Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a multi-part profile of Aberdeen Mayor Erik Larson. The story was written by John C. Hughes, longtime editor and publisher at The Daily World, and now the chief oral historian for the State of Washington. The profile is part of a series called Who Are We? and written for the Legacy Project, an initiative from the Secretary of State’s office.
By John C. Hughes
As the sun rises over Grays Harbor on a crisp October morning, Erik Larson and his brother place their decoys and rub the numbness out of their fingers. They’re crouched behind a duck blind. Sunlight flashes golden over the bay. Larson savors the moment, telling himself, “How lucky I am to live in such a beautiful place.”
In high school, Larson was an honor student and state champion swimmer. He graduated from high school and community college the same week in 2010. After earning a civil engineering degree at Washington State University, he did something out of the ordinary for a millennial who grew up in Aberdeen, an old timber town pundits have written off as dying: He came back home. Now, at 24, he’s the mayor.
Larson was elected in a landslide in 2015, capturing 71 percent of the vote against a former city councilman old enough to be his father. The two-term incumbent mayor—a contemporary of Larson’s grandfather—didn’t even survive the primary. Records indicate that Larson, 23 when elected, is the youngest mayor of a sizable city in Washington State history. Without question, he’s by far the youngest in Aberdeen history. Larson oversees a city with a $47 million annual budget and 176 employees. He is strikingly mature, articulate, boyishly handsome, clean-cut.
The mayor’s Aberdeen roots are a century deep. His paternal great-great-grandfather, 19-year-old Paul Julius Larson, was one of the 1.2 million Swedes who migrated to America between 1870 and 1910. A hundred-thousand came to Washington State, and a thousand of those—mostly single men—high-tailed it to Grays Harbor County.
Arriving in Aberdeen around 1910, Paul Larson soon found work in one of the mills lining the waterfront. Their saws screeched around the clock, milling the knot-free Douglas fir lumber that rebuilt San Francisco after the great quake of 1906. Lumber schooners were docked up and down the Chehalis and Wishkah rivers. In 1920, Aberdeen was the state’s eighth largest city, well ahead of Vancouver and twice as big as Olympia. Hoquiam, Aberdeen’s twin, was No. 10.
The peak year at the Port of Grays Harbor was 1926, when two dozen sawmills cut 1.56 billion board feet of lumber. By then, Paul Larson was a lumber inspector for the E.K. Bishop Lumber Co. A proud naturalized citizen, Larson had a solid, unpretentious house and an industrious Swedish wife, Josephine Jonsdotter, who gave him four sturdy children, including the mayor’s great-grandfather, Robert Larson.
AFTER WORLD WAR II, Robert Larson left a plywood mill to become a partner in a new neighborhood tavern they dubbed Duffy’s. The glory days of logging were over, though it took another 30 years for that reality to slowly play out. Duffy’s thrived, becoming famous for pressure-fried chicken as it morphed into the area’s most popular family restaurant. At Duffy’s everyone knew your name. The mayor’s enterprising grandparents, Ralph and Sue Larson, acquired the business in the 1970s and branched out to two other locations on the Harbor. The mayor’s dad, the second Paul Larson, joined the company after graduating from WSU with a degree in hotel and restaurant management. Logger-size breakfasts with Swedish pancakes and Duffy’s signature little wild blackberry pie kept the company afloat during the 1980s. On the Harbor, it was the worst hard time since the 1930s. Automation slashed mill payrolls while unprocessed logs were shipped to the Pacific Rim and the wily Canadians produced cheaper lumber.
The jobless rate in Grays Harbor County soared into double digits and stayed there year after year. The last blow was the most devastating: Set-asides for the endangered Northern Spotted Owl curtailed logging on public lands. Aberdeen lost nearly 12 percent of its population between 1980 and 1990. Then downtown was Wal-Marted. Just when things were looking up, the Great Recession hit. In 2010, when Erik Larson was setting a state record in the 100 freestyle as an Aberdeen High School senior, the unemployment rate on Grays Harbor spiked to 16.3 percent.
It was half that in the fall of 2016—though still twice as high as in King County and well above the state average—when the young mayor pondered his celebrity. Crosscut, the Seattle website billing itself as “News of the Great Nearby” for ostensibly urbane readers, had featured a profile of Larson with a headline Grays Harbor folks viewed as Puget Sound’s typically patronizing view of its poor-relation colonies: “Can a millennial mayor save Kurt Cobain’s dying hometown?”
