Carolyn Dimmick Final PDF.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Hughes: Are you musical?
Dimmick: No. But my father was. My father played classical piano. Because his dad,
remember, was a violin maker, and his mother played the cello, so they had a trio.
Hughes: Did he play at home?
Dimmick: Yes, he had a Parlor Grand and he played the piano at home.
Hughes: And that didn’t whet your appetite?
Dimmick: I took piano lessons but I wanted to play Cow Cow Boogie and In the Mood. I
wasn’t in for classics, so it didn’t work out.
Hughes: Cow Cow Boogie and In the Mood are great songs.
Dimmick: I know it!
Hughes: I have my uncle’s diary from World War II when he was in England with the 8 th Air
Force. It’s filed with annotations like, “Saw Glenn Miller in London. Loved String of Pearls.”
Dimmick: Big Bands, all the Big Bands.
Hughes: Were there Big Bands and dances that you got to go to?
Dimmick: We didn’t have the Big Bands around here. We went to the high school dances
and the college dances, but not like they had in L.A. or down in those big cities. My
husband talked about having done some of that because he was in the War.
Hughes: Cyrus Dimmick?
Dimmick: Yes.
Hughes: Was he called “Cy”?
Dimmick: Yes.
Hughes: We’ll get back to the war years later.
The Spring 2007 edition of the UW Law magazine ( University of Washington School of
Law) features you and former Justice Smith. Smith says he found the Law School faculty to be
wonderful. And he says that to this day if a classmate calls on the phone they can recognize
one another’s voices. Tell us what was it like to be in law school at the UW from 1951 to
1953. Did you know Smith and some of the other future Supreme Court justices in school?
Dimmick: I knew some of them in passing over various years. I knew Jim Dolliver, of
course, because we were on the Student Council together.
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