Dave Watson
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Dave and Susann #1 Dave and Susann #2
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Jane Olive (JO): Introduction – Testing. We are located at 3801 75th Ave Ct NW; Gig Harbor, WA 98335 Artondale. March 29th, 2019 Dave Watson is being interviewed for his work with Pep-C and the interviewer is Jane Olive
JO: Dave, when were you born?
DW: 1942, 21st of August. I remember it well.
JO: Place of birth?
DW: Seattle
JO: Have you lived most of your life in this area?
DW: Washington. I was away in the navy.
JO: You’re married. You’re wife’s name?
DW: Susann.
JO: Kids?
DW: We have three kids. They’re all in the area.
JO: And how many grandkids?
DW: I have ten right now and two great grandbabies.
JO: You smile great big when you talk about those. They must be darling. So, occupations…when were you in the navy?
DW: In the early sixties. Four years. On a ship for most of that time. My navy experience was school and on an aircraft carrier, USS Hornet in the Pacific. 4 years, I was in the Navy Nuclear Weapons Program which included handling, arming, maintenance, repair of many types of nuclear weapons. I had and have a TS clearance.
JO: Those were the Kennedy years.
DW: Kennedy was killed when I was in Japan.
JO: Were you involved at all in the Cuban blockade?
DW: Yes. I was in the Pacific. When the Cuban thing happened, I was in nuclear weapons and we went to DEFCON 3. We armed two of them. One on a plane and one on the hanger deck.
JO: Scary!
DW: Yep. We had radio silence for ten days. Went up off the Russian coast. Yeah, that was not fun.
JO: Have you ever seen the movie, Thirteen Days? What did you think of it?
DW: When you’re out there doing it, you don’t hear all the stuff. We didn’t know any of the details of this thing going on. No one talked to each other; to your people back home.
JO: After you got out of the navy?
DW: I went to college. Ended up teaching. Went to Seattle Pacific College. I graduated with two degrees. I worked at Boeing while I was going to college; at the calibration lab at Federal Boeing Field for flight tests, doing all the instruments they were doing.
I was raised at the campus there. I lived in a dorm. My dad was a professor there. He was Dean of Education and Dean of Math. My grandfather was the President.
JO: Wow! So education was your heritage.
DW: Yeah, it was.
JO: You said you have two degrees.
DW: Yes. I have a bachelors and a masters. Then I worked at Renton and got laid off. The tax thing. You know about that? The state was going to tax Boeing on the planes they had on hand on one day of the year. So, Boeing was not stupid; they flew all the planes out of state. Then the district lost all of us. They laid off all the first year teachers and half the second year teachers. Anyway, I was fired.
JO: And what did you teach?
DW: I was elementary. I taught sixth grade. Well, I came to the Peninsula District after that. I worked at several schools, and taught third grade, fifth grade, fourth grade, sixth grade. And then I became a principal. I started at Evergreen, half-time teacher, half-time principal. Then I moved to Artondale. I was there eighteen years. Tore it down, built a new one, and now they want to tear it down again. I’m not sure why. I don’t think they know all the facts.
And then I joined the fire department here as a volunteer. That was at the Arletta Station when we lived there. Then we moved to North Rosedale so I was at the Rosedale Station. Then they built the new one and I was at the Swede Hill Station. I was a captain, an EMT, for twenty-six years. Lot of aid calls; I was in most of the homes here in those days for various reasons. I used to go across and get the firetruck and go on fire calls when I was at school. My superintendent said it was OK.
JO: Well, that’s life in a small town.
DW: It was then. Not so much now.
JO: I’m going to stop it and make sure we’re getting good sound…OK. Any hobbies and interests?
DW: We have a cabin. We like to go in the woods. This is at Black Diamond. Neared the mountains. Near the Green River Gorge. Been all over that area. And we RV, and we dance.
JO: What kind of dance?
DW: We like to waltz, polka, things like that.
JO: Could you give me a year when you actually came to Gig Harbor.
DW: Came in ‘78 to have a house, but we came before that, we rented. I was trying to get a job somewhere else, so we moved to Enumclaw for two years. In 76 and 79.
JO: Would you spell that for me. I’m new up here.
DW: E-n-u-m-c-l-a-w. I was their first EMT in that department. They had no idea what to do with me.
JO: And what is an EMT?
DW: Emergency Medical Technician. I was in the first class here in Gig Harbor. That’s when Medic One started in Seattle, and it kind of spread out into the hinterlands. We had a class of about twenty-five of us. And that was the first time we had aid service to the citizens, other than an ambulance.
JO: There wasn’t a hospital here.
DW: No. Years ago there was…a little tiny one. That was down in the Harbor. It was long gone when I came. Yeah, it was a long way to the hospital. Long way. I figure I’ve done roughly five hundred car wrecks and thousands of aid calls over the years.
JO: How did you get interested in the Emergency medic work?
DW: A friend of ours wanted me to be in the fire department when I was in Arletta. So I joined up.
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JO: Well, that was quite a career in itself!
DW: I loved the medical part. There haven’t been many fires here. As we grew, the homes, they don’t burn as many. But I don’t like the junk in Olympia. Paper. Paper requirements and constant fiddling. The fire department’s great. It’s a really good fire department.
