Phone photo 2858

Of the four portraits by James Abbott adorning the front of the old Rhodes Grocery, this one of George Osgood (1868-1955) is the best.

Osgood was an early business partner of Henry McCleary.

Phone photo 2856

James Abbott portrait of Henry McCleary (1861-1943), the timber baron who virtually ran this town as a one-man principality until 1941.

This is a portrait of a timid person, and Henry was many things, but never that.

Phone photo 2854

Four portraits by James Abbott at the entrance of the old Rhodes Grocery, long ago converted to a cram-yer-crap storage business. So far as I know, this little alcove is unique in the Abbott art experience in that he has an area where human faces are the main focus. This was not his strong point and the combined effect is actually sort of like eating stale bread.

I bet if we took a poll here in McCleary, Washington (pop. about 1600) on who these four portraits are supposed to represent the results would be enormously embarrassing to the town. So, at the risk of sounding like a know-it-all, stick with this blog and in the words of Sherlock Holmes, "observe and learn." I even personally met one of the subjects portrayed here.

Also, this is a spot where certain inebriated people like to hover for awhile. How one can do that while all those eyes at your back, I don't know, but they do.

Morty Comix # 2494

Morty Comix # 2494 looked like the kind of comic art that needed to travel, so I turned to my online card deck to help me decide where to send it.

The 5 of diamonds. Five. Our 5th President was James Monroe, the first of the subset of Obscure Presidents. Since this blog is basically an online Obscuro Comix, Monroe was the perfect choice Fate decided to use.

There are 17 counties in the United States named Monroe County, and I am guessing each one is named after the President. I whittled the list down to the counties residing in states I have visited: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia. I've been in Missouri, but only in the St. Louis airport changing planes and I won't count that.

Next card, 6 of hearts. Six. Ohio was the 6th state I listed. Hearts starts with "H" so I searched for a place in Monroe County, Ohio that starts with that letter and found the small settlement of Hannibal, on the Ohio River across from West Virginia.

I've actually been within about 40 miles or less of Hannibal in 1999 when I was driving north on I-77. Nearby Cambridge, Ohio was the home of Henry McCleary, who founded McCleary, Washington. The McCleary family farm now sits under an artificial lake created in the 1950s and is part of an Ohio state park.

Hannibal is nestled in some nice country.

I also visited Ohio during SPACE 2011, with my friends Bruce and Joan Chrislip as my hosts. In both visits I was impressed by how welcoming the natives of the Buckeye State were. My own ancestors lived for a generation or two in the northeast and southeast corners of pioneer Ohio on their way West.

Anyway, it turns out Hannibal is unincorporated and about a quarter of the size of McCleary (we have a bit over 1600 people here). So I simply searched for Hannibal online and chose the first place that popped up with an address, which turned out to be a vacant place of business up for sale. So I'm sending it care of the "Art Director," with a brief note, and hope whoever receives it has a sense of humor and an appreciation for the unexpected.

I submit that there will be no other comic art title harder to collect than Morty Comix. In March this serial will be 30 years old. And in a weird twist, it is the later issues that will be much harder to find. I am sure most of them have been thrown away since I have created this art form of Obscuro random distribution.

Morty Comix # 2483

It was getting really cold, wet, and dark. So Ron, Louise and I raced to film this distribution of Morty Comix # 2483 for the Bezango WA documentary before we all froze to death. The target was the display of the ancient horse-drawn fire engine and the second oldest locomotive in Washington exhibited in McCleary's Beerbower Park. In recent years, this park attraction has been enhanced during the holiday season by festive lights.

Here's a phone photo I took last year of the same site at night. It has a sense of fun and I like it.

So I managed to slip Morty Comix # 2483 into a crack of one of the supporting logs holding up the roof. It used to be this display was out in the open, but sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s this chain link cage was constructed to protect the relics.  Ron and Louise filmed the whole episode.

After this freezing event we returned to the warm and comfy confines of Steve's Acres of Cats. Ron and Louise conducted another interview with me. Well I hope you come and see me in the movies, then I’ll know that you will plainly see the biggest fool that ever hit the big time, and all I gotta do is act naturally.

