Pauline and Bill Kombol, summer 1972, photo by Barry Kombol
Mom died 15 years ago today. A few days later, a good friend placed his hand on my shoulder and told me, “You just lost the best friend you’ll ever have.” Truer words have rarely been spoken.
We knew it was coming. She had COPD – Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Like many of her generation, Pauline smoked. For years, make that decades, she tried to quit, and for the most part did, limiting herself to just a few smokes a day. In fact, for the longest time, even I didn’t know she still smoked. She hid it that well.
In her last year, grandchildren from far away came to visit. Thanksgiving weekend 2010, Mom wished to take a ride around Enumclaw and point out her old family homes. And that of her grandfather, Joshua Morris, whom she never really knew, as he died before she was two years old. She packed her oxygen tank, and though experiencing discomfort, we completed the several-hour trip around town and out to Osceola. A few weeks later, she called me at work first thing in the morning. For thirty minutes, she shared her Christian faith journey and how proud she was to have passed it down to her children, in different iterations.
A week before Christmas, she fell. How many times have falls lead to death in older adults? First stop was Enumclaw Hospital, then a Federal Way rehab center, where we visited her on Christmas Day. She seemed to be getting better, but a setback landed her in Swedish Hospital. On New Year’s Day, many of the family visited. Mom convinced the doctors to pump her up on steroids, then put on makeup, so that when we visited, she was sparkling and appeared to be years younger. I was amazed by her remarkable recovery – right before my eyes. She was vibrant, almost perky. She held a great-grandchild in her arms, looking angelic. I imagined she’d somehow been cured. Foolish me, for I didn’t know of the doctor’s trick.
At Swedish Hospital, Pauline and her great-granddaughter, Nina Marie Clooke, age two months, January 1, 2011.
Pauline left Swedish for the Kline Galland nursing home near Seward Park. It’s a lovely place in a forested setting. And for the next three weeks, she slowly proceeded to die, under the gentle care of hospice personnel who calibrated the precise dose of morphine to keep her both conscious and free of pain. On the last few nights, we rotated sleeping beside her.
The fateful call came Monday afternoon, January 24, 2011. We were in Auburn at the Celebration of Life for Jill Alverson, Cal Bashaw’s daughter. Mom and Cal had joined their lives in partnership a decade earlier. Cal and his family became a part of our family. Were two daggers purposely thrown that day?
The following week was a whirlwind. We organized the funeral at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and coordinated with Enumclaw Funeral Home, just like we did for Dad, 32 years earlier. Father Bill Hausmann, one of Mom’s best friends and the priest who married Jennifer and me, came to perform the service. Mom wanted to be buried, so I chose a coffin, the simplest, bare pine box available, like those of earlier generations. Mom was never showy; she always practiced modesty but never pretension.
Our job was made easy as Mom had written down most of what she wanted after life. Father Hausmann graciously guided us through assembling the funeral service. Old family friends filled the pews. “How Great Thou Art” and “Amazing Grace” were sung. The 23rd Psalm was read, as were Corinthians 15:51-57 and Luke 12:48-49. Each of her four children delivered remembrances, as did two grandchildren. Following the Celebration of Life in the Parish Hall, the immediate family journeyed to the cemetery where Pauline was buried next to her husband, Jack. Flowers were tossed on her pinewood coffin. Her gravestone read, ‘Morte in Vitam,’ Latin for ‘death into life.’
Pauline (Morris) Kombol’s funeral program.
Thirty-two years earlier, Dad’s end came fast, dying a little over three weeks after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. One night before he died, he called me to his bedside and set forth a task: “I want you to take care of your mother.” Both daughters lived far away, while Barry and Cathy had three toddlers and a fourth on the way next year.
That was the easiest job I ever had. There was one simple way to take care of Mom – I let her take care of me. I was single, unattached, and living in their Lake Sawyer summer cabin, a mere 10 miles away. I came frequently for dinner. She hemmed my pants and sewed buttons on my shirts. And always sent me home with food: casseroles, lentil soup, scones, and blackberry pie.
We became pals, going to concerts and plays. With Danica, we drove to Pasadena and attended the 1981 Rose Bowl. I encouraged her to purchase a condo in downtown Seattle and joined as a 20% partner. We jointly managed Dad’s affairs, sharing the bookwork and undertaking investments. Each summer, she joined me at her lake house until I moved out after purchasing a Maple Valley condo. Even then, we accomplished a remodel that doubled the size of her lake home while maintaining its chalet character and style.
Together, we undertook projects. We sorted through piles of family photos, identifying faces whose names I wrote on the back. She guided me through family genealogies, from which I published several Morris and Kombol family histories. Those endeavors inspired me and led to a second-act writing hobby. Mom remained an essential part of my life until the end.
Knowing she was gone, I conjured ways to keep her alive. During the first nine months of my life, in utero, I shared everything with her. After leaving the womb, a baby carries maternal cells for decades, possibly for life. It’s called maternal micro-chimerism. There was my hook, my hold – deep down in the cavity of my soul, a few of Mom’s cells may still reside in me. On a molecular level, she was still with me. Just as during her life, I was still part of her, as mothers continue to carry cells of their infants for years, even decades after birth. Maybe I was grasping at straws, a drowning man trying to save a sense of self by clutching the DNA of flimsy reeds. But it worked.
Memory is a curious sort of history. The past in your head becomes the present. You step through its walls to the days and months of yesteryear – the way it used to be. We conjure snippets of recall from faraway events, hoping to make them real again. And then we’ll see each other and speak as we did before. There’s an element of magic at work. Like the alchemists, trying to change one element into another, we hope against hope that our leaden memories might somehow be turned to gold.
Some questions remain long after their owners have died, lingering like ghosts searching for answers never found in life. On this side of heaven, all we possess is the present. But the present endlessly dissolves into the past. There I am, a little boy of three or four. One of my earliest memories, in Elk Coal, with Barry. We’ve planned a performance to show off our skills to an audience of one – Mom.
On the edge of the yard where the tall trees grow, there’s a vine maple tree with a branch growing horizontally from the ground. Barry, two and one-half years older than me, flips upside down, hanging by his knees, grinning broadly. I jump and grab the branch and hang by my arms. Mom claps wildly, as if it’s the most incredible show she’s ever seen. Barry continues to hang. I drop from the branch and run into her outstretched arms as she squeezes me tightly. I’d never felt so proud.
That’s what Gary Habenicht meant when he advised, I just lost the best friend I’ve ever had.
Grandma Pauline with 13 of her 14 grandchildren on the occasion of her 80th birthday celebration in Arizona, March 31, 2007.
Anton Kombol, upper left , pouring a beer from a bottle with a group of Croatian friends.
Growing up in the extended Kombol clan meant at least four family gatherings each year – Easter, Father’s Day, Fourth of July, and Christmas Eve. Occasionally, there was a wedding, an anniversary, or a Sunday assemblage added to the mix. Grandma (Lulu) and Papa (Tony) had five children. For me, that meant four sets of aunts and uncles, a total of eleven grandchildren, seven of them cousins. Only Frank and Dana Zaputil were childless, but they always brought their good friend, Art, and the de facto twelfth grandchild, Pierre, a full-size French poodle, fully accepted into the family. Pierre was probably the favorite.