JO: Well, I was a school teacher too. Primary grades, special education. I always thought the administrators’ job was to think up more paper work for us to do; as if we weren’t busy enough!
JO: When did you become involved in Pep-C.
DW: Pep-C didn’t exist. Some of us were concerned about – well, it started out with earthquakes. We took some FEMA classes here locally, in various places. I started in about ’74 learning things and then we started some dialogue. When we first started we had an ex DEA agent, I can’t remember his name. He started getting the whole shebang about getting the departments together.
JO: What is the DEA?
DW: What is it? The Drug Enforcement Administration. He was a drug agent. I don’t remember his name and he was transferred to Louisiana or someplace. This was before Don was involved. We had a retired Navy captain, Ray Zimmerman, a wonderful man; and absolutely marvelous guy. We got all the agencies together, the schools, the power, the phones, the police and the fire with two departments on the two peninsulas. We actually had the state patrol there for a while but they’re so shorthanded, that disappeared. Once the city was a city, we had them. We had Gretchen Wilbert for years. She was the mayor. She used to teach kindergarten for me. And when she retired she went into politics. She was a feisty little gal. She was a nice lady. She’s passed away now.
We had a lot of, as the membership grew, we tried to involve the community so we had a lot of military who took leadership in their neighborhoods and they would join, but of course, they’ve all joined the big gate in the sky by now.
JO: Well, this sounds to me like, when the town was smaller, I may be jumping the gun here, but it sounds like neighbors knew each other and so you could get together and talk about it.
DW: It’s much denser now. Our problem at that time, we were teaching, this is before PC-NET. We would go out to neighborhoods. The hardest thing to do at that time was defining a neighborhood. Everybody thinks like a town now, but then it wasn’t like that at all. Your nearest neighbor might be a quarter-mile away on the peninsula. It used to be that way here. This used to all be bare land.
JO: It may be that people chose to live in isolation. So they didn’t really want to be cozy.
DW: They don’t have any choice now. The land is disappearing. Gig Harbor High School was to be about here on the other side of 40th. It was beautiful timberland. They made a deal to move it to where it is now because of sewers. So that eliminated that problem for them. It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous site. It would have had a middle school with it too. It was that big. Now it’s all homes.
We had uh, I know where you’re going with the question, I think. Stop me if you want. Anyway, we did OK. We did strategic plans, emergency plans for the county. We were working in concert with the county before they really had the Department of Emergency Management. And then it sort of evolved as the need grew. I was sent to FEMA Academy by the district and then I was co-sent at another time by the school district and I was also sent by the fire department for a different class.
Pep-C; we had a lot of retired engineers on board. They were joining. We started planning for the schools. We did an assessment. We had structural engineers as members or we drafted some. We did all the schools that existed at that time. Did a needs assessment, and then we formed teams. We went into the schools on the weekends; bolted, moved, strapped down, screwed to the floor. The schools were built different then. They didn’t have any idea of escape and things like they do now. And the new codes after 1998 helped a lot. Anyway, we did all the schools. High schools were more difficult because the assumption was that they’d get out of there; get in their cars and run and try to get home. Little kids, you have to keep them in tow.
JO: In Hugh’s mind, you headed this up. He thinks it was a marvelous work that you did.
DW: After that, I was part of the district, of course, doing this stuff for the district…
JO: Is Ray Zimmerman still involved?
DW: No. We don’t know if he’s passed away. He wanted to be with his children who are all military and they’re living south. He was in a motor home and finally they abandoned ship. I was so sad to see him go. He was a peach of a guy.
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We did kits in all the schools. The district paid for it. We involved the prison. We had all the medical guys, we had ER doctors and nurses, kind of get together, and our district nurses and the fire department and they said, “What do we need when the building falls down?” So we built kits out big plastic tubs like Tupperware. No, Rubbermaid. Anyway, we had a certain size kit; like a high school would have five kits, middle school would have three, and a big elementary school would have three. We’d get all this stuff together at a school, Artondale I think, yes, it was Artondale. We got prisoners and they came and they put all these kits together. And, we had an escape. One escaped. They let these people talk to their friends. Well, they knew they were coming and they went. Anyway, we made kits and put them out all in all the schools. We had lights, and whistles, and space blankets. We tried to get one space blanket for every two kids, but it was kind of being squished. Always is. Anyway, every school had things they could get by with.
That started the barrel program. Pep-C got into that to make money. We used to sell space blankets, but we could not with…well, of course, now it’s all online. That was before the internet. We didn’t want to go into competition with our local merchants so we always would discuss that before we had any kind of promotion thing. Ace Hardware had our back all the time. Later, Costco. Home Depot. That was the early years. Of course, they weren’t around; it was all woods. That was deer country.
JO: So, when Pep-C formed, were you the first president?
DW: No. No. The DEA guy was. I don’t remember what they called him. I took over after Ray went south and I got all his stuff, all his maps and earthquake scare tactics that we would do with the community. That was…I was president…I don’t know, twenty years.
JO: When did you start being president?
