Editor’s note: This is the third and final installment in a series. Find the previous installments at https://www.chronline.com/opinion/.
During the late 1950s, while attending Western Washington College in Bellingham, Janice Duncan used her fiancé’s car to drive to Ferndale, Washington, for student teaching and to visit her parents in Centralia on weekends. Her betrothed, Allen Erickson, who had enlisted in the Air Force Reserves, was training at Fort Worth, Texas.
During her senior year of college in 1959, Janice and Allen were married on Valentines Day, the same day her parents had married in 1928. Her family hosted two weddings in one year as her sister, Mary Lou, married Vernon Chalberg in September 1959.
“It was hard on my mother,” Janice said, although Vernon’s mom, Ellen Chalberg, an expert seamstress, sewed Mary Lou’s satin wedding dress and a bridesmaid dress. Janice bought her wedding dress.
Allen started sales training with Weyerhaeuser Timber Co. and worked at the Everett mill, so the newlyweds lived in Marysville. While finishing her senior year, Janice caught rides to Bellingham with a friend but missed most of her Washington state history classes, which took place in the library.
“I never had time to get to the library, and the worst grade I ever got in my life was in Washington history, and that’s been my life,” she said. “So I have made up for that grade double-time.”
After graduating, she taught a class of 45 first-graders at Marysville.
“That was quite a learning experience, but the children were so well-behaved,” she said. “They were just little angels.”
Weyerhaeuser transferred Allen to Longview, which is where their daughter, Marla, was born.
“When she was 10 days old, they moved us to Eugene, Oregon, then Tacoma, then back to Everett,” Janice said. “By 1961, Weyerhaeuser sent us to Chicago.”
Allen, who loved the outdoors, sold timber from an office for two years, during which time their son, Mark, was born. Chicago had record-breaking snow that winter and hot, humid summers.
“We could not wait to get back to the Great Northwest,” she said.
When the company wanted to transfer him to Colorado, he applied for a job with the Washington state Department of Natural Resources as manager of the Webster Forest Nursery. They packed up and drove west when Mark was four months old and Marla a toddler. Her sister, Mary Lou, flew out to help her drive, towing a car, while Allen drove a truck with Marla.
“Oh, my, our good Lord had His hands full guiding and protecting us,” she said.
The family moved to Olympia and joined the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, where Janice taught Sunday school and Vacation Bible School.
“We always donated the Christmas trees for our church, but last year was the last tree that we donated because we’re selling the farm,” she said. “Mark was baptized there and all three children confirmed there, and I am blessed to be a member for 62 years.”
She belongs to a Wednesday morning quilting group and the Sages senior group. Allen served as Sages president for a year, and Janice volunteered nine years as secretary.
In 1964, at the request of Allen’s parents, they moved into the 1893 Swedish Heritage House on the family farm north of Rochester and Grand Mound.
“It wasn’t restored,” she said. “At that point, we used towels in the windows to keep out the water. Our heat was fire in a fireplace.”
They built a new trilevel home and their last child, Andrew, arrived in 1965.
“He was disabled, so I was never able to go back to teaching, but I was able to do a lot of volunteering,” she said. Her son suffered major motor seizures from the time he was four months old. “He was well-known in the Emergency Department at St. Peter’s. That’s where I really learned to pray.”
She and Allen became involved in the Rochester/Violet Prairie Grange, and they later became state and national members.
“He soon became master and I became secretary,” she said. “I was just given special recognition in the Grange News for serving for 50 years as a secretary. I was made Pomona Granger of the Year for 2025.”
She described it as fun. “I’m always looking for fun.”
They also belonged to the South Sound Farm Forestry Association and enjoyed square dancing with the Prairie Steppers.
All three children did chores and showed animals in 4-H. Janice served as a 4-H club leader, teaching girls to sew, bake, and can fruit and vegetables.
Their children rode the school bus 11 miles each way to school in Tenino, where Andy was in special education. Marla ran cross country, and Mark played football and baseball on the state championship team. After graduating, he attended Washington State University and served as a DNR flight observer during the summers looking for forest fires. One time, he was driving a truck of explosives on a narrow gravel mountain road near Colville when a loaded log truck barreled toward him.
“Mark figured he was two inches from going over the road,” she said. “He also parachuted into a forest fire. One of the firefighters got heat stroke. They had to go get him.”