Tony & Lulu’s 50th Anniversary party, Aug. 2, 196. L-R: Nadine, Tony, Nola, Lulu, Dana, Jack, Bernell.
Like most family parties, talk often turned to events of the second generation’s youth. My parents, aunts, and uncles all grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in Kangley, Black Diamond, or Enumclaw. Anytime one of the Kombols told a story, there was sure to be a dispute about the facts or the event. There were often two or three different versions of what happened, to whom, and how. There was even uncertainty regarding the date of my father, Laverne Shercliffe Kombol’s birth in 1921. He was born at home in the small coal mining town of Hiawatha. Some said July 17, others July 18, while July 21 was offered as the birthdate, according to his grandmother, Jennie.
And as to when Jack contracted polio and missed several years of school, no one could agree. Though it was some time after Tony’s fateful day. As to that tragic event, no one remembered the month or year, but all agreed it happened in a Kangley mine. But which one?
Maybe this is why I started researching and writing history, especially about the coal industry. It’s no doubt helped having two grandfathers who were coal miners and two grandmothers who were school teachers.
Papa Kombol spoke in a thick Croatian accent. Back then, the term Yugoslavian was still in use, or Austrian, as Austria ruled both. His face and hands were speckled with purple freckles owing to a coal mining accident in the 1920s. He wore thick, I mean thick, glasses and typically read his Croatian periodicals, mailed from the old country, held close to his face. He had a hearty laugh, and when we were young, he always invited us to sit on his lap.
Anton Kombol was born January 6, 1885, in Fuzine, Croatia, to Anton Kombol (1849-1911) and Franciska Mihaljevic (1857-?). Croatia had been a part of the Austrian Empire since the 1815 Congress of Vienna. The first Kombols emigrated from France during the Napoleonic era, and successive generations of Kombol men married Croatian women. The local industries were woodworking and furniture-making, which attracted the original French immigrants. According to Leo Gregorich, Anton grew up in a place called Vrata, which means “gate” in Croatia. It’s within walking distance of Fuzine.
As Anton approached adulthood, woodworking was in his future, if the Austrian army didn’t call first. At age 17, Anton obtained an Austrian passport, issued on November 12, 1902. He made the 20-mile journey to Fiume, then part of Italy (now known as Rijeka, Croatia), and sailed December 8 on a ship bound for Southampton, England, by way of Le Havre, France. Anton arrived in New York on December 22, was processed through Ellis Island, then boarded a train on December 23, arriving in Roslyn, Washington, five days later. It was nine days before his 18th birthday.
Two older brothers, John (Ivan) and Matt Kombol, both living in Roslyn, welcomed him. Within days, he began work at the Northwestern Improvement Company’s coal mines that supplied fuel to power the locomotives of its corporate parent, Northern Pacific Railway. Anton soon changed his name to the Americanized moniker, Tony. For the next six years, Tony Kombol worked underground and saved his money. He later moved to Cle Elum.
L-R: Matt Kombol, John Kombol, Anton Kombol, early 1900s, Roslyn.
In May 4, 1908, Anton Kombol filed his Declaration of Intention to become an American citizen. He described himself as 5 feet, 6 inches, weighing 165 pounds, with brown hair, grey eyes, and a mustache. That September, a 23-year-old woman named Lulu Shircliffe accepted a teaching position in Ravensdale as her pay in Centralia “was not sufficient to our tastes.” She and a friend “landed in the hinterlands in Ravensdale, where the pay was tops, a coal mining town not far from Seattle.”
Sometime over the next two years, Tony Kombol moved to Ravensdale, whose mines were also operated by the Northwestern Improvement Co (NWI). Tony found room and board with William and Hanna Joseph, while Lulu lived at the home of Stephen and Lottie Weston, and their son, William. Stephen Weston was the hoisting engineer at the Ravensdale mine.
Tony Kombol, second from top with Croatian friends, likely near Ravensdale, circa early 1910s.
On November 11, 1911, Tony Kombol filed his Petition for Naturalization. Matt Starkovich, a fellow Croatian and Deputy Sheriff for King County, and Frank Ludwig, a Ravensdale liquor dealer signed as witnesses stating, Tony “is a person of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and is in every way qualified to be admitted as a citizen of the United States.” Tony declared his Oath of Allegiance on June 27, 1912, and received his Certificate of Naturalization on July 16, 1912. After ten years in the U.S., Tony became a citizen.
Lulu frequently returned to Chehalis to visit and stay with friends. It isn’t clear how or when they met, but at the time Ravensdale’s population was just over 700, so it would be natural for two eligible adults to know each other. In her job as a schoolteacher, Lulu was well-known and highly respected. And in a town with 230 coal miners, many of them single, she would have been one of the best catches around.
Lulu Shircliffe with her class of Ravensdale students, 1913. She would marry Tony Kombol the following year and retire from teaching . . . until circumstances dictated a return.
On June 18, 1914, John and Marguerite Carnero agreed to sell a 7,250 square foot lot to Tony Kombol for $160, due on or before December 31, 1914. Tony went to work building a house. Tony and Lulu were married in Seattle on August 4, 1914, and enjoyed a ten-day honeymoon before returning to their new Ravensdale home. As was the custom for young schoolteachers of the day, Lulu quit her job and went to work making their house a home.
Tony Kombol stands in front of the home he had built for his fiancée, Lulu Shircliffe, 1914.
On Tuesday, November 16, 1915, a blown fuse knocked out the hoisting machinery at Ravensdale No. 1. One hundred miners were sent home until the problem was fixed. Tony Kombol was one of them. Hours later, 31 men were killed by an explosion that destroyed the mine. It was the third-worst coal mining disaster in Washington state history. Many of the deceased miners were buried in the Ravensdale Cemetery, while others were sent back to the homes of their youth. The tragedy hit Ravensdale hard, and the townsfolk suffered. Merchants closed shops and miners left town seeking greener pastures. It isn’t clear what Tony and Lulu did with their home; they probably sold it cheaply. It survived and still stands at 27521 S.E. 271st Street in Ravensdale. The Kombols’ next two years would be hectic.
Shortly after the Nov. 16, 1915, explosion that claimed the lives of 31 coal miners and ended mining in Ravensdale for the next several years.
At the time of the tragedy, Lulu was three months pregnant with their first child. In late December 1915, Tony traveled to Ray, Arizona, with a fellow miner, Charley Canonica, where they found work in a copper mine. Several Ravensdale miners and their families followed. Lulu shipped their belongings a couple of months later. Bernell Kombol was born there on June 3, 1916.
After leaving Arizona, Tony found work in an Aberdeen, Washington, sawmill, while Lulu moved to Billings and joined her mother. That’s where their second child, Dana, was born. After rejoining the family in Montana, where he spent time working at the copper mine, Tony set off for Alaska, where business was booming. He was determined to make a small fortune or return. On his way north, Tony stopped off at Ravensdale to see William Reese, the Superintendent of the Northwestern Improvement Co.’s mines. A new mine, called Hiawatha, located halfway between Durham and Kangley, opened in 1917. Experienced coal miners were needed. Tony accepted the offer, and Lulu returned to Washington and found lodging in Durham, where their third child, Nola, was born.
Tony Kombol and his first son, Bernell, circa 1918.