DW: I don’t know. Seems nonstop. I couldn’t do it anymore. You know what I didn’t like? I didn’t like getting the agenda together and all that stuff. And I honestly (I don’t know if you want to say this), I was getting discouraged by the attendance withering down. In early times, we had everybody there. I mean it was a big meeting, fifty people. And these were all agency heads and civilians. Well, you know, they are so short on time, we started losing them. Pierce Co. roads were the first to leave. They were just up against it all the time. They couldn’t meet monthly. They would come once in a while. Then we lost State Patrol because they kept reassigning the staff and they were leaner and leaner and leaner, for a while out here anyway. We got along great with them. The Sherriff would come and go. We had Sargent Hooperholtz. He lives over here. I had his daughter over at Artondale. Wonderful kid. I wonder what happened to him. I haven’t seen him since he retired; oh, one time.
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Of course, now, it’s a detachment out here; before, you might get a guy from Lakewood driving down here like crazy to come to a call. You know, it’s a lot nicer now. And everything is funding now. We didn’t have all the funding then. When I started at the fire department, we bought our own jackets to go on an aid call. Sew the patches on your jacket. But the times have changed. Anyway, we had problems with the agencies. I think the biggest thing was the regular meetings. They were being pushed by all their people to have meetings too. Their time is just pressed, so we lost them. That’s when they separated. They have the MACC now installed. I don’t remember what it used to be called; “interagency” or something like that. We had already done two plans by the time they broke out; two emergency plans for the county. Those things that go on the shelf and nobody reads.
About that time, the computer was coming in, about the time we separated; and I might be a little foggy here. The County came in and we kind of took over. We were out training neighborhoods. They kind of wanted to do it, and of course, our people said, “If you’re going to do it, why would I do this?”
Understand, a lot of us were younger then, most of us, and so we had all this energy. Let’s go down and take Joanne Gray. She was a volunteer and she was a couple of the officers. It was like a crusade for her. She was really a nice lady, suffered physically, but she was really, really, a nice person; and lived not too far from here. She was involved about twenty years. And she passed away. It can’t remember the disease, but it might have been MS. She brought her parents in too. He was retired army and the nicest people in the world. And all of a sudden they didn’t come. They were in it about a year-and-a-half and they didn’t come any more when we heard she passed. Then they went to a home. You know, life changes! Changes all the time.
JO: It certainly does!!!
DW: Anyway, the agencies went their own way and Pep-C turned into a…and this was a hard sell. I was a first responder for most of the time I was in this thing. And it’s hard for civilians and not think they’re going to be there when the bell rings. And we had various people with their personalities and things, and it was just a hard pill that they didn’t think they were going to be in the action. But the agencies don’t want people they aren’t used to, or trained with, to go to things or do things.
JO: Oh, so you mean like people were joining Pep-C hoping they would go out on runs?
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DW: Well, they want to do something. Comes the big day, they want to be able to do something. And you see that all the time. Maybe you’re that way.
JO: Sure! But just in my neighborhood. I want to be helpful in a crisis.
DW: The agencies found it hard to work with them, especially because of their liability. The law enforcement are really that way!! I mean they hold everything close. And I don’t blame them because they have to go through the court system. And the fire is always under scrutiny, as all agencies are. We had a hard time all these years with the phone company. They were kind of in a land by themselves. (Don’t embarrass me here too much). They were kind of, “We’re going to do our thing, no matter what you guys want to do.” And you can understand that. They’re the underground stuff and not up in front. But they’re better. They got better. They just don’t want to come to meetings. In the early years, the light company was that way. Then they got way better! Because they knew they had to work in concert with everybody.
I think the thing that turned them was the big ice storm. I was at school. Our buses were underway and we had all the busses turn around that we could get on the radio. The kids were brought in and kept at Artondale. The trees and limbs were falling like crazy. The power lines, you could hear explosions. Boom! Boom! Boom! That’s the time, when they went out on a call that day or the next day, they went down to Key Peninsula and they had guys draw guns on them. “You get my house, right now!” They had to call law enforcement. After that the whole thing changed. They started sending teams – law, fire, whatever was appropriate, you’d get a team to go.
JO: That’s a great story! That storm lasted quite a while; ten, nineteen days in some places?
DW: I don’t remember, but it was a long one. That was pre-prison. They were always sort of in a world to themselves. They really kind of came around, to the fire department anyway. In the early years, it was a different kind of prison. They had one firearm in a safe with the warden. They had people escaping all the time. They’d just run down to 16 and hitch a ride. It happened so much that they didn’t go looking for them. Why? Why would you do that? Because they’d go right back to where they came from and they’d find them the next day. No chase, no problem. I worked there two summers to make extra money. Teaching. Quite a place. Anyway, it’s much more organized now.
JO: And I have the impression it’s now used for rehabilitation.
DW: They’ve had a lot of good programs to do that; the dog thing, baby sitting, and things like that. They have the “Four-Steps” program. They’ve done that with buildings now. They used to have the “hole” (isolation) I taught in there. A lot of people were mentally ill. When I moved up north and had the station for that, I’d go there with fire trucks. There were always suicides. I went to three hangings there.
JO: People get hopeless.
DW: But! They’re better now. I went to two babies. They’re better now. I think they have an RN always on. They used to have an RN occasionally. That part’s better. They’re good neighbors; that’s what I tell everybody, they never ask for sugar.
