Let us raise a parting toast, or one final fist of fury, for Adele Ferguson, who died this week after contracting the flu. The longtime journalist and columnist was 90.
The Kitsap Sun, her home newspaper, noted in her obituary that the paper never could have gotten away with reporting her age if she were still alive. A woman’s age, weight and salary were nobody’s business but her own, Adele said. On that matter, like most others, she usually got her way.
In an interview with the secretary of state’s office a few years back, she held fast to her ageless rule, admitting only that she was born “near the time of the Great Depression.” Her parents and the family’s eight children were poor as could be — Adele said the only person in school with worse shoes than hers was her sister — and she stands in my mind as the kind of hard-charging, self-made person who defines a pioneering era of our state and nation.
Adele was well known to readers of The Chronicle. To some, she was notorious. I looked back once and can confirm the photo that ran with her column was unchanged for at least 30 years. Her deep creases remind me of the lined faces of my own elderly Scandinavian relatives, whom I’d visit in Kitsap County on a route that took me past the Adele Ferguson Bridge — created at her urging and named in her honor.
Never afraid to express an unpopular opinion, Adele’s earthy conservatism led her to a few statements that landed with a thud for many 21st century readers. Still, considering her long, trailblazing career, those few columns shouldn’t define her legacy.
Adele was one of Washington’s first female journalists. She landed a job at the The Salute, the Bremerton Naval Shipyard’s newspaper, by inventing a few previous newspaper jobs back east out of whole cloth. She quickly moved up to the Bremerton Sun and earned attention for her fearless and creative storytelling. When the Navy refused to let her join the male reporters for a ride on the new Nautilus atomic submarine, she wrote all about the snub, including the purported reason — there was no ladies’ room on the submersible. The stink she raised made life so difficult for the Navy brass that they ended up giving her a ride (with an outhouse strapped to the bridge deck.)
She’s remembered in Olympia for breaking the Capitol press corps’ old boys club wide open in 1961 as the first female statehouse correspondent.
Utterly unafraid, she was feared and respected throughout the halls of power. She delighted in skewering everyone who needed it. She was known for being pointed — and fair.
“I always liked Adele because she would stab me in the front,” said former Gov. Dan Evans.
She kept her writing down to earth, figuring her audience was “the ship-fitter who lives down the road.”
Steven Gardner, who now occupies her former place as the chief political reporter for The Sun, memorialized her on his blog, Kitsap Caucus. He described Adele as the talented journalistic equivalent of a Willie Mays or Sandy Koufax.
“We, both women and men, walk through doors she opened,” Gardner wrote. “It’s hard for me to imagine some of our open government laws existing without reporters like Adele Ferguson, who called nonsense on secrecy. Women, particularly journalists, owe their opportunities to Adele and others like her.”
Adele’s trailblazing accomplishments led the secretary of state’s office to choose her as one of the first Washingtonians to be profiled in the state’s oral history Legacy Project.
The resulting website and book, “The Inimitable Adele Ferguson,” is available online at sos.wa.gov/legacyproject or can be ordered in print.
Like her best writing, it’s a great read, and a fitting homage to a Washington original.
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Brian Mittge and his family live south of Chehalis. For better or worse, he’s no Adele Ferguson, but drop him a line anyway at brianmittge@hotmail.com.
