Person of the Year, Gail Shaw: ‘We’re Really Here to Make This a Better Place to Live’

Gail Shaw would prefer this story not be about him.

He’d much rather direct attention toward the many people he has worked with over the past six decades to continually make his adopted hometown of Chehalis and the larger Lewis County community into a better place to live.

At age 94, Shaw is still energetically pursuing an enterprise that could be called “social capitalism” — the business of building relationships in a way that helps good work be done for the betterment of the whole. 

“It is a fantastic world out there,” Shaw told The Chronicle, “and I believe friendships are a prime opportunity for us to bind together Lewis County and make progress.”

His many friends agree. In a series of interviews with personal historian Julie McDonald, who is working with Shaw on a book about the history of the Industrial Commission, a wide array of local leaders point to Shaw as a wise mentor in the skill of working together for a bigger purpose.

“He just has the unbelievable look-to-the-future attitude,” said Buck Hubbert, president of the Industrial Commission and a longtime friend. “He keeps everybody up on the board just thinking. He’s an amazing guy, and so’s Carolyn, his wife.”

Heidi Pehl, former executive director of the Port of Chehalis, said she has been honored to work with Shaw over the years.

“He’s one of the smartest men you’ll ever meet in your life,” she said. “Just as a chemist, he’s brilliant. As a real-estate developer, as a community philanthropist, he’s just a brilliant man.”

Former Lewis County Commissioner Joanne Schwartz said she feels privileged to have spent so much time with Shaw.

“His wisdom, creativity and recall never ceased to amaze me,” Schwartz said. “Our conversations were engaging and fascinating. Those are times that I will always treasure as very special and remarkable.”

Shaw is the chairman and elder statesman of the Industrial Commission, an economic development group he helped create in the 1950s to build an industrial area south of town.

He was also one of the “Gandy Dancers,” a lighthearted but hardworking group of industrial boosters who dressed up in old-time railroad gear to raise money and help build a railroad line to attract a Goodyear tire plant to the fledgling industrial park along Bishop Road. 

That successful effort was eventually written up in Readers Digest and The Christian Science Monitor. Shaw still has copies of the articles, which he points to as examples of how a community can come together.

Shaw has stayed involved ever since then. In honor of his work, in 2006 the Lewis County Economic Development Council began awarding the Gail and Carolyn Shaw Industry Award. The couple were grand marshals of the Chehalis Santa Parade a few years later. 

Many of the most prominent businesses and buildings in the Chehalis Industrial Park are there in large part because of Gail Shaw’s work — and yet, except for his dedicated friends and fans, he is little known in the Twin Cities.

While that might be exactly how he would want it, his story is important, and is in many ways the story of how Chehalis has developed since the middle of the 20th century. 

A Chemist and a Social Entrepreneur

Gail Shaw didn’t expect to spend his life in Chehalis. Not at first.

The industrial chemist already had many patents under his belt when he came to work at the Callison plant. He intended to leave town within a few years for bigger and better opportunities. 

When he arrived, the Callison company was known for its greens — they shipped hundreds of carloads of ferns, huckleberries and salal across the country in refrigerated cars for use in floral arrangements.

Shaw, who was coming from a job at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, had the job of helping the Callisons refine their operation of converting the digitalis plant, the pretty flower known as the foxglove, into its medicinal products.

Shaw arrived in September of 1950 on a sunny afternoon, driving south on Highway 99 in those pre-Interstate days. 

The Callisons introduced him to the community, and within weeks he had joined the Rotary, beginning what became 60 years of participation in that service group. 

W.F. “Bill” West (namesake of the as-yet unbuilt high school) quickly convinced Shaw that he ought to become involved in the community — and by the way, West said, the Claquato Cemetery needed a board member. Shaw joined, and has been on the board ever since.

As he settled into his job at Callison’s (and looked at apartments in Seattle as he planned his move onward and upward), a huge fire changed Shaw’s life, and the civic life of Chehalis, in a way that no one could have foreseen. 

Adventure in Cooperation

When the Chehalis Perma Products plant burned on Aug. 9, 1952, the city faced a crisis.

This major employer was in ashes, and neighbors whose homes were nearly consumed in the blaze were fighting against rebuilding the fire-prone cedar mill in the same spot in the West Side neighborhood.

While the people of Chehalis bickered, a sudden announcement shocked the town — the mill would be relocated to Winlock. (It’s still there, under the name Shakertown.)

A shaken Chehalis was ready for some soul-searching, and a University of Washington program based on the new book “Democracy is You,” was available to help.

The people of Chehalis gathered for a series of ongoing community meetings under the name “Adventure in Cooperation.” People from the university came to facilitate as the community decided just what it wanted to be.

There was so much energy after the fire, Shaw said, that 530 people attended one of the meetings. Eventually one in six adults in the city was participating.

