Carolyn Dimmick Final PDF.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Hughes: Emmett Watson, who became one of Seattle’s most popular writers, was there as a
young reporter and columnist.
Dimmick: Oh yeah, but I didn’t know any of those people.
Hughes: Emmett had been at the Seattle Star during the war and then became a star at the
P-I.
Dimmick: I knew Emmett many years later when I was in the Prosecutor’s Office.
Hughes: But, let’s take you back to your childhood: You’re a girl growing up in the
Depression in the 1930s. What was that like? Did your dad still have a job, or were those
pretty tough times?
Dimmick: That’s when he got that mail contract and we went up to Alaska when I was about
five years old. He needed a job.
Hughes: What was Juneau like?
Dimmick: Very small town. But they had a swimming pool. We were able to use it twice in
one year because the weather was always so bad.
Hughes: Or alternatively it was an ice rink!
Dimmick: And Mendenhall Glacier was huge. It is now shrunk down to the size of ice cube
comparatively. And I can remember we had May Day and we would dance around the May
poles. Stuff that they don’t do down here.
Hughes: There’s probably some reason that you can’t do that now. It would be politically
incorrect.
Dimmick: I don’t know. And I know for some reason we were dressed up in Hawaiian
outfits and my dad made us all little, I don’t know what they called them but they were little
Hawaiian tools and he made them on a lathe. So that was kind of fun. I have a picture of that
somewhere.
Hughes: So when you were in Juneau you got to see dad more?
Dimmick: Yes. He would be gone three or four days. We had a big mansion there and my
mother took in boarders from the Juneau Gold Mine. So we had four boarders there who
became long-term friends of my folks.
Hughes: Boarders. That must have been an interesting thing in a household with kids.
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