Interview with Mary Esther Lippold
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Northwest Public Television | Lippold_Mary_Esther
Robert Bauman: Okay, here we go. Okay. We'll go ahead and get started.
Mary Esther Lippold: Okay.
Bauman: So we'll start maybe by having you say your name and spell your last name for us.
Lippold: Okay. Mary Esther Lippold, L-I-P-P-O-L-D.
Bauman: All right. Thank you. And my name's Robert Bauman. And today's date is December 9th of 2013.
Lippold: Right.
Bauman: And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about your family. I understand you were born in Richland?
Lippold: Well, actually I was born in Pasco.
Bauman: Oh, okay.
Lippold: And my parents at the time lived in White Swan on the Yakima Indian Reservation. My dad was the administrator and my mother was the faculty. So they got married and lived in the same house. [LAUGHTER] And they had to come to Pasco to have me. That's where their family was. My grandfather was born in Pasco. My father was born in Pasco. And I was born in Pasco. And my brother was born in Pasco.
Bauman: That was where the closest hospital was?
Lippold: Yeah. Well, there was a hospital in Yakima, but they wanted to be here. I was the first grandchild, so it was a big deal. [LAUGHTER] My mother said that when she got ready to go over the green bridge to have me, she decided she didn't want a baby. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So then did you live in White Swan for a little while then?
Lippold: For two years, yes. Then we moved Selah, where my dad was hired to be principal of a new grade school there. Then he joined the Navy. And we moved to New York from Kennewick. Mother and my brother and I came down to stay with my grandparents in Kennewick at that time, which was 1942. Then we moved to New York for six months till my dad was sent overseas. I don't know if it's considered overseas, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where he was wounded in action. My mother got a telegram saying her husband had been wounded in action. But he called shortly before this and said you'll be getting notice that I was wounded. And he said I was playing tennis. [LAUGHTER] So his wounded in action wasn't exactly what you would picture that.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Okay. And so what point did you move back to Eastern Washington?
Lippold: We came back in 1946. After the war ended, my dad was stationed in Seattle for a while. And then he was hired to be the principal of Carmichael Junior High School at the time. And he worked at Columbia High School for a couple of years until Carmichael was ready to move into. And I had the stigma of being the principal’s daughter.
Bauman: And what was your father's name?
Lippold: Christian Anderson.
Bauman: Christian Anderson.
Lippold: Chris Anderson was what he was called.
Bauman: And so how old were you then when you moved here?
Lippold: Ten.
Bauman: Okay. And so what was Richland like in 1946 when you returned to the area?
Lippold: It was dusty and windy. [LAUGHTER] That's mainly what I remember. We used to go out for rides. And we got caught in a dirt storm one day. We were actually up on Van Giesen. And my dad had to pull over, because we couldn't even see where we were going. We lived on Falley Street, which is where you cross George Washington Way, it becomes Bradley Boulevard to go down to all the hotels and motels down there and where the old garbage dump was. And we moved into an F house on Falley Street in 1946.
Bauman: And where did you go to school then?
Lippold: I went to Lewis and Clark Elementary. And then I went to Carmichael Junior high. School. I went to Columbia High School, graduated from there in 1954, long time ago. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: Do you have any memories from your time going to school here?
Lippold: Oh, heavens. [LAUGHTER] Yes, I have a lot. We moved here from Seattle in the summertime. And my mother sent me to school. They entered me into Lewis and Clark on a Friday afternoon. And I wore knee socks. And not one other girl at Lewis and Clark had on knee socks. So we had to go buy some anklets for Monday. And when I got to school on Monday, they were all in knee socks. [LAUGHTER] That's my big memory of my first day at school in Richland. We lived in walking distance. We were just a block from Lewis and Clark. And I can remember running home at noon and running back to school. And I remember a lot of my teachers.
Bauman: Are there any that particularly stand out or your favorites?
