Editor’s Note: All of us here at The Beachcomber are thankful to celebrate the milestone of publishing the 100th edition of “Time&Again,” a recurring feature by writer Bruce Haulman and photographer Terry Donnelly, detailing the rich history of the place we call home. Here, Haulman and Terry take us behind the scenes of their remarkable collaboration. From the past, we can better understand the present, and work toward a better future here on Vashon. Long may “Time&Again” continue to help us do just that on Vashon.
— Elizabeth Shepherd, Editor
The Historian
Twelve years ago, in May 2009, Terry Donnelly and I published our first Time&Again article in The Beachcomber, encouraged by then editor Leslie Brown.
Terry Donnelly Photo Bruce Haulman with his trusty notebook, leaning against the Mukai equipment shed, which has since been removed, at the National Register and King County Landmark Mukai Agricultural Complex.
This is the 100th Time&Again. During these past 12 years we have worked with five editors and then with reporters, Elizabeth Shepherd and Paul Rowley, when the newspaper dropped having an editor in April 2020, due to the COVID lockdown. Shepherd was appointed editor of the Beachcomber this past October.
The inspiration for Time & Again came from Paul Dorpat’s long-running weekly series of articles, “Seattle Then&Now,” which were first printed in January 1982. Leslie Brown approached us with the idea and the very first Time&Again, titled “Vashon Heights Dock” was printed.
Terry Donnelly Photo John Sage, Bruce Haulman, Greg McElroy, Patricia Cummings Bolen, and Janis Mallman (left to right) at The Coffee Roasterie reminiscing about how they started the Vashon Potter’s Tour in 1980 which morphed into the popular Vashon Studio Tour.
During these 12 years and one hundred articles, we have written about and photographed diverse Vashon places, events, and people.
We began by highlighting historic places, such as the Nike Base, Dockton’s Piano Row, the Point Robinson Lighthouse, and the Mukai Garden. The series evolved into covering island events, including the Hydrofoil Crash, the Other Maury Island Incident, Strawberry Festival, and the Introduction of English Ivy to the island. And finally, we began to include island people — photographers Norman Edson and Terry Donnelly, rowers Don Canfield and Mia Croonquist, bicyclists Kuichi Tanaka, Bob Horsley and Bruce Morser, and ferry captains Gertrude Wiman and Marsha Morse.
Terry Donnelly Photo Patty Hieb and Bruce Haulman at Patty’s Dockton farm where she carried on Helen Brocard’s tradition of growing Marshall Strawberries. Marshalls were the strawberry that powered the success of Vashon strawberries through the first seven decades of the 20th Century.
Over the span of these one hundred articles, the style and approach has grown, matured, and morphed, driven largely by Terry’s photographer’s eye and his sense of how to communicate through images. Beginning as a “then and now” approach, we very quickly decided that approach was not totally satisfying to us or to our readers. After the first twenty or so articles, we began to switch to a more personal view and to a focus more on people and events rather than strictly places.
Places still played an important role, but the Dorpat style of recreating historic photographs gave way to a more interpretive approach that attempted to capture the sense of place and the sense of changes that have taken place.
— Bruce Haulman
The Photographer
As our Time&Again series began, it was largely inspired by historic photographs from the Museum’s archives; images which might offer insights into Vashon history and the passage of time if we compared those old views with contemporary ones. Bruce and I soon discovered how many of those historic vistas were now completely obscured by trees, often making visual comparisons impossible. The persistent and unsurprising lesson is that the island is being dramatically reforested.
Terry Donnelly Photo Miyoko Matsuda and Bruce Haulman in the Historic Matsuda Farm farmhouse, remembering the history of the Matsuda Family on Vashon: How they purchased the farm in the name of the American-born son of close friends because as Japanese immigrants they were not permitted to buy land; how they built a successful farm until they were exiled and imprisoned during World War II; how the family returned and rebuilt their lives and their farm; how they continued to grow commercial strawberries until Yoneichi’s death in 1985; and how the family decided to sell the farm to the Land Trust to become the working farm it is today.
As our series progressed, it became apparent to me that the most engaging aspect of our project wasn’t so much in visual comparisons — old vs. new — but in the narratives associated with the passage of time. The real story was not so much about the physical changes of Vashon, but about the people who witnessed and affected those changes and the stories they had to tell.
Terry Donnelly Photo Hal Green and Bruce Haulman at the Paige/Green, Triplebrook Farm Barn, the oldest barn on Vashon. They are discussing the 2007 restoration Molly and Hal Green oversaw using dimensional fir lumber cut to match the original timbers, and the hand-cut steel nails they had made to match the original nails.
It is always fun poking around the island coves and back roads with Bruce, old photos in hand trying to ferret out the old tripod holes of Van Olinda or Edson. However, the real joy for me was photographing and sitting in on the interviews we did with the people who had witnessed those times we were trying to illuminate. Those behind-the-scenes tales, family histories, and richly personal details might never be printed but nonetheless, they added insight and color to the articles Bruce crafted.
Terry Donnelly Photo Bruce Haulman, Carol Slaughter, and Al Slaughter (left to right) at the Slaughter’s Tahlequah home, discussing the changes the Slaughters have seen at the South End of the Island over the past 70 years.
Although the images we see here are not directly concerned with the subjects of these articles, they are illustrations of those wonderful encounters we had with the islanders who knew the stories, the people who grew up in the buildings, founded the organizations and altered the landscapes we were investigating.
Terry Donnelly Photo Larry Flynn and Bruce Haulman recounting bus driving stories about the changes in busses since Harlan Rosford drove for his Vashon Transit Company in the 1950s to when Larry drove for Metro from the 1990s to the 2010s.
Maybe for the next hundred stories, we should sell tickets to ride in the back seat of Bruce’s car.
— Terry Donnelly
