It was 1966 when my grandfather, Joe Husby, died. On a sunny winter day my family drove to the funeral home in Everett and as I walked past the coffin I saw my grandfather for the first and last time. He and my mother had been estranged, complicated by a few monkey-wrenches thrown by my father. It was the same on his side of the family, I didn't meet his parents either. The main things I have known about my grandfather are that he was very smart, that he wanted a son and when my mother, the third daughter was born, he was very disappointed. And I heard stories from my cousins, because I learned, to my astonishment, that he used to travel and visit with them. Knew them growing up.
Both of my parents are gone, and each of them left me with a large task to do. My father's music collection needs organizing before donation to a university folk collection. And my mother's father's many writings need to be scanned and considered for republication. I will be scanning both image and OCR copies of the columns I have stored inelegantly but safely in a brown paper bag that my mother handed them to me in the early 1990s. As I come across interesting, funny, topical, whatever, articles I will publish all or excerpts here.
Mom wanted to be a writer and had several unpublished fiction mss to her credit. In later years she wrote essays in a senior center journal group, and these are like gold for the family. My sister wisely had friends and family read some of these at the memorial reception following Mom's death, and it was wonderful to see the reactions of those mentioned in her essays. I have been a writer for many years, but when I was hired to be a writer at a university library I put aside much of my freelance work and some of my personal projects. The writing bug has been in me since I can remember - my early years of employment were as a technical forester and a park ranger - I had a lot of quiet time working in the woods, and on my days off I climbed mountains so I had a lot of time spent thinking and walking. And it all needed to go down on paper, in my journals.
These formative years were spent in Washington state, but it wasn't until I moved away and was in graduate school that I started thinking back to all of the threads in my life that I realized that my photos of the Puget Sound area and the Cascade mountains could illustrate my grandfather's articles. After my mother died I realized her journal entries covered important episodes from her childhood and young adult self. They dovetailed nicely between grandfather's newspaper columns and my photos and could come to life in one volume some day. In the end, a book might contain all of these elements, but for now, the most important part of the process is to unlock my grandfather's thoughts, long held in clippings, never digitized. One paper he wrote for (The Arlington Herald) is long gone, the other (The Everett Herald) is owned by the Washington Post Company, and I'll hazard a guess that they don't know my grandfather from a hole in the ground.
So this is the beginning of a journey, to examine the little I know about the man I never met and use his words to hang flesh on that skeletal frame. I'll filter some of it through my mother's memories and my own experiences and there are still a lot of people around who knew Joe Husby to offer insight and answer question - I'll enjoy visiting with them again. I hope to make this an interesting story and a valuable look back.
--Maggie Dwyer, who has planned this writing project for years and reminded herself of it daily by using the moniker Stilly River Sage, in homage to "The Sage of the Stilly" and the task he and my mother have set me to.
