75 years ago

August 3, 1942

Ehrhart’s Kids — ex-gridders of Hoquiam high school who played under John D. Ehrhart from 1912 to 1915 — gathered Saturday night for a reunion dinner in honor of Hugh Miller, one of their members who is leaving this week for service in the army. The affair was held at Green Gables.

Miller, center and fullback of the Hoquiam team for four years ending in 1916, has passed his induction examination and will report to Fort Lewis on Friday. It will be war No. 2 for him, he having served two years with the navy during the first world war. He is employed at Rayonier, Inc.

August 4, 1942

Julius Heyer thinks it’s about time for America “to get tough” and win this war.

The retired Aberdeen millworker, who came here in 1887 and sawed 1,000,000,000 feet of Harbor logs before he retired in 1923, isn’t talking about the boys who are doing the fighting —“because they’re doing all right, just as they always have in all our wars” — but he is talking about the older generations.

“Maybe some of the older folks need a little more of that old time toughness that the loggers and millworkers had when Aberdeen was young,” Heyer muses. “They need a little more fight in their blood. They’re too soft.”

Still hale and hearty, Heyer has had a part in virtually every historical event here since the morning he first saw Aberdeen; he helped fight the big fire of 1903, and he knew Billy Gohl when waterfront slayings terrorized the Harbor. He helped welcome the railroad to Grays Harbor and walked the trail to Montesano many times before the road went through. Heyer remembers when Joe Graham was the town marshal. The hollow boom of loggers’ boots on the plank sidewalk of Aberdeen’s early-day streets still echoes clearly in his mind.

50 years ago

August 3, 1967

Open house for the newly reconstructed Harbor Rexall Drug Store, 316 8th St., Hoquiam, is slated for this weekend, according to Edward F. Wandell and George G. Wandel, owners and operators.

Construction of the building began last August. The original Grays Harbor Drug Co. building was demolished in May to make way for a parking lot adjacent to the new quarters of the pharmacy.

August 4, 1967

The former Albert Schafer home, which George Nye of Raymond purchased from the county for $10, is to be moved later this summer one-half block north to the present site of the old Presbyterian Church on the corner of Main and Spruce.

25 years ago

August 3, 1992

Two wheelchair lifts will be installed at Aberdeen High School this fall.

Several months ago, the school board considered an expensive plan to tie the newer Phillips Building with the 1909 Weatherwax Building via an elevator with ramps. That plan would have cost more than $250,000.

But recently the board decided it could serve those who use wheelchairs just as easily with less costly wheelchair lifts.

By October, the two lifts — which will cost a total of $58,000 — should be installed, said the district’s new business manager Keith Bigelow.

August 4, 1992

A federal appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling that would have made 91 ITT Rayonier pulp mill workers on Grays Harbor rich.

A three-judge panel for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed U.S. District Court Judge Jack Tanner’s ruling that ITT Rayonier should pay back wages to maintenance workers who were on call during their off duty hours, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

In March of 1991 Tanner awarded the workers collectively almost $58 million, with individual awards from $46,000 to $832,000.

Compiled from the archives of The Daily World by Karen Barkstrom