and had gotten to know Mary Chase who was at that time the owner and manager, he became enamored of the place. As she got older and was looking for someone to take it over, he purchased the property from her. He never directly ran it as a resort, but hired managers for it. We spent our childhood growing up there in the summer as guests of the resort and in the winter, when it was closed we would go up and do work projects. In 1962, the idea was the whole family was going to move to Port Townsend. We sold our house in Seattle. I was enrolled to go to Chimacum Elementary, but at the very last minute my mother got cold feet and we went back to Seattle. They shut down the resort because buildings were falling apart and needed renovation. For the next period of time it served as a family home and summer home. There were a couple of cabins that were in better shape, oftentimes we rented those out to artists who would be performing at either Marrowstone or Fort Worden. We had the Youth Symphony folks staying there for a while. Marjorie Nelson was heading up one of the precursors to the local theatre scene, the Port Townsend Summer Theatre, designed by Victor Steinberg at Point Hudson. So, there was a connection to this incipient cultural community that was developing in Port Townsend that my father got attached to. He actually was one of the founding board members of Centrum. That got me, through nepotism, an unpaid internship in the summer of ’75 with Centrum for Joe Wheeler. That was near its founding. Centrum was a new organization and the Fort was hardly developed. Everyone had all the duties—from making sure there was toilet paper in the houses and dorms where people were staying to making sure speakers were in place for performances, to writing brochure copy. I was just kind of the runaround guy that first summer. Joe was kind enough to let me write some brochure copy. I think some of it still exists today as ways that the organization is described. I got deeply attached to the place. When I graduated from Amherst, Joe hired me and I worked there for three or four years. When I came back to work, I was given way more responsibility than any kid out of college should be given. I got to put together programs and ended up developing long-term relationships with a lot of Northwest artists. We did programs for Washington State youths that were most of the time led by Washington artists because we were funded by Washington State public dollars. It was really an exciting time in the Northwest for a certain generation of artists who were all working together and thinking about different ways of making art. They have incredibly fond memories of a highly unregulated time back at Fort Worden when we were probably lucky we didn’t get into more trouble than we did. The regulations were a lot more lax and there was a lot less fear of taking risks. It was an exciting time for everybody.

The great thing about Joe Wheeler was that he was incredibly empowering. He gave me an enormous amount of responsibility. I screwed some things up significantly. I lost my temper with someone who was of great importance and told him off. He stomped off and we never worked with him again. Joe just laughed about it. Joe was very much ‘just try this, try that, see what works,’ He was in the spirit of being a mentor. More importantly the spirit of the whole place at the time which was that creativity comes in many forms and you want to have an organization that has an ethic that inspires everybody who touches it. He let us come up with ideas, nine out of ten of which weren’t that good. But every once in a while, we’d come up with a kind of great idea and everyone would be pretty excited about it. It was very fun. Not that funding was always easy, but there was a greater sense of excitement around the state about what was happening there and less scrutiny about how this money might get spent or might not get spent. There was a bigger embrace of the thinking –if we’re going to support artists and making of art, let’s not pinch pennies in silly ways.”

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Interview with Raymond C. Baker

Posted on 05/24/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Raymond C. Baker of Urbandale, IA conducted by phone by Wendy Los on September 27, 2011 from the Fort Worden  History Center.  Mr. Baker served in the US Army Headquarters, Headquarters and Service Company, 369th Engineer Amphibious Support Regiment at Fort Worden during the Korean War.  Here he describes being stationed at Camp Desert Rock, NV during the atomic bomb testing:

“At Fort Worden we found out that our whole regiment was being held in reserve to go and operate Camp Desert Rock, which later became the Nevada testing grounds.  Our Shore Battalion built Camp Desert Rock and our Headquarters Company operated it for the first six tests.  They made me acting first sergeant for the Headquarters Company for those tests. Nobody told us how serious it was.  I don’t even know if the people in town (Las Vegas was 75 miles away) knew what was going on, it was hush-hush. We flew from Seattle to Camp Desert Rock.  We lived in little eight man tents that had wooden floors and an oil heater.  At night it got real cold and in the daytime it would get over 100. We had four of these tents on each side of our little street.  There was a mess hall and a couple of other buildings nearby.  Our company of about 50 men was to go into five foot trenches about four and a half miles from ground zero to see what it would look like to experience the demolition of 2000 pounds of TNT from that distance.  Anyway, all you could see was a puff of smoke.  We were the first to participate in those things.  I don’t know who knew what, we weren’t told or warned about what we were going to do until we got out there.  Then they showed us this thing and said, ‘The next one is going to be an atomic bomb the same size that was dropped on Hiroshima.’  The real one was very, very impressive, it was beautiful also.  About half of the bombs, the big bombs, were dropped from airplanes, I think B-52s. The rest were detonated from 300 foot high towers.  They had a PA system, we could hear the bombardier countdown whenever the bomb was supposed to go off not when he let it go. 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1—at the count of three we had to put our hands over our eyes and close our eyes and bend down into the trench.  Then we had just three seconds before the bomb went off.  When it went off you could see the bones in your fingers with your eyes closed, the light was that intense.  Then the ground shook a little bit like an earthquake—it moved under you.  Then we could look up for 17 to 20 seconds and see the mushroom go up in the sky and all the colors like a mushroom and then all the debris coming toward us.  You could hear the noise.  The noise wasn’t as impressive as the debris and the cloud.  The cloud had blue and red and white and orange on the inside of it as it was rolling like a smoke ring.  I think it went up to about 15,000 feet.  It went up fast and you could see ice form on the top of it and then the ice would melt and go down the sides like frosting on a donut.  It was moving toward us.  That’s why we had 13 seconds before all that debris would get to us, then you had to put your hands over your eyes and duck down in the trench.  We were covered with debris.  Then the force would knock against the back of the trench and a vacuum would pull you forward.  Then you could open your eyes again because the dust and dirt had all cleared.  Then we’d get out of the trenches and go back to our tents.  At one time we had 150 officers assigned to come in and observe.  They would observe from busses about 12 miles away.”