It looks like Ron and Louise and I will have at least one more caper in the very near future before their filming is complete.

Phone photo 2062

McCleary Mansion

Olympia, Washington

Mini-Comics Day in McCleary, pt. 6

Although he unfortunately no longer resides in Washington State, our old pal Bruce Chrislip in McCleary's sister-city of goetta-rich Cincinnati (Henry McCleary was from Ohio, so it isn't so far fetched. Plus, I have actually met and shook hands with the mayors of both cities. Who else can say that?) participated in McCleary Mini-Comics Day from afar! We love you Bruce!

Phone photo 734

The stained glass window Henry McCleary had installed in the local Methodist Church was meant to honor the memory of his wife, Ada, shortly after she died. To partially pay for the thing, he supposedly garnished the wages of the workers in his one-man principality. The church was a Wohleb designed structure, the same architect responsible for many of Olympia's public and private landmarks. The window has recently been temporarily removed for restoration, giving the structure an incomplete look these days.

During Prohibition the local preacher allowed moonshiners to store their goods in the basement, reasoning that if people were going to drink the stuff they might as well consume quality, safe booze under his watch as protector of the flock. My Dad was responsible for hauling the long retired bell out of the basement and putting it back in the belfry more than a decade ago. I hear it every Sunday morning and although I am not a church going man it makes me feel good to know his contribution to the town is still being heralded even though he is gone.

McCleary: Fact or Fiction?

Here are four historical myths (of varying degrees) about McCleary, Washington.

50 Years Ago -- December 1941

I used to write for our local museum newsletter here in McCleary, Washington. I'll be posting a bunch of these for a bit.

Unfortunately, my favorite article, "Henry McCleary and the Land of the Rising Sun" does not seem to be in my files, which is too bad since it is one of the more visual pieces I assembled for this periodical. However, the text can be found on OlyBlog, and it does relate somewhat to this scanned essay. Also, I'll includes the actual text from OlyBlog here:

Henry McCleary & the Land of the Rising Sun

Fri, 11/11/2005 - 10:58pm — stevenl [The following article was originally published in the McCleary Museum Newsletter v. 11 issue 3 (Sept. 2001). OlyBlog seemed like a good venue for introducing this local history to the online world. For those who don't know, the town of McCleary is about 20 miles west of Olympia].

According to conventional wisdom, Henry McCleary sold his entire operation to Simpson in the last hours of Dec. 1941 due to several factors: his age, the fact that his timber was played out, the unions were closing in, and the start of another war economy. Sam Lanning quoted Henry in Jan. 1942, "Sam, I am old and I have had enough. The whole world business has gone to war and production for war needs. I have closed out and bought 22,000 acres of grazing land stocked with cattle, quite a distance from town and prefer raising beef to making bombs."

But there was another, more subtle, reason for Henry's departure. One of his chief business clients, Japan, was now our enemy. Since Henry was a man of action, leaving very little in the way of written thoughts, we can only guess what was going through his mind in Dec. 1941. Pearl Harbor has never been mentioned as one of the reasons for his selling out, but one cannot look at the McCleary-Japan relationship without concluding Henry must have felt some sense of betrayal.

Japanese Railroad Workers
We have no photographs of them. They never figure in written or oral recollections of our area. Newspaper accounts of them are few and far between. Yet the McCleary region was home to over two dozen Japanese railroad workers for the better part of two decades. It is believed they lived in an encampment northwest of town, on the far western end of Mohney's Prairie.

McCleary's preference for foreign labor was well known. They were inexpensive and not likely to unionize. The early community was multinational, with a considerable number of Scandinavians, Greeks, and Italians. It was a melting pot-- almost.

How the Japanese came to be hired by Henry is not known, but we do have an account of their arrival. The July 23, 1904 Elma Chronicle made a note that McCleary had hired Japanese workers, "as men are very scarce." And the Elma newspaper also noted, "On the 2:13 train, Friday, there were several Japanese workmen, brought here by the Henry McCleary Lumber Co. They were met at the depot here, compelled to re-board the train, and to go on to the next station. It is reported that arrests are to be made on the charge of intimidation."

