A woman of 8,500 hours

Published 10:54 pm Tuesday, June 19, 2007

MARYSVILLE – On her last day as a volunteer, Joanna Ellis showed up in her usual stylish business suit, ready to work.

This time however, she had to remove the portable oxygen tank line from her face before she sat down with fellow volunteers at the Greater Marysville Tulalip Chamber of Commerce to assemble a brochure packet.

Ellis, 82, has emphysema and lung cancer, and she’s a bit angry that she can’t keep working.

Earning national Lifetime Service awards for her work at the chamber and for the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, Ellis has logged more than 8,500 hours as a volunteer. That’s over a period of nearly 11 years for the chamber and seven years for the sheriff’s office.

At the chamber, which also runs a busy regional visitors’ center, Ellis is known for her work ethic, her professional skills and her ability to encourage others to volunteer.

In fact, Ellis is responsible for getting her daughter, Trudy Downey, 54; her granddaughter-in-law, Mandy Downey, 35; and her great-granddaughter, Kaylee Downey, 15, all of Marysville, to volunteer at the chamber.

They also were on hand for Ellis’ last work day.

“We call her Grandma the Great,” Kaylee said. “She’s done so much. I want to be like her when I grow up.”

She’s been a hard worker her entire life, Trudy Downey said of her mother.

“She would go in early and stay late. She needed to get things done,” Downey said.

Ellis smiled at the remembrance of her career.

“I loved working so much and I always have,” Ellis said. “I should have paid the chamber to let me volunteer here.”

Born in Kansas, she grew up in Ketchikan, the daughter of an Alaska pioneer. After obtaining some post-high school education back in Kansas, she began her long civil-service career.

Ellis was first employed as a secretary for the U.S. Coast Guard in southeast Alaska. Then with the Army, she served for a time in Japan after World War II.

When she returned home, Ellis worked for the Army Corps of Engineers in Bridgeport in Eastern Washington as the Chief Joseph Dam was built on the Columbia River.

That’s where she met her husband, to whom she was married for 25 years. They had five children.

In the early 1960s, after putting in several years with the Atomic Energy Commission in Spokane, Ellis went to work as an executive secretary for the Air Force at Paine Field, and that job landed her in Snohomish County for good.

Later, while employed as deputy city clerk for the city of Lynnwood, she also started her own business. Primarily a word-processing service, the business prompted her to buy a facsimile machine, when the word fax was still new to the business world.

“I was told I was the first individual in the county to get a fax machine,” she said.

Trudy Downey said that when her mother left her job in Lynnwood, the city had to hire three people to do the work Ellis had done.

In response, her mother shook her head and smiled.

Chamber chief executive officer Caldie Rogers calls Joanna Ellis, “the consummate professional.”

“She was a woman ahead of her time. And after her career, she came here,” Rogers said. “It was like hiring a loyal executive professional. For free.”

Along with working with Rogers, one of the things Ellis said she especially liked about volunteering for the Marysville Tulalip chamber was the move into its current digs in the Quil Ceda Village shopping center along I-5. With its visitor information center, the chamber sees as many as 43,000 tourists a year.

“I enjoyed meeting people from all over the world,” Ellis said. “It was so interesting.”

Though politically astute and interested in civic matters, Ellis said she never considered running for public office, in part because public speaking is not her strong suit.

“One-on-one is different,” she said.

These days, Ellis enjoys drives in the country, a round of bingo and playing on her laptop computer.

“But I miss work,” she said. “I wish I could put in a few more years.”

Reporter Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427 or gfiege@heraldnet.com.