CATHLAMET – Welder. Truck driver. Union agent. Crocheter.
Which word doesn’t belong? For James “Curly” Cochran, every one fits. The 84-year-old Cathlamet man wields crochet hooks as expertly as he does a welding torch.
Using fine white cotton thread, Curly flicks his wrists and fingers and whirls and twirls it into lacelike handiwork for bedspreads, tablecloths and doilies.
Not too shabby for a guy who at one time had to quit working for two years after falling off a house and crushing his left leg and right arm.
After 30 years of crocheting, his hobby has transformed his daily routines. “Every time I set down to watch TV, I pick up the crochet needle,” Curly said. “If I’m not reading. I do a lot of reading, too.”
Curly’s wife, lifelong Cathlamet resident Delores Quigley Cochran, shared the needlework with her husband in 1977, following his retirement as the union agent for the local loggers union, the International Woodworkers Association.
An active guy, Curly pined for things to do in winter. He had taken up latchhook rugs, and Delores watched, amazed, as her husband’s large, work-roughened hands used the needle quickly and smoothly. She vowed to teach him crochet, a pastime she could no longer enjoy because of arthritis in both thumbs.
“I said to him, ‘You’re going to learn to crochet and knit,’” Delores said. “He started out crocheting afghans, then he went to bedspreads.”
Curly honed his skill using large yarn. Afghans spilled endlessly from his hands, and the couple gifted their children and other relatives with his work.
It was time for Curly to take the next step, his wife decided.
“I said, ‘I don’t know why you can’t use the fine thread instead of the heavy yarn,’” she said. “He said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve got such big hands.’”
The fine thread meant a smaller needle, too, but Curly was game. With practice, reading and skill, he has gone on to create filmy pieces for family and friends.
His work is a perfect metaphor for a many-patterned life.
Curly grew up in Alabama and came to Cathlamet in 1939 to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps. He earned $30 a month and sent $22 back to his mother and family.
After a depressing, rain-filled six months planting trees and fixing roads in Wahkiakum County, Curly was ready to move back south. “Then I met this girl,” he said, gesturing to his wife. “And she convinced me to stay.”
Cathlamet was a thriving town then, with a box plant and a sawmill, plus plenty of work in the woods. After the CCC job ended, Curly took a job with Crown Zellerbach and raked in 75 cents an hour.
After he and Delores married Dec. 27, 1941, Curly decided to join the Navy and enter World War II. He wasn’t yet 21, so the Navy required his mother’s signature for him to join.
She refused to sign the papers, Curly said. “She said, ‘I haven’t seen that boy for 21/2 years and I’ll not sign anything until he comes home.’ So we got married and spent five days on the bus going to Birmingham.”
The military plan didn’t pan out, and Curly ended up working first as a chauffeur for a studio photographer and then as a steelworker. He and Delores saved his salary for a year and a half to make enough to come back to Washington.
He worked for Longview Fibre Co. and then in the shipyards as a welder. After Delores’ brother-in-law was hurt in a logging accident, the couple moved back to Cathlamet to help out on his farm.
Curly worked as a guard for ships that were being commissioned at Puget Island. He did welding on the ferry the county was building and carpentry work on the side.
It was while building a house that he fell and crushed his left leg and right arm. The family moved to Alabama while Curly recovered. It took him two years, and Delores worked 12 hours a day, six days a week to pick up the slack.
When Curly was better, again they returned to Cathlamet. Curly farmed, worked for Crown Zellerbach, drove truck for seven years and was elected business agent for the woodworkers union, a position he held for 19 years.
“We had almost 600 loggers that belonged to the union at one time, from Long Beach to here,” he said. “Now there’s not one union logger in this town.”
The family, which included three sons, a daughter and two foster children, did everything they could to make money. Funds raised by picking blackberries, peeling bark, cutting and selling firewood and baling hay combined to help the Cochrans pay for the land they’d purchased.
“You name it, I’ve done it,” Curly said.
When Albert Rossellini was governor, Curly, chairman of the Wahkiakum County Democrats, served on a committee that made recommendations for schools. He had always loved to read, and the pushed for better reading instruction.
“The one thing that I tried to impress … (was) teach my children how to read and understand what they’re reading,” he said. “If you do that, they can teach themselves everything else under the sun … . That was my sole argument when I was on that board.”
He lived what he preached. When Delores taught him how to single- and double-crochet, the basic stitches, he wanted more intricacy and complex patterns. So he read about crochet, subscribed to Magic Crochet, and figured out pattern directions.
“I couldn’t do it,” Delores said, shaking her head. “But he can read any kind of pattern there is.”
Curly buys 1,000-yard balls of thread and it takes him three or four days to run through one. The standard bedspread takes about 72 squares, Curly said, and he crochets them at six hours per square.
“Then you have to sew them together,” he said. “And you have to go all around the thing 12 or 13 times.” One special bedspread was for his mother, who now lives in a nursing home in Cathlamet. She’s 102, and Curly visits her every day.
His latest project is a popcorn stitch bedspread with 4,000 stitches on each side. He’s fast and steady. “I’ve only got so much motion in my elbow,” he said, never looking up from his handiwork.
If he makes a mistake, he rips it out and starts over, Curly said. The challenge, he said, is keeping things fresh. “I go through the book and try to find something I haven’t done before,” he said.
Delores has set aside items for all of their granddaughters, two of whom are getting married in the fall. And the closet still overflows. The bedspread he’s working on will probably be his last, Curly said. The big pieces take too long.
But he can’t quit completely. It’s too satisfying. “It keeps me busy and out of trouble,” Curly said. He grinned, winked and tilted his head in Delores’s direction.
“She says it keeps me away from other women.”
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