On Saturday morning, I checked my phone to discover exciting news and a photo of the baby boy born to my niece, whose story I shared in a column after the stillborn birth of her first son. Praise God, after losing Lincoln only a couple of weeks before his due date and then giving birth to a daughter, Robin and Danny Riat welcomed a healthy baby boy.
A few hours later, I received a text message from my daughter saying her husband’s great-grandmother had passed away. A week earlier, I attended a memorial service and drove from there to a baby shower.
I’ve been pondering the circle of life a lot lately after attending so many memorial services for longtime community members who have passed away, including former state Rep. Bill Brumsickle, Rosie the Riveter Doris Bier and former Centralia Mayor Lee Coumbs.
And now we’ve lost Glenn Aldrich, 88, a former Lewis County commissioner from Mossyrock. I met Glenn and his wife, Wisten, more than three decades ago at a baby shower hosted for us by members of the Lewis County Farm Bureau. It took place at the Newaukum River home of Chris and Pam Cheney, both of whom passed away within the last couple of years.
We have Glenn’s family to thank for bringing blueberries to East Lewis County, which hosts an annual Mossyrock Blueberry Festival. Glenn’s father, Neal Aldrich, who was born in 1899, brought blueberries to the county’s Klickitat Prairie in about 1940 with his wife, Marjorie (Huntting) Aldrich, a teacher in Mossyrock. They bought 20 acres in 1933, three years before Glenn’s birth in May 1936, and established the Aldrich Berry Farm & Nursery, a business that began with the planting of one-and-a-third acres of berries in the fall of 1944.
A July 30, 2012, feature in Washington State Magazine spoke about Glenn as a 12-year-old helping his father carry blueberry plants to a sheep pasture near their home. The family hired 25 pickers in 1950 to harvest 20,800 pounds of blueberries, Glenn wrote in a history of the family business at https://www.aldrichberryfarm.com/history.html. The farm added overhead irrigation in about 1952, experimented with drip irrigation in the 1980s, used bees for pollination, and eventually expanded to 26 acres.
Neal Aldrich proved instrumental in forming the Washington Blueberry Growers Association in the early 1950s, Glenn wrote, and served on the co-op’s board of directors. So did Glenn, who also served a dozen years on the board of directors for the Washington Blueberry Commission, which he helped form in 1969. He also nurtured the North American Blueberry Council, organized in 1972, served as a board director of the Rainier Chapter of the Washington State Nurseryman’s Association, and chaired the Lewis County Agricultural Resources Council.
My husband, who wrote a feature story about Glenn for The Daily Chronicle in Centralia in July 1974, described Glenn as a hard worker, as most farmers are, especially operating a small farm. At that time, in addition to blueberries, he farmed eight acres in raspberries, three acres as a forest nursery, five acres in filberts, and three acres in Christmas trees along with about 100 acres in grassland. He also grew sweet corn for the cannery.
I loved catching up with both Glenn and Wisten at Lewis County Republican Party events through the years. I always found him friendly, intelligent, well-versed on topics and easy to converse with.
Glenn served in the U.S. Air Force and graduated in 1958 and 1962 from Washington State University, where he belonged to the Farm House fraternity with my brother-in-law Al Zander, who died in October 2020 at 84. After graduating, Glenn and his wife, Wisten, moved to Mossyrock in 1963 and purchased his parents’ farm. During the late 1960s, Glenn taught vocational agriculture at Mossyrock High School, where his mother was a teacher. He and Wisten raised two sons, Chris and Jason, who both attended Washington State University.
We bought blueberry plants for our Toledo home more than 30 years ago from Glenn and Wisten, and through the years, my husband has bought Christmas tree seedlings from Aldrich Nursery and Christmas trees from their son, Chris.
The WSU article quoted Wisten as saying Glenn “majored in talking” when asked if he’d be interviewed for a story.
“Well, he majored in agriculture, I think,” she said. “But he could have minored in talking.”
Maybe that’s why he ventured into politics.
Glenn campaigned for Lewis County commissioner in 1994, won the Republican primary and then defeated one-term Democrat Warren Dahlin in the general election. He served one four-year term from 1995 to 1999 until Republican Dennis Hadaller defeated him in the September 1998 primary.
It’s sad to see so many precious people pass away. I suppose it’s part of aging, saying goodbye to people you’ve known and respected. I’m known among family and friends as someone who’s always snapping photos, but I like to chronicle life as I live it and look back knowing I cherished what I had when I had it … in case I don’t have it in the future.
Life is short. Celebrate precious moments and milestones, let go of minor annoyances, and love one another.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