DW: Back to Pep-C. I got worn out that’s why I left. I’d been doing it since the 70s. It’s just a long haul. And then I got interested, when I retired, I was the safety officer for the district after I retired.
JO: When did you retire, Dave?
DW: Two thousand. I worked for them for a couple of years. I was a kind of roving safety guy doing their emergency plan, things like that. Anyway, I got out of the fire department. I kind of got hurt, I couldn’t lift big people anymore; I lifted the biggest man in the world; hurt my back. I’d been doing it for twenty-five years. Anyway, I got asked if I would be interested in the museum. So I started doing that. And then I was asked to be on the board, so I said “OK.” This is at Black Diamond. And then the archivist, the board, said, “We want to digitize. These aren’t holy pictures, you know, these are just pictures and we want to be able to see them.” The archivist left and I got sort of drafted.
JO: And when was this that you were drafted? When did you get into the museum work?
DW: Oh, man. I think I’ve been there seven years already. I’ve been the archivist five years. I will not live long enough to digitize everything.
JO: No. Nobody will.
DW: Thousands! Thousands of pictures. That’s a priority because we are losing them, they’re turning white or they’re turning black. Then the documents are coming. I’ll have to get help to do that; just volunteers. You know how that goes.
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JO: Yes. It’s a worthy project.
DW: Yeah, it’s fun. And we were raised in that area. Have a cabin.
JO: So how do you feel about Pep-C now?
DW: I wanted somebody else to do it. I handed over all the stuff I had. I made a stick and I gave it to my successor and I stayed for a while. But once I wasn’t part of the fire or school districts I wondered, “Why am I here? I’m not doing any good.” I used to do a lot of stuff for the fire and that’s why we built that station, to be up on that hill there, to have one big united thing. We were going to do it up in Gig Harbor, at Kimball (you know where that is), there is a big old land there. Anyway, we decided to go up and have a training center. The back part of that building is reinforced. It’ll take a little bit of an earthquake.
JO: A 7-point? They think?
DW: Oh, maybe.
JO: So you’ve just left Pep-C officially the last few months. Don and Curt were unhappy about that.
DW: Don, he was a teacher and a fire-fighter. Then he quit to be a career fire-fighter. He was a captain and a battalion chief. Anyway, I love that guy, he’s a great guy. And Hugh, I wish he’d wear his hearing aid. Love the guy! But, you know, it wears you out. Don and I have talked for years; we’ve had some other guys too. it’s hard to get people to volunteer. Every ethnic group or social group is having exactly the same problem. The Elks are having it; the Italian clubs, they are diminishing. German House in Seattle will fold. The antique four-story house is worth a million dollars. All the gold from the Alaska gold rush went to it. It’s in the vault down there. The vault’s still there. Its right by Harbor View Hospital. It’s down about a block. Everybody’s doing the exact same thing. There’s some dance clubs we’ve been going to for years. They’re all doing the same thing. The young kids don’t want to do it. So they’re going to pass away.
JO: But they were big in our era.
DW: Yeah. We used to have two dance clubs; the Dakota and the Minnesota Club. They merged and I’m not sure they’re in business at all now.
JO: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
DW: Pep-C?
JO: Yes.
DW: The hardest thing I think in the life of Pep-C is, people come in and want to be ‘Superman, Superwoman.’ If they could take one task and do it well, keep it a size you can do… When we were training neighborhoods, it was very successful. We had lots of people, the civilians, they wanted to be safe. And that’s changed too. Not that interest. People are coming here from the city, and they expect it to be a city. We faced this in the fire department. What do you do? You can’t have somebody right on your doorstep. You’ve got to be ready yourself. And that’s a hard sell for city people. They think the fire house is right there. And it isn’t. The same with police services. Although it’s way better now. I can remember a deputy going from Lakewood out to the Devil’s Head, out on the tip of Key Peninsula, on a call. It’s so easy to get in a wreck when you do lights and sirens and stuff. So easy. You’ve just really got to watch yourself. But those days are long gone. And they should. These people all pay taxes. They should have police service.
JO: Well, Dave, we’re near the end of the tape. Anything else you want to add? Any thoughts?
DW: Mix up my fire service with Pep-C too. We’ve had a lot of good police people. I tell you, they are just ground down by how many calls they get. There was a deputy, Tom Miner, and he had a dog named Major. He used to come and demonstrate his dog. Of course, he’s long gone now. I think Tom is retired. Bill Seeward, he was a peach of a guy. He got sick, but he was a nice guy; a lot of nice people. I loved PSCO Huberholz. He was kind of a gruff bear with a heart of gold.
JO: Anything else you can think of…
DW: No. I have all those records still in my computer. I’m not sure where it went. It had minutes, documents we sent, forms we had, photographs, things like that.
JO: And they’re in the computer still somewhere.
DW: I never purged them.
JO: We might put them on a CD.
DW: Oh, you guys. I gave you a stick full.
JO: And where is it? Where is the stick? Who did you hand it to?
DW: Ken Roberts replaced me and I handed all files and records over to him. He left with medical problems. Marv Nauman was president for several years with me as VP to support him.
