PORT ANGELES — This year, she’s going to break the record.
Gail Ralston is determined to beat the Olympic Medical Center Foundation’s Great Olympic Peninsula Duck Derby lifetime record for sales that has been unchallenged since the death of Bill Littlejohn of Sequim in 2019. Littlejohn’s record is 37,748. Ralston’s total at this point is 35,529.
“I hate to do this to this wonderful man, but I am going to pass him,” Ralston said.
She has competition. Among the top sellers in 2024 were Larry and Sylvia Strohm, with 2,175 (23,572 all-time sales); Esther Littlejohn, Bill Littlejohn’s widow, who was the top seller in Sequim with 1,441 (9,051 all-time); and Edna Petersen, 1,230 (2,048 all-time).
Sellers will man booths beginning today for the 36th annual Great Olympic Peninsula Duck Derby at Swain’s General Store and the Lincoln Street and Eastside Safeway stores in Port Angeles, as well as the Safeway in Sequim; at First Fed and Sound Community Bank branches in Port Angeles and Sequim; and at Wilder Toyota.
The giant raffle presented by the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe will be decided by the “duck pluck.” Thirty-six prizes will be awarded, including the top prize of a Toyota from Wilder Auto in Port Angeles.
Those prizes will be awarded after the main race, which is set for 1:30 p.m. May 18. The Bub and Alice Olsen VID (Very Important Duck) race will precede the main race at 1:15 p.m.; three prizes will be awarded in that race. Festivities will start at 11:30 a.m. with the opening of the Edie Beck Kids Pavilion and the VID party.
All will be in a new location this year. The duck pluck will be at the Port Angeles City Pier stage.
Main race tickets are $7 per duck or $35 for six entries for the price of five. Each VID ticket, which is $350, buys 60 entries in the main race and one VID duck. VID ducks are larger than the main race ducks and have the names of the business or individual purchasers emblazoned upon them.
Proceeds go to the OMC Foundation Healthcare Scholarship Fund, a $500,000 scholarship program to help increase the number of healthcare workers in Clallam County.
The program pays tuition, fees and living expenses to recipients pursuing training in the medical field, most of whom attend Peninsula College, who then promise to be available to work for at least two years at Olympic Medical Center.
Students in the Peninsula College medical assistance and nursing programs are among those selling duck derby tickets. All proceeds from student sales go to them, paying for certification fees for graduates in the medical assistant programs and for penning ceremonies for nursing program graduates.
Ralston has been selling duck tickets since Bruce Skinner, executive director of the Olympic Medical Center Foundation, created the fundraiser for OMC in 1989.
“We had just a few people selling and we didn’t have that many ducks, maybe 8,000,” Ralston said.
The 2024 derby sold 28,854 ducks.
Her second year she sold a ticket that won the first-place prize, and every year she has sold a winner of one of the prizes “so people come to me because they think I’m lucky,” she said. “They call me the Duck Lady.”
Ralston can be found during duck sales season at the Lincoln Street Safeway or at Swain’s. She sells to friends locally and elsewhere in the state as well as to people in Arizona, California, Montana and Minnesota.
“They know what the hospital means to me,” said Ralston, a longtime supporter and 2021 and 2022 OMC Foundation volunteer of year who organized the first Teddy Bear Tea at the holiday-season Festival of Trees.
She has been involved with the hospital since 1970, when she was in high school. She worked as a candy striper at the hospital and also learned switchboard there. She put that skill to use later at the Clallam County office, where she still works part-time, now the Assessor’s Office, at the age of 70.
She also had her three children at OMC.
“It feels like this is home,” she said.
She especially is grateful to the staff for their work in stabilizing her son and getting him to a Seattle hospital when he fell off a whale boat. Alex was 17 and had just climbed Mount Baker when he fell and became a quadriplegic, she said.
Now 38, he lives in Arizona.
When people ask her why she volunteers for the hospital, Ralston said she tells them about Alex.
“If it hadn’t been for the hospital, my son wouldn’t be here today and I wouldn’t get to hug and kiss him,” Ralston said.
For more information, see the OMC Foundation website at https://www.omhf.org, call 360-417-7144, or go to the foundation office at 1015 Georgiana St., Port Angeles.
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Leah Leach is a former executive editor for Peninsula Daily News.
