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Noel V. Bourasaw, editor 810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284 Home of the Tarheel Stomp Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug

David G. McIntyre, circa 1920s

David G. McIntyre became a leader in the 1920s of the Good Roads Movement in Washington State and promoted a North Cross-State Highway for 20 years. He spent much of his early years here in the woods repairing logging equipment and he helped publicize the recreational opportunities of the Skagit river and the North Cascades as part of the promotion. Berniece Leaf photo.

Sydney and Marjorie McIntyre, early 1900s. Berniece Leaf photo.

Baby Berniece McIntyre 1902, Berniece Leaf's namesake.

John Anderson, founder of Sedro-Woolley Iron Works.

Catherine McIntyre and her husband, Wyman McClintock, circa 1940s. George Haas photo.

      The house that papa built had a front room with our piano and a bookcase full of books, a mahogany love seat upholstered in blue plush with two matching chairs, a beautiful double-globe kerosene lamp of green glass with pink and red roses and gold trimming, and a wall-to-wall carpet covered with flowers. There was a dining room with a bedroom opening from it and across the back of the back of the house was a large kitchen. The huge Round Oak range dominated the kitchen and the entire household with its six lids, a warming oven, a baking oven and a five-gallon reservoir at one end for hot water. There was a stairway at one end of the kitchen that led to bedrooms upstairs and the attic where apples and vegetables and nuts were kept during the winter. In back of the kitchen, extending the width of the house, was a spacious open porch. Stored on the back porch was the laundry equipment, comprised of a hand pump, a copper wash boiler, some big galvanized iron tubs and a hand wringer, a pile of wood for the stoves, milk buckets and the business end of a clothesline pulley.
      West of the house at a sanitary distance was a barn for Dick, our horse, Blossom, the milk cow, and her calf Rosie, some laying hens and one rooster, and close by was the outhouse. Father rode his bicycle back and forth to his work in the machine shop at Sedro-Woolley. I remember the bracelet he wore around his ankle to keep his pants leg from catching in the chain. Once a week we would go into town with mother. Papa had Dick harnessed, ready and waiting for action and action is what we got the minute mother commanded him to move, but she was never quite sure what direction he would take or what kind of a show he would put on before settling into this lazy, three-mile trot to town. We always went to Billy Todd's butcher shop, to the little library, the Union Mercantile and Howard & Reynolds grocery, and occasionally to the Episcopal Guild meeting where the ladies gave me Cambric tea and cookies. [Ed. note: Todd's shop was on State street then near the Episcopal church and the other two shops were clustered on Metcalf street north and south of Ferry. The little library was shoehorned into a building on the east side of the 600 block of Metcalfe street, then spelled with the "e."]
      When I was three we moved to Sedro-Woolley to be closer to papa's work. We lived first in a tall, white house on Reed street close to the Great Northern railroad. It had an open stairway in the front room with a slick banister for sliding down and a newel post at the end for a stopper. My sister Marjorie took music lessons by the hour. I still see her sitting at the piano, gold-rimmed glasses on her nose and an intent look on her face. I also remember my mother playing the piano in the late afternoon and my belief that her music brought papa home from work each night. She also remembered the family's sadness on different occasions — when three little black and white kittens, one for each of the girls, were killed at the same time by the train; the terrible hush when Marjorie had pneumonia and waiting for the crisis to come and go; and when Catherine had the measles and counted the roses in the wallpaper as she spent hours in bed.

McIntyre house on Puget street. Berniece Leaf photo.

