Snohomish man kept public officials on their toes

Bill Patrick was outspoken, outrageous and one of a kind.

Often a candidate but never elected, Patrick was a Snohomish legend who spent years bending the ears of public officials. Though he called them names, in the end they came to sing his praises.

“I like to think of this as his final public hearing,” said Steve Dana, a former mayor of Snohomish, at Patrick’s memorial service on Wednesday.

William C. Patrick, 86, died June 5 at a care facility in Monroe, where he had spent a year after breaking his hip.

“Some of us were amused by Bill, some of us were angered by Bill. I’ve been in both camps,” Dana said. “He truly marched to the beat of a different drummer.”

Patrick’s pet issues ranged from saving Northwest salmon to fixing local schools, the world AIDS crisis to mad cow disease. He had abrasive ways of making a point.

Snohomish Mayor Liz Loomis remembers her first meeting as a new member of the Snohomish City Council in 1997. “Mr. Patrick brought me a gift in a brown paper bag,” Loomis said. At first, she was pleased by the older man’s kindness.

The bag, she soon discovered, contained dog feces. It strongly conveyed Patrick’s views on the condition of city parks.

“Bill Patrick was and is this community,” Loomis said. “He was a hard man to love, but I think each and every one of us loved him.”

Patrick’s history is visible in the charred remains of his pioneer family’s hardware business in downtown Snohomish. Patric Hardware was founded by his father, Arthur Patric, in 1901. Fire destroyed the store in 1907. Its replacement burned down in 1987.

After Wednesday’s service, Patrick’s family and other mourners gathered on closed-off Cedar Avenue, where the store had been, for lemonade and more stories. Across the street is the old Carnegie Library building, where Patrick’s mother, Emma Crueger Patric, was the town’s first librarian.

Patrick is survived by a daughter, Mary Peebles of Bellingham; daughter-in-law, Trina Patrick of Woodinville; and five grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his son, John; his brothers, John and Jim; and his sister, Dorothy.

Patrick didn’t trust public water supplies. He’d get his water from a spring on Three Lakes Road, said Tom Peters, who worked with Patrick on the grass-roots effort Save Our Salmon.

State Rep. Hans Dunshee, D-Snohomish, said Patrick “would consume vast amounts of my time.”

“He would come to my house and just walk in, sit down and start ranting about issues,” Dunshee said. “He enjoyed getting in politicians’ faces, and that is incredibly valuable. We should have whistle-blowers.

“Maybe he’d only hit on one out of 10 issues, but it was still valuable to have that. He was very well-read. He loved the punch of politics at that level,” Dunshee said.

Snohomish County Sheriff Rick Bart said when he took over as sheriff, Patrick was his first official visitor. “The first thing he wanted me to do was arrest the president,” Bart said. Contending that paper money had no value, he gave Bart a dollar campaign donation, and later replaced it with a silver dollar.

Patrick was a “self-appointed adviser” who demanded a get-out-of-jail-free card signed by the sheriff. “I think he used it about 12 times,” Bart quipped. The two became friends, and Bart complied with Patrick’s request that he come in uniform when he visited the care facility.

As a former member of the Snohomish School Board, Kathryn Deierling heard plenty from Patrick about education. “His favorite term for us was nincompoop,” she said. Still, Deierling said, one of his causes was to get soda pop out of schools, something that’s now happening.

Arne Hansen has a childhood memory of his mother telling his dad not to go down to Patric’s Hardware and stay all day.

“He had that potbellied stove, and they’d sit in the back and talk politics,” Hansen said. When Hansen grew up and had his own business in town, Patrick would stop by to share opinions and bits of news.

“I considered him a friend,” Hansen said. “He was challenging, stimulating, an honorable character. He believed in his causes.”

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