An illustrious history, a unique voice that won’t be silenced
KATHLEEN MERRYMAN; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Fast” Lucie Griswold is taking the slow road home.
She’s a fighter, that one.
On May 5, her friends celebrated her 101st birthday with a tea at Emmanuel Lutheran Church. Last week, she was baking cookies and banana bread. Tuesday morning, after making her bed and fetching her paper, Lucie suffered a stroke. Dale Griswold, the youngest of her 10 children, found her a short time later.
The doctors at Tacoma General Hospital told Lucie’s children that the stroke had wrought massive damage, and she would likely not survive the night.
Those doctors did not know the depth of Lucie’s will and strength, or the dryness of the humor with which she sustained her family.
They had to laugh, her six surviving children say, because they sure weren’t eating.
Lucie was born May 4, 1906, in McDonald, Kan. She lost her father when she was 3, and her mother when she was 18. During the Great Depression, she married a Civilian Conservation Corps worker so tall and skinny everyone called him Slats. They settled in Platte, S.D., and had eight children.
“He came out here during the war,” Dixie Bame said, sitting by her mother ’s bed. “He wasn’t sending money, and he had a girlfriend.”
Lucie Griswold was having none of that. She packed up the kids and headed to Bremerton to sort Slats out.
“They bought the shell of a house, with a roof, framing and a subfloor,” and had two more children, Darrell Griswold said. “Payments were $35 a month. He and Mom finished it off. Not well, but finished.”
The five girls slept in one bed in one room. The boys climbed a ladder and hoisted themselves into the attic, which Slats called the Skunk Den.
When war-damaged ships came into the shipyards, Darrell said, the crew would toss remaining galley provisions overboard, and the boys would row out to snag them for the family. Once, Darrell said, they saw a halibut sunning itself near the surface. They whapped it with a board and took it home for a week’s worth of dinners.
They clammed, fished, collected berries and fruits and begged soup bones from the butcher. Lucie cooked and canned everything they brought home. She made the girls dresses out of flour sacks. She sewed for friends and later sold Tupperware.
“She drove,” Dixie said. “She just never had a license.
“She tried to get a driver’s license, but she couldn’t pass the test,” Darrell said. “But we had to eat, so she had to drive.”
When Slats moved to Alaska for work, and once again failed to send money home, it did not occur to Lucie to go after him, Dixie said. She was living in Tacoma with assorted children and grandchildren and doing just fine. When Slats had a heart attack and one of the boys brought him back, Lucie was furious.
Darrell remembered the day Lucie got an apartment in South Tacoma.
“She got a cat and lived by herself,” he said. “She was one happy lady.”
Were it not for her habit of haranguing drug dealers, she’d be there still. Dixie, worried that one of them might bite back, found her a spot in a calmer neighborhood.
Lucie lapped up the chance to bake only when she wanted to, and feed people by the dozens only on holidays.
She adored her son-in-law, legendary musician and nightclub owner Red Kelly. When he and his pals formed the OWL (Out With Logic and On With Lunacy) Party in 1976 and ran for every major state office, she made the slate as “Fast” Lucie Griswold. She vowed that, if elected secretary of state, she would take correspondence courses in typing and shorthand.
Lucie got 41,807 votes.
Over the next decades, Lucie lost her hearing and gravitated to the stage. At Kelly’s, she became a treat and a tradition, closing out the evenings with stirring, though not particularly melodic, renditions of “Red Red Robin” and “Show Me The Way To Go Home.”
She could sing when she was younger, and it didn’t matter a whit to her, or anyone in her delighted audience, that her pitch was a thing of the past.
Fast Lucie Griswold earned her fun, her fans, her loving children, grandchildren and greats. Her humor was dry, and her life was sweet.
Even now, she is in no hurry to leave.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
