After their marriage in March 1933, Pearley Davis, a descendant of Claquato pioneers, and Mabel (Carlson) Duncan moved to Klaber in West Lewis County. They later lived in the former John Roundtree place at Boistfort while Pearley worked in a gravel pit for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, was designed to put men to work during the Great Depression.
Then Pearley found a job as a custodian at Boistfort High School, so he and his bride and their son, Richard Davis Duncan, moved into a small shack across from the school. That’s where they lived when Janice (Duncan) Erickson was born on July 2, 1937, the same day famous female pilot Amelia Earhart and her navigator disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean after leaving Miami on a round-the-world flight from California.
“But being close to the Fourth of July, I also was close to being a firecracker,” said Erickson, 88, of Rochester. “I was born at the Sweet Hospital in Centralia although my parents lived in the Boistfort Valley.”
Sweet Clinic, a private hospital across from Edison School on First Street, later became St. Luke’s Hospital. Janice was baptized as an infant at Centralia Immanuel Lutheran Church by Rev. Fred T. Lucas. The reverend confirmed her mother in 1920, married her parents in 1933, and baptized all three of their children. He also married their son, Richard, to Betty Walter on Feb. 7, 1951, and their daughter, Janice, to Allen Erickson on Valentine’s Day in 1959 but retired before their daughter, Mary Lou, married Vernon Chalberg in September 1959.
Janice spent her first three years living in a small shack while her father worked across the road at Boistfort School. They used an outhouse behind the shack but had running water inside.
“We bathed in a galvanized wash tub — I think probably once a week,” she said. “I remember splashing in the water when my mother was washing clothes there in the kitchen and playing in the water while she was running the clothes through the wringer.”
The shack had a small front room with a wood stove, a tiny kitchen with a nook, and one bedroom in the back, where she slept with her parents. She couldn’t remember where her older brother, Richard, slept or explain how her parents managed to conceive her little sister under such crowded conditions. But she recalled one grievance.
“Dick got to listen to The Lone Ranger on the radio, but I had to go to bed after listening to the opening overture,” she said.
When she was three, the family moved to the hop manager’s two-story house in Klaber. Her grandfather had started operating the Klaber post office and general and feed stores in July 1912, only months after Herman Klaber died in the April 15, 1912, sinking of the Titanic.
For a time after World War II broke out, her father worked at the Navy shipyards in Bremerton, helping to build ships for the war effort. He couldn’t fight because of his poor eyesight.
When Janice was six, the family moved to a house in Centralia with a hot water tank heated by coils in the wood stove. It had indoor plumbing too. She started first grade at Jefferson School, which was close to their home, and her father worked at Pacific Highway Transport on Main Street in Chehalis, where Jeremy’s Farm to Table is now.
“I was always afraid I’d be a bit late to school,” she recalled. “I think I was always the first one there, right across the street. Oh, they were happy and carefree days.”
With an older brother, Janice described herself as “quite a tomboy” who participated in many sports. She and her sister climbed trees and played games with neighborhood friends. They belonged to Girl Scouts, where they learned valuable lifelong lessons about always being prepared and sold cookies for 50 cents a dozen. “This year I paid $6 but there’s more of a choice,” she said.
Janice had 18 first cousins on the Carlson side and 21 on the Duncan side, including double cousins, so Carlson and Davis Duncan family reunions always drew crowds.
“For 90 years, we have always had annual family reunions at Alexander Park, Mayfield Lake, Fort Borst Park, or Claquato Church,” she said.
She noted that most of her Carlson cousins didn’t realize the family had lost their youngest son, Elmer, who died of pneumonia at 16. She places flowers on his gravesite at Greenwood Memorial Park. The Carlsons’ oldest child, Idah, also died of pneumonia at 13.
“My mother was always afraid of hospitals after that,” Janice said.
Her Carlson grandparents often drove her to spend weekends with her cousin Anne. The girls picked berries, baked pies, weeded the vegetable garden and had so much fun.
Janice celebrated birthdays and holidays surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins. For family vacations, they frequently gathered at Grayland in Grays Harbor County to dig clams for a week, either camping or staying in cabins.
“Summers, most of us kids picked strawberries, raspberries and green beans,” she said. “Then we bought our school clothes and saved some to buy Christmas presents. But I remember my dad always taking me to Brunswig’s Shoe Store to buy shoes, and I still buy shoes at Brunswig’s.”
