Phone photo 59

This little stand was built by a guy who was the previous resident of a house I owned here in McCleary from 1986 to 1994. He was a World War I veteran and had lived here many years.

By the early 1980s he was a long time widower and had apparently been included in a circle of old fellows who had been befriended by a white supremacist nutjob. This young fellow must've thought McCleary was a nice place to hide out and do whatever sort of illegal thing he was doing. They say he made himself useful to several oldtimers by doing carpentry oddjobs.

The story goes that this young racist left town in order to stay at some compound filled with others of his ilk out in Missouri or Arkansas. But before he left he asked if our old guy would let him use his upstairs as a storage unit. So the elderly vet agreed.

Shortly after this junior Nazi departed town, the old fellow went to the Post Office and fell dead as the result of a heart attack. His nephew inherited the house and found some interesting things upstairs, chiefly explosives, firearms, napalm detonators, etc. The FBI and Fort Lewis came and cleaned the place out. The neighbors told me Feds told them that if that house had caught fire half of McCleary would've turned into a crater. I assume the guilty party was apprehended.

Anyway, the explosives storage area later became the same place where I conducted all my comix business, including editing City Limits Gazette, from mid 1986 to mid 1994.

So as a token of that local lore, I still have the old fellow's little homemade stand and his homemade fishing pole.