The OCC Newsletter, 4/20/2016

The photograph on the first page of the current Oysterville Community Club’s newsletter is beyond fabulous – at least from my perspective.  And that’s the whole point.  It shows our house from a time and perspective that I don’t often see.  Talk about a trek down memory lane!  And who was the horse, anyway?

The picture was taken in 1973 by Peter Janke (now the newsletter’s editor) and shows the field that was north of our house for all of my lifetime and most of my mother’s.  When my grandfather was a boy, the Stevens Hotel was on that property.  By the early twenties, the Stevens were gone and the hotel was owned by Andrew Wirt.  My mother remembered it from her childhood as the place “where the bachelors lived.”  I don’t know when the hotel “came down” – probably in the late nineteen- twenties.  That’s when the Heckes/Kemmer/Caulfield Family built “the Annex” to the northwest of the Heckes Inn using the lumber from the Stevens Hotel.

Heckes House with Annex (r.) circa 1930

The Annex (which was known as and used as a garage in the seventies and eighties) is now gone, too.  And I’m not exactly sure if you can say the field is “gone” but on it is the Hampson House built in 1985/1986.  John Hampson, with a lot of help from Hank Batten, landscaped the grounds with trees and shrubbery which has now grown up so that our view of the Heckes House is completely blocked.  Nor have we ever seen Cyndy Hayward’s lovely new home from our place, located as it is, just north of Hampson’s.

One of my fondest memories of ‘neighborliness’ in Oysterville is of Helen Heckes keeping an eye on my grandparents in the forties and fifties and later on my folks, as well.  If she was up in the middle of the night and saw a light on at our house, she’d call first thing in the morning.  “Is everything all right over there?” she’d ask.  These days, the only light we might see from that direction is the security light over the Hampson’s garage which sometimes shines right into our bedroom window. Unfortunately, not so neighborly.

Hampson House, 1987

There are other changes to be noted in Peter’s picture, too.  The power lines along the east side of the road, now gone underground.  The old spruce tree in the southwest corner of our yard, once upon a time (1917 or so) a live Christmas tree that my grandfather and his sons brought from the woods and replanted there.  Fearful that it might take part of our house or the church if it toppled in a storm, we had it removed in the late 1990s.  (There was quite a hue and cry about it – never mind that it showed rot at its core.)

So a big shout out to Peter for a fabulous look from next door forty years ago!  Seems like yesterday in some ways… at least from my perspective.