Alas, poor Kurt. Nirvana’s front man checked out at 27 in 1994 when Mayor Larson was a toddler. It took some City Council members and a lot of Aberdeen’s older generation several years to come to grips with the city’s status as a pilgrimage destination for Nirvana fans from around the world, Cobain having bad-mouthed Aberdeen, battled drug addiction and committed suicide. Forks had its vampires; the vampires had Kurt. A life-size, 600-pound statue of Cobain, shedding a kitschy concrete tear, languished for years in a local artist’s muffler shop. “There’s a difference between being famous and being infamous,” one Chamber of Commerce leader said, worrying that a city-sponsored memorial would send the wrong message to kids. “When he was famous, he was from Seattle. As soon as he kills himself, he’s that messed-up kid from Aberdeen.”
IN THE SPRING of 2016, boosters intent on restoring civic pride, paid for a new sign on the bluff at the city limits. Aberdeen, it declares, is the “Lumber Capital of the World.” Problem is that’s demonstrably no longer true, as many have pointed out. No one denies, however, that the other Welcome-to-Aberdeen sign accurately reflects the character of a blue-collar town struggling to reinvent itself. “Come As You Are,” it says, reprising the title of a song written by Aberdeen’s most famous son. In the heart of downtown, there’s a striking new mural celebrating the birth of grunge rock. It features Kurt and his lanky Croatian bandmate, Krist Novoselic, two disaffected youth who put Aberdeen on the map and Nirvana in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The concrete Kurt was moved to Aberdeen Museum of History in 2014, with Larson’s predecessor expressing the hope the museum will become, as a consequence, “as big as Graceland.” Larson, a Nirvana fan, isn’t counting on that.
Elvis, Kurt and the former mayor have all left the building. But is Aberdeen actually dying?
Homeless people still huddle in vacant storefront doorways, and the sad-eyed freelance hookers prowling the east end of the main drag keep a lookout for the cops and take refuge from the drizzle in bus-stop shelters. The mayor, City Council and police chief have been catching hell from business owners and citizens who say the city isn’t doing enough to deal with vagrancy. Larson observes that Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, who has Aberdeen roots, is dealing with the same challenge, just on a much larger scale. As for people living in cars and campers near the scenic riverfront walk, Larson tells a concerned citizen that the law ties his hands. All they have to do is move the vehicle a few feet every 24 hours. “And, after all,” he says, “who would live in a car if they had another choice?” If the state would provide adequate funding for mental-health programs, there would be a lot fewer people living beneath bridges, Larson says.
What’s clear, judging from a late summer Friday night, is that the rumors of Aberdeen’s death are exaggerated. The mayor and writer settle into overstuffed chairs in a busy new wine bar. The microbrew pub around the corner, next to the new bakery, is also buzzing. Two upscale restaurants down the street are filling up, and a concert is upcoming at the handsomely restored D&R Theater. If many storefronts are still vacant, windows covered with peeling butcher paper, and the traffic outside is mostly headed for Ocean Shores or the tony new village of Seabrook, progress is apparent. Bulldozers are grading a long-vacant lot for a Tesla supercharger station. The trick will be getting the occupants of those pricey sedans and gull-wing SUVs to linger longer than it takes to recharge their batteries. In Aberdeen, a new Wendy’s is still a big deal. The fact that Donald Trump carried Grays Harbor—for decades one of the most reliably Democratic counties in America—italicizes how left out Aberdeen feels.
“We’re growing like the national GDP is growing,” Larson quips, “at a rate so slow it’s almost unmeasurable. But we’re not dead yet and I believe there’s huge potential here. Which is why I came back home, and why I wanted to be mayor. Three years ago there was absolutely nothing happening downtown. We’ve still got a long way to go, but look outside: Every single parking space is full and you’ve got people out and about, having a great time. Listen to the voices in this room. What it takes is enterprising people who can see past the doom and gloom. And some building owners were willing to take a chance and give people great deals to jump-start the revival of downtown. We have so many historic buildings. I think this is just the beginning.”
In 2016, James Fallows, the award-winning writer for The Atlantic, completed a three-year, 54,000-mile journey to assess “How America is putting itself back together.” Fallows came up with a checklist of traits shared by successful cities. The list underscores Aberdeen’s potential. It has a downtown with what Fallows calls “good bones”—classic Main Street-style structures built between the 1890s and 1940s. It also has a first-rate community college offering four-year degree programs. Further, Aberdeen “people know the civic story,” as Fallows puts it. The city takes pride in its resiliency and colorful history, which is replete with legendary saloons, soap-box orators, sensational unsolved murders and millworkers defying bayonet-wielding National Guardsmen.
Fallows points to another promising characteristic: “You can pick out the local patriots.” The first thing he’d ask when he arrived in a place was “Who makes this town go?” Sometimes it was a civic activist; sometimes a business leader, columnist, council member or the mayor. “What mattered was that the question had an answer.” At this writing, young Erik Larson has been mayor for less than a year, but a lot of people mention his name when you ask “Who makes this town go?”
