A Conversation with Local Writer and Historian, Wally Lee Parker

When asked if the label “historian” was appropriate for him, Wally Lee Parker insisted, “amateur historian.” Born in 1945 in Tulare, Calif., Parker grew up in Williams Valley, west of Deer Park, where his family migrated to settle on a farm in 1947. He said his parents grew up in the Depression era, following fruit and agriculture opportunities for work.  They were from Oklahoma originally, and eventually landed in Wenatchee, Wash. While there, he said, they found a newspaper listing advertising land for sale in Deer Park. “Things were getting better, and they wanted to settle and thought Deer Park sounded like a good place to raise kids. It was me, three older sisters, and the folks. I attended Clayton’s grade school, starting there the same year as the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society’s (C/DPHS) president, Bill Sebright,” Parker recounted. 

Sebright affirmed, stating, “Wally and I started first grade together and played games like ‘soldiers’ together. He was quiet and smart, but not in a classroom sort of way.”

Parker has been involved in the C/DPHS since 2003 and wrote his first article for the Deer Park Tribune in 2004. In a recent interview, he discussed his love of history, sharing many stories about the Deer Park area that he both lived and researched. 

In the late 1990s, Parker said he began compiling personal family histories. “At that time, we did everything by mail; it was a primitive time where you requested records through the mail,” he chided, comparing it to the modern digitized process. While working with the C/DPHS, he said, “Once in awhile, people would contact us to tell us history bits and stuff. They always said, ‘We’re going to write this’ and they never did. So, I said, ‘What I’m going to do is create a newsletter.’” This later became the society’s monthly newsletter formally known as the Mortarboard.

Parker shared that he contacted Sebright in 2003, because he heard that a historical society was being formed. He said the historical society was an offshoot of the old Clayton School, which was going up for sale. “This group got together with the idea of trying to save the school because they figured, if it went into private hands, who knew what would happen to it? Somewhere along during all that, an organization that offered teaching to homeschool kids came around and needed a place. That’s a state-run program, so they came up with the idea of refurbishing the old Clayton School to provide that,” Parker elaborated. He said they put close to $4,000,000 into it and tried to keep the original style as much as possible. Sebright was the president then and still is; Parker said Sebright was  “bloody good at it,” adding, “no one else wants the job either.”  

He continued, “In January or February of 2004, I did my first interviews with the specific idea of putting stuff together and seeing if we could get a knowledgeable presence in the community. At that time, it seemed like having articles in the newspaper with my byline, or whoever wrote them, and then, ‘Clayton Historical Society’ would help to publicize us.”

Parker chronicled, “Over the next several years I think Tom [Costigan] published nine or 10 more of my history-based articles in the [Deer Park] Tribune. With me as editor and primary writer, the society started a series of four 48-page desktop publications in 2005 under the title, ‘Reports to the Clayton Historical Society.’ While these were being produced, "Deer Park" was added to the society's name. The second booklet in this series was a single topic issue; said topic being Deer Park's Atlas Missile base. The booklet series ended in 2008 when we began the monthly newsletter, the Mortarboard. I wrote, edited, and published the first 17 issues, then went off in pursuit of other interests. In January of 2014, I once again became editor and continued on until 2022, when I quit due to health issues. In November of 2023, we introduced a new, randomly dated series of publications commonly referred to as the ‘Brickbats.' That's currently ongoing.”

When asked more about his childhood in Williams Valley, Parker detailed his first definite memory at age 3, on his birthday. He said, “I remember that because the folks got me a little metal boat that you wound up. We went down to the creek and I was going to send this boat out across.” He said a couple of his uncles were visiting and they were dominating playing with his boat, summing up with, “Finally, Mom came out of the house and yelled at them saying, ‘You let that boy play with his damn boat!’”

Parker expounded on the nature of memories, suggesting that a lot of people can remember age three for example, “but the thing is that, they can only see slices and bits and pieces. If you don’t have an actual date you can hang it to, it’s more difficult to hold.”

He reported his parents bought the 106-acre family farm for only $4,500 in 1947, with most of it being timberland. He said that some timber was sold for pulp, and that they heated their house with wood. “My dad got a job at the Washington Brick and Lime plant in Clayton and worked there until it closed down.” He described it as a very well-known, large company with lime kilns that manufactured clay bricks. He shared he was able to accompany his father to work and help out there as a boy from ages 10-12, before the company shut down in 1957. 

He said his dad worked swing shift and farmed on the weekends. “At night, I was running around stoking those kilns. That left an impression, because those things are 1,500 degrees or more, and sometimes inside they go way over 2,000 degrees. You pull the door to the side and you’re looking in there and the firebox is just pink; the bricks are fluorescent pink colored. You’re standing there, maybe 7-8 feet away; you can feel the heat, and you run at it and throw the coal in and then back away. It was really interesting in winter, because it’s maybe 20 degrees outside; your back side is freezing, while your front side is baking. This was quite a sensation, and I just fell in love with it. If I’d had the chance, I’d probably still be out there working in the brick plant my entire life.”  

