BILL PURNELL’S LIFE is filled with interesting chapters.
In 1947, when he was a teenager, he had a Seattle Times paper route in north Seattle that he covered on horseback. He took his dates to the Aurora Drive-In in a horse and wagon he rebuilt, friends on horseback serving as crossing guards while he drove it onto the avenue.
He worked on Atlas missile sites in Idaho, did soil samples for the construction of the Space Needle, built a dam in Alaska and traveled around the world.
But it’s the title of an earlier chapter of his life story that stops the local reader: Protection Island.
That’s where Bill and his brother Dave spent summer days scavenging for treasure while their father, a Chimacum farmer, tended his cattle.
Last week, Bill was back in Chimacum, where he shared memories of their forays around the island, near the entrance to Discovery Bay.
“It took us all day to go all the way around it,” Bill said. “You had to time it right not to get trapped by the tides.”
Bill was a year old when his family moved from Lopez Island to Miller Farm in the Chimacum Valley in 1933.
In 1935, his father, Harry Purnell, also leased Protection Island, which was owned by a Seattle attorney named Grimshaw, to raise wheat and cattle.
Livestock was transported by a barge that his father built, Bill said.
When he and his brother Dave, 18 months his junior, were older, their father took them with him when he went to the island to check on the cattle. The trip from Cape George in a 14-foot rowboat took two to three hours.
“Dad would sit in the rear, and Dave and I would each take an oar,” he said. “Dad would call, ‘Stroke, stroke, stroke.’”
The long days were spent mining the beach for treasures, which were plentiful during the war years.
The boys salvaged cans of sea rations that had crossed the ocean, eating the little chocolates and saving the Spam, which they liked, for later.
They found kapok life vests, pieces of lifeboats and the occasional glass float.
They collected phosphate from unexploded bombs dropped on small parachutes by planes from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station during night maneuvers.
“They made a good night light,” Bill said.
Best of all was the colored gunpowder from the small lead bombs dropped by P-38 fighter planes for target practice.
The bombs were easy to find: Their father leased Violet Point, on the northeast end of the island, to the Navy for a bombing range.
“When we heard the planes coming, we ran for high ground,” Bill said.
Each plane carried bombs with a different-colored powder so the pilots could tell who hit the target, Bill said — red, blue or yellow.
About a third didn’t explode, he said, and could be defused by removing the nosepin and the 10-gauge shotgun shell.
The gunpowder behind the shell could be mixed to make different-colored smoke and was a popular trade item — one of their friends got in trouble for setting it off in the schoolyard, Bill recalled.
They also salvaged fabric from the parachutes and nylon targets towed behind planes for target practice.
“Nylon was a new fabric then,” he said. “Did the ladies like it in Chimacum.”
The island’s natives also dropped bombs — Protection Island is the nesting ground for thousands of gulls, auklets and puffins.
Look out from below
The gulls built nests on the beaches, and if you got too close to their offspring, the mother gull would fly overhead and regurgitate on you.
“We always wore hats when we went out there,” he said.
For dinner, Bill and Dave would go down to the beach at low tide and rake Dungeness crabs into an apple crate with a stick. They also jigged for rock cod out of the rowboat near the dock.
Their father had a garden on the island, Bill said, and traded produce for salmon from fishing boats during crossings.
The family was also allowed to shoot the Chinese pheasants that their father introduced to the island.
“You could shoot them out of the door,” Bill said. “You had to shoot the green heads through the eye.”
The farmhouse on the island had a well with a pump but no electricity or indoor bathroom.
On one trip, they arrived to find no kitchen — the prize bull had pushed open the door to the kitchen and fallen through the floor into the old cistern under the house.
It took two days to dig a tunnel, but they got the animal out, Bill recalled. The worst part: trying to sleep with an angry bull in the basement.
“For two nights, we laid there while he bellowed,” he said.
Every August, his father would go over to the island and stay for two months to harvest the wheat and replant. Machinery was brought over by boat.
His father had the first combine in the Peninsula, Bill said, but communication with the mainland was manual — his father would go down to the beach and signal with a flashlight to his mother, who would drive the family’s ’36 Chevy to Cape George and point the headlights at the island.
“He taught her Morse code,” Bill said.
Bill also remembers the stormy night they went to pick up their father, who was rowing back to be with the family for Thanksgiving.
After waiting and worrying, they watched as Harry Purnell came surfing ashore in his boat on a large wave that carried him over the beach and into the small lake.
Bill also remembers rowing over to the island in the fog with his brother and father, who used a compass and timed the trip to estimate where they were.
“We would listen for the breakers on the shoreline,” Bill said. “A couple of times, we overshot the spit and had to turn around and come back.”
His father leased Protection Island until the end of 1944, when he quit farming and moved his wife and third son, Dan, who was born that year, to Seattle.
Finished school year
Bill and Dave stayed on at the Short Farm to finish the school year, then joined the family.
His father was probably the last serious farmer on the island, Bill said.
He went into heavy construction, working on the Alcan (Alaska-Canadian) Highway and as a supervisor on projects in Peru, North Africa, Afghanistan and Cambodia. He died in Bangkok in 1968.
After high school, Bill served in the Navy, attended the University of Washington and worked as an engineering geologist, eventually forming his own company.
His interest in geology stemmed from something else the boys found on the beach: mammoth teeth, tusks and bones that the spring storms washed out of the west bluff.
“I found my life’s work on the island,” he said.
Bill now lives in Bellingham, and will celebrate his 80th birthday in December.
He still does some consulting and helped brother Dan build a retirement home on 15 wooded acres in the Chimacum Valley, part of property their father bought in 1941 for $200.
Bill remembers his father letting him and Dave each hold a $100 bill used to make the purchase.
In the spring of 1999, more than half a century after he last set foot on the island, Bill returned to visit Protection Island, now a national wildlife preserve but once a small kingdom that belonged to two boys.
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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.