Lippold: Well, remember Mr. Bressler, because he lived down the street from us, for one reason. But he was a very dynamic teacher. I don't actually think I ever had him. I think he was my PE teacher. My first teacher was named Jean Mabley, Mrs. Mabley. And she was from Tennessee. And we were all just fascinated with their accent. And then she got pregnant. And back in those days if you were pregnant, you did not teach elementary school. So she left us. We outgrew the building at Lewis and Clark and moved into Quonset huts. So I spent my sixth grade in a Quonset hut. And the boy in back of me used to untie my belt that I had on around my dress and tie it to my chair, so that when I got up, my chair went with me. [LAUGHTER] Those are the types of memories I have. I did have two uncles who worked out at Hanford. They both lived in Pasco. They were both chemists on the Hanford reservation. They didn't know what their job was really. I mean, they knew what individually they did. But they didn't realize they were building an atomic bomb. And it's interesting to me that they both died fairly young of pancreatic cancer. And they weren't related by blood. It was my uncle-in-law and my blood uncle. So I don't know. You read all these things about things that have occurred with people who worked at Hanford. It may be coincidence, but that's why happened to our family. My dad was--well, my mother and dad both worked in the Richland school district for 30, 40 years.
Bauman: Do you remember any community events or those sorts of things when you were growing up?
Lippold: Well, I was a Girl Scout. And we did a lot of community things. I know all the churches, and I know what kind of organs they all had, because I'm at church organist. And I started that when I was ten at All Saints Episcopal in Richland. Oh, I remember the Atomic Frontier Days every summer. And there was a baseball diamond just down at the end of Falley Street across George Washington Way down over the embankment there. And we spent a lot of time in the park—I guess it's Howard Amon Park now, yeah. And as far as community events, that's about all from a ten-year-old—I was from ten ‘til I went away to college here.
Bauman: Could you describe the Atomic Frontier Days, like what sorts of--
Lippold: Well, it originally started out being the Grape Festival. And that was in Kennewick. And it somehow turned into one big Tri-City event called Atomic Frontier Days. And it was just, I don't know, two or three days of—a carnival always came to town and always had a Miss. Richland. That was usually wear Miss Richland was crowned and that type of thing. I don't particularly—nothing stands out to me as far as Atomic Frontier Days goes, other than it was something we looked forward to.
Bauman: You mentioned the churches, you played organ?
Lippold: Yes.
Bauman: Was this when you were growing up?
Lippold: Yes.
Bauman: So what churches were there in the 1940s and early '50s?
Lippold: Well, the one I remember best is what is now Richland Lutheran. And it was just a big white government building. And the Lutherans owned—well, they didn't own the building. The Army owned everything at that time, or the government owned everything. But the Episcopalians, of which I was, used the church from eight until nine o'clock. And I sat up front at the organ. And I always was looking out of the corner of my eye. And I could see the Lutheran pastor standing waiting to come out. [LAUGHTER] So we always knew it was getting time for us to get out of there. And then there was Central United Protestant Church, which was a big church at the time, Christ the King, Southside, Northwest, and West Side United Protestant, which is now--I guess it's still called West Side. But they all had Hammond organs at the time. All the organs were alike, same instrument. And I played at All Saints in the Sunday school until I was 13, when the organist moved away. And they moved me upstairs, where I could see the Lutherans waiting to come in and play the organ. And I'm still playing.
Bauman: So when you were growing up, both your parents you said were in the school district.
Lippold: Yes.
Bauman: Were most of your friends’ fathers or parents working at Hanford then?
