The Senior Scene

William Blackwell began running the Tacoma Hotel in 1886, but long before that he apprenticed as a wagon builder. When the hotel needed a conveyance of some sort to meet potential guests coming by rail, Mr. Blackwell knew where to go for a good quality wagon. He ordered a hickory-wood stagecoach, painted high-gloss yellow and vermillion, from a company in Indiana at the shockingly-high cost of $1,200, and hired a man wearing full livery to drive it.

At that time, when a train pulled in to the station, wagon drivers from every hotel in town were there to meet it and quick to grab what luggage they could. Before the passengers knew what hit them, their bags had been loaded on top of a hotel’s conveyance and they were being helped inside.

The last train of the day arrived at 6:30. After passengers were delivered to the Tacoma Hotel, the city’s shining star, the driver took the coach to a wash rack where workers cleaned it and any repaired any scratches. The hotel used its horse-drawn coach for about 15 years. When automobiles came along, hotel management sold the wagon to the Tacoma Junk Company. The company stored it at its Pacific Avenue site, hoping to sell it to another hotel. Unfortunately, the other big hotels were also buying cars, and the wagon was too big for the small hotels. It sat in the junk yard until the paint faded, the wood shrunk, and the wheels nearly fell apart. In 1921, two draft horses pulled it to Wright Park to act as a Cinderella’s carriage, and then Tacoma Junk put the wagon up for sale. They asked $50. Mr. T.B. Walker of Puyallup counter-offered $15. The junk company agreed.

Mr. Walker was a woodcutter and, at the time, he was clearing land in north Puyallup. However, his home and work site were far apart, and he lost a lot of working time, particularly when it was too wet to log, going back and forth. With typical pioneer ingenuity, Mr. Walker hauled the old coach to where he was cutting wood and took out a window in the front. He made a small stove out of a milk can and hooked it up to a stovepipe that protruded through the window hole. His jerry-rigged apparatus heated the wagon, and if it rained, Mr. Walker sat inside and read.

    Back in the day, wagons, or drays as they were often called, regardless of their size and the numbers of horses required to pull them, were every bit as important as delivery trucks are now. In 1891, the Cream Laundry at 2124 A St. employed 36 men and women and had a healthy monthly payroll of $1,800. The proprietor, Mr. H.A. Durr, used a fleet of horse-drawn wagons to deliver the cleaned clothes to owners all around town. Likewise, Messrs. Grinnell and Walker used horse-drawn wagons to transport groceries, hay, grain, and feed from their two-story, framed building on Sixth and Pine.

     Down in Old Tacoma, between Carr and North 30th streets, the McKenzie Transfer Company advertised they were capable of moving heavy items such as lime, plaster, cement, brick, coal, sand, and furniture in their wagons. Milton Hock, owner of the Ideal Tea Company at 927-29 Tacoma Avenue, about where the County-City Building is, and the management of the Eggers Fish Co., located at the City Dock near the foot of South 15th Street, also made deliveries but in smaller conveyances. 

    Until Prohibition, the Pacific Brewing and Malting Company located between Jefferson and C (Broadway) Streets on South 25th was one of Washington’s largest breweries. Like other breweries, it transported beer in cases loaded on horse-drawn wagons. In 1933, the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition, and to celebrate, the Budweiser Company created its famous team of Clydesdale horses. A year later, the team delivered cases to the Tacoma Hotel.

     In 1903, German emigrant Thomas C. Carstens established Carstens Bros. Packing Company on three and three-quarters acres at 1623 East J St. Two years later, the company bought land from the Northern Pacific Railroad and expanded to 15 acres. This provided room for the thousands of beef cattle, hogs, and sheep shipped in for processing. Within five years, Carstens was slaughtering 150 cattle, 400 sheep and 300 hogs daily. With true waste-not-want-not, the company built a glue factory, tannery facility and fertilizer plant to make use of its animal by-products. In 1947, when a delegation of businessmen came to town from Hawaii, they were shown the sights from the horse-drawn Carstens Meat Wagon.

     However, not every Tacoma resident was enamored with these horse-drawn vehicles. According to a Dec. 14, 1912 Tacoma Times article, Mr. Nicholas Decker was suing the Tacoma Rail and Power Company for $10,000 in damages because while riding in one of their wagons, it tipped over and threw him out and onto the brick road. Five days later, Mr. Decker was awarded $3,000 in damages, but the paper no longer cared much. It awarded the story about an inch and a half space. Two Tacoma women were bitten by rabid dogs, and that was the new headline.