As Tony labored building the new Hiawatha mine, NWI built cottages west of Kangley-Kanaskat Road to house their workforce. Some homes were transported by rail from Ravensdale, which hadn’t yet recovered from the disaster. Superintendent Reese was fond of the Kombol family and offered them one of the choicest homes, next door to him. Jack Kombol was born in that Hiawatha home, which still stands at 27723 Kanaskat-Kangley Road S.E.
The company needed that house back, so their fifth and final child, Nadine, was born in new quarters. Sometime later, William Reese made it possible for the Kombol family to return to the nicer home and secured a 100-year lease for them. They lived in that home until Tony died. Lulu remained several more years before moving in with Nola for her final season of life. There, she wrote a striking autobiography, a testament to her writing skills and a treasure for her family.
In the forests above Tony & Lulu’s longtime home on the Kanaskat-Kangley Road, their grandson, Bill Kombol, explores the artifacts and surface structures around the old Hiawatha mine, Nov. 28, 2023
NWI’s Hiawatha mine proved to be a colossal failure. The coal seam was subject to faulting, so production was frequently interrupted. Plus, higher wages being paid at the nearby Durham mine caused Hiawatha’s miners to hold out for wages of $15 – $20 per day, compared to the $8 daily rate paid at NWI’s mine in Roslyn. The Hiawatha mine temporarily shut down on November 1, 1920, then opened and closed on and off until its permanent closure in 1924.
For the measly amount of coal produced, Hiawatha had one of the worst records in the state, as measured by deaths per ton mined. Joseph Ripoli, an Italian, age 43, was instantly killed by a gas explosion on the evening of July 7, 1918. Ripoli left a widow and four children. Then on May 12, 1923, a Greek miner named John Panotos, age 42 and single, perished in the mine after a slab of coal fell from the chute, striking his head, and causing instant death.
While we don’t have Tony Kombol’s work records, he probably kept working through closures owing to his close relationship with Superintendent Reese. Even an inactive mine needs someone to run pumps to prevent flooding and start fans for ventilation. William R. Reese was appointed State Coal Mine Inspector in 1923 and left NWI. So did Tony Kombol.
In 1922, George Parkin and associates reopened the Kangley mine. A year earlier, they started mining in nearby Elk Coal. The new Kangley portal was on the Alta seam, but no shipments were made that first year. It isn’t known when Tony started work at the Parkin Kangley Coal Company. It was located less than a mile from his home. At the time, automobiles were a luxury, so most laborers lived within walking distance of work.
Life trundled along for the Kombols. Lulu stayed busy raising five children, all under the age of ten, while Tony labored underground. After more than a year of development work, the Parkin Kangley mine began shipping coal, just over 20,000 tons, in 1924. They employed 32 underground miners, while another four processed and sorted coal in the top works. The following year, production tripled to 64,000 tons, with 56 underground miners and twelve on the surface. The addition of so many new miners, many of whom spoke different languages, coupled with a push for higher yields, may have weakened safety protocols. We will never know.
The morning of Sunday, August 7, 1925, began like any other. Most mines operated seven days a week, so Sunday work wasn’t unexpected. It was a pleasant day with an expected high of 77°. Rain hadn’t fallen in over a month. I still haven’t found the accident report that documents exactly what happened and how. I did, however, by chance review an old envelope in Lulu’s collection of memorabilia, where I discovered the accident date, the coal company name, and the Washington Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) claim number 329482.
The Labor & Industries letter I discovered in an old envelope from Lulu’s collection of memorabilia.
But my attempts to find further evidence and information have thus far been stymied by arcane Department rules, communicated to me in a terse email dated June 20, 2024:
RE: Anton Kombol Records Request ID 154566
We have received your request for workers’ compensation claim records. However, Washington State law prohibits us from releasing confidential claim records to anyone who is without express written authorization from the injured worker or the employer of injury. At this time, the Department has to deny the request.
With Anton Kombol dead and the Parkin Kangley Coal Company closed over 98 years ago, I’m not exactly sure from whom I must seek written authorization. Right now, L & I have blocked me from seeing the file until I figure out an angle, or a kindly bureaucrat bends the rules. The search continues.
The only detailed description of the accident came during a September 2008 interview I conducted with Leo Gregorich, a close family friend and fellow Croatian. At the time, Leo was 96 years old, but sharp as a knife with a keen storytelling ability. My interview was fortuitous, as Leo Doran Gregorich Jr. died the following May.
Here’s how Leo described Tony’s Kombol debilitating accident:
“Tony told me about the accident. He was in the hospital for 30 days, but he was always confident that he would get his eyesight back. The accident happened when he was working in a coal mine. He was working in a ‘room’ of a ‘room and pillar’ mine. They were mining a ‘room’ in a pitched coal seam, in the crosscut. They were using dynamite. Tony has set some dynamite shots by lighting the fuses. The lit fuse burned at a set time per inch and would ignite a cap that caused the sticks of dynamite to explode.
When Tony set his shots, there were miners working in the next room, and they were shooting their dynamite shots at the same time. Tony set three shots to go off. He thought he heard his three shots go off and then returned to his working area (room) and was met by his last shot, which exploded near his face. Apparently, one of the three shots that he’d heard explode came from the miners in the next room.”
The explosion blinded Tony and permeated his face and hand with tiny specks of coal that in time became purple-colored blots. After several years, Dr. J. Thomas Dowling, an associate in the Virginia Mason Clinic, performed an operation that restored Tony’s eyesight so he could read and perform chores around the house. He was 40 years old. His second act lasted 41 years. As a side note, the clinic’s founder, James Tate Mason, was formerly Black Diamond’s company doctor. As King County Coroner, Mason also led the investigation into the 1915 Ravensdale explosion. Mason’s daughter was named Virginia, and that’s how the organization was named.
Ten months after the accident, Anton Kombol’s L & I claim was approved, and he was awarded a $40 monthly pension. The three older children, Bernell, Dana, and Nola, were each awarded $5 per month. Jack, at age 5, was given $7.50, and Nadine, age 3, received $12.50 per month, totaling $75 per month for the family of seven. The Kombols also received an immediate payment of $3,955 for Tony’s lost vision and partial hearing loss.
The Dept of Labor & Industries accident report and calculation of benefits under Claim No. 329482, for Anton Kombol, his wife, Lulu, and their five children, Bernell, Dana, Nola, Laverne (Jack), and Nadine.
The Kombol family’s troubles were not yet over. Two years after the accident, likely in 1927, when polio saw its worst outbreak since 1916, their second son, Jack, contracted the devastating disease. It landed him in bed for more than a year and kept him from attending school. At home, Tony cared for him, as Lulu taught during the school year.
Then, their second daughter, Nola, became a very nervous, tense, and active child. So much so that she developed fevers, which would last a week, and was bedridden. Lulu took her to a child specialist who advised, “Keep her away from other children as she wears herself out keeping up with them or excelling them.” A decision was made to send Nola to live with William Reese and his wife in the Mount Baker area of Seattle. Nola lived with the childless Reeses until about 1930, when Mr. Reese, still the State Coal Mine Inspector, died.