He added that, due to science books he was reading at that time, he understood coal to be essentially fossilized sunlight, “because it was from plants and wood and stuff that had compressed. So, the heat coming out of there was just a concentrated, ancient sunlight,” he explained, which delighted his young mind to contemplate. He stated that he has written about the brick plant, but that he would like to do more, expressing, “I’ve just got to live long enough.”  

His father went to work at the sawmill after the brick plant closed, and Parker recalled running the tractor on the family farm as a teen. He said he dropped out of Deer Park High School to attend trade school for auto body work. “After, I don’t know how many quarters, it just became apparent that I was no good at it,” he chuckled, rendering his education history. Later he said he got his diploma from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane and then got work at the Deer Park Sawmill, where his dad was employed. He got a position running a saw in the cut shop, and when his dad heard, he expressed strong concern. “One thing that was common to people who’d been in a cut shop for a long time, is that they had something missing. Usually it was a finger, or two, or three,” Parker impressed. He stated the mill shut down in 1970, which was a big surprise to the 200 men employed there, including Parker.  

Parker wrote more extensively about the environment there in an article called, “The Last Whistle” published in the Mortarboard, available online through the C/DPHS. An excerpt from it described his work philosophy, “As Dad told it, hiring out was selling your time – quite literally, selling part of your life. The employer could tell a worker to do certain things during those hired hours, and, as long as those requests were within reason, the worker was supposed to do them. What I took from this was that it was all a matter of how I chose to see things. If I chose to work rather than bum, thieve, or go into politics (all pretty much the same), I could see it as something demeaning if I wanted to…On the other hand, I could look at working for wages as a cooperative endeavor – which would at least leave me with some dignity. Manipulating my frame of mind might just be, as Mary Poppins says, ‘a spoonful of sugar’ – but it would be better than being chronically angry. That mind trick – common to most working men – got me through an assortment of small jobs, through four-and-a-half years at the sawmill, and another 35 years at Holy Family Hospital.” 

As mentioned in those lines, Parker said he ended up going to school and becoming an orthopedic nursing assistant at Holy Family Hospital in Spokane. Sebright divulged, “I have met several people he cared for there, and they all spoke highly of (Parker’s) kindness and dedication.” With his first wife Juanita, who he married in 1967, Parker moved from Deer Park to Spokane because the commute for school and work was taking a toll. He said his wife worked in the neonatal intensive care unit at Sacred Heart. He remarked that both of his wives were very smart ladies, although both are deceased now. He has two children and two grandchildren.

Parker said his parents sold their farm for their retirement in the 1970s and purchased a travel trailer to return to the vocation of their youth, following the fruit crops. Parker said with the income from selling the property, they could work when they wanted; when they were too tired, they didn’t. He shared that his mom said they were appreciated, even at that age, as they knew how to tend the trees and fruit correctly, which was unusual compared to other workers.

He cited the impetus for his involvement in preserving history came from an awareness that stories were out there, and they weren’t being recorded. “The people who knew a lot of that stuff were either gone or going,” he reflected, adding, “So many of the stones out at the cemetery, you know there’s a story to every one of them, but for most of them, there’s nothing left to even get a hint of it. So, the ones you can trace, they have to stand in for everybody else.” He admitted that he always wanted to be an artist, yet claimed he lacked the talent. “But in this case, [collecting and organizing historical narratives], you’re dealing with puzzles that are very free-form, and you’re finding all kinds of clues and you’re trying to stick things together.  You just get drawn into these stories, putting this stuff together; it’s like putting a puzzle together,” Parker described.

“Basically, I think historians speak for the dead. And what you’re saying is, ‘They were here. They were important,’” he emphasized. Parker said he writes articles and follow-ups on various, unsolved mysteries in the area, such as the “Drowned Boat in Loon Lake.” He listed his bullheadedness as a positive trait in this endeavor, stating, “You walk into these things and somehow, it just seems important. And you can’t give it up.” His work compiling these histories has been a volunteer effort, and he urged the community to relate family histories to the society to be published and possibly volunteer.

Sebright commented, “As you see in our publications, Wally is an incredibly talented writer. He researches topics with more depth than anyone I know, and he manages the entire process from writing to publishing. Our society simply would not be the same without his contributions.  Much more should be written about Wally, his writing and publishing.”

Parker summarized, “My feeling about this whole thing is that when you become a part of a community, when you put down roots, the entire history of that community becomes yours, because you become a part of the history too. I just wish people were more interested. We’d like people to put their family histories into the record. Then, if we publish them, they get into the archives of these various groups and there’s a good chance that they’ll survive. Even if you have a couple of generations who aren’t interested, if they survive in some form, future generations will have the database they can get into.”

For more information visit the Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society online at cdphs.org