THE END
Jane Olive (JO): Introduction – Testing. We are located at 3801 75th Ave Ct NW; Gig Harbor, WA 98335 Artondale. March 29th, 2019 Dave Watson is being interviewed for his work with Pep-C and the interviewer is Jane Olive
JO: Dave, when were you born?
DW: 1942, 21st of August. I remember it well.
JO: Place of birth?
DW: Seattle
JO: Have you lived most of your life in this area?
DW: Washington. I was away in the navy.
JO: You’re married. You’re wife’s name?
DW: Susann.
JO: Kids?
DW: We have three kids. They’re all in the area.
JO: And how many grandkids?
DW: I have ten right now and two great grandbabies.
JO: You smile great big when you talk about those. They must be darling. So, occupations…when were you in the navy?
DW: In the early sixties. Four years. On a ship for most of that time. My navy experience was school and on an aircraft carrier, USS Hornet in the Pacific. 4 years, I was in the Navy Nuclear Weapons Program which included handling, arming, maintenance, repair of many types of nuclear weapons. I had and have a TS clearance.
JO: Those were the Kennedy years.
DW: Kennedy was killed when I was in Japan.
JO: Were you involved at all in the Cuban blockade?
DW: Yes. I was in the Pacific. When the Cuban thing happened, I was in nuclear weapons and we went to DEFCON 3. We armed two of them. One on a plane and one on the hanger deck.
JO: Scary!
DW: Yep. We had radio silence for ten days. Went up off the Russian coast. Yeah, that was not fun.
JO: Have you ever seen the movie, Thirteen Days? What did you think of it?
DW: When you’re out there doing it, you don’t hear all the stuff. We didn’t know any of the details of this thing going on. No one talked to each other; to your people back home.
JO: After you got out of the navy?
DW: I went to college. Ended up teaching. Went to Seattle Pacific College. I graduated with two degrees. I worked at Boeing while I was going to college; at the calibration lab at Federal Boeing Field for flight tests, doing all the instruments they were doing.
I was raised at the campus there. I lived in a dorm. My dad was a professor there. He was Dean of Education and Dean of Math. My grandfather was the President.
JO: Wow! So education was your heritage.
DW: Yeah, it was.
JO: You said you have two degrees.
DW: Yes. I have a bachelors and a masters. Then I worked at Renton and got laid off. The tax thing. You know about that? The state was going to tax Boeing on the planes they had on hand on one day of the year. So, Boeing was not stupid; they flew all the planes out of state. Then the district lost all of us. They laid off all the first year teachers and half the second year teachers. Anyway, I was fired.
JO: And what did you teach?
DW: I was elementary. I taught sixth grade. Well, I came to the Peninsula District after that. I worked at several schools, and taught third grade, fifth grade, fourth grade, sixth grade. And then I became a principal. I started at Evergreen, half-time teacher, half-time principal. Then I moved to Artondale. I was there eighteen years. Tore it down, built a new one, and now they want to tear it down again. I’m not sure why. I don’t think they know all the facts.
And then I joined the fire department here as a volunteer. That was at the Arletta Station when we lived there. Then we moved to North Rosedale so I was at the Rosedale Station. Then they built the new one and I was at the Swede Hill Station. I was a captain, an EMT, for twenty-six years. Lot of aid calls; I was in most of the homes here in those days for various reasons. I used to go across and get the firetruck and go on fire calls when I was at school. My superintendent said it was OK.
JO: Well, that’s life in a small town.
DW: It was then. Not so much now.
JO: I’m going to stop it and make sure we’re getting good sound…OK. Any hobbies and interests?
DW: We have a cabin. We like to go in the woods. This is at Black Diamond. Neared the mountains. Near the Green River Gorge. Been all over that area. And we RV, and we dance.
JO: What kind of dance?
DW: We like to waltz, polka, things like that.
JO: Could you give me a year when you actually came to Gig Harbor.
DW: Came in ‘78 to have a house, but we came before that, we rented. I was trying to get a job somewhere else, so we moved to Enumclaw for two years. In 76 and 79.
JO: Would you spell that for me. I’m new up here.
DW: E-n-u-m-c-l-a-w. I was their first EMT in that department. They had no idea what to do with me.
JO: And what is an EMT?
DW: Emergency Medical Technician. I was in the first class here in Gig Harbor. That’s when Medic One started in Seattle, and it kind of spread out into the hinterlands. We had a class of about twenty-five of us. And that was the first time we had aid service to the citizens, other than an ambulance.
JO: There wasn’t a hospital here.
DW: No. Years ago there was…a little tiny one. That was down in the Harbor. It was long gone when I came. Yeah, it was a long way to the hospital. Long way. I figure I’ve done roughly five hundred car wrecks and thousands of aid calls over the years.
JO: How did you get interested in the Emergency medic work?
DW: A friend of ours wanted me to be in the fire department when I was in Arletta. So I joined up.
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JO: Well, that was quite a career in itself!
DW: I loved the medical part. There haven’t been many fires here. As we grew, the homes, they don’t burn as many. But I don’t like the junk in Olympia. Paper. Paper requirements and constant fiddling. The fire department’s great. It’s a really good fire department.