It was a prime example of what Shaw, quoting sociologists, calls the building of human capital.

“Social capital is a matter of people getting together and learning how to include your neighbor instead of excluding,” Shaw said, “to bring them in and to develop the relationships, because there are so few people left in this country who realize that democracy is dependent on participation by individuals and sharing of their ideas.”

His voice quickens, even five decades later, as he recounts how the town flourished as a result of these innovative and cooperative ideas. Nine committees were formed, ranging from agriculture and health to church and history. Soon the town built the city pool, renumbered the streets and installed new lights at the school.

“The Adventure in Cooperation is probably the most significant social event that happened in the second portion of the 1900s in Chehalis,” Shaw said.

Shaw became part of an industrial development group that later became known as the Industrial Commission. People bought shares in the group, and that money was used as seed for a fledgling industrial park. First, however, they needed a tenant.

The Gandy Dancers

The ideal occupant of the as-yet undeveloped industrial park was a Goodyear Tire and Rubber retread plant — according to the people in Chehalis, at least.

The company itself only knew that it wanted to be in the Northwest at a spot with good electricity and rail service.

Shaw and several others invited company executives to Chehalis for a precisely choreographed dinner, carefully sounding out the company’s interests and concerns about where they would locate their new factory. After that friendly intelligence-gathering, they took promotional photos and put together folders of why Chehalis was the perfect spot for Goodyear. A copy of that nearly six-decade-old custom-made advertisement is carefully stored at the office of the Industrial Commission.

Even as they promoted their town, Shaw and other members of the new Industrial Commission scrambled to find a spot for the factory. They finally decided on a patch of land at what today is the intersection of Bishop Road and Interstate Avenue. 

There was one major problem with the site — no railroad served the area. An old logging railroad ran nearby, but it had been sold to the Great Northern company and was being torn out. After a flurry of deals, the railroad company agreed to let the industrial group use its rail line but wouldn’t pay for the extension out to the farmland where the Industrial Commission hoped to put the Goodyear plant.

Here the Adventure in Cooperation turned into a true cooperative adventure. 

The American Crossarm and Conduit company contributed creosote for old railroad ties. Chehalis Mayor Walter Graham and his son used their heavy trucks to haul material. And in a lucrative gimmick, the industrial promoters put on old-style railroad hats and declared themselves “Gandy Dancers” (an old railroad term). They drove to Olympia and barged into legislative offices asking for donations from shocked lawmakers. Even the governor kicked in a few bucks.

When the time for construction came, Shaw remembers stepping into mud up to his crotch — but it all worked. The railroad was built, Goodyear came to town, and the Chehalis Industrial Park was born. 

The Chehalis Vortex

To explain why his plan to stay two years has turned into a 62-year stint in Chehalis, Shaw quotes a true old-timer — Paul Eggers, who arrived in the 1920s and founded the goat cheese factory now known as Mount Capra.

Shaw recounts how Eggers described mysterious “vortexes” down in Oregon, where the laws of nature seem to be suspended.

Eggers said he got off the train, looked around the valley, and said, “This is the Chehalis Vortex, this is where I want to go and establish my business and stay.”

Shaw continued, “He many times told me that Chehalis was a fantastic place for people who felt the love of nature and the responsibilities that a person could develop on their own and be independent here.”

Even today, Shaw and his friends discuss how many people who arrive in Chehalis quickly decide they never want to leave. Those whose careers bring them here briefly often choose to retire here and take up volunteer efforts, Shaw said.

“The vortex is still pulling people in,” he said.

It’s a pioneer spirit that infuses Chehalis and appeals to people who want to work for a bigger purpose, he said. It’s the same drive that pushes people to rebuild after floods and take up the responsibility to maintain the assets they have and improve the community around them. 

“It is an absolutely wonderful gift to be around people like that,” Shaw said. 

Looking to the Future

With his 95th birthday ahead, Shaw is still formulating plans. He wants to write a biography of his father, an internationally known geologist who mapped and developed the very first oil well in Iraq in the years after World War I.

And as he takes part in new local volunteer efforts, he says his mantra hasn’t changed since the Adventure in Cooperation brought his adopted hometown together to respond to a crisis 60 years ago.

“I'm naively out there saying I know some basics,” Shaw said. “If you guys can't do it, we need to get some more friends involved.”

He’s energized by the Chehalis Renaissance project and efforts by the Chehalis Foundation to rebuild the city’s outdoor swimming pool.

Expansion of the natural gas pipeline through the county is an important development, he said.

He is also excited about a new community engagement project, still in its early stages, that brings together Centralia, Chehalis and the rest of the county, under the auspices of the college.

The goal: “To bind these communities together.”

It’s an old idea, but one that’s forever new for Gail Shaw and his many friends.