by StevenL
Half of McCleary had the potential to be transformed into a giant crater during the Reagan era.
You could call this story a bit of local rural legend. The news media for some reason missed this one at the time, so here I am relating the tale as it was told to me. I can’t verify any of the facts with documentation, so it has to remain in the category of dubious oral history.
But, McCleary being McCleary, I believe this event to be true. However, I will gladly be corrected by any reader out there who is in possession of verifiable truths.
This takes place in the first half of the 1980s. Down on Mommsen Street, a literal stone’s throw from where the noted author and buongustaio Angelo Pellegrini lived as a child, in the heart of the neighborhood known as “Little Italy” in the past, sits a cute little grandma house. In this home lived a widower veteran of the First World War who shall be nameless.
I remember seeing him around. He had a bad hip and walked with difficulty. His wife, the town librarian, died in 1978. She had also been the seamstress for the gowns and capes for the girls who had the honor of being the royalty for the McCleary Bear Festival. This is an annual town event where, since 1959, the consumption of bears, usually in stew, is considered a highlight.
You might think I’m kidding about the bear thing.
I’m not.
This little house actually had a previous colorful story associated with it. During Prohibition a moonshiner lived there (McCleary’s supreme place in the history of Washington State bootlegging and moonshining deserves a column all by itself). Children used to crawl under the dwelling and enter the house via a trap door and steal this fellow’s booze. During one such caper, a child lifted the trapdoor and received a shock. The man was sitting in a chair waiting for them, shotgun across his lap. Then the kid got a second shock.
The man had died while sitting in the chair waiting for those pesky brats.
One of the children involved in this 1920s adventure, now dead for over a decade, told me this story. The teller of this tale had a father who was sent to the Crowbar Hotel for a Prohibition offense. Occupational hazard. Such conditions
were common in McCleary history.
Anyway, let’s zip ahead to the 1980s to our WWI widower. He was befriended by a young New Guy in town. This fellow was apparently some kind of white supremacist militia type in the template of Oklahoma City right wing terrorist and mass murderer Timothy McVeigh.
I’ll call the New Guy the New Guy. I feel pretty safe in saying the New Guy did not and does not represent the values of our community here in McCleary.
The New Guy had a pattern of befriending lonely old men in town and doing odd jobs for them. Regarding our WWI vet, he poured a new cement floor for the garage and replaced the front porch planks.
But he also would answer a knock at his door in a defensive stance while aiming an automatic weapon on whoever was calling. “Paranoid” is the word that comes to mind.
Living life among real citizens was apparently too much for the New Guy, even in live-and-let-live McCleary, so off this fear-based soul went to join some compound in Arkansas or Missouri of like-minded enthusiasts of extreme conservatism.
But before he left, he asked our WWI vet if he could store some “things” upstairs. And so he did. Given the steep and narrow steps coupled with our vet’s bad hip, I have always wondered if the vet ever knew what was really up there.
We’ll never know.
Why won’t we ever know? Because shortly after the New Guy departed from The Home of the Bear Festival to the Summer Camp of Twisted Right Wing Racists (wherever that was), our WWI vet dropped dead of a massive heart attack in November 1984 while visiting the McCleary Post Office.
O u r vet’s nephew inherited the cute little house. And when he went upstairs he found, you guessed it, thousands of rounds of ammunition, napalm detonators , hand grenades, etc., etc. The place was a virtual armory big enough for a small country.
Naturally the FBI and Fort Lewis got on the case. Some official connected with them stated that if the cute little grandma house had caught on fire, half of McCleary would’ve turned into a giant crater.
Apparently this New Guy soldier of misfortune had some connection to Fort Lewis and had managed to pilfer a large quantity of dangerous weapons over time.
Like I said, none of this was, as far as I know, ever reported in the media. Not in Olympia or Aberdeen. But I have always maintained McCleary sits in the Phantom Zone where the spheres of influence of those two municipalities do not quite touch. And we have not had our own newspaper since the early 1960s. But, perhaps students of media politics can come up with other reasons.
So here I am relating the tale. How do I know so much about this?
I lived in and owned that house from 1986 to 1994.
The moonshiner’s trap door led to the bedroom of my little baby daughter. The upstairs armory was where I set up a cartoonists studio, drew my Morty the Dog comix, and ran a zine newsletter.
Over time I was filled in by my townsmen about the history of that place. And now all of my primary sources have passed on. Today I realize I am the same age as those who originally told me these stories at the time they told it! So here I am sharing this bit of local rural legend with you. In print. Long live hardcopy!
Weird real life stuff goes on all the time and the press only gets the tip of the iceberg, if at all. And so, it becomes legend, like this tale. ◙