Foursome Looks At 140 Years For History Of Normandy Park

-- NORMANDY PARK

For two years, four women have followed ancient trails, dug into musty, long-forgotten files, knocked on doors and probed the recollections of their oldest neighbors.

What they've turned up could fill a book - and will.

Bette Loomis, Helen Kludt, Betty Le Penske and Kristy Webster have traced the history of Normandy Park over the last 140 years, from the first homesteaders through the rum-runners of the Prohibition era and on into the present.

This band of four - the Normandy Park Historical Society - plans to publish their history early next month.

It's a history that starts surprisingly early, Kludt says. Both the Duwamish and Puyallup Indians seem to have hunted, fished, clammed and picked berries in what's now Normandy Park for many generations before the first white homesteader arrived in 1852.

The Miller family staked their claim and started growing hops the same year other settlers began homesteading near Elliott Bay.

"We have Miller Beach and Miller Creek here," says Webster, "but we can't find the Millers."

Other homesteaders soon arrived, but in the early territorial days, Normandy Park was largely a summer camp, Webster says. People set up tents on the beach and, as the Puyallups and Duwamish had done, gathered in the bounty of the land.

By the 1880's, ambitious developers bought out most of the homesteaders, Kludt says. But not much development happened - in the 1920's, during Prohibition, the local population still was sparse enough that bootleggers would land on Normandy Park's beach and haul their illicit hooch up a rutted dirt track that would one day become Eighth Avenue South, she says.

In those days, a Tacoma development company plugged the area as the coming home of a hoity-toity residential community with baronial estates on the English and French model, wrapped around a golf course, bridal trails and a marina. That idea dried up and blew away with the Great Depression, Loomis says.

A gushy brochure from those days still survives, though. The copy provided the first half of the title for the historical society's book: "Wonderful World of Woods and Water - A History of Normandy Park."

Kludt says homes gradually sprouted in the area through the 1930s and '40s, before a boom in the '50s that coincided with the growth of nearby Seattle-Tacoma International Airport after 1947, and construction of a new school and incorporation of the city in 1953.

Le Penske and her husband moved to this city in 1947, Kludt in '53 and Loomis in '54. Webster retired here six years ago from Seattle.

"We considered this living out in the middle of the woods," Kludt says. The city's population, 1,600 at incorporation, has since grown to more than 7,000.

The idea of putting together a history grew out of the Washington State Centennial celebration in 1989, Kludt says. She and Le Penske, serving on the local centennial committee, had begun hunting out tidbits of historical interest.

"We got so much information, we decided it would be just a shame to put it all away," says Kludt, a member of the Normandy Park City Council.

With $2,000 the council had allocated to the centennial fund, the Normandy Park Historical Society was established to continue the historical research, Loomis says.

Webster, a former bookkeeper and editor of a model railroading magazine, quickly joined the fold. Her interest in local history had been piqued by stories about her grandfather's homestead in Shelton. She teamed up with Kludt to shovel into state archives, turning up old homestead applications and other documents. Loomis, who had served as press aide to former Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, unearthed a wealth of photographs compiled by the Works Project Administration during the early '30s.

Le Penske says the group interviewed every resident they could find in their late 70s or older.

The book, which will be about 100 pages long in soft-bound edition, is being published by Emerald City Press of Seattle, Loomis says. Any profits from sales of the book will go to the city of Normandy Park's fund for historic preservation, she said.

now someone special in the community we should be writing about? Drop us a note at South Times, 31620 23rd Ave. S., Suite 312, Federal Way, WA 98003.