Bill Moeller Commentary: Any More Old Timers Out There?

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I’ve had a nice warming experience from readers about my qualifications for joining the Lewis County Old Timers Club. Thank you! However, I hoped that you would supply me with some more I could pass along. Just email them to the address on the bottom of this column. To help awaken some of my little grey cells — as Agatha Christie’s crime solver, Hercule Poiroit, used to call them.

You are, indeed, a member of the Lewis County Old Timers Club if you can add to this list:

Number one: You once rented a rowboat to go fishing on Packwood Lake. You get an extra point if you ever ate a meal in the small, office-restaurant-headquarters that used to be there alongside a couple of cabins.

Two: You’re getting close to membership if you graduated from Boistfort High School.

Three: Your bicycle was equipped with a “coaster” brake and had only one speed forward. 

Four: You had a favorite multi-program episode on the 15-minute daily radio programs. Mine was “I Love a Mystery.” It’s a good thing that one wasn’t run just before my bedtime or I never would have gotten to sleep.

(Side note... I think I mentioned this a few years ago but the coincidence is worth repeating. I forget the name of the program. It may have been “Captain Midnight,” but on Friday’s last program of the week, the main characters were headed to solve a mystery at a place which most of us had never heard of, called “Pearl Harbor — and the date of that Friday program was December 5, 1941! The script writers probably didn’t get much sleep that Sunday night.)

Getting back to the test for membership in the Lewis County Old Timers Club:

Five: You can remember what the very last sound effect was after Fibber McGee opened his closet door.



Six: Can name the orchestra leader on the Jack Benny programs? If you said “Phil Harris” you were wrong. He was an actor playing the role of a band leader. But here’s the surprise: the actual leader of the orchestra was Mahlan Merrick, a graduate of Centralia High School — somewhere around 1918! He was also a graduate of Washington State College — as it was known then. He led the orchestras on many other radio programs and in concerts as well.

Seven: You enjoyed listening to “Amos and Andy” on radio and didn’t consider it an ethnic stereotype at the time. I still don’t. It was about human nature.

That’s enough for now.

It’s springtime and I can’t get over the inconsistency of some plants. A neighbor up the line has a camellia bush almost through blooming while my own hasn’t even developed a bud. Mine did produce two or three blossoms somewhere around Christmas. As I write this, most of my daffodils are blooming but they all seem shorter this year.

Another topic change; if you want to hear some great music, poetry and other entertainment, drop by the King Street Cove on Thursday evenings around 6:30 p.m.. There is no admission charge. The guitar playing and singing are equal to any professional club. There’s also some great poetry reading and, on a recent Thursday, I even read a couple of chapters of a children’s book I began writing some years ago. Fellow columnist Brian Mittge has also written about performing there. King Street is one block west of Washington Street and the building is remembered as once being a synagogue. The entrance is on Centralia College Boulevard.

See you there?

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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.