JO: Well, I was a school teacher too. Primary grades, special education. I always thought the administrators’ job was to think up more paper work for us to do; as if we weren’t busy enough!
JO: When did you become involved in Pep-C.
DW: Pep-C didn’t exist. Some of us were concerned about – well, it started out with earthquakes. We took some FEMA classes here locally, in various places. I started in about ’74 learning things and then we started some dialogue. When we first started we had an ex DEA agent, I can’t remember his name. He started getting the whole shebang about getting the departments together.
JO: What is the DEA?
DW: What is it? The Drug Enforcement Administration. He was a drug agent. I don’t remember his name and he was transferred to Louisiana or someplace. This was before Don was involved. We had a retired Navy captain, Ray Zimmerman, a wonderful man; and absolutely marvelous guy. We got all the agencies together, the schools, the power, the phones, the police and the fire with two departments on the two peninsulas. We actually had the state patrol there for a while but they’re so shorthanded, that disappeared. Once the city was a city, we had them. We had Gretchen Wilbert for years. She was the mayor. She used to teach kindergarten for me. And when she retired she went into politics. She was a feisty little gal. She was a nice lady. She’s passed away now.
We had a lot of, as the membership grew, we tried to involve the community so we had a lot of military who took leadership in their neighborhoods and they would join, but of course, they’ve all joined the big gate in the sky by now.
JO: Well, this sounds to me like, when the town was smaller, I may be jumping the gun here, but it sounds like neighbors knew each other and so you could get together and talk about it.
DW: It’s much denser now. Our problem at that time, we were teaching, this is before PC-NET. We would go out to neighborhoods. The hardest thing to do at that time was defining a neighborhood. Everybody thinks like a town now, but then it wasn’t like that at all. Your nearest neighbor might be a quarter-mile away on the peninsula. It used to be that way here. This used to all be bare land.
JO: It may be that people chose to live in isolation. So they didn’t really want to be cozy.
DW: They don’t have any choice now. The land is disappearing. Gig Harbor High School was to be about here on the other side of 40th. It was beautiful timberland. They made a deal to move it to where it is now because of sewers. So that eliminated that problem for them. It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous site. It would have had a middle school with it too. It was that big. Now it’s all homes.
We had uh, I know where you’re going with the question, I think. Stop me if you want. Anyway, we did OK. We did strategic plans, emergency plans for the county. We were working in concert with the county before they really had the Department of Emergency Management. And then it sort of evolved as the need grew. I was sent to FEMA Academy by the district and then I was co-sent at another time by the school district and I was also sent by the fire department for a different class.
Pep-C; we had a lot of retired engineers on board. They were joining. We started planning for the schools. We did an assessment. We had structural engineers as members or we drafted some. We did all the schools that existed at that time. Did a needs assessment, and then we formed teams. We went into the schools on the weekends; bolted, moved, strapped down, screwed to the floor. The schools were built different then. They didn’t have any idea of escape and things like they do now. And the new codes after 1998 helped a lot. Anyway, we did all the schools. High schools were more difficult because the assumption was that they’d get out of there; get in their cars and run and try to get home. Little kids, you have to keep them in tow.
JO: In Hugh’s mind, you headed this up. He thinks it was a marvelous work that you did.
DW: After that, I was part of the district, of course, doing this stuff for the district…
JO: Is Ray Zimmerman still involved?
DW: No. We don’t know if he’s passed away. He wanted to be with his children who are all military and they’re living south. He was in a motor home and finally they abandoned ship. I was so sad to see him go. He was a peach of a guy.
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We did kits in all the schools. The district paid for it. We involved the prison. We had all the medical guys, we had ER doctors and nurses, kind of get together, and our district nurses and the fire department and they said, “What do we need when the building falls down?” So we built kits out big plastic tubs like Tupperware. No, Rubbermaid. Anyway, we had a certain size kit; like a high school would have five kits, middle school would have three, and a big elementary school would have three. We’d get all this stuff together at a school, Artondale I think, yes, it was Artondale. We got prisoners and they came and they put all these kits together. And, we had an escape. One escaped. They let these people talk to their friends. Well, they knew they were coming and they went. Anyway, we made kits and put them out all in all the schools. We had lights, and whistles, and space blankets. We tried to get one space blanket for every two kids, but it was kind of being squished. Always is. Anyway, every school had things they could get by with.
That started the barrel program. Pep-C got into that to make money. We used to sell space blankets, but we could not with…well, of course, now it’s all online. That was before the internet. We didn’t want to go into competition with our local merchants so we always would discuss that before we had any kind of promotion thing. Ace Hardware had our back all the time. Later, Costco. Home Depot. That was the early years. Of course, they weren’t around; it was all woods. That was deer country.
JO: So, when Pep-C formed, were you the first president?
DW: No. No. The DEA guy was. I don’t remember what they called him. I took over after Ray went south and I got all his stuff, all his maps and earthquake scare tactics that we would do with the community. That was…I was president…I don’t know, twenty years.
JO: When did you start being president?
