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Nov 16, 2023

Political sea to pea harvest navigation

Annie, a House bill clerk, adds pages to a rostrum bill book on the floor of the Washington State House of Representatives in 1979. House bill clerk, working bills and amendments into the rostrum

Annie, a House bill clerk, adds pages to a rostrum bill book on the floor of the Washington State House of Representatives in 1979.

House bill clerk, working bills and amendments into the rostrum books in 1979.

Annie, far right, with fellow House bill clerks on the rostrum with Speaker of the House Rep. John Bagnariol in 1979.

The work I did in Olympia while serving in the 1977 and 1979 sessions as a House of Representatives legislative bill clerk led from the state’s hallowed halls to the hallowed hills surrounding Dayton and Waitsburg.

Legislative session employees required sponsors, and mine was good ol’ dad, Rep. Donn Charnley (D-King County).

House and Senate bill clerks updated bill books throughout the session, working from the bill room in the bowels of the rotunda-capped Legislative Building on the Olympia campus.

Clerks distributed newly printed bills introduced by each legislative body to the offices of every senator and representative, other offices and on the floor of the House and Senate.

Bill clerks walked around a huge central bill room table stacked high with bills, some single pages, others small booklets and collated them in numerical sequence.

Slits on the outside edges of the holes punched in the bills allowed us to slip them into bill books.

Each clerk had a route. My bill books were on the Democrat side of the House floor and on the rostrum for the House speaker and sergeant at arms.

Every day we added to those bill books that expanded to 5-7 inches thick.

Annie and Donn at his desk on the floor of the Washington State House of Representatives. I guess we loved a plaid blazer in 1979. I loved that Chinese dragon dress.

As Speaker of the House Rep. John “Baggy” Bagnariol leads a session, Annie and two other bill clerks peek from behind his tall chair on the rostrum.

Bill amendments came out of discussion in committee and on the floor. Amendments printed on slips of paper were inserted in the bill books, overlaying the original wording.

A cardboard square with glue on it, amendments and bills in hand, we updated the bills by slipping the left-hand glued end of each amendment into the fold or inside gutter on the related page. The books held together with shoelaces or long metal prong folder fasteners that when loosened separated the pages to slide in more bills.

It was a busy time during sessions that run from two to 3 1/2 months. There’s always a lot of politicking going on.

It was energetic work and fun to be there. Every day legislators were in session, the clerk called roll and shook things up on Saint Paddy’s Day by adding “Mac” or “O’ “ to make each representative’s name sound Irish, such as MacSmith or O’Charnley.

One late night we clerks were called in ahead of an even later legislative session. We piped a local radio station’s music over the House speakers while bill clerks hastened to update books on the floor with the latest amendments. We cheered when our phone call to the DJ on duty resulted in a song dedicated to us. “Here’s to the bill clerks in the Washington State House of Representatives who are burning the midnight oil,” the DJ told listeners.

Going to lunch with fellow clerks was an easy amble from the capitol campus to restaurants downtown. And there were parties quite often, not just on weekends.

A source in the Chief Clerk’s office in 2023 said the Legislature has gradually moved away from the tons of paper used in the ‘70s, although some members still want paper copies of everything. During COVID, everything was done electronically, which has remained in place for most things. And there still are bill clerks during session to help set up for committees.

Oddly, as soon as warm, sunny spring weather dawned in Olympia and the 39 Yoshino flowering cherry trees on campus burst forth in a riot of pale pink to white blooms, we experienced phoned-in bomb scares several times per week, it seemed.

Annie with a newborn calf in 1977 on the Donohue ranch outside Dayton.

Annie poses at the wheel of a Green Giant pea combine in 1977.

The authorities never caught the culprit(s). We theorized the bomb caller(s) wanted to get outside in the sun.

With each call, personnel were evacuated from every building to mill around on the 50-acre grounds, waiting until the State Patrol cleared the buildings.

The flowering cherry trees dropped their petals like a snow flurry. We had Mitsuo Mutai, a Japanese newspaper owner from Yoshino, Japan, to thank for his 1984 donation of the glorious trees.

I met Greg Nysoe in the bill room. He was a Senate bill clerk under the sponsorship of his uncle, Sen. Hubert Donahue of Dayton (D-Columbia County).

Greg said he was from Dayton. “Oh,” I said. “Dayton, Ohio?” That’s when I learned about Dayton, Washington. He invited me to come over one weekend and visit his family’s ranch.

It was the first opportunity for this big city girl to see farmland and huge farm implements in action, listen to the radio while riding over fields in an air-conditioned self-leveling combine, meet an awesome family, friends and neighbors and cradle a newborn calf.

I loved the area, especially the rich, rolling hills of silt/quaternary loess, covered in peas or wheat waving in the breeze and looking like green teddy bear fur. There were the weather-beaten barns and rusted, retired tractors, early homes and century farms. The oldest courthouse in the state.

Greg is the reason I came to Walla Walla after the Legislature, but first I worked pea harvest for Green Giant in Dayton.

Greg’s brother Dain was a Green Giant field supervisor and I worked on his crew. First, the swathers swarmed into the fields and cut the peas. Then the red pea combines drove over the long rows of cut peas, picked them up, shook the peas out of the pods, stored ‘em in a hopper and spit the silage out the back as they ambled forward.

As harvest team records clerk, I drove a lumbering, full-size stick-shift school bus with all its passenger seats removed. The bus served as a rolling repair shop and office. Over the radio, pre-cell phones, I summoned Dain or the field mechanic when we had a problem.

The bus carried a variety of implements the field mechanic needed to repair the machines, from acetylene tanks to an array of metal rods, grommets, drive belts, gaskets and such.

The stick-shift school bus Annie drove over steep hills was stripped of its passenger seats, replaced with supplies a field mechanic would use to repair pea combines in the field.

Annie, Green Giant pea harvest records clerk, radioing the field mechanic in 1977.

Most of the fields we harvested that were under contract to Green Giant crested the tops of rolling hills outside Dayton and Waitsburg.

Part of my job as records clerk was to keep track of productivity for all the combines in the field. I recorded when they operated and any downtime — when they stopped or broke, when they were repaired and running again.

While waiting for something to happen, I clambered on top of the bus, watched the combines offload their shelled peas into waiting trucks and took panoramic shots of the breathtaking view.

The most dramatic breakdown occurred when through belching black smoke, a combine driver suddenly leapt from the top, maybe 10 feet to the ground, because the wheel below her caught on fire after a hose broke loose and spewed oil on the hot metal. Another driver extinguished the flames before the field mechanic arrived.

I had my merchant mariner’s documents and had planned to be a deckhand on the Washington State ferries like brother Brent, but instead came to Eastern Washington. Out of that decision came children, a family and a newspaper career. No regrets, a’tall.

Retired editor/journalist Annie Charnley Eveland freelances the Etcetera column and stories for the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin. Send contact name, daytime phone number, news and clear sharply focused photos as .jpg attachments to [email protected] or call 509-386-7369.

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