By Peggy Sturdivant

“Those folks are all gone,” a friend still working with the Nordic Heritage Museum’s Oral History project told me recently. Evidently “Voices of Ballard: Immigrant Stories from the Vanishing Generation” was aptly titled. Their voices have stayed with me so thoroughly I can’t compute that it’s nearly 20 years since I interviewed the “Old Ballard” folks in person.

Still, the undeniable math didn’t hit me until I stood outside the front door of Dodie Leach (“spelled like peach”). As of New Year’s Day, Dodie has lived in her Ballard home for 50 years. She’s lived there long enough to know the former neighbor who was born in what has been her bedroom for half a century. She’s raised children who went to the original Adams Elementary, but also scraped the side of her car getting out of “new” QFC’s underground parking.

Sitting with Dodie in her dining room I realized that she’s the face of the “new old Ballard.” She’s old enough and “disabled” to have her Seattle Public Library materials delivered to her home weekly (who knew???). She’s also Facebook ‘friends’ with the pastor of the church she’s been attending since she moved to Seattle in 1960. The video monitor on her computer is four times bigger than mine, but she makes quilts in her sewing room. When the Mariners are on TV she embroiders tea towels, “to keep my hands busy.”

When I met Dodie by happenstance at Bartell Drugs #22 in its last days, the 50th anniversary in her house sounded historic. Now I realize that my own parents have been in their home for 47 years, and Dodie is probably younger than my mother. Eating Dodie’s ginger crackle cookies has exploded my definition of “history.” In these fast paced media-fueled days yesterday is already a footnote.

Dodie Leach was new Ballard in 1965, moving to a street filled with the widows and widowers of the original builders. She was able to hear firsthand the stories that Mildred Davis told her about listening for the last trolley of the night turning onto 32nd Ave NW before she went to sleep. It was Mildred’s father who built the wood house himself. When automobiles came along he then raised the house and dug out a basement and garage. There were no closets, just chifforobes; when’s the last time you heard that word used?

Mildred’s birthplace was in the house that Dodie and her husband moved into on January 1, 1965. They had two children, and another one on the way they didn’t even know about yet. The most recent owners had stripped it clean, even returning for the bushes. It was Mildred Davis, living in another of the houses built by her father in the lot to the north who was able to tell Dodie about the house. Dodie learned that one owner had had “eight girls and eight boys, I kid you not.”

In 2015 Dodie Leach lives in 1910’s “big house” by herself; her youngest son lives in an apartment in downtown Ballard.

The house has been a work in progress ever since move-in day, which Dodie says is why her husband left after five years. “He was sick of remodeling.” A telephone installer, he left a lasting legacy along with the wainscoting he helped restore in the kitchen. The last four digits of the telephone number are the same as the street number of the house, causing her children to be doubted when asked to recite address and phone number.

Dodie claims that even on move-in day 1965 she yelled down the front steps a very ‘old Ballard’ type of quote, “Only way you’ll get me out of this house is in a pine box.” She hopes that will still be true, claiming, “It’s not the 19 steps up to the porch that’ll kill me, it’s getting in and out of the claw foot tub.”

Leach lived at the YWCA in Seattle while awaiting her high school sweetheart from Grandview, Washington. Once married they lived in a rental at 8th & Market until an inheritance provided them with the exact $500 amount of closing costs on the $11,500 home in West Ballard. Her daughter used to yell from the front steps, “The mountain’s out!” How is it that when Mt. Rainier is out we never cease to be enraptured? The view is somewhat obscured now by newer construction, but from the second floor, Dodie’s view is still prime.

The “new old Ballardite” is harder to define and identify than it used to be. It can include readers like Gerry Hansen who still types me notes, remarking, “I don’t have a computer. Still living in the Dark Ages…” Then there are people I meet like Dodie who have their cane and a Fit Master, their iTunes library, their Facebook friends and library deliveries. They have their Croc-shod feet in the past, present and future. It’s only a few feet of original fir floor between their computer screen and their 1910 claw foot tub. The trolley tracks have been paved over many times since the trolley’s last trip, but Dodie Leach still has the clothesline that belonged to Mildred Davis.

Like Mt. Rainier when it’s out, there’s nothing quite like the smell of line-dried clothes, or realizing that the new old Ballard… is me.