75 years ago

June 1, 1942

Use of the city’s new gas masks and treatment of gas attack victims will be demonstrated tonight at a mass meeting of all Aberdeen’s home defense medical units, Dr. Milton Graham, chief of the units, announced today.

C.O. Magnuson, chemist of Rayonier, Inc., will show how to don, test and take off the new gas masks, some 400 of which were received this weekend by the city’s defense council. Using a large “dummy” patient, he also will demonstrate proper treatment of persons suffering from effects of gas.

The program will include singing of “America” and a mass pledge to the flag.

June 2, 1942

Ten Grays Harbor Japanese today were enroute to a California evacuation center — Mrs. Natsu Saito and her three children and Mrs. William Moyer and her five children.

They were to board a special train at Olympia, traveling south to Tule Lake, California, where the army has set up the second largest alien evacuation center on the coast.

Speaking for his family, Perry Saito said they “hope to come back to Aberdeen when the war is over and resume our business and our many friendships here.”

50 years ago

June 1, 1967

Word has been received that Capt. Paul Fournier, 32, Montesano, has been critically injured and burned in a plane crash in Vietnam and is being treated in a San Antonio, Texas, hospital.

Fournier crashed shortly after take-off May 23 from an airstrip near Saigon and suffered burns over 40 per cent of his body. Army authorities suspect his plane may have been sabotaged.

Fournier is a graduate of Montesano High School and Seattle University graduate.

June 2, 1967

It’s Sum-Fun Days time in Elma! Festivities are scheduled to get under way at noon Saturday with a huge parade that will feature hilarious clowns, big bands, colorful floats, precision drill teams and pretty baton twirlers by the dozen.

Mark George, parade chairman, said more than 30 units and about 639 people will be participating in the parade, including the 40-member 25th Air Division U.S. Air Force Band from McChord Air Force Base, the 21st Army Band from Fort Lewis and the Hoquiam High School Band.

25 years ago

June 1, 1992

• Marge Leggett, a second grade teacher at McDermoth Elementary School who began teaching in 1960, will retire in a few weeks. Her husband, Jim, who taught math at Aberdeen High School, retired two years ago. They have three grown children.

She has taught first, second, third and fourth grade and resource room. “But I think I’ve been a second grade teacher the longest,” she commented.

“I want to instill in the kids a sense of consideration for other people,” Mrs. Leggett said. “I think that is probably the most important thing in the world — to care for other people.”

• He’s served under five superintendents and eight principals. Clayton “Bud” Hood, 61, cleans out his desk next week after 38 years at Aberdeen’s McDermoth Elementary School.

“I remember when the desks were one piece — the desk and chair together — bolted to the floor. The lighting was just one big bulb and this was our intercom system,” he said picking up the old-fashioned receiver hanging on the wall near the window. “This is how we had to buzz the office, but sometimes it was easier to open up the window and yell down.”

He and his wife plan to do some traveling and some gardening and he hopes to fill in at school now and then. “I want to sub,” he said, “because I still enjoy teaching.”

June 2, 1992

James Powell is an intense young naturalist who thrives among the kind of ancient trees that once covered the rolling Willapa Hills from the Chehalis River to the Columbia and from the ocean to the foothills of the Cascades.

But at 19, Powell was born too late to see those stands that once seemed never-ending. In 1992, most of what he knows about them comes from stumps and old aerial photos.

“Out by Grays River, I saw the most impressive, old-growth Douglas fir I’ve even seen,” says Powell of an area he found in 1988. “I found about 15 patches that day and ever since then I’ve seen practically all those patches cut down.”

Compiled from the archives of The Daily World by Karen Barkstrom