PORT TOWNSEND–Port Townsend poet and poetry printer Rusty North has died at age 88.
“She was a poet who took words so seriously that she typeset them one letter at a time, printing the results page by page on a hand-cranked press,” said Paula Lalish, who knew North for 30 years.
“She was definitely not a Hallmark kind of poet.”
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., North, who died Sunday, attended the Rochester Institute of Technology to learn printing.
It was at college when she met her husband, John, whom she married in 1943.
She was beginning a promising career as an artist when she lost her right hand in a printing press accident, forcing her to learn to write with her left hand.
It was then she developed her poetry: writing, typesetting, printing and binding small books of her own and other people’s works.
North and her husband had five children.
The oldest, Christopher, said his mother published more than 40 books of poetry, many with only a few hundred copies each.
Local friends, such as Caroline Wildflower, have collected several of North’s books, “but I don’t think anyone has them all.”
Nickname for red hair
North’s given name was Elizabeth, but she earned the nickname “Rusty” for her bright red hair, something that many of her Port Townsend friends never got to see.
Rusty and John arrived in Port Townsend in 1970 while they were looking for a place to live that was less congested than New York state.
Christopher North said his parents chose Port Townsend because “the first day they arrived there was a dog lying in the middle of the street, and [they] decided that was the place they really wanted to live.”
Christopher North said that having an artistic mother “made me think that I could accomplish anything that I wanted to do.”
He said that his mother boasted of being the first woman to wear jeans on her college campus.
“She was not ever going to be told there was something that she couldn’t do,” he said.
“She was going to do everything that the boys were doing.”
Christopher North lives in South Carolina with his wife, Diane.
Rusty North is survived by four other children, David of Port Townsend, Jonathan of Albany, N.Y., Carol Rose of Forks and Douglas of Seattle, as well as seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
John North died in 1974.
Last year, when she was ill, North and her oldest son met to determine what she would like to occur at her memorial.
The date and place for the memorial have not been determined and will be available from Wildflower at 360-379-5376 or Beth Cahape at 360-643-3913.
Christopher North made two videos of his mother reciting poetry, which can be viewed via http://tinyurl.com/37pebxz and http://tinyurl.com/332b9tl.
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