There was no shortage of work for these workers. Henry McCleary's empire would rapidly expand during the next 25 years, and his logging railroad would grow with it. It would seem almost impossible that anyone living in McCleary during this period would not see them. But trying to uncover information about this group is very difficult.

The Japanese somehow managed to avoid being listed in the 1910 McCleary census. Fortunately, some dutiful listmaker must have taken great pains to phonetically sound out the names of the workers recorded in the 1920 McCleary census. There are 28 workers, plus the wife of the section boss, and their 4 month old daughter, apparently born in McCleary in the fall of 1919. This was in a year when Grays Harbor County had only 155 Japanese total. As low as this number seems, it was actually the high-water mark for Japanese here in the first half of the 20th century. The 1930 census counted only 29 Japanese. This was partly due to the Johnson Immigration Act. More on that later.

Business Partners
Henry's employment of workers from Japan was apparently highly unpopular among some elements of Grays Harbor County. But Henry kept them on. Of Ada McCleary, John Anderson wrote, "Mrs. McCleary didn't care what nationality anyone was, be they Greek, Italian, Irish or Swede. As far as she was concerned one could learn from every culture. Indeed all these cultures made McCleary the great place it was to live." Unlike Ada, her husband was not known as a social activist. He had a business to run, and business being business, he followed the money. If that meant taking the risk of hiring Japanese railroad workers, so be it. It also meant trading with that strange and frightening land on the other side of the Pacific, Japan itself.

Mr. McCleary, always the economic risk-taker, was rewarded for his willingness to do business with a country most others feared and misunderstood. Here's a sample: according to McCleary's car sales book, if I'm reading it right, he grossed over $2 million between Sept. 1925-Jan. 1926 from loading up Japanese ships at his Westside Olympia mill. The ships were the Clyde Maru, Milan Maru, Malta Maru, and Tasmania Maru. The Milan Maru visited twice during that slice of time. They were bound for Osaka and Kobe. As a side note, all four ships became casualties of World War II in the Pacific.

The Apr. 4, 1929 Elma Chronicle told the readers, "Henry McCleary, president of the McCleary Timber Co., left last Saturday for Japan accompanied by his son Charles of Olympia and his nephew Jack, of McCleary, sailing from Victoria on the Empress of Russia. They plan to be gone about thirty days. Most of the time in Japan will be spent at Kobi with visits to other parts of the country also included." As another side note, the Empress of Russia was noted in future McCleary businessman Al Fleming's diary when he was stationed in Vladivostok, May 18, 1919: "... The largest ship that had ever been in this port. She is a beauty. Couldn't dock as the water wasn't deep enough." The Empress was used by the Allies in the Atlantic, survived the war, but burned in drydock, Sept. 8, 1945.

A photograph of the McCleary entourage in Japan, taken by a Tokyo photographer probably during his 1929 trip, shows each man accompanied by a geisha girl. All the businessmen look very happy, except for Henry, who appears somewhat perplexed.

Even in hard times Henry kept up his ties to Japan. The very same railroad that had been laid by Japanese workers was, during the Depression, torn out. According to Kramer Adams, "Like many another operator, Henry McCleary sold his rails to Japan for conversion into steel."

The Sept. 28, 1934 McCleary Observer reported, "The next few weeks will see the end of the McCleary railroad. A crew is taking up the rails and loading them on cars for shipment to Olympia where they will be transferred to a boat destined for Japan."

By this time, of course, militarists had gained control of Japan's political system. The steel no doubt went into their imperialistic expansion. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, McClearyite Lauren Bruner would survive being burned and shot while in the crow's nest of the Arizona. One has to ponder how much the McCleary rails contributed to that attack. Henry McCleary probably wondered too. And he probably felt betrayed.

In yet another of the growing ironies in this case, after Simpson acquired McCleary's operations, they dismantled the mill where the present Beerbower Park now sits. As the Elma Chronicle for Apr. 30, 1942 reported, "Now that the Simpson Company is dismantling the long idle mill its metal salvage is going into war production. Already some carloads have been shipped to the smelters at Cleveland ..."

