When Wendell Dawson began teaching in the Tahoma School District in 1955, each fall students took a district-wide field trip to attend the Puyallup Fair. This image was taken in the spring of 1957. The entire sixth through eighth grades had been invited to Boeing Field for the rollout of a new airplane. Wendell remembers a rather precocious young boy asking the tour guide: “Do you think this thing can get off the ground?” For some of the students, this was their first trip into Seattle. Drop by one of the McDonald’s restaurants or Gloria’s Restaurant in Maple Valley and there is a good chance you will run into one of our most venerable community members. Wendell Dawson, born in 1916 in St. Maries, Idaho, may be the oldest living employee of the Tahoma School District. He started teaching fourth grade in the fall of 1955 (his first contract was for $3,800) at what was then an elementary school, but is now the home of the Maple Valley Historical Society. He also opened Lake Wilderness Elementary School in 1959 and the new Tahoma Junior High School (now Cedar River Middle School) in the fall of 1961 and, in total, taught twenty years in the district, his assignment mostly middle school social studies. His summers were busy as well. For fifteen years he served as the assistant director at Lake Coeur d’Alene as a member of Washington State University’s Camp Easter Seals for disabled youth. (Story continues below photo caption)
This staff identification card was issued to Wendell Dawson in the 1962-1963 academic year. He was teaching social studies at Tahoma Junior High School, which was then located at the current Cedar River Middle School. When he came to Maple Valley, he brought with him what already seemed a full measure of life experience. His grandparents were early pioneers to Washington back when it was still a territory, having come to Washtucna from Missouri by team in 1879. They later relocated to Idaho, founding the community of Emida after Wendell’s grandfather traded a horse and wagon for 160 acres with a house on it. The name of the town was coined after the surnames of three families: East, Miller, and Dawson. When Wendell was only six years old, his father was killed in a railroading accident, leaving his mother with three young children to raise and another on the way. Wendell was in the first grade at the time, and he remembers the hardships the family endured, but his mom persevered. Eventually she graduated from Washington State Normal School at Bellingham (now Western Washington University) and became a schoolteacher.
After graduating from Sedro-Woolley High School in 1932, Wendell attended Western Washington University, Lewiston State Normal School (now Lewis-Clark State College), and the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. His first teaching position was in 1940-41, in a two-room schoolhouse in Indian Valley, Idaho. Grades one through four were housed in one room and grades five through eight were in a second room. Wendell had the fifth through eighth graders in all subject areas.
He also served in the Naval Air Reserve and in the United States Army during the Second World War. The summer before Pearl Harbor, his cousin coaxed him into volunteering for the Army Air Corps at McChord Air Force Base. The weight he listed on his application, however, was fifteen pounds over limit and they refused to take him. But after filling out the enlistment papers, he spent a season working for the Forest Service and had “got in pretty good shape.” So when he next tried to enlist—this time in the Naval Air Reserve—the recruiting officer in Seattle had him step up on the scales and, after sizing him up and down, said: “You look okay. Raise your right hand and I’ll swear you in.” Three months later and three days before Pearl Harbor, Wendell was directed to report to the Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle for training. On the evening of December 7, with everyone in the city frantic about the possibility of a second attack and this one on the mainland, his sergeant ordered him to climb up on a hangar to take watch. Holding out two boxes of rifle shells, the sergeant told him “Dawson, get up there and shoot every enemy SOB that you see.”
But when Wendell struggled at hitting the mark on landing his plane on a mock ship deck in flight training, his career in the Naval Air Reserve grounded to an abrupt halt. He was issued an honorable discharge and returned back to civilian life. Out of the service, he hired on at Boeing in south Seattle where he worked for three months in war production as a dispatcher in wing assembly, Shop 309, receiving monthly raises from 62.5 cents to 65.0 cents to finally 67.5 cents an hour. After just ninety days, however, a commercial painter that he knew from Idaho offered him $1 an hour or $10 per day to go to work for him and Wendell submitted his resignation to Boeing that same night. Then, in early 1943, he was drafted into the Army and, for the duration of the war, he served in the Alaska Communications System, part of the United States Signal Corps. In that capacity, he deployed to Attu Island and was among the first replacements after the Battle of Attu in which American forces lost 500 men and Japan had 2,500 killed. He also served on Kiska Island and was assigned to duty stations in the cities of Seattle and Anchorage.
Following the war, Wendell ventured into commercial real estate, selling houses for a decade before coming to the Tahoma School District. As an educator in Maple Valley, he holds many memories, but one stands out. In the middle 1960s at today’s Cedar River Middle School, which was then a junior high school, Wendell was serving bus duty. One day after school students were walking out to get on the buses to go home when a rifle shot rang out, which sent Wendell running in the direction of the sound. About two buses away, he encountered a student holding a .22 rifle, which he had kept concealed under his coat. Seizing the weapon and the student, Wendell escorted the boy straight into the building where the police were called and an ambulance was summoned for three students who had been injured from the spray of material ricocheting into their legs. They were fortunate, Wendell concludes, that they hadn’t been killed. The shooter was permanently expelled from the district.
Over the span of his teaching career, the school district underwent considerable transformation. Wendell recalls his first faculty that included an original graduate of Tahoma High School. And, when he started teaching, he was the sole social studies teacher in his school, which meant that every student had to take his class. By comparison, by the end of his career there were four or five social studies teachers. In other ways, there was perhaps more continuity than change. Wendell cites locker checks, confiscating knives, and there was a popular “smoker’s tree” located across the street from the high school.
Wendell retired in 1975, but he has remained an active and visible member of the community. He holds an uncommon wealth of firsthand knowledge of a city that has been his home for nearly six decades. He remembers when Bank of America was housed in a trailer house and, across the highway from the downtown McDonald’s, there used to be just one old house sitting on about twenty acres. But Maple Valley has retained its small-town charm and Wendell still considers it a great place to live and raise a family. Now his grandchildren walk the hallways of schools where he once taught, while he remains staunchly independent and going strong. “The first ninety-five years are the hardest,” Wendell smiles, adding that he is looking forward to what the future may hold in the next ninety-five.
