SEQUIM — If you like your history topped with a pitchfork-ful of prairie-dry humor, Doug McInnes is your man.
And clearly, he was Mr. Right for Tuesday’s birthday party for the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce.
McInnes is 80 and a Sequim native, and so is the chamber.
So, with sparkling apple-grape juice flowing beside the birthday cake, McInnes and Sequim’s business people got together at the SunLand Golf & Country Club for a quick Dungeness Valley history tour.
McInnes started the trip in 1930, the year he was born and the year the movie “Untamed,” starring Joan Crawford as a girl raised in the jungle, was playing at Sequim’s Olympic Theater; adult admission 40 cents, kids 20 cents.
• Also in 1930: the U.S. Census was under way, and would count 534 Sequim residents.
• 1933 was a wet year, with 25 inches of rain on Sequim and the end of Prohibition.
• In 1934 you could get lunch in the Sequim school cafeteria for 7 cents.
• In 1936 Hugh McCrorie would drive his cow herd through downtown, while out in the fields, tractors were replacing horses and milking machines were gaining popularity.
• 1937: Elk hunting is begun in order to thin the population, and 800 elk were killed — plus two men; that same year a sign went up on the east end of town announcing “Sequim: Where Water is Wealth.”
• 1941: After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, brought this country into World War II, blackouts and coastal patrols got under way on the Olympic Peninsula, with gasoline and food rationing soon to follow.
• 1945: The war ended, with 58 service members from Clallam County killed in action.
• 1949: McInnes’ bride-to-be, Bonnie, was crowned queen of the Irrigation Festival.
• 1950: Some Sequim residents acquired their first television sets, and an especially snowy winter hit; “That was a toughie,” said McInnes, who was 20 that year.
• 1953: Sequim’s single traffic light became a full-service stoplight as the population reached 1,125 — and the town got house numbers.
• 1958: The Three Crabs Restaurant — now at 11 Three Crabs Road — opened in the back of the Dungeness Tavern.
• 1959: Some 13,000 cows lived on dairy farms in and around Sequim.
• 1966: With the population up to 1,325, Sequim’s railroad depot closed, but visitors began to find out — and spread the word — about the “Sequim lifestyle,” with its sunshine, fertile farms and good fishing and hunting.
“And the rest is history,” McInnes said, before serving up a reading list of his own invention.
“I promised the library I would plug some of the lesser-known books,” he joked, before touting such fictitious titles as “A High Tide’s High Tide,” by Sue Nami; the sequel to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” known as “Confessions of an Early-Day Pot Smoker;” and “Don’t Start the Evolution Without Me!” the prequel to Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”
McInnes’ own actual book, “Sequim Yesterday,” is available at the Museum & Arts Center, 175 W. Cedar St., and at Pacific Mist Books, 121 W. Washington St.
McInnes, honored as a grand pioneer in the 2007 Irrigation Festival, is the member of a family with deep — and ongoing — roots in this community.
He likes to be known as dad to David McInnes, who teaches math at Sequim Middle School and has starred in many Olympic Theatre Arts shows.
His great-niece, Vickie Maples, is the executive director of the Sequim chamber of commerce.
And he’s been married for a mere 57 years to Bonnie, a farmer’s daughter whose family, the Robbs, worked the land until the 1970s.
Their farm, McInnes said, is now the site of Sequim’s Walmart.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