Lippold: Yes. All of our neighbors except for the ones who were teachers. We had a few teacher neighbors. But all of our neighbors worked at Hanford. I don't know what they did. And I'm not sure they knew what they did. But they got on buses. And it was funny, things I do remember back then, the houses were all exactly alike. There were two F houses on our side of the street and four on the other side of the street. And every Saturday night—evidently the payday was on Friday. And the guys that were single, or maybe they weren't single, would go out and celebrate pay day. And then they would be on their way home and get the wrong house, because they all looked exactly alike. But we had people walking into our house all the time thinking they were home. Well, we did the same thing. We walked into our next door neighbor's house one night. One day my aunt and my grandmother came out. And Mother and I looked out the window and my aunt up going like this into the next door neighbor's window. And we called. I was like, what are you doing? Oh. [LAUGHTER] She thought she was at our house. But that was easy to do—the houses all looked exactly alike until you got to know who lived inside, and then we knew.
Bauman: So were you still living in Richland when it became sort of independent of the federal government then?
Lippold: No. It became incorporated in 1958. And by then, I was married. My husband was in the Air Force. And we were all over for 21 years. And then we came back. We didn't find any place we liked better than the Tri-Cities. Except for the fact that the year we came back, the wind didn't quit blowing for over a year. [LAUGHTER] We were about ready to pack up and go somewhere else, and then it quit.
Bauman: Did your parents buy their house then, when they--
Lippold: They bought the F house that they lived in, yes. I don't recall what they bought it for. I think $6,000. And it was a nice house. They were so excited, because it was the first new house they had actually had. And you got assigned a house by what job you had. And my dad, being a school administrator, got a fairly nice house. The Fs are a two-story single unit. And I remember even—General Electric at this time had taken over the project. And if you had a light bulb burned out, you just called GE, and they came and put in a new light bulb. They delivered coal. And it was like living on a military installation, which I did for 21 years. [LAUGHTER] So it was quite a bit like Richland was in the days before I left. Then I worked for the City of Richland from 1976 to 2001. And I was the expert—if anybody wanted to know anything about the old garbage dump, they came to me. [LAUGHTER] Because we lived right by it and played down there. In those days, you could go down, play at the dump and really find some neat things. My original engagement ring is down there somewhere. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] And how did that happen?
Lippold: My husband and I had to date to go see Gone with the Wind. And he was out flying a model airplane, and he came home too late to go to Gone with the Wind. I think I was 16 or 17. And I took my ring off and threw it at him. And then he took it, went out on the front porch and really let it fly. That was Labor Day weekend. And all the neighbors spent Labor Day weekend looking for my ring. And we never found it. A pickup truck went down the street shortly after hauling a poplar tree. And we think the ring probably hooked on the poplar tree and went with it to the dump. But I was always familiar with all the--I knew where the sewer plant was and where the water plant was. Well, I worked in public works. But I had known where the old ones were.
Bauman: So what year did you graduate high school?
Lippold: I graduated from Columbia High school. Yeah.
Bauman: In what year?
Lippold: '54. 1954. [LAUGHTER]
Bauman: And then you came back to Richland?
Lippold: Yeah. We were gone for 21 years. And then we moved back. And we didn't know what we were going to be doing or where we were going to be living, but we decided to buy a house in Kennewick. And we ended up with my husband working in Pasco. And I was working in Richland. And our kids went to school in Kennewick, which worked out well.
Bauman: You were covering the Tri-Cities.
Lippold: Yes, very. I definitely am a Tri-Citian.
Bauman: So how had the place changed in the 21 years that you were--
Lippold: Well, housing prices [LAUGHTER] had increased immensely. My parents, as I said, paid $6,000 for their F house. And just when we came back—our last military assignment was in Germany—and when we got back from Germany, they offered us the house for $18,000. And we were like idiots, we did not buy it. So we went to Kennewick and paid a lot more than that. But housing went up quite a bit in those 21 years. I don't really remember how much houses were when we left here when I was married. Because I paid my parents $25 a week rent while I worked for GE and waited till my husband got out of cadets, so we could get married.
Bauman: How about the community itself? Had it changed much did it seem to you?
Lippold: Not really.
Bauman: Same place?
