Everyone – Candy Hatcher

EVERYONE IS FAMILY

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER December 08, 2000

CANDY HATCHER

Everybody should be lucky enough to die in a place like Darrington.

When death passes through this town, people don’t just send condolences. They whip up a meatloaf or a fruit salad. They alert the setup and cleanup crews. They set tables for 150 or 300 or 500.

Here, it doesn’t matter if the deceased was a close friend or a stranger. The whole town mobilizes for a Darrington

Memorial Dinner, a half-century tradition of fixing food for – and providing comfort to – grieving families.

Darrington, a picturesque spot in northern Snohomish County, has timber, good fishing and plenty of bluegrass music – with a jam session every month at the community center. But its hallmark is its Southern culture, and that includes an impressive funeral feed.

The town, population 1,245, is one of two settlements in Washington where large concentrations of North Carolinians have immigrated since the early 1900s. They came here for logging jobs, but they brought with them the manners and customs that usually accompany a Southern accent.

Yes ma’am, they carry neighbors a homemade pie or casserole, chop their wood or mow their grass if they’re sick or need a hand. Yes sir, they’re glad to show you to the community center; just follow them. Absolutely, they’ll share their recipes for sweet tea and cornbread and green beans cooked with bacon fat.

Pull up a chair and sit for a spell with Janet Cabe and the Buchanans and the Nationses, all of whom moved to Darrington from North Carolina 50 years ago or more.

See what it means to love thy neighbor and honor the dead.’My funeral salad’ The phone calls begin as soon as someone hears of a death. Four pages of names to call, people who have volunteered to bake or buy when somebody, anybody – resident, former resident or relative of a resident – dies.

Inajean Buchanan is on the calling list. She knows that when she gets a call or reads an obituary, “I’m to make a fruit salad. I call it my funeral salad.”

The routine, which has happened 31 times this year, is practically science. The caller tells each person how many people to cook for – often 150 or more – and the time and day of the funeral. An hour or so before the service, cooks bring their dishes to the Darrington Community Center, where middle school students have set the tables, properly placing the forks, knives and napkins.

The spread of food takes up the length of one wall. There’s Inajean’s fruit salad, made with a half-gallon of pineapple. Jeannie and Madge brought potato salad. Waldorf salad? “This has got to be Mary Faucett’s,” says Janet Cabe, the feast’s chief organizer and one who knows the cooks by their containers.

Don and Donna have brought nachos. Teresa made slaw. There’s Janet’s 20-pound meatloaf. The list goes on, table after table. Pasta salad. Three-bean salad. A plate with four dozen deviled eggs. Baked beans. Green beans – you never saw so many. Chili. Mashed potatoes. Three hams. Corn muffins.

You have to come back for dessert. It’s on another table – brownies, apple pie, banana bread, various kinds of cakes and cookies.

Organizers planned this dinner for 150 people, but there’s enough to feed plenty more. Anyone is welcome to stop by, pay their respects to the family and fix themselves a plate.

Ellis Nations is on the setup and cleanup crew. He loves this tradition because “people get to eat, and they get to visit each other.”

David Cabe, who used to can 250 jars of green beans every year just for funeral meals, started this tradition in the early 1950s. “There was no place for out-of-town people to eat,” Janet Cabe said. The two began spending the day before a funeral in the kitchen, cooking together, and they would invite the grieving family and their out-of-town guests to eat.

“My husband decided it was the best way we could help,” she said. “It’s something we could do for the families. After so many years, different people said, ‘Let me help you.’ “

Whenever she heard of a death, Janet would call the family and ask whether they would like a meal prepared, and if so, how many people they should expect. Then she’d call those who volunteered. “Let’s fix a meal,” she’d say. After awhile, the churches started helping, and “it grew into a community thing.”

“You can’t explain how good it is,” Janet said, but she knows too well how much it means. She and her husband celebrated their 50th anniversary with a party in this building last Christmas Eve. “We had one of the nicest wedding anniversaries anybody could have. Everybody helped with it.”

A few months later, David Cabe became ill. “Three months, my husband was sick, and there wasn’t one minute somebody wasn’t coming in the door” to help with food or chores. “We didn’t have to wash a dish or do any ironing,” she said. She tried to send thank-you notes to everybody. Sometimes, she didn’t even know who to thank.

When David died, the town prepared a funeral feast. As many as 600 people came to pay their respects. It meant the world to Janet. Afterward, “I told my family, ‘Anybody needed their wood gotten in or their yard cut, I’d be there.’ “The story of Aunt Viva Last month, the town prepared a meal in memory of Viva Ellen Tatham, 86, a beloved community elder known for her rhinestone-studded sneakers and fun-loving spirit.

Everyone, it seems, knew Aunt Viva, even though she lived in Everett, 45 miles away. Nieces, nephews and friends told stories about how she gave McDonald’s gift certificates for Christmas. She used to let children slide on her floor in their socks. She kept a one-armed bandit in her guest bedroom, and taught her nieces and nephews the lessons she had learned in Reno:

Never chase numbers. Always eat pie and ice cream before bed. And always greet people with a kind word and warm smile.

Just before she died, she was in a nursing home chanting, “Go, go Mojo!” and cheering for her favorite Mariner, Alex Rodriguez.

At dinner after the funeral, Darrington residents mingled with Aunt Viva’s relatives. Frankie Nations, whose specialty is meatballs, was running around, making sure everybody had what they needed. People kept slipping $5 or $10 in her hand for the “Darrington Memorial Dinner” fund, which pays for paper plates, cups, napkins and ham.

Typical Darrington, she said. “When somebody dies, everybody pitches in. If a house burns down, everybody pitches in.”The community’s history It’s comforting to see people who are so busy with work and family stopping to take care of their neighbors.

But that sense of community is not what drew them here. David Buchanan came here from Sylva, N.C., after he got out of the Army in December 1945. He had heard the timber companies were hiring, and in North Carolina, “there was no work. It was poverty. You can’t imagine how poor it was when we were growing up. We drifted out this way looking for work, and here we are.”

Jobs were what drew so many Tarheels to Darrington or the other haven for Carolinians, the Lyman/Hamilton area in Skagit County. They couldn’t make it back east, growing cotton or falling timber.

In 1947, 500 of 850 people in Darrington were first-generation North Carolinians, Elizabeth Poehlman wrote in her book, “Darrington: Mining Town/Timber Town.”

But jobs are not why most people stay. In Darrington, folks don’t have to worry about traffic or crime. “I never take the keys out of my truck,” one resident confided.

Said Kathryn Bates: “It’s a close-knit community. If you need help, you know who to call.”