Home Instead Senior Care passes along the following about a program in which more than 40 seniors from Pierce County and south King County were treated to a holiday party and other glad tidings in December:

Be A Santa To A Senior is a program conducted by Home Instead Senior Care’s non-profit organization called Aging With Excellence.  We have been adopting a lower income senior housing building each year for the last five years and providing them with dinner, dessert, music and gift bags with cards, candy and a gift card to Fred Meyer. We have been able to do this with the contributions from staff, CareGivers and network providers from referrals through the year. Each time a referral turned into a client for us, we donated $10 in your name; we also donate $10 in the memory of a lost client.

This sixth year, we decided to get the community involved, and what a blessing this turned out to be.  We want to thank Cassie of the Puyallup Silver Crest location for allowing us to adopt the 41 residents of her building, along with three individuals out of Enumclaw.

We want to thank all of those who helped make this evening special: The kids of St. Vincent de Paul for making Christmas cards for all the residents; Aaron and Russ of the Puyallup Olive Garden for providing dinner, 4Fun, a wonderful ladies quartet, for their gift of music; the community who donated funds for this special evening, Good Samaritan Hospital, St. Joseph Hospital, St. Elizabeth Hospital, Puyallup Group Health, Federal Way Group Health, Dr. Mark Elmore, Puyallup-River Road Fred Meyer, Enumclaw QFC and Enumclaw Rite Aid.  We raised a total of $3,217 for our Tacoma-Federal Way office and another $4,564 for our North end and Spokane offices. That is over $7,700 given to 136 seniors.

We could not have done this without all of you, so thank you very much from all of us at Home Instead Senior Care for supporting our non-profit Aging With Excellence, and we look forward to working with you in 2013 and to your support for our seventh year of  Be A Santa To A Senior.

Pierce County residents who subscribe to yard waste collection service can place their unflocked Christmas tree in their trash container for pickup by their recycling hauler, according to the county’s  Public Works and Utilities Department.

To “treecycle,” remove the tree stand, tinsel, decorations and any nails or staples from trees. Place the tree in the yard waste for the regularly scheduled collection day. The tree must fit into the closed container, so it may need to be cut  into pieces if necessary. If your tree isn’t in the cart, you may be charged a pickup fee, officials said.

Flocked trees can’t be recycled. They must be disposed of as garbage, officials said. More information is available at www.piercecountywa.org/treecycle.

Recycled trees are composted into PREP (Pierce County Recycled Earth Products), a “soil amendment that is popular with home and commercial gardeners,” said Sheryl Rhinehart, outreach coordinator for the utilities department. “The compostenhances soil quality, saves water, and reduces reliance on chemical fertilizers. Treecycling also helps save valuable landfill space.”

The cities of Milton, Tacoma, Puyallup, and Ruston have special collection programs for households within their city limits, with information available from the respective city halls or local garbage haulers.

As a social worker in Seattle, Beth Farmer knew that tens of thousands of refugees were coming to the United States from war-torn countries such as Burma, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia. Most had witnessed horrific violence and experienced severe trauma, yet the concept of mental health was foreign in many of these cultures. How could she help these refugees obtain emotional support that could help them to resettle successfully?

Farmer found a way. And the efforts of the program director for Lutheran Community Services Northwest’s international counseling and community services program, based in SeaTac, resulted in her being named one of 10 recipients nationally of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Community Health Leader awards.  Nominated by fellow LCSNW staff member Sasha, Farmer was chosen out of hundreds of applications nationwide.  Along with the honor is an award of $125,000 which will primarily be used for a project that she’s planning to submit to the foundation for approval.

The Community Health Leaders Award honors men and women who have overcome significant obstacles to tackle challenging healthcare problems in their communities. Farmer received her award during a ceremony in San Antonio, Texas Oct. 17.

“Refugees come from tremendously difficult situations, witnessing loved ones killed in bombings, living through unimaginable suffering, and then experiencing deprivation in refugee camps. They get a tremendous opportunity to build a new life in the United States, but the past is still with them,” said Farmer, who launched the Pathways to Wellness project in Seattle to improve delivery of mental health care services to refugees. Upon arrival, the nearly 80,000 refugees who come to the United States each year are screened for diseases, but until recently, mental health was rarely included, according to Farmer.

As a graduate student, Farmer worked with a psychiatrist and others to develop a screening tool in collaboration with refugee communities.

“A lot of Burmese, Bhutanese and Iraqis are coming into the United States as refugees right now. Many of the Iraqis worked with the American military, so they are targeted for killing,” Farmer said. “These are very different cultures and languages, and we needed to make sure that each translation was right according to language and culture.”

Farmer convened focus groups from refugee communities to discuss translations and meanings for screenings. Her work resulted in a short assessment for symptoms of anxiety and depression. A pilot program in King County screened 251 people and found 30 percent in significant distress; 70 percent of those accepted support. Today, about 70 percent of the 1,800 refugees coming into King County will be screened. The method is also used in Arizona, Maryland, Florida, Idaho, Orego, and Maine