The first year after the accident, Lulu was hired as a teacher in Cumberland through the influence of a friend. It had been twelve years since teaching in Ravensdale. Lulu started teaching 3rd and 4th grade on September 3, 1926. She was paid $100 per month, or $1,200 for the school term. Lulu Kombol continued teaching full-time for another 40 years until 1965, the year she turned 80. She remained a substitute teacher several years thereafter.
In 1937, Mrs. Lulu Kombol was teaching grades 1 & 2 in Selleck.
Tony never again found gainful employment. He played an early version of a house husband, taking care of the animals and performing household chores. From my second to fifth birthdays, our family lived in Elk Coal, one-half mile from Grandma and Papa. Sometimes I’d be dropped off with Papa for babysitting. I remember following him during chores, napping in their bedroom, and Papa making me tomato soup for lunch.
Tony lived to the ripe old age of 82, spending the final weeks of his life with Jack and Pauline and their four children, to be closer to medical services in Enumclaw. Lulu survived him by ten years, passing away in January 1977, at age 91. They are buried together at the Enumclaw Cemetery near three of their children.
So, on this, the one hundredth anniversary of that fateful day, we salute brave Anton Kombol with a solemn adieu, farewell Papa, adieu.
“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever.” – Tom Stopppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
More than fifty years ago, two grandparents died on the same day. It was the last day of summer, and the first time anyone close to me had died.
A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar. – Leonard Lipton / Peter Yarrow
Released in Jan. 1963, Peter, Paul & Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” soon topped the charts.
I remember those first thoughts about dying. It was the spring of 1963 and I was nine years old. Grandma and Grandpa Morris lived in a large, white, country home west of Enumclaw on McHugh Street. The radio played in the background.
The number one song was “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter, Paul & Mary. It’s a children’s song wrapped in fabled lyrics released during the height of the folk era. I’d heard it before, but never fully absorbed this line: “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.” My tenth birthday would be in a month or so.
Grandma (Nina Marie Morris) was in the early stages of dementia which even a boy could recognize. She was easily confused. One day, Billy Hawthorne (the son of Grandma’s part-time caregiver) and I played a cruel trick on her by hiding in the closet. We watched her search for us in vain. After frantic calls we reappeared, only to see a vacant look of despair on her bewildered face. Mom explained she had hardening of the arteries, causing blood to flow slowly to her brain, meaning she couldn’t think as clearly as before. She was ill and wouldn’t get better. I felt bad about our trick.
Grandpa and Grandma – Jack and Marie Morris, a night on the town in San Francisco, 1959.
The song ended but a feeling lingered – I wouldn’t be a little boy much longer. Just like Jackie Paper, my imaginary dragons and toy soldiers would soon be gone. Those wistful feelings of melancholy floated in the wind like the down of a dandelion.
One evening that summer, I lay in bed. It was a Friday or Saturday night. Next to my bed was a cheap AM radio. Late at night, I spun the dial picking up a distant station in Salt Lake City and listened to the final innings of a baseball game.
It ended and the nightly news was read – “At 12:01 a.m., a convicted murderer on death row will be executed by firing squad. Growing tired I turned off the radio and saw a blindfolded prisoner led to a brick courtyard. The moment passed but the memory remained – a boy, the radio, a distant broadcast, the bleakness of death.
Bad posture, Billy at Grandma & Grandpa Morris home, Spring 1967.
In the 14th year of my life, the grim reaper appeared. It was 1967. Music defined my world and I delighted in its sounds. Newspapers called it the “summer of love.” For me it was a summer of friends, family, fun . . . and Sgt. Pepper. Each morning brought new sounds and adventures. The sun shone day after rainless day, for so long it set a record – 67 days without rain. The bluest skies you’d ever seen were in Seattle.
That September, I entered the final year of junior high as a 9th grader. Three weeks later that cozy world was disquieted by the death of two grandparents: Grandma Morris and Papa Kombol. On the same day, my father lost his father, and my mother lost her mother. In a way, this double death was a tonic for both parents. They told us kids of feeling like orphans, leaning on each other – weathering funerals and wakes, one after the other. September 21st was the last day of summer . . . and the autumn of my youth.
Papa Tony Kombol and Grandma Nina Marie Morris died on the same day.
Both grandparents were elderly: 82 and 77, yet important fixtures in life. Papa (Tony Kombol) babysat me when I was four and five. Mom dropped me off at their home near Elk Coal where I’d follow Papa doing chores, fixing lunch, then put me down for a nap. Legally blind from an August 7, 1925 coal mining accident, he stayed home while Grandma Lulu taught school in nearby Selleck. Needing to be near Enumclaw’s medical facilities, Papa stayed at our home the last few weeks of his life.
Grandma Morris was the first person I remember reading to me. We flipped through “Two Little Miners” so many times I could picture each page. I boarded an airplane for the first time in late June 1962, a Boeing 707, when she and Grandpa took me to San Francisco. We braved chilly Candlestick Park and watched my first major league baseball game. The Giants won the pennant that season.
When in San Francisco Grandpa always stayed at the Maurice, a businessman’s Hotel near Union Square where that day we had our shoes shined, July 1962.
We dined in the Starlight Room of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, celebrating great-aunt Ruth’s 75th birthday . . . and my 9th. I still have the menu dated July 3, 1962. Two weeks earlier, Tony Bennett released the song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
Great Aunt Ruth’s birthday was July 4th and mine July 5th, so Grandpa Morris took us to the restaurant at Sir Francis Drake Hotel. It was a fancy place with the date printed at the top of the menu. The waiter gave it to me as a souvenir.
In later years Grandma Morris was confined to the Bethesda Manor nursing home not far from our home, falling deeper into the darkness of dementia. Mom visited her daily, sometimes twice. She hired our neighbor, Wilma Boerlage to provide extra care. I’d go on occasion, but in time she no longer knew me.
Over the coming weeks, I began to imagine life without parents. It was the year Mom stopped tucking me in and saying nighttime prayers together. Alone in bed, save for a pink teddy bear won at the Puyallup Fair, I thought of the future. One day Mom and Dad will surely die, just like Grandma and Papa.
A profound sense of sorrow consumed me. Visualizing their deaths, I cried myself to sleep each night. I tried to figure a way out – what if they never died? Maybe I’d die first and be spared the heartache? Whatever scenario I concocted, the end was always the same – falling asleep to tears. The end of their lives and my childhood hung in the balance. But I knew not how nor when.
Unbeknownst to me, the thoughts of that 14-year-old boy were long ago known by Stoic philosophers. The anticipation of hardship softens its eventual blow. A Stoic prepares for the future by focusing on the worst possible outcome, a Latin principle called premeditation of adversity. Seneca advised his followers to rehearse ruinous scenarios “in your mind – exile, torture, war, shipwreck,” thereby robbing the future of its awful bite.
By morning, Mom woke me as I skipped downstairs to find a hearty breakfast on the kitchen table. Jean and I walked to the Junior High, a three-story, brick building four blocks away. There I roamed halls, diagrammed sentences, and played with friends after school.
Male tear ducts shrink as boys become men. It becomes more difficult for men to cry. Evolutionary psychologists can no doubt tell you why. My tears were gone in time.