Lippold: There were more houses that weren't government. Alphabet houses, of course, had been built in North Richland. And they were just starting to build out at Meadow Springs area. And we had some friends who had bought land out around Columbia Center area when we were teenagers. It was one of my friends’ father's. And we just could not imagine why he would buy land out there. [LAUGHTER] But it was a good move on his part.
Bauman: It seemed quite remote at the time, I guess. [LAUGHTER] Anything else? Any other memories that sort of really stand out to you from your time growing up in Richland?
Lippold: Well, it was just a nice place to grow up. We were running around the streets playing hide-and-go-seek at night and playing tag and all the things that kids did back then. We followed the mosquito spray truck, which was DDT. And the big sport was to ride your bicycle in the fog behind the mosquito truck. And no one thought a thing of that. And I remember one day we were having a party in our backyard and the mosquito truck came by, and we were just all lost in a white fog until it blew away. We could walk just about any place. I walked to my music lesson, which was on Van Giesen. And I lived on Falley Street. And that was a long walk. We went to the movies. The Richland Theater was there. And The Village Theater had movies. They had westerns every Saturday morning. And then after Uptown was built--I'm not sure what year Uptown was built. I know it was when I was in junior high, probably 1949, '50. And that was a big occasion to have the Uptown Theater there. And they Army, I remember when the Army base opened up, Camp Hanford. Because my dad was military, and my husband-to-be was military. Our wedding reception was out at Camp Hanford. But it was just a nice safe place to live. You never thought anything would happen to you or could happen--anything bad--here.
Bauman: You mentioned the Uptown shopping center. Before Uptown, where did you go to for shopping?
Lippold: Downtown, which is now called the Parkade. And down there, they had Thrifty Drugstore. Well, and the owner of Thrifty Drug was our neighbor. He lived in an L house, which was a very nice single four bedroom two-story unit. They lived just around the corner from us. And then there was a C. C. Anderson's, which is now Macy's. But that was the big department store. There was a hardware store on the corner of Lee and George Washington Way. And the Village Theater was across the street on George Washington Way from the hardware store. The building is still there. If you know—when you're driving up George Washington Way, you can find where the theater was. There was an optometrist in there for years. But my memories of Richland are—I don't have a lot of memories of Hanford, because we were never really directly concerned with Hanford other than everybody we knew worked there. We were very involved in anything to do with the schools.
Bauman: Right. And so your father was at Carmichael?
Lippold: Yes.
Bauman: And for how long?
Lippold: He was there until 1963. He retired just at the right time when boys started wearing their pants low and didn't wear belts to school. My dad sent them home to put on a belt. He was an old fashioned school disciplinarian. And I think it was good for his blood pressure that he retired in 1963, because things changed pretty drastically during the '60s. Then my dad worked for Benton County Public Health District as the business manager for 15 years. And then he retired.
Bauman: And how about your mom? You said she was--
Lippold: She was a teacher for years. She always said her most interesting teaching experience in Richland was at John Ball School, which was a school built out north of Jefferson. And it was built for the Camp Hanford kids.
Bauman: Okay.
Lippold: And she said those were the most interesting group of kids she had ever had. Because they were from all over the United States. And here they were all of a sudden up in the middle of nowhere Hanford where the wind blew all the time. But she loved John Ball School. She was there for two or three years. She taught at Jefferson, Marcus Whitman. She wouldn't substitute at my dad's school, she wouldn't go to Carmichael, because he was there. [LAUGHTER] Not that she didn't like him, but she didn't think she should be substituting at her husband's school. Like I shouldn't have been going to my dad's school.
Bauman: What was her name?
Lippold: Her name was Mary Anderson. That's one of the reasons I go by my two names.
Bauman: Well, was there anything else that we haven't talked about yet in your memories of Richland that you'd like to share?
