SEQUIM — A few minutes with a pioneer puts Sequim in perspective and provides a gentle reminder about the quality of life that’s easy to take for granted.
Ask Margaret Eberle Lotzgesell, one of this year’s Sequim Irrigation Festival grand pioneers, what positive changes she’s seen in this town, and she first mentions a body of water — the one at the Sequim Aquatic Recreation Center.
This fits with the Irrigation Festival theme: For 114 years, the community party has celebrated the valley “where water is wealth.”
The pool is a great gathering place, said Lotzgesell, who at 84 is an avid swimmer.
“You see people of all ages there.”
She likewise praises the Dungeness River Audubon Center, a destination for school children’s field trips and bird walks for grownups every Wednesday morning.
Her parents, Joseph and Elizabeth Eberle, taught her to love being outdoors and to love growing her own food in the family garden.
As she’s watched the Dungeness Valley transform from a farming community to a retirement mecca, Lotzgesell has stayed active in a cross-section of organizations.
She volunteers at the Hospital Guild Thrift Shop, bakes cookies for the Dungeness Schoolhouse Christmas tea — she went to school there through eighth grade, after all — and in springtime, “You’ll find me at the baseball games,” watching grandson Jake Lotzgesell, a junior at Sequim High School.
On the subject of Sequim’s development, Lotzgesell points out another relatively new addition.
“You can’t blame people for coming here. Look at our [Olympic] Medical Center,” she said. “You no longer have to go to Seattle for cancer treatment.”
Lotzgesell married her childhood sweetheart, Dick; they had five children and 55 years together before he died in 2002.
John Jarvis
Grand Pioneer John Jarvis, like Lotzgesell, is a lifelong resident of the Sequim community.
He was born March 18, 1931, in the hospital that was once on Washington Street and grew up on his parents’ farm, where he still lives and works.
Jarvis and his wife of 57 years, Carmen, still raise beef cattle and chickens at the Finn Hall Farm in Agnew and hope to pass it on to their daughter, Suzie Bliven, and granddaughter Jonel Lyons.
Jarvis is one of the few pioneers who didn’t sell his land as a nest egg for his and Carmen’s retirement.
The family hopes instead to sell the development rights to Friends of the Fields, Clallam County’s farmland preservation coalition.
Friends (www.FriendsoftheFields.org) is in the midst of raising local funds and applying for state and federal grants to make the purchase.
It would leave the farm in the Jarvises’ hands while guaranteeing that it’s never turned into housing tracts.
Cliff Vining
Cliff Vining, an honorary pioneer in this year’s Irrigation Festival, also had a career connected to cows: He hauled milk across eastern Washington for three and a half decades.
Those years are bookended by his childhood and retirement in Sequim.
He moved here from New Mexico at age 4 and stayed until he was 19. Then Vining moved back in 1982 with his wife, Betty Lou. They were married 57 years; Vining has been a widow for four.
Even as the population grows, life on the North Olympic Peninsula is good, Vining says, and so is the fishing and the golf. There’s that water-is-wealth thing again.
Best of all, though, “I really like the people,” added Vining, who is 87.
Mary Loretta Miller Schott was also to be an honorary pioneer, but the Sequim farmer and mother of seven died on Feb. 17.
A few months ago, her children came from across the state to celebrate her 89th birthday.
Her daughter, Kristy Cook of Raymond, said that Schott was delighted when she learned she had been chosen as a pioneer and had chosen an outfit and accessories for the Irrigation Festival events in her honor.
Schott, who during the 1960s was the first woman to run a truck farm in the Dungeness Valley, valued farming as not only a job, but a way of life.
“It’s rewarding to work in the soil,” she said in a November interview with the Peninsula Daily News.
“It was hard. But I enjoyed every minute of it.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