Madison Grant and Albert Johnson, the Aristocrat and the Redneck
The weirdest part of this story is yet to come. Madison Grant (1865-1937), a Yale-educated lawyer and promoter of Eugenics, wrote The Passing of the Great White Race in 1916, a book the Holocaust Study Center considers, "A major text of the American racist movement from 1916 until 1925." Hitler himself personally wrote Grant and thanked him for writing this work, probably due to passages like this: "[Sterilization could] be applied to an ever widening group of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types."

Substitute Grant's use of "Nordic" with Hitler's "Aryan," and it is indeed difficult to tell the two philosophies apart. Grant had Nazi ties, including Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's chief scientific advisor and leading German Eugenicist. Grant's later work, Conquest of a Continent, earned this preface in the 1937 German edition: "No one has as much reason to note the work of this man [Grant] with the keenest of attention as does a German of today in a time when the racial idea has become one of the chief foundations of National Socialist States population policies."

Grant found a kindred spirit in the person of U.S. Congressman Albert Johnson (1869-1957), a Republican who served in Congress from 1913-1933. Johnson was a midwest transplant who was publisher of Hoquiam's Grays Harbor Washingtonian. He was elected as a crusader against "radicalism" and he favored immigration restriction. In his first campaign, Johnson stated, "The greatest menace to the Republic today is the open door it affords to the ignorant hordes from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose lawlessness flourishes and civilization is ebbing into barbarism." In 1913, Johnson proposed a "Panaryan Association" to unite the "white race." As Johnson was making pronouncements of this kind, Henry McCleary was offering employment and home for the very people the congressman despised, right in Johnson's district.

Johnson became the Chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. In 1923, through his connection with Grant, he was elected the President of the Eugenics Research Association, based at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. This was, as one writer put it, "An incident that deserves at least one chapter in any full length biography of Johnson. Its title would probably be something like 'New York Aristocrat Courts Pacific Northwest Redneck,' as the 'chemistry' that brought together the patrician Madison Grant and the backwoods Congressman needs considerable explanation."

Johnson made his big move in 1924 as co-sponsor of the Johnson-Reed Act (with Sen. David Aiken Reed, R-PA), also known as the Japanese Exclusion Act. This placed quotas on immigration, rolling them back to 1890. This placed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and eliminated Japanese immigration entirely. Said Johnson, "Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed ... The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended." He was especially applauded by the KKK.

The long-range effect of the Johnson-Reed Act is that tens of thousands of Europeans attempting to escape Nazi or Stalinist oppression were denied entry to the U.S., leaving a large percentage of them to perish. That is the legacy of Albert Johnson.

Henry McCleary's Kingdom
We must wonder what Henry McCleary thought about Albert Johnson and his "Panaryan" concepts. Surely Henry knew Johnson. They were both Republicans in the same district. Henry was a delegate for Coolidge at the 1924 GOP National Convention.

But in those days, as now, East County and Aberdeen/Hoquiam were worlds apart. McCleary's camp was his own kingdom, and the antics of politicians probably didn't concern him as long as they left him alone. Henry seemed content to let fellow executive Mark Reed be the political voice for the timber industry. We don't know the circumstances of the Japanese departure from McCleary, but if it was due to the Johnson-Reed Act, Henry must have had some conflicts concerning political party loyalty.

McCleary's Japanese workers, having arrived in 1904, predate the coming of the Italians and the Greeks. By McCleary standards, they are pioneers. Being here as early as they were, it is safe to say they were part of the foundation upon which McCleary built his empire. They deserve to be recognized for their contribution to the history of our town.

--Steve Willis

[2011 note: In the interests of revealing my personal bias, I should mention that Johnson's Democratic Party opponent in the 1918 congressional election was my great-grandfather, Theodore J. Hoss of Centralia. Theodore supported President Wilson's League of Nations and advocated the radical idea of equal wages for equal work for men and women. Johnson's people used Theodore's German surname against him in the campaign. Too bad Theodore didn't win]

Henry McCleary : a Centennial Scrapbook, 1898-1998

Charles Fattig and I put together this collection of material for the McCleary Historical Society in 1998. Only 55 copies were printed. Henry McCleary a Centennial Scrapbook