Everyone needs a good friend like Maggie. I mean that sincerely. Maggie is my best ever cheerleader when it comes to writing. And she is my best tell-it-like-it-is critic. Besides all that, she knows of what she speaks. Maggie is an author and...
It's been seventy years since my Uncle Willard Espy began painting the town red. Well… maybe not the whole town of Oysterville, but certainly two of the most significant buildings in this little village. It was 1947, the year of his parents'...
I've been thinking of Willard lately. Willard Richardson Espy, my mother's "twin" – well, they were 11 months apart but for all of his 89 years, Willard would write mom on her November 13th birthday and remind her that they were now identical in...
After vespers Sunday, a man approached me to ask, “What happened to the roses that have always been on the fence in front of the old courthouse in Oysterville?” I had to think for a minute to realize that he meant the profusion of Dorothy Perkins...
Alexander Hamilton, Indian killer, was my grandfather’s great-grandfather, or my father’s great-great-grandfather, or my own great-great-great-grandfather, depending on how you want to put it. His daughter Anna married Tom Espy, who… begat the...
I’ve begun to take a better look in the Crosscut file box – the work of Ilwaco High School journalism students in late 1970s. The notes and tapes from twenty interviews of local residents are a treasure trove of recent Peninsula history and, I...
When it comes to writing and storytelling, especially about Oysterville, my uncle Willard Espy has always been my role model. Even before Willard got into the book writing business and certainly long before my own writing interests became...
Last Sunday I met a woman who said she knows one of my relatives – “Sue Espy” who lives in Portland. I know (or think I know) all the descendants of my great-grandfather, R.H, Espy and, in addition, I know many of the descendants of his brothers...
When I finished writing yesterday’s blog about the 1876 “newspaper cuttings” featuring my great-grandfather Daniel Sidney Richardson, I took a few minutes to look beyond those first few pages of the “Ready Reference Receptacle” as this...
Yesterday afternoon I spent the better part of an hour with my Uncle Willard. He was telling stories about Oysterville – familiar stories that I had heard him tell many times previously. On this occasion, though, he was ‘in person’ but not ‘live.’...
As far as I know, the little two-room shed just north of the Red House is the last outhouse in Oysterville. It seems fitting, somehow, that it is a double-occupancy affair and that it is at the erstwhile home of one of the town’s founders, R. H....
During the Christmas holidays of 1956, my son Charlie, his father and I stayed in the Red Cottage. At that time, it was owned by my grandfather who, at age 80 was “in his dotage” as the family said, and was being cared for by my aunt Mona in the...