Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a multi-part profile of Aberdeen Mayor Erik Larson. Part one appeared in Tuesday’s paper. 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 was written for the Legacy Project, an initiative from the Secretary of State’s office.

By John C. Hughes

It’s likely that no mayor in Aberdeen history has had as much literal grass-roots experience as Erik Larson. In the summer of 2011, he was a day laborer for the Parks & Recreation Department, mowing lawns and tending flower beds. “That’s probably the lowest position on the city payroll—summer help,” the mayor observes. His boss, Stacie Barnum, is now one of his department heads.

Growing up, Larson, 24, also pulled some shifts on the bottom rung of the family restaurant business, Duffy’s, an Aberdeen institution. “Dishwashing is a horrible job,” he says. “It teaches you the importance of finding a good job! The worst part was the heat. You’re wearing your undershirt, your Duffy’s shirt and your apron — three layers of clothes. The steam is filling the room. You’re sweating to death, and when the plates come out of the dishwasher they’re like 180 degrees. You’ll burn your fingertips if you don’t hurry. You can’t fall behind.”

Larson admires what his grandfather Ralph and father Paul have accomplished in the restaurant business, but joining the company never appealed to him. Fascinated by an uncle’s career as an environmental engineer, he was always intensely curious about how things worked.

“Erik was born 35,” his Grandma Sue Larson says. “When he was 18 months old, I was holding him on my lap. He looked at the cookie jar on the counter and said he wanted two cookies. So I opened the jar and gave him two cookies. Then he gave me one. That is so unlike a toddler. He’s just way beyond his years. He was swimming before he could walk. He mulls things around in his brain and comes up with his own ideas. And when he sets his mind to something, he does it. At Saint Mary’s School they have an annual science fair. The younger kids don’t have to take part, but when Erik was in the second grade he wanted to. He came home one day and said he was going to build a hovercraft. My dad had a workshop with all sorts of tools. So Erik designed a hovercraft and went up to my dad’s place and cut the wood. At the science fair, all the kids were riding around on Erik’s hovercraft!”

Erik smiles at the memories of growing up in a close-knit family, with grandparents right across the street and lots of independence. “I’ve always been a very independent person. I bought my first car for $9,000 when I was in high school. My mom took out a loan at the bank because I wasn’t old enough to have a loan. I made the payments, except during swim season. My attitude was, ‘You can’t punish me by taking this away because it’s my car.’ I hate not having the independence to make my own decisions.”

There was little need to ever punish Erik, according to his family. He loved hunting and camping, learning early on how to safely handle firearms. Tall and strong, he quickly developed into a powerful swimmer, studied intently and took piano and violin lessons. He grew up listening to 1970s and ’80s rock with his dad and tuned in to the MTV Top 10 countdown before school. His first concert was AC/DC’s 2009 stop in Tacoma, but he was never tempted to trash a motel room during a swim team outing. Larson was a Running Start student at Grays Harbor College during his final two years of high school, excelling in math. Engineering came to him intuitively.

Coming Home

In 2012, before his last semester at Washington State University, Larson secured a summer internship close to home with the Vaughan Company Inc. of Montesano. Vaughan is one of the leading designers and manufacturers of chopper pumps for agricultural and industrial applications, with 40 worldwide patents. Management was mightily impressed with the young engineer’s ingenuity. Larson graduated on a Friday and started work that Monday. In his spare time, he bought a house, coached a baseball team and enrolled in the civil engineering master’s degree program at Saint Martin’s University.

“So now I’m a property owner. I looked around at what was happening in Aberdeen. What I saw was that we weren’t making the investments we needed to make to create the quality of life that adds up to a healthy community. I asked myself, ‘How can we build property values, create more tax revenue and then use those tax revenues to invest in ourselves? Where’s the ROI project that’s going to multiply the effect of the money we spend? How can we create change?’ There was this idea that every year the budget’s a little bit worse. There’s less money coming in, so ‘OK, we’re going to cut services to make up for that.’ But when you cut services you have worse streets and worse parks; the utility bills are higher; there’s fewer police and firefighters. Those things matter. So it becomes a less attractive community; people don’t take care of their property, and now you’ve got even less money the next year. Nothing is going to get better that way. If you don’t invest in yourself, no one else is going to.”

deciding to run

Larson’s frustration marinated for two years: “Nothing was changing,” he says. In the winter of 2015, when he told his parents and his grandparents he was thinking about running for mayor, they wondered whether he was aiming too high, or as his Grandma Sue put it, “One would think you’d run for City Council first.” One would. But Erik, as usual, had already explored that option. He admired the two bright women who represent his ward. “I didn’t want to run against either of them. In my mind, they weren’t part of the problem.” In fact, one of them, businesswoman Kathi Hoder, was herself weighing running for mayor. When she decided against it and gave Larson her blessings, he was off and running — with free advice from a seasoned political adviser.