Ninth grade led to new friendships and adventures. I turned out for basketball and made the greatest team ever. I raised tropical fish in an aquarium. At semester’s end, I earned my first perfect report card, all A’s. As a special treat, Dad took me to the Four Seasons in downtown Enumclaw for Chinese food. I felt pride in the glow of my father’s love.
Twelve years later, I wrote a poem and read it at his funeral. The lines recalled mournful feelings of those earlier times:
The last day we expected was the morning that we feared feared
the nights we cried so long ago have come to rest right here.
And so we’ll cry these tears of pain from sorrow we must store
the tears we have are tears we’ve cried a thousand times before.
Father and son, Jack Kombol and Bill, Lyon, France, Feb 1978, a year before he died.
In February 1968, Barry and I picked copper strands from piles of rocks and sticks at the Mine #11 wash plant in Black Diamond. The wire came from blasting caps used when dynamite dislodged coal at the Rogers #3 mine. Seven years later I’d work in that mine, learning just how those wires were used. Over several weekends we collected nearly a pickup load of coiled yellow wire, then burned off the plastic coating. Dad sold the copper for 40 cents a pound at the recycling yard. It was souvenir money for us four kids to use during our family’s forthcoming trip to Europe later that spring.
We missed the last few weeks of school. In Ireland, England, Wales, and the continent we saw historic sights, tasted new foods, and explored a world far removed from our own.
We also visited the embodiment of death – Dachau, the Jewish concentration camp near Munich. The visitor’s center displayed black and white photos of emaciated bodies, showing all manner of depravity.
Mom kept a journal of our trip so I know the day we visited Dachau – May 31, 1968.
The guide told of Jewish children with tattooed numbers on bony arms – herded from rail cars, not knowing their fate. We walked through the barracks, gas chambers, and crematoriums where thousands died at the hands of their Nazi henchmen. We saw death on an unimaginable scale. I’ve never forgotten that visit or the sign on the entrance gate: Arbeit macht frei. “Work sets you free.” Mom read its translation from Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day,
The sign on the gate as you enter Dachau – Work sets you free.
Three weeks after coming home, I turned 15. Four days later a boy I’d grown up with died. John Sherwood attended our Presbyterian church. His parents, Earl and Isabelle Sherwood were our youth group leaders and taught us Sunday school. John was a troubled lad who’d just flunked 10th grade.
On a warm summer evening in early July, John went to a party and guzzled 190-proof Everclear from a bottle. Mr. Sherwood found his son slumped over the front seat of their car just after midnight. The Enumclaw police never figured out who provided the bottle, though some teens in town surely knew.
He was the first contemporary I’d known who died. John was 16. The coroner’s jury attributed his death to “consuming excessive amounts of liquor furnished by a person or persons unknown.” The Courier-Herald ran articles linking his death to narcotic and alcohol abuse among local youth in 1968. Glue sniffing was a particular concern that year.
The following spring our Cascadian yearbook printed his photo in remembrance, followed by a short poem:
John Sherwood’s page in our high school yearbook.
He is not dead, this friend not dead,
But in the path we mortals tread
Got some few, trifling steps ahead
And nearer to the end;
So that you too, once past the bend,
Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend
You fancy dead.
Sporting a Nehru jacket on my first day of high school as a sophomore, Sept. 1968
When you’re young, five years is practically forever. “Puff the Magic Dragon” was a distant memory. Heading to high school in September new adventures emerged. I started a job as the Saturday boy at Palmer’s mine office in Black Diamond. I joined the chess team and found a new sport’s calling. By summer, I’d have a driver’s license plus two more jobs to fill my days. Papa and Grandma were fading memories.
As boyhood drew to a close, a young man began to emerge. My horizons broadened. Ahead of me lay many deaths . . . relatives, classmates, and loved ones. Those first tastes of mortality would always be with me, but childhood fears were fading. A new set of adolescent anxieties gripped me. I was growing up and my world was growing larger.
How many walks do you even remember? Walks to school as a child? Your walk at graduation? Strolling home from campus late at night? Walking down the aisle towards your life of marriage? The solemn pace of the pallbearer when that dear uncle passes?
Some of life’s most memorable moments are seemingly mundane. So it was with my walk in Wales in the spring of 1978. I was 24 years old and spending four weeks of my five-month pilgrimage to Europe, living with a friend in a tiny village in western Wales. Scott Hamilton was in the service, stationed at a nearby U.S. Naval base. Scott was something of a loner and rented a stone cottage far off the beaten path. He lived there with his English sheepdog named Gretchen.
Scott Hamilton fixing his antenna that picked up short wave radio station, with Gretchen, the English sheepdog at his side.
Middle Mille was no more than six homes and an abandoned mill. A small creek that once powered the mills flowed through the town. Remnant water wheels of rotting wood and rusting iron dotted a maze of surviving channels and canals. A portion of the old woolen mill had been converted into a home.
Middle Mille, Wales, April 1978. The old mill is to the left and Scott’s stone cottage is center. The stream is seen below.
A family lived there with two young boys, perhaps five and seven. Most days, I was at loose ends so made the acquaintance of their mother. She was in her thirties and glad for the company in this isolated place. On occasion, I’d share a cup of tea with Mrs. King. The King family traded woolen goods from their storefront, which doubled as the front room of their rambling stone house.
The King boys (whose names I’ve forgotten) were game for an adventure, so one day, with their mom’s approval, I proposed a stroll up the creek as far as we might go. It was a typical spring day in western Wales with light breezes and sunlight broken by passing clouds. The valley was mostly unkempt fields and broken-down fences. It was a vestige of Wales that time and prosperity left behind. Without a plan, map, or lunch, we began our trek with the creek as our guide. We hopped fences as necessary and crossed stone bridges where sheep once roamed. The stream grew smaller as we pressed further up the valley.
The King boys reveled in discoveries and played imaginary games, while my mind drifted back to a childhood hike some two decades before. The summer of my fifth year, we climbed the mountain just east of my grandparents’ house. They lived in what was left of a coal mining outpost once called Hiawatha. Only three homes remained, identical miners’ cottages on the Kanaskat-Kangley Road. My dad was born in the middle house 35 years earlier. The St. Clairs lived next door. My climbing partners were Barry, age seven, and Billy and Dickie St. Clair, ages nine and ten.
The Kombol kids the summer Barry and I climbed the mountain: Billy, Jean, Danica, and Barry at our home in Elk Coal, August 1958.
We crossed over the old railroad tracks and followed a creek up the forested hillside. Our first stop was a primitive dam where Pa Kombol maintained the water system, which fed the three homes. We played near the pooled reservoir, then continued our climb through dense stands of fir, hemlock, and cedar covered with moss. There was a trail of sorts, but the path was steep. Determined as only the youngest really knows, I struggled to keep up yet never admitted weakness.
The creek became a trickle, but we climbed still higher. When the creek was no more, we determined the summit had been reached. A view appeared within a narrow clearing. The sun shone down upon us, which added to our sense of glory. To memorialize the accomplishment, a knife was produced from which shirt buttons and shards of cloth were cut. We attached these badges to the stump of a fallen tree. The four of us stood in solemn camaraderie. Our sacrificed tokens echoed a hope that one day we’d return to find proof of the ascent and reclaim our hidden treasures. Little did I realize that future treasures would one day be found in memories.
Exploring the graveyard with the King boys in Middle Mille, Wales.
