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Coincidences always leave me wondering, and last month was no exception.
I received a call from longtime Centralia resident Robert McInnis offering me a history book about the Fry family who crossed the Oregon Trail in 1851 and settled ultimately in Grays Harbor County. I told him I’d look through the book and then donate it to the Lewis County Historical Museum.
About the same time, I received an email from Johanna “Jo” Vander Stoep about a former local resident, Richard “Dick” Fry. He died on May 27 at the age of 103. Jo’s parents, Jim and Suzi Vander Stoep, met Fry when they moved to Chehalis in 1950. Suzi worked as society writer for The Advocate, where Dick Fry was news editor under the owner, Ron Ingraham. All became close friends of the Vander Stoeps.
Centralia native Ron Ingraham, a 1926 Centralia High School graduate who attended Washington State University in Pullman, started his newspaper career in 1928 selling advertising for The Centralia Chronicle. He married Margaret “Peggy” Magoon in June 1930. During World War II, he enlisted in the Navy, assigned to manage the recruitment office in the Longview-Kelso area. After the war, he worked at The Daily News in Longview as assistant to the publisher. In 1949, he purchased The Chehalis Advocate, which he ran as a daily newspaper for a short time before switching to a weekly.
The Chehalis Advocate, a conglomeration of merged newspapers that traced its history back to 1883, quit publishing in April 1962, according to an article in The Daily News.
Albert Tozier and H.C. Mayfield, a Civil War veteran, published the first newspaper in Chehalis, The Lewis County Nugget, on July 14, 1883. A year later, on June 6, 1884, G.M. Bull and W.W. Francis published a newspaper called The Lewis County Bee, which became The Chehalis Bee in 1887 about the time the other newspaper became The Chehalis Nugget.
In the summer of 1889, J.C. Bush bought The Chehalis Bee and partnered with his brother, Dan, who became owner a year later, then combined the newspapers into The Chehalis Bee-Nugget.
Another paper debuted in August 1892 called The People’s Advocate. I.P. Callison bought The People’s Advocate, changed its name to The Lewis County Advocate in 1903, and published it with his brother, R.W. Callison, until 1905. Advocate Printing Co. was formed in 1907 to run the publication.
In 1916, Bush, who was involved in the newspaper for more than 42 years, sold The Chehalis Bee-Nugget to Clarence Ellington who published it until 1925, when Chapin Foster bought it. In 1934, he brought on George Hayden as partner and business manager.
In 1937, Advocate Printing, which published The Advocate, bought its rival newspaper, The Bee-Nugget, and in August 1938, the now-combined paper was called The Chehalis Advocate. And that’s the newspaper Ingraham purchased in April 1949 and ran until 1962, when it ceased publication. He said ad revenues failed to keep pace with steadily rising costs. However, Advocate Printing Co. has remained in business as a commercial printer.
Ingraham retired in 1974. His wife died in November 1993, and he passed away on July 5, 1999, in Olympia, leaving a daughter, Marlyn (Ingraham) Brady, three granddaughters, and five great-grandchildren. One of his granddaughters, Sue Brady Ardington, taught in the Chehalis School District.
Dick, a native of Oroville, Calif., left his studies at San Jose State College when World War II broke out. He served in the Army Air Corps as an air traffic controller in China until the end of the war. After returning to San Jose State, he met Beatrice Dooley, who had served with the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. They married on March 20, 1948, in Santa Clara, Calif., after graduating. Dick worked for United Press International in the San Francisco, Reno, and Olympia bureaus before moving to Lewis County in 1949 to take the job as news editor of The Chehalis Advocate, where his wife was women’s editor. Their children — Jim, Kristen, and Kevin — were born in Lewis County before the family moved in 1952 to Pullman, where Dick worked for Washington State University as editor of alumni publications and later as sports information director and then, from 1970 until retiring in 1985, as manager of the WSU news bureau. Bea Fry was only 46 when she died of cancer on June 14, 1971. Six years later, Dick married Marilyn Johnson, the widow of Spokane Daily Chronicle sports columnist Bob Johnson, and they traveled extensively before her death in 2021.
Through the decades, Vander Stoep said, her parents and the Frys continued exchanging Christmas cards every year, and after Suzi died in May 2022, Jo communicated regularly with Dick at Christmas. Dick celebrated his 100th birthday in 2023 with a party at Brelsford WSU Visitor Center in Pullman. His son sent word to Jo of Dick’s death in May along with a copy of his obituary.
While interesting that two instances of the Fry family popped into my life within days, it’s unlikely Dick Fry, a California native, was related to the pioneers who settled in the Pacific Northwest in 1851. Their journey is recounted in a 314-page book called “Our People: A Story of the Fry Family,” written by Edwin Van Syckle and published in 1949 with a revised edition released in 1978.
Next week I’ll share a bit about that pioneer family’s trek across the Oregon Trail and settlement first at Rainier, Ore., and later in Grays Harbor County.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
