STUDENTS AT CHIMACUM High School are dismissed at 2:20 p.m., leaving them free to go home or hang out with friends.
But once a week during his senior year, Jarrett Hansen would walk over to the elementary school’s end of campus to spend time with his little brother, Darnell.
Darnell and Jarrrett, who is in a band, also liked to play guitar together, go on outings and go swimming.
“It was more than hanging out,” Darnell said. “It was brother-type things.”
But Darnell and Jarrett didn’t know each other until three years ago, when Jarrett signed up for the school-based Big Brother/Big Sister program.
He continued when YMCA Building Futures took over the mentoring program.
“It was a match made in heaven,” said Kim Hammers, who worked for both organizations.
The boys have another thing in common. Darnell has an older sister. Jarrett has a younger sister.
Besides spending guy time at school, they have gone to the Woodland Park Zoo with Jarrett’s family and swimming in Port Ludlow.
A strong student
Jarrett said he could have helped Darnell with homework during the school year, but he is too strong a student.
“I did help him one time with math,” Jarrett said.
Last year, 30 Chimacum and Port Townsend high school students volunteered to “adopt” a younger student in the school-based program, Hammers said, and spend an hour each week together.
In Port Townsend, the district’s new early-release policy — every Wednesday at every school — makes it even easier for high school students to go over to Blue Heron and spend time with a young student.
“I’m hoping that will be a great option for them,” she said.
That the YMCA is offering activities and classes on early-release days — cooking, chess, biking — that students can sign up for and have their mentor join them, offers options for the time spent together.
Or they can choose what they want to do.
Community service
Being a mentor counts towards community service needed for graduation, but that’s not why Jarrett signed up.
“I just thought this was something I should be involved in,” he said.
Darnell will be in sixth grade this year. Jarrett is off to Central Washington University.
Their last official event together was the YMCA’s Building Futures picnic at H.J. Carroll Park last week.
There, mentors, students and families tie-dyed T-shirts in the YMCA colors with the help of Janet Getzendaner of Discovery Bay.
Janet’s spouse, Mark, cooked hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill.
Homer Smith Insurance was the major sponsor of the event, Hammers said, with the Port Townsend Safeway store giving in-kind donations.
Tom Kent led games, and everyone really got into disc golf.
“Big, small, whenever we get together, we have fun,” Hammers said.
The YMCA is gearing up for the start of the school year and is now recruiting adults and high school students for the school-based mentor program.
Sign up by contacting Hammers at 360-774-6342 or kim@olympicpeninsulaymca.org.
Mentors and matches will also be invited to an upcoming Y picnic.
Tunes from the hills
What would Garrison Keillor be like if he had grown up in Missouri instead of Minnesota and gone to Pentecostal tent meetings instead of the Lutheran church?
Is it possible to find true love on the road to Wieser?
What can wipe the smile off a dead man’s face?
The answer to the first question is Mitch Luckett, a musician and teller of tall tales who plays fiddle tunes like his daddy used to back in the Ozarks foothills.
Luckett will answer the other questions when he performs songs and tells stories at the Olympic Arts Festival on Saturday in Quilcene.
He might also talk about his boyhood idols: Mark Twain and Jesse James.
Hero, outlaw
“One was a hero, one an outlaw,” Luckett said. “I was torn between the two.”
Now a resident of Brinnon, Luckett grew up on a farm near Hawk Point in what he calls the old hills of Miss-our-ah between St. Louis and Hannibal.
He started playing guitar in high school and picked up the banjo after joining the Navy because a friend onboard ship had one.
When musicians got together to play old songs, Luckett was surprised he could keep up.
“I thought I was touched by divine inspiration,” he said. “I knew exactly where it was going.”
Later, his mother informed him that his father, a fiddler who was known to imbibe, would come home from playing at dances, and she would make him sleep in the barn.
In the morning, she’d go out and find 4-year-old Mitch asleep on a hay bale.
Mitch’s parents divorced by the time he was 7, he said, but the tunes his father played in the barn are etched on his brain like the grooves of a 45.
“She said I had heard all these songs when I was a kid,” he said. “Years later, I pulled them out of there. The old tunes kind of came back to me.”
Luckett ended up more like Twain, studying literature at Missouri’s Truman University and in graduate school at Portland State University in Oregon.
He put his writing skills to use for the Portland Audubon Society, where he was director of two sanctuaries and wrote a bird column.
He was on a hiking trip to the Olympics when he heard about property for sale in a valley near the Duckabush River and fell in love with it.
He’s been living in the house he built in the valley for four years.
“You can hear the river,” he said.
At Saturday’s event, you can hear him play old barn-dance music like his father used to play: “Quincy Dillon’s High ‘D’ Tune,” “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” “Old Joe Clark,” “The Wreck of the Old 97.”
“You always have to have a train song,” Luckett said, even though the train doesn’t go through Hawk Point — or Quilcene — anymore.
Quilcene Shindig
For more music on the grounds, go over to the sixth annual Quilcene Shindig on the grounds of the old theater.
Another free event, it starts Saturday at noon, with Irish Salt, the Machete Sisters, Steve Grandinetti and Locust Street Taxi on the bill.
“Bring food, bring drink, bring your neighbors, children and second cousins,” Linda Herzog recommended in her latest Quilcene Conversations email (quilcene-conversations@googlegroups.com).
I could bring Luckett; while talking with him, I found out that Mitchell is a family name.
My father’s family settled in foothills of the Ozarks. Luckett’s mother was a Mitchell. My grandmother was a Mitchell.
Luckett has family in Reed’s Spring near Springfield. My maiden name is Reed.
At the very least:
“We are shirt-tail cousins,” he said.
Mitch Luckett will play bluegrass and old-time music on the banjo, guitar and harmonica Saturday at the fifth annual Summer Olympic Art Festival in Quilcene.
The festival is free and goes from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the grounds of the Olympic Art Gallery, U.S. Highway 101 at Washington Street on the north end of Quilcene.
For more information, visit www.olympicartgallery.com.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or email jjackson@olypen.com.