Back in Wales, I pondered, “Might these boys one day experience a similar feeling?” Several hours into our hike, the creek forked. Neither branch provided sufficient flow to keep our interest. Clouds gathered behind us, and it was time to head home.
We left the valley floor, climbing the upper ridge. A trail led us back to the village. By the time we reached Middle Mille, we’d rambled maybe five or six miles. I deposited the boys with their mother, with promises to explore again. The King boys and I undertook several more adventures during my stay. We examined a nearby church and graveyard. We found an old water wheel where I tried coaching the older lad to snap my photo. He fumbled with the camera, asking, “Which button do I push?” As I leaned forward, the shutter clicked.
Bill Kombol, 1978, in his trusted pea coat, at an old wooden wheel in Middle Mille, Wales. Photo by one of the King boys.
My time in Wales was coming to an end. There was only so much to learn in Middle Mille. My visits to the nearby market town of Haverfordwest began to grow stale. London was calling, but I yearned for a piece of this green valley to take home. Mrs. King helped me choose a Welsh-made woolen blanket. It cost a pretty penny, and I shipped it home in time for Mother’s Day. Both of my Mom’s parents were children of Welsh immigrants, making her almost pure Welsh. When she died, the red plaid blanket came back to me. It reminds me of my walk in Wales.
The Welsh blanket given to Pauline Kombol for Mother’s Day 1978, and returned to her son after her death in 2011.
In October 2015, after visiting our son Oliver at Cardiff University, Jennifer and I spent a night in Haverfordwest before boarding a ferry to Ireland. We drove along a narrow path barely wide enough for our car to reach Middle Mille. I wanted to show her the place I’d stayed 37 years earlier.
There were a few new buildings, but the village was mostly unchanged. Scott’s stone cottage looked the same. The old mill complex still sold woolen goods. The Solva Woollen Mill is now the oldest working wool mill in Pembrokeshire – one of only two remaining in the county. We wandered about the grounds. Jennifer snapped my picture standing beside a restored water wheel. We hadn’t time for a walk, for there was a ferry to catch.
I found myself back in Middle Mille, 37 years later standing by a water wheel where the King boy once snapped my photo.
A child listens while pages turn. He studies pictures as literacy begins on his mother’s knee. He was three or four years old. It wasn’t the first book read to him, for that happened well before memory. And it wouldn’t be the last. For little did he know that as he grew older, books would grow with him.
As for children’s books, I wasn’t fond of Br’er Rabbit stories, they didn’t make sense. “Hansel and Gretel” rather frightened me—children left in a forest only to fall prey to the hands of a wretched old woman. And really, Hansel, didn’t it occur that breadcrumbs trailed behind might get eaten? “Three Little Pigs” seemed too obvious on successive readings, but we read on. I admired Goldilocks’ insistence on getting things justright. She did after all get her fill of porridge, took a nap, and escaped unharmed. “Old Mother Hubbard,” “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” were all fun stories to hear.
But the book I loved best was Two Little Miners. It spoke to me—most likely since both grandfathers were coal miners, as were a bunch of uncles. And so was Dad. He operated mobile equipment, like bulldozers, shovels, and loaders outside the mines. On special occasions, Mom packed an extra lunch bucket when I went to work with him. If the day was nice, I played in freshly bulldozed dirt. If it rained, I stayed in his pickup watching droplets become streams that wiggled down the windshield.
We lived in the remnant of a forgotten town called Elk Coal. Most pronounced it El-ko. Elk Coal, you ask? It’s located halfway between Kanaskat and Kangley, pressed against the foothills of the Cascades. The coal mine for which the town was named closed in 1953, the year I was born. The shabby village fell further from grace when miners left. Our family moved there from Selleck, one week before my first birthday. The next day my sister, Jeanmarie, was born. They called us Irish twins.
My earliest childhood memories belong to Elk Coal. Further north was Hiawatha, where Dad was born in the same house where his parents still lived. Sometimes my grandfather, Tony Kombol, babysat me. An errant dynamite coal mine blast 30 years prior left him nearly blind with a face freckled purple from embedded coal dust. Grandma Lulu taught school in nearby Selleck. She was Barry’s first-grade teacher and beloved by every school kid she taught.
Our home was a stone’s throw from Durham, where Mom was raised. It was once a company town. Many of its residents were her uncles who worked in the coal mines, and aunts who performed the many mundane chores that make a small town livable.
Her Uncle Jonas and Aunt Maggie managed the large brick building called the Durham hotel. It was really a boarding house for single miners. Twenty or more homes, built in rows along the hillside, housed most of Durham’s 70 to 80 residents. Some even worked at the Elk Coal mines across the street.
Durham was fully deserted by the 1950s, but Elk Coal, situated on a county road, survived. Durham’s impressive coal slag piles still dominated the landscape. Its crumbling company houses were a source of lumber salvaged by Dad. After he disassembled boards in the driveway, we scoured the gravel with horseshoe magnets picking up rusty nails.
Our Elk Coal home still stands at 28603 Kanaskat-Kangley Road (April 1940 King County Assessor photo).
We lived in a four-room home my folks bought from Benj Whitehouse in late June 1954. He’d been a coal miner in nearby Durham. He built the house in 1930. Its two bedrooms, one bath, and two porches spanned 952 square feet, and cost my folks $3,000. Our yard bordered scrub woodlands on one side and a rundown farm on the other. That’s where Anne Pearson, our babysitter, lived.
Rare was the day when kids our age visited, as none lived in Elk Coal. Sometimes cousins would drop by, or maybe the Kahne boys—for their mother, Pat Hunt, had grown up nearby. Two older kids, Billy and Dickie St. Clair, occasionally came by. They lived next door to my Kombol grandparents half a mile up the road. When Barry started school, Jeanmarie and I, a year and a day apart, became fast friends.
Two hundred feet south of our home lay the Elk Coal gas station and grocery. It was a tiny clue this village was once something more than a name. Aileen (Pearson) Gregovich ran the store which served ice cream cones, had a penny candy counter, and carried basic canned and dry grocery goods. Behind the cash register, one caught glimpse of a bedroom filled with musical instruments. A decade later, I learned the young man who studied music in that room was Aileen’s son, Bob Estby, Enumclaw’s choir director. He too was a product of Selleck and Elk Coal.
The Elk Coal store and gas station. Our home was 200 yards beyond.
In my sophomore year at Enumclaw High, a chess team was established with Mr. Estby as coach. Curiously, he didn’t play chess. Practice was hosted in his classroom each day after school. Every few weeks, he drove our five-boy team to matches played throughout the region. For three years Bob was my mentor and coach. Amazingly, he kept our chess team’s trophies for 40 years after we left school. When Mr. Estby passed away, his daughter gave me those trophies.
The secluded nature of Elk Coal made for limited social lives. The store was the brightest star on the horizon and a two-minute walk from home. With pennies found atop the dryer, Jeanmarie and I walked there for candy. We envied older kids who bought soda pop with nickels. In that innocent time, Mom didn’t mind her three and four-year-olds, pennies in hand, wandering about unattended. We napped together in separate cribs, those of a wooden-slat, jail-bar-style of the 1950s. When one awoke, we’d call across the tiny room to the other. Soon we were chattering about. Best of friends we were, for Barry was at school and Dana not yet born.
