The phone call I received one morning in May 2010 telling me that Verna Oller had died was, in fact, a message that now her secret could be told – the amazing story of the five million dollars she had amassed during her long life of hard work and frugality.

Verna had entrusted the information to me a year and a half before her death, asking that I hold on to it until she was gone.  We had met several times in the living room of her cozy little home at the corner of Cranberry Road and Sandridge; I took notes and she shared the memories of ninety-plus years, even showing me her account books with their notations of every penny earned and spent from the time of her marriage to Ed Oller in 1932.  I wrote up her story, stored it on my computer, and gave a copy as backup, to Guy Glenn, Verna’s friend and attorney.

Part of her secret, of course, was her plan for all that money.  She told me that it had always bothered her that Long Beach didn’t have a library and, at first, she thought she would leave the money so that the city could fill that void.  But, soon she decided that a library wouldn’t reach enough people.

“I think I’ll be leaving at least four million for the swimming pool in Long Beach.  They have acres and acres of land so they can choose a good place to put it.  Maybe next to Culbertson Park.  Somewhere central where it’s easy to get to,” she told me.

“I’m leaving $500,000 to Ilwaco High School for students and teachers, another $500,000 to the Ocean Beach Education Foundation.  The rest is for the swimming pool.  But it’s just for the building,” she cautioned.  “The city will have to maintain it themselves.”

The money for schools, she told me, was Guy’s idea, and that was fine with Verna.  But her priority, what she really wanted, was a bricks-and-mortar legacy that would serve all the citizens of the community.  I don’t think that it ever occurred to Verna that the city would reject the pool.  She was confident in the belief that if she could save five million dollars in a lifetime of shucking oysters and cleaning fish, surely the city could find a way to maintain the building once it was constructed.

I guess that Verna had somehow lost sight of the fact that this was the only community on the Peninsula that had said “no” to a library years ago.  Some things don’t change.  The article in last week’s paper said …the committee received “a resounding ‘No’” from residents who were informally surveyed regarding the establishment of a recreation district that could possibly include Verna’s pool.

It’s the maintenance, of course, that’s the sticking point.  In another time and in another place, maybe there would have been a “Friends of Verna’s Pool” established.  Perhaps such a group could have generated a fund to cover upkeep and liability – all those things that Verna felt the city should take responsibility for.

I don’t for one minute think that Verna would seriously object to the entire amount going toward the schools of the Ocean Beach School District.  But I am absolutely certain that she would be disappointed – disappointed that her swimming pool dream could not be fulfilled and disappointed that Long Beach couldn’t rise to the occasion.  Me too.