In 1977, Allen and Janice took his father, Ray, and their daughter, Marla, to Sweden so they could do genealogical research and look up relatives. Allen later published a family history book, which he delivered to relatives. He and Janice traveled through Sweden and Denmark, then bought a car and drove through Belgium, The Netherlands, France, and the Black Forest in Germany.
“We especially enjoyed the very Black Forest where we bought cuckoo clocks,” she said. “I have this magnificent cuckoo clock that is too big for our new house.”
In Geneva, Switzerland, she said Allen swam where he wasn’t supposed to.
“He was always doing things he shouldn’t,” she said. “One trip to Sweden, he blew firecrackers off this dock in Stockholm for our Fourth of July.”
They wanted to see the Matterhorn at Salzburg, Austria, but the cloud cover never lifted. When they took a train back to their hotel, they heard voices speaking English in the depot. “They were members of our church,” she said.
Janice joined the Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington (DWP) in 1994 at the urging of her aunts Hazel Duncan and Idelia Carlson, who had both served as Lewis County chapter presidents. Janice also served as chapter and state DPW president.
“It was inspiring to visit lovely, friendly, committed pioneer descendants in chapters across the state,” she said. “Allen always accompanied me, and they called him wagon master.”
Marla, who became a nurse, married paramedic Peter Suver of Eatonville in 1984, and they had a daughter, Kristen. The couple restored the Heritage House on the family homestead before divorcing. Marla later married Dave LeFevre and worked two decades at the Panorama Assisted Living Center.
After graduating from WSU, Mark enrolled in flight school at Moses Lake, where he met Beth Walker, whom he married in Marysville in February 1993. They both flew as pilots out of Kotzebue, Alaska, 36 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Mark worked for Lynden Air Cargo of Anchorage.
Allen and Janice bought property south of their farm for a group home where Andy could live.
Her mother, Mabel Carlson Duncan, died in February 1996 at Riverside Care Center in Centralia during the 500-year flood.
“I had to leave that afternoon because the water was rising into the retirement center,” Janice recalled. “They were getting ready to evacuate the residents, but I had to leave before she died in order for me to get home.”
After Allen retired, the couple enjoyed cruises to the Caribbean islands, Alaska, Russia, and the Panama Canal. They traveled to Stuttgart, Germany, with her sister, Mary Lou, and her husband, Vernon Chalberg, to visit their daughter, Debbie, and her husband, Brian. While there, they toured Grimms Fairy Tale Road through Germany and Adolf Hitler’s Eagles Nest mountain hideaway. They drove their motor home to Anchorage, and then flew to see Mark and Beth, hand-carrying strawberries and roses to Beth for her birthday.
They also visited Hawaii, Mexico and Arizona, seeking sunny escapes from winter in Washington, and took a tour to Niagara Falls. But on that trip, Allen, who suffered dementia by then, became lost north of the hotel. Later, they took a bus to Buffalo to catch a flight to Chicago.
“We were in a hurry going through security,” Janice said. “Allen had metal on his suspenders, so he unhooked the front and I unhooked the back, and his pants fell.”
Security didn’t know how to react.
“I’m pretty sure I burst out laughing,” she said. “You’ve got to keep your sense of humor, right?”
They celebrated a wonderful joint 50th wedding anniversary with Mary Lou and Vernon Chalberg at the Veterans Memorial Museum, an organization they supported from the start. Allen was a founding member, and Janice baked cookies for the museum’s dedication.
After Allen was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, the couple joined a support group run by Sandy Calvert, a retired physical therapist who taught exercise classes.
“I still know how to get up off the floor because she taught us how to do it,” she said. “I fell flat going into my Bible study one day, made a grand entrance just flat on the concrete floor, and because of Sandy’s class I knew how to get up.”
Their son Mark retired from flying to help on the farm. He became a master gardener and co-chaired the Borst House Garden and forest arboretum for the city of Centralia.
The past two decades, losses flooded Janice, first the death of her sister in 2011, her husband in 2012, her son Andrew in 2014, her son Mark in 2022, and her brother in 2024.
“Those were real heartbreaking,” she said. “Oh, goodness, the good Lord gives us a story.”
Janice suffers from an essential tremor but has a terrific memory.
“I always slept well at night,” she said. “I think that’s a secret to keeping your brain good.”
After an unsuccessful back surgery in 2022, she said, “I’m not that strong anymore.”
She has osteoarthritis, but her daughter has retired, and they’re close.
“She said she’d take care of her strong pioneer mother,” Janice said. “She’s an awesome caregiver.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