By May 1958,Jeanmarie (left) and I were too big for the old crib, as by now it belonged to Dana (right).
In the era before preschool, Jeanmarie and I played on our backyard swing set, hoping for visitors. We sometimes saw an aunt or grandmother. Desperate for excitement one day I hid on the back seat floorboard of Aunt Nola’s sedan after she visited with Mom. I figured she was headed to Grandma’s and therein lay my escape. Instead, she drove the opposite direction to Mariani’s Goat Ranch. Nola parked and went to buy eggs and visit. I emerged from her car surprised we weren’t at Grandma’s, so drifted down the road with a vague idea of waking home. I was picked by an adult who recognized me and promptly delivered me the mile and a half back to Mom. It was that kind of place.
A typical King County bookmobile, or mobile library during the 1950s. Patrons entered on the side and exited the rear.
Each month a novel source of entertainment arrived. That’s when the King County mobile library made its round to our secluded hamlet. The Bookmobile parked on the gravel strip across from our house where the road was widest. Stepping anxiously through the side door, one entered a bus filled with books, any of which you could pick up and take home. With Mom or Grandma in tow, we examined colorful covers then checked out volumes at the rear exit. Upon its returned, we exchanged our previous cache for new selections. Once checked out, Two Little Miners through purchase or gift became part of our family’s library.
The Little Golden Book had a thin hard binding. Its child-sized pages were treasured art to these young eyes. The story by Margaret Wise Brown with pictures by Richard Scarry was published in 1949. Earlier books like, Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny had a rhythm and style. Nearly 70 years after Brown’s tragic death at age 42, they still sold by the thousands.
The copy I bought online more than five decades after it was first read to me.
Two Little Miners was Richard Scarry’s first illustration. In subsequent years he wrote or drew more than 300 stories. His sales eventually soared to several hundred million copies worldwide. Typical of Scarry’s drawings was their emphasis on action with precise detail in depicting everyday life. Two Little Miners tells the tale of coal miners and their hard work underground. The story’s happy ending was reason enough to have it read again and again. Memories of the book are warmly juxtaposed with Sunday evenings watching the Wonderful World of Disney in our cozy living room.
We moved to Enumclaw in December 1958. Kindergarten wasn’t available in Elk Coal, so I joined Mrs. Todnam’s class in January, halfway through the school year. Many of the classmates I met that first day of school graduated with me twelve years later.
Mrs. Todnam’s kindergarten class photo on a spring day, 1959.
Enumclaw was The Land of Oz compared to Elk Coal. My eyes were opened and the world brightened. We’d left the dreary sticks and arrived in a real town. Our neighborhood had stately churches with steeples that reached towards the sky. Paved streets, grass medians, and concrete sidewalks outlined blocks of well-kept homes. Front yards boasted rhododendrons with flowers that bloomed in spring. A thriving downtown with stores, cafes, and a movie theater was but a five-minute walk from home.
Kids were everywhere—at school, in back yards, and throughout the neighborhood. Our isolated existence in Elk Coal faded in memory. Enumclaw became my town and playing with kids my passion.
While Mom still read books to us at bedtime, my interests stretched well beyond fairy tales on printed pages. There was football to be played and baseballs to be thrown; skates to be rolled and bicycles to ride. There were streets to walk and alleys to explore. But mostly there were boys everywhere.
Jeanmarie was crushed when I dumped her for their companionship. Oh, we still bathed together on Saturday night and stayed inside on rainy days playing board games or listening to records. But once I stepped outside the backdoor my focus changed. No longer was Jeannie my best friend and faithful companion with whom we would one day live together like two little miners. My world was now all about messing around with other boys. In some ways, I’m not entirely convinced she ever fully forgave me.
My walk to the clean brick school building was five blocks away. At Byron Kibler Elementary we were taught to read under the “see Dick run – look, Jane, look” method. It’s called sight-reading and its efficacy I’ll leave to others. For me it was agonizingly slow, but apparently did the trick for learn to read I did.
Billy and Barry walk to Kibler school, May 1960.
There was even a modern library four blocks from our Franklin Street home. Alas, it was largely ignored as sporting fields beckoned. Though I had a library card and could search index cards to find books, my dreams of being shortstop for the Detroit Tigers fixed reading firmly on the back burner. However, reading the newspaper’s sports section and baseball box scores advanced my skills substantially. Comic books, particularly the Archie and the Superman series became my primary sources of literature outside of school.
It wasn’t until junior high—when paperbacks like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Mysterious Island captured my imagination—that I was first drawn to printed pages without pictures or batting averages. I also became an avid reader of magazines starting with Boys Life, migrating through MAD to Sports Illustrated, before graduating to Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Mom’s purchase of a complete, multi-volume, Collier’s Encyclopedia provided free reign for our inquisitive spirits. It also made school reports much easier to complete, with fewer trips to the library.
More advanced volumes like All Quiet on the Western Front and Hiroshima followed. High school introduced captivating novels like A Separate Peace, The Catcher in the Rye, plus Lord of the Flies, 1984, and several others.
I’ll be forever thankful to our senior English teacher, Bill Hawk. That spring semester, he recited the entirety of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet out loud to our class. It was almost like being back on Mom’s knee. College years were consumed with textbooks and assigned readings, so pleasure reading faded. After graduation, the works of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Maugham, and Austen beckoned. Eventually, my reading tastes evolved towards nonfiction particularly history, biography, politics, and culture.
Mr. Bill Hawk (left) – his casual style and collegial manner inspired a love for literature, EHS spring 1971.
Decades passed, I married, and we raised three boys of our own. Stories at bedtime became an evening ritual. New children’s books were bought. Some of the old folk and fairy tale books were recycled from Mom to me.
One day I found our old, crayon-riddled, torn copy of Two Little Miners. Foggy memories sifted back. The old copy was beyond redemption, but the rise of online book-buying made finding a replacement a cinch. The used copy arrived. Fingering its worn pages released unexpected emotions. The story endured: two little miners black as coal, scrubbed clean in wooden bathtubs, sit down to dinner. Arising the next morning their lives of mining coal are told in exquisite detail, concluding with baths and supper on the table. Though most pages were black and white, the ones in color are striking.
It’s funny how childhood memories seize the mind of a fully grown man. My thoughts turned to Elk Coal. I toured the world’s vast web seeking evidence to confirm youthful recollections. ‘Elk Coal’ was typed in the Google search box and up popped … nothing! I tried Elko and Elco—still zilch. I scoured all manner of keywords generating little better than Elk Plains, Elk River, or Big Elk. There were no links that even mentioned Elk Coal, Washington. It seemed like an important part of my childhood didn’t exist outside of memories.
“If it isn’t digital it didn’t happen,” is a fashionable view of today’s world. Following the French Revolution, a dramatist attributed to Napoleon the slogan, “If you want something done, do it yourself.” I felt the same way.
How could the curious people of Planet Earth enjoy full and fruitful lives knowing nothing of Elk Coal’s heritage? Being an amateur historian, the answer was easy—I’d write its history. Like any coal miner, I dug deep underground, excavated newspaper stories, and unearthed ancient mine reports. I was in the fortunate position of having access to source documents allowing the narrative to be told. I submitted “Elk Coal: Forgotten Coal Mining Town,” to HistoryLink.org where it was published in May 2010. Today, if you query Google regarding Elk Coal, several references now populate the list.