DW: I don’t know. Seems nonstop. I couldn’t do it anymore. You know what I didn’t like? I didn’t like getting the agenda together and all that stuff. And I honestly (I don’t know if you want to say this), I was getting discouraged by the attendance withering down. In early times, we had everybody there. I mean it was a big meeting, fifty people. And these were all agency heads and civilians. Well, you know, they are so short on time, we started losing them. Pierce Co. roads were the first to leave. They were just up against it all the time. They couldn’t meet monthly. They would come once in a while. Then we lost State Patrol because they kept reassigning the staff and they were leaner and leaner and leaner, for a while out here anyway. We got along great with them. The Sherriff would come and go. We had Sargent Hooperholtz. He lives over here. I had his daughter over at Artondale. Wonderful kid. I wonder what happened to him. I haven’t seen him since he retired; oh, one time.
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Of course, now, it’s a detachment out here; before, you might get a guy from Lakewood driving down here like crazy to come to a call. You know, it’s a lot nicer now. And everything is funding now. We didn’t have all the funding then. When I started at the fire department, we bought our own jackets to go on an aid call. Sew the patches on your jacket. But the times have changed. Anyway, we had problems with the agencies. I think the biggest thing was the regular meetings. They were being pushed by all their people to have meetings too. Their time is just pressed, so we lost them. That’s when they separated. They have the MACC now installed. I don’t remember what it used to be called; “interagency” or something like that. We had already done two plans by the time they broke out; two emergency plans for the county. Those things that go on the shelf and nobody reads.
About that time, the computer was coming in, about the time we separated; and I might be a little foggy here. The County came in and we kind of took over. We were out training neighborhoods. They kind of wanted to do it, and of course, our people said, “If you’re going to do it, why would I do this?”
Understand, a lot of us were younger then, most of us, and so we had all this energy. Let’s go down and take Joanne Gray. She was a volunteer and she was a couple of the officers. It was like a crusade for her. She was really a nice lady, suffered physically, but she was really, really, a nice person; and lived not too far from here. She was involved about twenty years. And she passed away. It can’t remember the disease, but it might have been MS. She brought her parents in too. He was retired army and the nicest people in the world. And all of a sudden they didn’t come. They were in it about a year-and-a-half and they didn’t come any more when we heard she passed. Then they went to a home. You know, life changes! Changes all the time.
JO: It certainly does!!!
DW: Anyway, the agencies went their own way and Pep-C turned into a…and this was a hard sell. I was a first responder for most of the time I was in this thing. And it’s hard for civilians and not think they’re going to be there when the bell rings. And we had various people with their personalities and things, and it was just a hard pill that they didn’t think they were going to be in the action. But the agencies don’t want people they aren’t used to, or trained with, to go to things or do things.
JO: Oh, so you mean like people were joining Pep-C hoping they would go out on runs?
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DW: Well, they want to do something. Comes the big day, they want to be able to do something. And you see that all the time. Maybe you’re that way.
JO: Sure! But just in my neighborhood. I want to be helpful in a crisis.
DW: The agencies found it hard to work with them, especially because of their liability. The law enforcement are really that way!! I mean they hold everything close. And I don’t blame them because they have to go through the court system. And the fire is always under scrutiny, as all agencies are. We had a hard time all these years with the phone company. They were kind of in a land by themselves. (Don’t embarrass me here too much). They were kind of, “We’re going to do our thing, no matter what you guys want to do.” And you can understand that. They’re the underground stuff and not up in front. But they’re better. They got better. They just don’t want to come to meetings. In the early years, the light company was that way. Then they got way better! Because they knew they had to work in concert with everybody.
I think the thing that turned them was the big ice storm. I was at school. Our buses were underway and we had all the busses turn around that we could get on the radio. The kids were brought in and kept at Artondale. The trees and limbs were falling like crazy. The power lines, you could hear explosions. Boom! Boom! Boom! That’s the time, when they went out on a call that day or the next day, they went down to Key Peninsula and they had guys draw guns on them. “You get my house, right now!” They had to call law enforcement. After that the whole thing changed. They started sending teams – law, fire, whatever was appropriate, you’d get a team to go.
JO: That’s a great story! That storm lasted quite a while; ten, nineteen days in some places?
DW: I don’t remember, but it was a long one. That was pre-prison. They were always sort of in a world to themselves. They really kind of came around, to the fire department anyway. In the early years, it was a different kind of prison. They had one firearm in a safe with the warden. They had people escaping all the time. They’d just run down to 16 and hitch a ride. It happened so much that they didn’t go looking for them. Why? Why would you do that? Because they’d go right back to where they came from and they’d find them the next day. No chase, no problem. I worked there two summers to make extra money. Teaching. Quite a place. Anyway, it’s much more organized now.
JO: And I have the impression it’s now used for rehabilitation.
DW: They’ve had a lot of good programs to do that; the dog thing, baby sitting, and things like that. They have the “Four-Steps” program. They’ve done that with buildings now. They used to have the “hole” (isolation) I taught in there. A lot of people were mentally ill. When I moved up north and had the station for that, I’d go there with fire trucks. There were always suicides. I went to three hangings there.
JO: People get hopeless.
DW: But! They’re better now. I went to two babies. They’re better now. I think they have an RN always on. They used to have an RN occasionally. That part’s better. They’re good neighbors; that’s what I tell everybody, they never ask for sugar.