Later, she babysat, did housework and hoed cucumbers and corn in Curtis to earn money. One summer she helped an uncle prepare peas to sell to a freezing plant in Chehalis.
“My Swedish stubbornness helped me learn diligence and perseverance,” she said.
She remembered the 6.7-magnitude earthquake on April 13, 1949, that shook buildings throughout the state, including Jefferson School.
“Mrs. Blair, our teacher, had us coming down the hallway, down the stairs, with the plaster falling on our heads,” she recalled. Nobody was hurt. “We were tough kids.”
Her brother, Dick, was riding his bicycle back from the high school.
“The road was weaving on him, and he was watching chimneys fall off the houses,” she said.
The ground shook for only 30 seconds, but the earthquake killed eight people, including 69-year-old Mark Cuvric of Centralia, who was killed while walking past the Matz Building at Tower and Main when hundreds of bricks fell to the street.
“My friend Nancy Rice’s mother’s car, sitting on Main Street, was demolished by bricks falling from one of the buildings,” Janice recalled. “Mom had cinnamon rolls rising on the wood stove shelf, and they fell off in the glass dish.”
About that time, Janice was confirmed at 13 in Centralia Immanuel Lutheran Church and attended Washington School, where she graduated from eighth grade.
Her father suffered a heart attack at 47, so he couldn’t work for about a year. Her mother took an accounting job at Warren Brothers Chevrolet in Centralia, so that’s when Janice learned housekeeping.
“I was educated into doing family laundry on Saturdays, waxing floors, doing some cooking, though my dad was a great cook, but I remember I always did the dinner dishes,” she said.
Her mother felt upset at being unable to keep house and work too. But when Warren Brothers sold to Campbell Chevrolet, she kept working. She didn’t retire until she was 72.
Janice’s father returned to work, first delivering dentures for Arnold Anderson, then at a Dodge dealership on Tower Avenue.
At Centralia High School, Janice took precollege courses, served as first vice president of the Girls’ League, and participated in Honor Society, Girls C Athletic Club and Peppers, a service club. She earned the senior girls’ award for friendliness and graduated among the top 10 students of 1955.
While attending high school and Centralia Junior College, Janice worked three years at 24 Flavors Ice Cream Store on Main Street in Centralia, where she and two others helped the owner, Frank Howard, make and pack ice cream in pints, quarts and gallons. He received cream by train from Portland and made ice cream.
She attended college classes in the new Kemp Hall.
One summer, she and her mother visited the Erickson farm to pick blackberries for pies, and that’s when she and Allen began dating. They usually saw movies and enjoyed a milkshake afterward—strawberry for him, chocolate for her. He had graduated from junior college a year earlier with her friend Vernon Chalberg, whom her sister was determined to marry (and did).
During college, Janice and her friend Judy Ely played tennis and field hockey and attended formal dances. Allen and Vernon, who were attending the University of Washington, often returned home to accompany them to dances or chaperone them. They both studied forestry with Rufus Kaiser at Centralia and pursued those studies at the UW.
After graduating from Centralia Junior College in 1957, Janice transferred to Western Washington College of Education in Bellingham.
“Miss Serena Armentrout was the best teacher I had,” Janice said. “I had had her in fourth grade, and I remember her telling me, you would do much better if you would slow down.”
Her influence and that of other teachers might have prompted Janice to pursue a career in education.
“Oh, I had excellent teachers,” she said, citing Ethel Thomas for algebra and geometry and Alice Atkinson for Latin. “I always admired my teachers, so I guess that planted something into my head.”
During junior college, she served as president of the Future Teachers of America chapter. She received the Margaret Corbet scholarship, which paid her tuition the second year.
“I was privileged to meet her, along with Katharine Kemp,” she recalled. “That was really something to get to meet her.”
She described Kemp, her psychology professor, as “a real kick,” a teacher with a great sense of humor.
At Western, Janice lived with a roommate in Edens Hall. She passed the math test, so she skipped the introductory class. “The courses there were easier than at Centralia,” she said.
She performed her student teaching at Ferndale Middle School under Miss Casanova, who tasked her with telling another teacher — an older Greek woman whose husband was a Merchant Marine—that she stunk of garlic. Despite her trepidation in approaching the Greek teacher, Janice said, “She was pretty gracious.”
“We have to find humor,” she said.
I’ll share the rest of Janice’s story next week.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