Lippold: Well, I've got how many years of memories. [LAUGHTER] I should have a lot. But most of my memories are through the eyes of either a ten-year-old, ten to 21. I was 21 when I moved away, when I got married and followed the military with my husband. So my memories are kid's memories. I remember when President Kennedy came to Hanford. I happened to be—we were home on leave. And that was exciting. I did get to go out and see him. We saw President Eisenhower. He came to the opening of Ice Harbor Dam I think, one of the dams. We got up at five o'clock in the morning to go see President Eisenhower. I don't know what stands out in my mind. High school was fun. We used to, during homecoming, the kids always did what they called a serpentine. I don't know if they do that anymore or not. But we all held hands. And there were 309 in our graduating class, and we all just held hands and ran all over. [LAUGHTER] I wouldn't go far right now. The night before the homecoming ball game it was just like a big snake. We were all in one big line and followed the person that we were hanging onto.
Bauman: Going back to President Kennedy's visit, do you have any specific memories from that visit, what the day was like or the crowd, or anything from that?
Lippold: It was a huge crowd. Mainly, I just remember we didn't get real close to him. But we were close enough to be able to recognize him and know who he was. And I don't remember what year it was that he came and why we were even here at the time, but we used to come home on leave. My husband got 30 days of leave from the military every year, plus every time we moved, which was 22 times in 20 years. [LAUGHTER] They usually had a couple of months to make the move, the transition and so forth, and we always came home for that. And our boys and I came home—lived in Richland when my husband was overseas. He was a pilot on B-52s, so he had three tours over Vietnam. One in Vietnam and the other two were just flying over it. And Richland then—yeah, that was in 1967 I think. And the price of gas went up to $0.41 a gallon. And I was just incensed over that, that they could charge $0.41 for a gallon of gas. I went to a gas station. We lived upon Cedar, our two boys and I, during the year that my husband was in Vietnam. And I went to a gas station up on the corner of Swift and Thayer I think--or Wright. And it was called Buck and Joe's. And one day I took my car in there. And they knew that I was living by myself and didn't have a husband to tend to my car. And I don't remember what it was that wrong with my car. But they charged me $0.10. [LAUGHTER] So I decided they were good guys. One day I was down at the golf course--there was par three golf course just down off George Washington Way, kind of where the golf course is now, but way north of it. And I couldn't get my car started, so I called them and they came down. And they said, well, maybe if you put it in park it would start. So I was rather embarrassed over that. [LAUGHTER] Plus my golfing was a very bad, too. I hit every tree down there.
Bauman: So just looking back over your years, especially your years growing up, overall how would you describe the community in Richland in the '40s and '50s?
Lippold: Well, we loved it. Like I said, it was just a fun place to be. My parents were very strict with both my brother and me. And my dad, of course, was always close to the police chief. And my brother is two and a half years younger than I am. And my dad always had the police watching him. [LAUGHTER] So he couldn't get away with anything. And he did try, but it didn't work. It was a place where you just didn't think anything would happen to you. And actually nothing really did. I had to be in bed by nine o'clock. All the kids knew that I had to be in bed at nine o'clock. So they would ride their bicycles up and down the street yelling at me, and I was always up in my bed lying down looking out my window wishing I was out there riding my bicycle with them. [LAUGHTER] It was just kind of like Mayberry in Andy Griffith living here. Everybody knew everybody. Our Girl Scout troop, we were all friends. We all lived in the south end. Even now, when we go to our class reunions, we tend to pair off or group of into the Lewis and Clark group and the Marcus Whitman group and the Spalding, you know, all the different grade schools. Because those are the people that we had known since the beginning of--well, I came here in the fifth grade. But a lot of them had been there earlier. Not too much earlier, because we came here about maybe a couple years later than the majority of the families—kids who were in school.
Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much for coming in today and sharing your memories of those early years of Richland, growing up here.
Lippold: Well, you’re welcome. I wish I knew more about the actual history of Hanford. But hearsay is about all I would have on that subject.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Well, no, these are great stories. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Lippold: Okay. You're wel--
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