      The house we lived in next was the best of all, on Puget avenue. It had eight rooms downstairs and two upstairs, lots of cubbyholes, big porches and a yard full of marvelous cherry trees — Royal Annes, Black Republicans and sour ones for pie; two plum trees and a crabapple tree, currant and gooseberry bushes, a kitchen garden and a front lawn for croquet and mumblety-peg. A woodshed, a workshop and an airy outhouse were grouped at the rear, and beyond them and the back fence was a wooded area flanked by a wide ditch where we poled rafts when the water was deep enough. Ceilings in this house were 12 feet high. For heat we had the big old range in the kitchen and two wood circulating stoves, one in the dining room, the other in the living room. One fall when mother was expecting relatives from the east, she decided to redecorate and kalsomine the living room walls and ceiling. The result was a beautiful, light and airy room with the ceiling and side-walls painted cream color and below that and all around a soft shade of green now called avocado, satin smooth with not a brush stroke showing. Someone suggested starting a fire in the heater to take the chill off the room, but that led to calamity in the morning. Cries and lamentation! There on that pristine surface, from ceiling to floor, an ugly black streak of creosote and soot that emanates from a wood stove, a cruel blot that could neither be removed nor hidden and one that remained for months as a mockery of mother's industry and pride.
      A cubbyhole in the wall on the first stair landing held collections of old magazines, Ladies Home Journals, Saturday evening Posts, National Geographics, Scribners, Delineators, Christian Heralds and various library discards. On rainy days I browsed among those, often finding the best stories of all.
      Down a short hall from the kitchen was a large pantry with counters and ceiling-high shelves for jars of fruit and pickles, canned goods and china. Tin containers as large as oil drums held flour and sugar in 100-pound lots, rolled oats in 50-pound, and there were five-gallon crocks of cherries, lives, spicy prune pickles, crabapple pickles and beet pickles. From the ceiling a couple of hams were hung in the coldest corner and there was always a large slab of bacon and caches of walnuts, raisins, doughnuts and cookies, which mother tried to hide from her marauding band.
      The kitchen here, as at Sterling, held the big, wonderful range with warming oven and shelves, reservoir and cavernous oven, and nickel-plated handrail across the front. The fire was kept going every day, even in summer, as it was the only means of providing hot water or hot food for that matter. Laying the fire at night was a ritual performed by papa. First he checked to see that there no live coals. Then, selecting a piece of smooth grained wood which he propped between his chest and the edge of the stove, he whittled a stack of long, thin shavings. These he arranged neatly in the firebox and on top he carefully placed several sticks of dry wood. In the morning, all that was needed was a match to set the fire roaring and it worked without fail. As the hub of the house, the range was all-important. How cozy, on cold winter mornings, to have breakfast on the table in front of the range and to feel its warm hand on your back or to sit with your feet in its spacious oven. On wash day it heated the big copper boiler and cooked the New England boiled dinner that I detested. On Tuesdays, it hosted a clutch of six or seven irons, and every day it provided us with an abundance of hot water.
      Next in importance was the dining room with its solid oak table and matching chairs for our family of six, and that could be expanded to accommodate 16 or 18. Suspended above it was a truly beautiful Tiffany lamp that shed a lovely light whether we were dining or using the table for our schoolwork. Around the circulating wood heather that stood in one corner there was ample room for mother's rockers and chairs or stools for children to sit on while she read from The Wizard of Oz, Pollyanna, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, and selected articles from current magazines. Although we ate breakfast in the kitchen, dinner and supper were served properly in the dining room on snowy white linen set with good china and polished silver. At the head of the table sat papa who did the carving and serving. He also directed the conversation, keeping it on a polite level, touching on world affairs, politics and local happenings, but not gossip or badinage.
      Out in the back was a chicken yard full of fat Plymouth Rock hens ruled by an even fatter rooster of the same ilk. I became father's little step-and-fetch-it helper in his shop. One of the first things he taught me was to put back in place immediately any tool that I used, a rule I still practice. Papa made a leather harness for my dog Colonel and fixed a "Flyer Express" wagon with shafts for him to pull. I carted groceries in that wagon and Colonel, a variegated shepherd, was the first of a continuing series of beloved pets, including white rats with pink eyes, garter snakes, a rooster that ended up as a roast for sudden, unexpected dinner guests, Muscovy ducks, peacocks, a goat, three horses, some geese, pigs, cows and many more.
      Because of his erect bearing, my father appeared taller than his modest five-foot-seven. His head, well-set on broad, thick shoulders, was large enough to accommodate big ears and a craggy nose. His large expressive eyes, sometimes grey-green, other times grey-blue, were set far apart under shaggy gray brows, almost thick enough to braid. They were lively eyes, attentive, warm and kind, though they could turn cold and hard in anger. A thin fuzz of steel-gray hair kept papa's pate from shining and he kept the fuzz growing by massaging it with Vaseline. His ruddy face was clean shaven; he always used a straight-edge razor. Instead of barbering himself in the bathroom he would come into the warm kitchen to be with us for company while, without benefit of a mirror, he would walk around or stand near the stove stroking off his whiskers with that vicious weapon as casually as if it were a butter knife.

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