Lake Stevens man shares his love for the community he never left

It reads like a valentine to another time and place. Yet, the author of “Lake Stevens – My Town: Recollections of a Native Son” is anything but living in the past. Jim Mitchell obviously relishes the here and now.

Thursday, he shared treasures collected in the Lake Stevens Historical Museum, a place close to his heart. Poring over artifacts – rusty logging tools, vintage “banana” water skis, athletic gear worn by University of Washington basketball legend Marv Harshman, and photos showing no trace of highway or suburb – I asked where the Rucker Brothers Mill had been.

Book signing Jim Mitchell will sign copies of his book “Lake Stevens – My Town: Recollections of a Native Son” ($19.95) 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Thursday at J. Matheson Gifts, 2615 Colby Ave., Everett. For more information, call 425-258-2287. To buy the book by mail, write to Jim Mitchell, 1015 Stitch Road, Lake Stevens, WA 98258. Profits will be donated to the Lake Stevens Historical Society.

The town Mitchell loves and never left exists today because in 1908 pioneers Wyatt and Bethel Rucker built their lumber mill on the lake. The mill? “You’re standing in it,” Mitchell, 80, said as he walked me through the museum on Main Street.

He’s too young to remember the Rucker Mill, which burned in 1925. The fire left Lake Stevens, which wasn’t incorporated until 1960, without its big employer.

Mitchell makes it his business to know the town’s past, just as he’s been involved in every aspect of Lake Stevens, from business and civic life to being a volunteer firefighter and state legislator.

He grew up to follow his father, Ben Mitchell, in the drugstore business. Mitchell’s Pharmacy, started in 1920 and housed like the rest of the original downtown on pilings over a creek, was a fixture until moving to Frontier Village in 1960. That was when Highway 9 was finished, making a straight shot from Snohomish to Arlington that bypassed little Lake Stevens.

Mitchell eventually sold the store to Bartell’s, and he and his wife, Nancy, are retired. But the essence of the drugstore billed “The Heart of Town” – an old sign at the museum says so – lives on, down to the old medicine bottles and a stool from the fountain that sold ice cream cones for a nickel and milkshakes for a dime.

The drugstore exhibit is part of the museum, where Jim and Nancy Mitchell are docents. The father and son’s University of Washington pharmacy degree certificates are there, dated 1913 and 1948.

In 118 pages, the book covers town history and personal reminiscences. Mitchell’s boyhood memories are told with affectionate detail – proof of an idyllic childhood before World War II.

He tells of a Lake Stevens I’d love to go back to see. It was a “fisherman’s paradise,” Mitchell writes, stocked with kokanee, a landlocked salmon. “The average fisherman caught his limit in an hour,” he said.

There were eight big resorts lining the shore, among them Lundeen Park, with rental cottages, a baseball stadium and enclosed swimming area, and Davies, which had “a general store that served fantastic hamburgers and one of the largest dance pavilions in the county.”

It was with envy that I read, “Almost every morning at seven o’clock, from May until October, Chas Cockburn and my father, Ben Mitchell, would take all the kids swimming, rain or shine.”

Conditions at school weren’t quite so enviable. Jim Mitchell attended the White School, which had eight grades in four rooms, outside toilets and no central heat or running water. Classrooms had potbellied stoves, which the boys kept stoked with wood. It was rebuilt and renamed Mount Pilchuck School in the 1950s.

There were inevitable pranks: outhouses tipped over and cherries stolen off a neighbor’s tree.

As I wandered through the museum, one of the couple’s two grown sons stopped by. Dr. William Mitchell is a physician in Olympia. His brother, John, teaches at Snohomish High School.

“Many of these stories, I never heard,” said Bill Mitchell, 53. “I read the book and said, ‘Dad, you never told me that.’ “

Calling his parents members of what Tom Brokaw labeled “The Greatest Generation,” Bill Mitchell said the message he takes from his father’s story is that we all have responsibilities to family and community.

In his “Final Word,” Jim Mitchell writes that if he could go back in time, “I wouldn’t change a thing. I would come back to Lake Stevens and do it all over again.”

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.