Rene Remund holds up the two volumes of a book created and read only by W.F. West student body presidents. Remund started the tradition when he was ASB president in 1965. The book will soon be bound into one copy.
Tessa Wollan, president of the W.F. West ASB, is the most recent person to have access to a 'secret' book that only presidents of W.F. West have ever read. The book is filled with entries from each president giving advice and information to successors.
For more than 50 years, presidents of W.F. West’s Associated Student Body have kept a secret tradition alive.
Each year, the outgoing president writes a few pages of information, wisdom and advice in a hardbound journal to pass on to his or her successor. To this day, the book’s wealth of knowledge for incoming leadership has only been read by a few dozen people.
Rene Remund, an attorney with Chehalis firm Vander Stoep, Remund, Blinks & Jones, created what is now known simply as “The Book” when he was president of the Chehalis high school’s student body in 1965.
“Basically, I got to the end of the year as student body president and realized much of what I had been doing was done as trial and error,” he said. “There really was no road map on how to go forward.”
Tessa Wollan, 18, current president of W.F. West, will be the next person to leave advice and information for future presidents. Wollan wasn’t aware of the book when she was elected.
“I had zero idea,” she said. “It was kept a really hidden secret.”
The 50-year-old book was a page-turner, she said.
“I read all of it. I stayed up through the night reading them,” she said.
Remund said he realized while president that his successors would have an easier time accomplishing their goals if they could learn from previous presidents’ experience.
“There’s some struggles you go through and you feel like you’re doing everything wrong,” Wollan said.
Reading the book didn’t necessarily make those struggles go away, but Wollan said it showed her that past presidents mostly felt the same way and faced similar struggles.
“It just makes it easier to get through,” she said. “We’ve all been through the same thing.”
While many people today know about the book’s existence, its exact contents are still a mystery — the book is passed down from president to president, and no one else is allowed to read it.
“It would inhibit the frankness of the writer if it were thought the information would become public,” Remund said.
The book was also created to let students impart some of their institutional knowledge to future presidents, and lend “some insight into key personnel … who could either be a help or a hinderance,” Remund said.
Some entries are as long as five pages, while others are more brief. Some contain poems, quotes, or even faculty members’ dirty secrets, Wollan said.
“It was privileged and only available to the incoming president,” Remund said. “It’s a political office … Sometimes you have to use the material available to you, and knowledge is power.”
Remund learned the book was still in existence in 2000 from his business partner, J. Vander Stoep, who was also a class president and wrote in the book in 1975.
“It was a surprise to me,” Remund said. “It was a pleasure to find that out.”
He said the book’s continued existence after 50 years is proof that succeeding generations saw value in it.
While the books, now in two parts having outgrown the first volume, are in Wollan’s possession through the end of the school year, Vander Stoep recently took possession of the books to have them rebound into one document. The original book started by Remund is falling apart, Wollan said.
Having the book in his law office gave Remund a chance to look at if for the first time in 50 years.
“J has looked through it, I’ve looked at some of it,” Remund said. “I’m pleased with what I’ve read.”
Remund said he doesn’t think a newspaper article will diminish the mysterious air surrounding the book, since the general public will still not be allowed to read it.
“If you don’t know what’s in something you can imagine a lot of things,” he said. “It was always known that the book existed.”
As elections for next year’s ASB president approach, Wollan is preparing to leave her own mark in the book.
“I’ve yet to write in it,” she said. “I’m very nervous. People have given really good advice and secrets nobody else knows.”
