Jim Johnson's roots run deep through history of North Bend

Originally published Saturday, May 3, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Jim Johnson wasn't much more than 3 pounds when he was first-born in an old line North Bend family three-quarters of a century ago.

"They used to put me in a shoe box," he said.

That was back when the family home was about where the South Fork bridge is now, and the entire town comprised about 300 souls, including the Johnsons and the Catchings on his mother's side.

The local economy was based on timber, turning fir and cedar into everything from dimension lumber to shingles to cabinets and door frames. Jim's father, Herbert, a contractor and second-generation North Bend resident, built many of the homes and business buildings in and around the original town center and the Meadowbrook area of what is now neighboring Snoqualmie.

A whole lot of water has passed under that bridge. North Bend has grown tenfold, and Jim Johnson's feet now might barely fit into a size 12 shoe box. Growth is the growth industry around here lately, and old-timers like Jim and his wife, Lois, have mixed feelings about it.

Lois, who grew up nearby in Cedar Falls, started dating Jim when she was a high school freshman and he was a senior.

They lived in and around North Bend all their lives instead of moving on like many others have done in the ebb and flow of small-town dynamics that has brought both depression and "Twin Peaks" fame to this town on the Snoqualmie River.

"We've talked about moving, or maybe just going south in the winters," Jim said. "But we're still pretty comfortable here, and we find things to keep us busy. I still like to fish a bit, but there's all sorts of rules that didn't used to be, and there just plain aren't as many fish anymore."

North Bend is no longer the kind of slow-paced community where the manager of the local lumberyard can take the afternoon off and drift the South or Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie and fly-cast till he's limited-out with 20 trout. The lumberyard Jim bought from his father after World War II and ran for several decades disappeared even before the 20-fish daily limit.

Seattle began growing outward with all the unchecked spread of a fat lady sitting on a bar stool, and before you could say planned development, there were new houses and businesses. What used to be State Route 10 became, for a while, the last, unfinished link in the Interstate 90 route over the Cascades. North Bend was known, not always fondly, as the only stoplight between Seattle and Snoqualmie Pass.

Big contractors bought lumber and building materials from much larger places, and the small Johnson Lumber Co. didn't last very long, even after Jim sold out in the mid-1980s.

The housing and roads and schools and utilities and everything that comes with population pumped new juice into North Bend as the construction continued to sprawl, particularly new homes. "I had a friend who used to be the rural-delivery mail carrier in town. Now there are at least five rural routes," Jim said. But watching all this growth can be sort of like standing on a levee and watching the water rise.

"You can drive down any small road in the woods and take a cutoff into the trees and -- Bam! -- you run into a whole bunch of $350,000 houses that look like they've been dropped in overnight!" Jim said, twisting his big white head and smiling in mock disbelief.

"Look over there ... what used to be the Si View Golf Course. All homes now. And out the other way, my younger brother, Harvey, built a retirement home on a lot that cost $50,000. It's on part of 17 acres our father bought for $2,000 when we were kids."

As we walk around a small piece of riverfront acreage he and Lois once hoped would be their home site, a fat blacktail deer bounds across the clearing and then watches us from the levee.

"We used to see them all the time around here, but not so much any more, with all this development," Jim said.

The Johnson family roots are deep in this land. Grandpa Elmer Catching's General Store was on the mother's side, and Elmer was North Bend's mayor from the mid-1920s to the mid-'30s. Jim's father, Herbert, built the North Bend Theatre and Sunset Garage buildings and many homes, including the Johnson family home that had to be moved for the Route 10 bridge over the South Fork.

"I was pushing my first wheelbarrows of concrete when I was 11 or 12," Jim recalled. "Dad always had me helping one one job or another."

Back then, Jim was fishing almost as much as other people were breathing.

"He'd put an old wooden boat in and drift to where it met the Middle Fork, where someone would have to meet him and help pull out the boat," said his wife of 54 years.

"And I'd have my limit -- think it was 20 fish then, trout -- by the time I got there," he interjected.

When she could get Jim off the river, Lois lured him to dances at places like the old Moose Lodge Hall on the North Fork, or up at Raging River or out to Cedar Falls, Lois' home community that disappeared when Seattle's dams back-flooded the area. Jim and Lois still laugh remembering how he didn't quite get her home from a dance on time because the battery fell right through the floorboards of his old Chevrolet.

Back then, the local bank was where the Chinese restaurant now stands, and the John L. Scott Realty office was the site of the first movie house. Zella Parsons played piano accompaniment for the first movies. And local women worked the switchboards of the locally owned telephone company at Third Street and Main.

There wasn't a whole lot of trouble on the streets of North Bend that couldn't be handled by Jack Ferguson, the one-man police department, or Roy Barrett, who served after him. They often walked the downtown part of their beat.

And North Bend folks walked to the top of Mount Si "almost every week, in good weather," Jim said. "It certainly was the place you took visitors, and you could always count on seeing someone you knew, a neighbor or friend, while you were going up or coming down."

Upon graduating from North Bend High in 1939, Jim went to work at Boeing. He and Lois married in 1942, before World War II caught up with him, and he served an Army tour in Occupied Japan. Afterward, they bought the Herb Johnson Lumber Co. from his father.

"It was a pretty good little yard," Lois noted. "Whenever a customer wanted something they might not have, someone ran all the way into Seattle for that item. That's the kind of thing they did for local customers."

"We also had a pretty good business making door and window frames for years, right across the street from the lumberyard," Jim added. And he even went into the manufacturing of patented wood-laminate diving boards for several years in the 1960s.

They raised a son and a daughter in a large home on the edge of town, then sold it and moved back to the north end of North Bend, in a newer home built by a local Weyerhaeuser mill executive. With a former lumberyard manager's perspective, Jim notes: "You can tell he must've handpicked every stick of lumber that went into this house. If you go up in the attic and look at the rafters, there's not a knot anywhere."

Not bad for a local boy whose family had to live in a wood-floored tent when his father lost most everything in the Depression. And Jim and Lois had to scratch for awhile before they had the lumberyard business running full speed.Jim served on the city council "a couple of terms, when I thought I could help make a difference," he said.

"No one ever figured it would get this big!" he said. "You don't really have to wonder why you don't meet anyone you know in the grocery store."

There are newer, bigger supermarkets outside the small downtown, where an attempt at ersatz Bavarian building fronts, a la Leavenworth, failed to revive the old business core.

Most of the North Bend-bound business and commercial traffic now heads toward the gigantic outlet mall down on I-90. Or Ken's Truck Town, also known as Seattle East.

And it is something of an Eastside neighborhood. Most of those folks in the new homes on those new rural routes think nothing of commuting 30 or more miles to work down I-90. Lois rolls her eyes when she recalls how the Trailways bus was the only regularly scheduled conveyance between North Bend and Seattle.

Nowadays, Lois and Jim think nothing of driving into Seattle for an evening of live music and dancing. And the battery hasn't fallen through the floorboards in all this time.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.