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Interview with Eldon L. Gallear

Posted on 05/22/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Eldon L. Gallear of Wasila, AK conducted by phone by Patience Rogge from the Fort Worden History Center on May 31, 2011. Mr. Gallear served in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II, attaining the rank of First  Assistant Engineer in 1945.  The following is an account of an experience that began when he boarded a ship in Galveston, TX:

“I went aboard and said to the gangplank watch guy, ’I work in the engine room.  I’ve got a fireman oil and water tender’s ticket to go to sea in those positions.’ He hustled me right down to the chief engineer who took me right down to the engine room and put me to firing right away.  The guy I relieved had been on duty so long he was bleary eyed.  Almost immediately we left Galveston.  We were going to pick up a load of bauxite and bring it back to America because they needed it for airplane construction.  This old ship had been built around 1920 for the Great Lakes trade.  She had a lot of weak spots in her.  They had taken out the water tight bulkheads by numbers three and four holds to make a boat carrier out of her, that weakened the whole ship tremendously.  After we had gone about 100 miles, just south of Cancun, a German submarine torpedoed us.  I was the only one watching the engine room and there was one hell of a lot of noise. It knocked me to the floor plates. I don’t know how long I lay there. The room was full of steam and all I could think of was getting the hell out of there.  I left the companion way, got up on deck and went out on deck.  There were two guys leaning over the bow rail speaking to someone in Portuguese.  I walked over and asked them what was going on.  They pointed to a life raft with two guys on it that was tethered right near the side of the ship.  They gave me to understand that the ship was going down fast, to climb over the rail and go into the water and these guys would pick me up.  One of them pointed to my side and said, ’Man, you’re hurt.’  That was the first time I realized that I was bleeding.  I started to climb over that boat rail and passed out.  Apparently those guys shoved me on over.  I kind of half remember being pulled onto that life raft. A bit later I came to and I remember a lot of yelling going on.  I passed out again and I don’t remember anything—I don’t remember how long I was on that life raft.  When I came to the next time I was looking at a pair of white silk stockings and I thought I must have gone to heaven, I couldn’t think of anything else.  A woman was sitting there, dressed in white.  I said, ‘Where am I?’ or ‘What’s this?’ or something.  She said, ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re alive.’ Then she paused and said,’ I’m not your nurse. I’m your guardian angel.’  Pretty soon a nurse did come in and I spoke to her.  I asked about this other nurse, and nobody knew about it.”

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Interview with Jeffrey D. Wheeler

Posted on 05/17/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Jeffrey D. Wheeler of Camano Island, WA conducted by phone by Patience Rogge on March 20, 2007 from the Fort Worden History Center. Mr. Wheeler is a Ranger at Cama Beach State Park on Camano Island. The son of Joseph Wheeler, the founding director of Centrum, he grew up in Port Townsend and began his career as a park aide at Fort Worden.  Here he describes youthful adventures at the Fort with his best friend, Blaine Bellerud, son of Glen Bellerud, the park manager:

“I pretty much grew up in the park with my best friend, Blaine Bellerud.  I dated one of the other Belleruds.  I was there quite a bit.  The night security guy knew my car from all the times I drove in and out of the park.  From junior high on we played in the bunkers and ran in all the tunnels.  We got to go in a lot of them and explore before they were welded shut. My last year of high school, we used to hide our beer in the cistern until the park welded it shut.  When I was working there six years later, someone broke into it.  I went up there as staff to make sure it was okay.  I thought maybe I’ll find my beer down there, but it was gone.  I later asked Park Manager Bellerud about it and he told me that  the rangers had searched the cistern before they welded it shut and had found the beer and taken it home that night.  So, my beer was long gone.  I don’t know how well Rainier would have aged over six years anyway.

My friends and I used to go up on Artillery Hill with my brother and his friends and have pinecone wars, kind of a game of “get the flag.” One group would take a bunker and defend it by throwing pinecones at the group trying to take the  bunker.  We had a lot of entertaining Saturdays doing that.  Because Blaine was in our group and his dad was the manager, we also had access to the gym.  We used to go in there and play dodgeball for hours on end. It was the older kids against the younger kids.  I was one of the younger ones and they usually beat us, but occasionally we won.  We had our own set of balls and kept them in a big bag we hid in the basement when we weren’t using the gym.  We had a lot of fun in that gym.”

Note:

The cistern, now named in honor of the late Dan Harpole, is used as a performance space noted for its long reverberation time, which makes interesting sound effects.  The gym, now home to Madrona MindBody Institute is used for teaching and performing the movement arts.

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