DW: Back to Pep-C. I got worn out that’s why I left. I’d been doing it since the 70s. It’s just a long haul. And then I got interested, when I retired, I was the safety officer for the district after I retired.
JO: When did you retire, Dave?
DW: Two thousand. I worked for them for a couple of years. I was a kind of roving safety guy doing their emergency plan, things like that. Anyway, I got out of the fire department. I kind of got hurt, I couldn’t lift big people anymore; I lifted the biggest man in the world; hurt my back. I’d been doing it for twenty-five years. Anyway, I got asked if I would be interested in the museum. So I started doing that. And then I was asked to be on the board, so I said “OK.” This is at Black Diamond. And then the archivist, the board, said, “We want to digitize. These aren’t holy pictures, you know, these are just pictures and we want to be able to see them.” The archivist left and I got sort of drafted.
JO: And when was this that you were drafted? When did you get into the museum work?
DW: Oh, man. I think I’ve been there seven years already. I’ve been the archivist five years. I will not live long enough to digitize everything.
JO: No. Nobody will.
DW: Thousands! Thousands of pictures. That’s a priority because we are losing them, they’re turning white or they’re turning black. Then the documents are coming. I’ll have to get help to do that; just volunteers. You know how that goes.
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JO: Yes. It’s a worthy project.
DW: Yeah, it’s fun. And we were raised in that area. Have a cabin.
JO: So how do you feel about Pep-C now?
DW: I wanted somebody else to do it. I handed over all the stuff I had. I made a stick and I gave it to my successor and I stayed for a while. But once I wasn’t part of the fire or school districts I wondered, “Why am I here? I’m not doing any good.” I used to do a lot of stuff for the fire and that’s why we built that station, to be up on that hill there, to have one big united thing. We were going to do it up in Gig Harbor, at Kimball (you know where that is), there is a big old land there. Anyway, we decided to go up and have a training center. The back part of that building is reinforced. It’ll take a little bit of an earthquake.
JO: A 7-point? They think?
DW: Oh, maybe.
JO: So you’ve just left Pep-C officially the last few months. Don and Curt were unhappy about that.
DW: Don, he was a teacher and a fire-fighter. Then he quit to be a career fire-fighter. He was a captain and a battalion chief. Anyway, I love that guy, he’s a great guy. And Hugh, I wish he’d wear his hearing aid. Love the guy! But, you know, it wears you out. Don and I have talked for years; we’ve had some other guys too. it’s hard to get people to volunteer. Every ethnic group or social group is having exactly the same problem. The Elks are having it; the Italian clubs, they are diminishing. German House in Seattle will fold. The antique four-story house is worth a million dollars. All the gold from the Alaska gold rush went to it. It’s in the vault down there. The vault’s still there. Its right by Harbor View Hospital. It’s down about a block. Everybody’s doing the exact same thing. There’s some dance clubs we’ve been going to for years. They’re all doing the same thing. The young kids don’t want to do it. So they’re going to pass away.
JO: But they were big in our era.
DW: Yeah. We used to have two dance clubs; the Dakota and the Minnesota Club. They merged and I’m not sure they’re in business at all now.
JO: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
DW: Pep-C?
JO: Yes.
DW: The hardest thing I think in the life of Pep-C is, people come in and want to be ‘Superman, Superwoman.’ If they could take one task and do it well, keep it a size you can do… When we were training neighborhoods, it was very successful. We had lots of people, the civilians, they wanted to be safe. And that’s changed too. Not that interest. People are coming here from the city, and they expect it to be a city. We faced this in the fire department. What do you do? You can’t have somebody right on your doorstep. You’ve got to be ready yourself. And that’s a hard sell for city people. They think the fire house is right there. And it isn’t. The same with police services. Although it’s way better now. I can remember a deputy going from Lakewood out to the Devil’s Head, out on the tip of Key Peninsula, on a call. It’s so easy to get in a wreck when you do lights and sirens and stuff. So easy. You’ve just really got to watch yourself. But those days are long gone. And they should. These people all pay taxes. They should have police service.
JO: Well, Dave, we’re near the end of the tape. Anything else you want to add? Any thoughts?
DW: Mix up my fire service with Pep-C too. We’ve had a lot of good police people. I tell you, they are just ground down by how many calls they get. There was a deputy, Tom Miner, and he had a dog named Major. He used to come and demonstrate his dog. Of course, he’s long gone now. I think Tom is retired. Bill Seeward, he was a peach of a guy. He got sick, but he was a nice guy; a lot of nice people. I loved PSCO Huberholz. He was kind of a gruff bear with a heart of gold.
JO: Anything else you can think of…
DW: No. I have all those records still in my computer. I’m not sure where it went. It had minutes, documents we sent, forms we had, photographs, things like that.
JO: And they’re in the computer still somewhere.
DW: I never purged them.
JO: We might put them on a CD.
DW: Oh, you guys. I gave you a stick full.
JO: And where is it? Where is the stick? Who did you hand it to?
DW: Ken Roberts replaced me and I handed all files and records over to him. He left with medical problems. Marv Nauman was president for several years with me as VP to support him.
THE END