We were having lunch at Huckleberry Square the other day when I spotted a regal looking lady seated across from our booth.

When I asked her where she lived, she said McMicken Heights. That is the community that sits atop the hill just east of the Sea-Tac airport.

Huckleberry Square is on Ambaum in Burien.

She is 92 and her name is Elysa Dohms and we had a great chat about that 70-year-old housing project where we once bought a house.

With a fireplace. For $4,000. Nothing down, $50 a month for 30 months and then lowered to $30.

It had two bedrooms, a coal heater, with a homemade ladder in the boy's bedroom up to a bend-over attic workshop where I fixed things on a bend-over work bench with a bend-over vise and a scrap plywood floor. I hit my head on rafters a lot.

When glowing chunks of coal somehow fell out of the heater, we got a fabulous Quaker oil burner and ran a copper tube from a 50-gallon tank on our back outside wall.

I built a barrow from a junkyard steel wheel and some scrap wood up in that cubbyhole.

Then I found a piece of hardware cloth screen and dug up a millyun shovels of blacktop dirt from the forest behind the house.

This screened blacktop gave me a giant backache but a nice garden in back of the house with a border of dinner plate-size dahlias and a whole lot of wormy radishes.

In three years there, a war started and I worked my Boeing salary up to $2 .76 an hour.

We had a struggle so I augmented my salary by painting the neighbors' shingle roofs.

I also painted our own house using a borrowed spray outfit.

I bought some seafoam green shake paint and one sunny day I set about the task.

It does not take a lot of brains to aim a spray gun so I placed the tank on the back porch by the door and set about the task.

I got the back wall finished when 3-year-old son Timothy walked out of the back door in his birthday suit. He was watching me when the hose burst, covering him from head to toenails.

At his howling, my beloved came roaring out the back door shouting," Why are you painting Timothy green?"

I had no answer as to why the hose broke so I shouted, " It is because it is the only color I have."

It did not help when she grabbed him and took him in while I tried to assist by shouting, " Have him wiggle around on the porch. I am using shake paint."

You would never have known about all that if I had not talked to Elysa Dohms.