The link below tells the story of that faded outpost where four of my first five years were lived. For me it’s the place where literacy began … in Elk Coal with Two Little Miners.
Billy, the three-year-old future author, gazes intently at the camera, while Jeanmarie climbs and Barry swings, as Sugarloaf Mountain looms in the distance, July 1956.
“Our being in this world is not accidental. We all have a mission to do some special work, and it is work that will honor Him and bless those around us. If we do not find that work and do it, our life is a failure; the true end of living is not realized. We may not learn in a moment; but step-by-step, day by day, as we go on things will be made clearer. Those who do the smallest things well because they are God’s plan, are to be honored far above those who do great things for the world’s praise.” – Nancy Matilda Hembree (1837-1922)
Nancy Matilda (Hembree) Snow (1837-1922)
Thus spoke Pauline’s great-grandmother, Nancy Matilda (Hembree) Snow decades before my Mother was conceived. Pauline Lucile Morris was born to John Henry and Nina Marie, both had the last name Morris. She was as Welsh as one could be. Her father was a coal miner and her mother a school teacher. Both her grandfathers and great-grandfathers worked in the coal industry. Her great-grandmother, Nancy was a pioneer of the 1843 Oregon Trail.
Pauline grew up in the coal mining town of Durham surrounded by an extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins most of whom worked in or around the mines. Her family moved to Enumclaw when she was six, first to a hop farm in Osceola and later a home above Newaukum Creek. At school she made life-long friends many of whom are here today. She edited the school newspaper and annual, graduating from Enumclaw in 1945, just as World War II ended. Her obituary claims she briefly attended the University of Washington. The truth . . . for about 15 minutes.
Pauline Morris, left with Shirley Stergion in front of Enumclaw High School, circa 1944.
After a short stint in Seattle, she landed back home working at the Palmer Coking Coal mine office at Four Corners. There she pumped gas and helped with bookkeeping. In 1950, she and Jack Kombol eloped to California and married. Eventually the couple made their way back to Selleck, where Barry, Jeannie and I first lived, and then to Elk Coal where Dana was born, just a quarter mile from the Durham of Mom’s childhood.
Mom had six life-changing experiences: Barry, Billy, Jeannie and Dana; but two others I’d like to tell you about. Her second baby, a daughter Paula Jean died two days after birth. Mom used to say that after the loss of that baby, she loved the rest of us so very much, so that she would never lose another child. One day years later, Jeannie and I rambunctiously raced around the living room, and Mother’s prized china cup collection crashed to the floor shattering every piece. Despite her initial sadness, Mom decided then and there that she would never value any possession more than the people in her life.
Pauline holding her second son, who 58 years later read this eulogy at her funeral, Sept. 1953.
Our family moved to Enumclaw in 1958. There Pauline joined civic life as a den mother, Camp Fire leader, election-day poll worker, raising money for the March of Dimes, helping elderly aunts, and later caring for her own mother. There she ran the home – baking cookies, canning homemade jam, making pies – always from scratch and never with a recipe or measured ingredients. Menus were traditional and set: Friday – fish or tuna noodle casserole; Saturday – hamburgers; Sunday – fried chicken or pot roast; Monday – meat loaf, and so on. We never had soda pop or potato chips, but did enjoy Kool-aid and homemade frozen popsicles. Each summer we took vacations with the Cerne’s to Grayland and Hoods Canal – I later learned that we stayed at the same Beacon Point cabins where her family vacationed when she was young.
One of the big events of our lives was the family trip to Europe in 1968. Mom researched and found our Welsh and Croatian relatives and planned our journey through ten countries in six weeks. Using her dog-eared copy of Europe on $10 a Day, Mom found cheap pensions and small family-run hotels to fit her tight budget. Jack drove us across Europe in a small station-wagon jammed with six people and 13 suitcases. We played Hearts in the backseat and listened to Radio Luxemburg with Danica stuffed back amongst the luggage.
The Kombol family portrait, 1967.
In later years we spent our summers at Lake Sawyer where Dad built a cabin. During one particularly inebriated summer party, Mom earned the nickname ‘Carrie Nation’ when she raced around the cabin pouring out booze and opening the tap of the keg refrigerator watching cold beer spill to the ground.
In early 1979 Jack was diagnosed with cancer and passed away within 3 weeks. A night before he died, he called me to his bedside and said, “I want you to take care of your mother.” Since the girls were away and Barry was married with a growing family, the primary duty of caring for Mom fell to me. So, I frequented her home where she cooked me delicious dinners. And, made sure I brought my laundry so she could wash it. And, she hemmed my pants and sewed buttons on my shirts; and, always sent me home with casseroles, lentil soup, and blackberry pies. It seemed the more I tried taking care of Mom, the more she took care of me. And who could ever forget the summer Keith Timm Jr. moved in with Mom and me. Then there were two of us . . . “to take care” of Mom.
Pauline and her three siblings, Evan Morris, Betty Falk, and Jack Morris, June 18, 1977.
During the early years after Dad’s death, she kept herself busy on the Enumclaw School Board and as a Director of Cascade Security Bank. But like a caterpillar, she spun her cocoon waiting to find the wings of the butterfly she became. And that she did. I can’t claim credit for pushing her out of the nest – I was too busy “taking care of her.” But off she flew – first to Seattle where she bought a condo and found friends through extension classes and her beloved movie group. More grandchildren were born and off she went to care for them. She enjoyed traveling and over the years took trips to Russia, China, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere. She loved her time in Lincoln City, and eventually spent her winters, first in Palm Springs and later Scottsdale.
Coal Miners’ Daughters: with Loretta Lynn at Sesame Street studios, circa 1983.
Around the turn of the century, a wonderful gentleman entered into Mom’s life. His name was Cal Bashaw. He was a widower born the same year as my Dad. Mom and Cal had known each other from their days as bank directors. Well, I have to admit that Cal and I have radically different styles. When he started to “take care of” Mom; he did things like always helping her with her coat; opening doors; helping with her chair, fixing things around the house, running errands, taking her out to dinner, and always being there to care for her needs. It seemed the more we were around Cal, the more my own lovely wife began pointing out all of Cal’s far-too-many good traits. I started hearing things like, “Why can’t you be more like Cal?” Basically, Cal’s caring manner made my previous efforts to “take care of” Mom look fairly absurd.
Cal Bashaw, Pauline, and grandson Henry Kombol, Christmas 2004.
But truly, Mom and Cal had a wonderful ten years together. And if only more people were like Cal, and like Mom, the world would be a far better place.
So, I come to the end, but also the beginning: the beginning of our lives without Pauline, without her sunshine.
Still, her light still shines – a small, bright star to guide me – to guide me through the darkness and back to life. So until that day when my light joins hers, I will rest easily, knowing that Pauline led a good life; a life worth living; a life which blessed those around her; a life of small things done well – done not for the world’s praise; but done through an honored existence, dedicated to her friends and to her family, and lived according to God’s plan.
Pauline Morris, graduation photo – Enumclaw Class of 1945.
And, if she were here today . . . I’ll let you complete the thought.