Larson’s cousin, Tony Sermonti, is the policy and legislative director for the Washington State Department of Licensing. While attending The Evergreen State College, Sermonti volunteered with John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Three years later, he was on the primary trail with John Edwards, overseeing media relations and logistics. The stellar reviews Sermonti received from old-hand Democratic campaign operatives led to a post as an advance man with the traveling White House, handling press availability for President Obama, the First Lady and Vice President Biden. Sometimes he’d pinch himself and say, “I’m a kid from Aberdeen. What on Earth am I doing here?”

When the Larson elders beckoned Sermonti to a reality-check dinner with the prospective mayoral candidate, he was determined to be blunt. “It was sort of ‘Let’s see: Am I going to try and talk him out of it or go whole hog?’ It became clear very quickly it was whole hog. I told Erik, ‘If you’re going to do this, you’re gonna win! And you’re going to need to work hard or I’m not going to help you.’ Little did I know how hard he would work. We walked out of there as a solid family team. Erik and I became very close. Besides electing a visionary young guy as mayor, it’s also a story of reconnecting family, which is the most important part of it for me.”

Campaign launched

The campaign was launched with a $900 contribution from Larson family businesses and $1,200 from Erik’s savings. Beyond that, fundraising was no problem. Everywhere he went, people volunteered to chip in—young, old and in-between. The campaign cost $8,500, expensive for an Aberdeen mayoral race, “but to people who’ve been active in politics that’s nothing,” Larson says. He tapped into social media and installed a huge campaign banner on a prominent downtown building. Mostly, however, it was yard signs, doorbelling and the word-of-mouth momentum Larson achieved after capturing 54 percent of the vote in the primary.

“There was a lot of frustration with the city government,” Larson says. The nice-guy incumbent mayor, a retired JC Penney manager, had joined the City Council three years before Larson was born. The other mayoral candidate, a 60-year-old lawyer, was a polarizing figure. “I had a strong sense that people wanted someone new with new ideas,” Larson says. “The community was going to have to take a chance on me because obviously I had no government experience. There was nothing I could point to and say, ‘Here’s an example of what I can do for you. Here’s my resume.’ I’d never done anything in public service other than YMCA Youth and Government. And that’s not something you should bring up in a campaign debate as an example of your leadership experience! Everybody’s going to look at 23-year-old and go, ‘OK, this person is not serious. It’s great that he’s getting involved but this isn’t a real candidate.’ I had to change people’s minds. I felt that if I could get in front of someone and talk to them for 10 minutes they would at least realize I was competent. I might not have experience but at least I could understand the issues and make good decisions.

“I think there were two other things that really helped: One is that there’s a large sector of the senior community that has seen nothing positive happen in Aberdeen for the past 30 years. I think those folks concluded, ‘Well, it couldn’t get any worse. We might as well give the kid a shot.’ If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that, I’d have paid for the whole campaign right there. There was also a little bit of name recognition from my dad and my grandparents being so well known and respected in the community—and from my mom and her family as well. I had enough of a reputation that people felt I was intelligent and sincere. Some highly respected people backed me, so that was important to my credibility. But if you had told me in the beginning that I was going to win with nearly 72 percent of the vote, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Inferiority complex

Sermonti wasn’t surprised: “He’s very mature for his age and he exudes poise. He was viewed as a change agent.” Now comes the hard part: Doing something. “Erik knows you have to do more than one thing at once. It comes around to public investment and buy-in. He’s now the No. 1 cheerleader, and not just as the sash and bouquet. Aberdeen has been hobbled for so long by an inferiority complex. Erik is saying that it’s OK to do nice things. It’s OK to invest.”

Long-term, Sermonti says, what Aberdeen needs is to get people Erik’s age to come back home. “You get that critical mass of energy and ideas and stuff starts happening. But you have to make the investments first. I about died when I saw that ‘Lumber Capital of the World’ sign. The way it used to be is not the way forward. Erik understands all this.”

Erik’s brother, Hunter, two years younger, is doing his part. A Gonzaga graduate, he moved home from Seattle to take a new job with D.A. Davidson, the investment company.

Tomorrow: He may have to squint, but Mayor Larson sees opportunities in downtown Aberdeen.