Concrete, Washington - Notable Locals

Notable Locals

Concrete has had its share of interesting characters—some famous, and some only locally known.

Lady entrepreneurs and telephone pioneers

Two such locally known and enterprising females decided that they would help bring Concrete into the 20th Century in a before-their-time fashion.

Sisters Kate Quackenbush Glover and Nell Quackenbush Wheelock were born in Clay, New York in 1866 and 1877, respectively. They both arrived in Skagit County in 1908 and shortly thereafter, Kate was hired by the Superior Portland Cement Company to manage their telephone exchange. Initially, Kate lived at the exchange building until the phone company became incorporated. Investing her wages over time, Kate was able to purchase controlling interest in the company, renaming the telephone system, "Skagit River Telephone Company". Kate and her younger sister Nell bought the existing telephone exchange building from Portland Cement as well – remodeling it to house the phone system on the entire lower level. After building an outside stairway to the upper level, Kate had the second floor converted to rooms they could rent, charging 50-cents a night.

Set on expanding their phone service to the areas east and west of Concrete, Nell climbed the poles and strung the lines. By 1918, the upriver phone lines extended to Hamilton and connected the Skagit River Telephone Company to the national phone system through Sedro-Woolley. The large logging camps and all government operations such as the local ranger stations and fish hatcheries had lines installed and served by the sisters' phone operation. Nell was also in charge of the work crew that dug and set all the company poles. She had a team of horses she drove to drag the poles into position, directing the pole setting, and she would then finish the job by installing the telephone wiring.

Kate was in charge of the switchboard operation (with the assistance of a young girl they had taken in, Ethel Thompson). The phone service was equipped with hand-crank-style phones that would ring into the switchboard by a live operator and the telephone service these women gave was quick and often personal. In the event that no one answered the line being rung by the operator, Kate or Ethel would often promise to find them as soon as possible and have the call returned. When there was a problem with a line down, or a phone not operating properly, Nell would rush to service the problem. Beyond their telephone enterprise, the Quakenbush sisters were known in Skagit County for their ability to do almost anything they put their minds to. As a trained nurse, Kate sometimes assisted in childbirth as a midwife. Additionally, when she first arrived in the county from the east-coast, Kate worked on the homestead she shared with her then-husband (and later Concrete City Marshal), Joe Glover, helping to "prove up" on their timber claim on the upper Baker River, near Bear Creek. Together, Kate and Nell claimed the vacant lot between their home and their telephone office and built a chicken house – raising thousands of chickens and selling the eggs as well as some of the chickens. Nell and Kate also purchased a large tugboat in order to tow logs to a lumbermill on Lake Shannon and operated a fishing-boat franchise. Building a large float on Lake Shannon (just above the town of Concrete), they had approximately fifty fishing boats available for rent. Nell ran the tugboat for the mill-operation and Kate ran the fishing boat operation on the weekends, allowing them to still run the telephone company during the week.

With modern progress and some personal hardships came change for Kate and Nell's businesses. In July 1935, due to faulty business-dealings and technological modernization, the sisters were forced to sell their communication enterprise to the Skagit Valley Telephone company (later known as Continental Telephone) with service based out of Mount Vernon, Washington – 30 miles (48 km) "downriver". To add insult-to-injury, the bookkeeper the sisters had hired and trusted with Power of Attorney and managing their finances was discovered to have been embezzling funds for quite some time. The bookkeeper was tried and sent to prison, but irreversible damage had been done to the company's finances as the greater portion of the company's bank account had been stolen, forcing Kate and Nell to sell. Following the sale of the telephone company, the sisters moved to an unimproved property near Birdsview, building a small house for themselves along with a barn and chicken houses. Later, with their chicken houses having burned from an electrical short, their debt increased from a lack of fire insurance. Then, having been in poor health since the 1930s, Kate died on November 21, 1944 at the age of 78, deeply in debt. Still suffering from her own mounting debts, Nell now was left with the burden of Kate's debts as well. In order to help pay off their combined debt, Nell bought an old tractor and worked wherever she could and long into her elderly years. Nell stayed in Skagit County up to her death in April 1969 at the age of 93.

Tobias Wolff and This Boy's Life

Another local notable is internationally-known author Tobias Wolff, who spent a large part of his teenage years in the Concrete area. Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life chronicles his early life living in eastern Skagit County and attending Concrete High School (referred to as "Chinook High School" in the novel). In 1993, the novel was also turned into a feature film (of the same name) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Ellen Barkin. The movie's exterior and outdoor scenes of Concrete (as well as some interior scenes) were filmed in the town of Concrete and the surrounding area and a number of local residents were used as extras. In order to fit the "look" of 1950s-era Concrete, the town itself was transformed back in time "Hollywood-style" for the weeks that filming took place in 1992.