Bantering about the Saturday (March 20) services for long-time Bothell resident Ron Green, my collaborator Smitty describes it as “the third state funeral in Bothell in the last 23 months.”
Ron Sr. died earlier this month at the age of 93, a victim of cancer. Ron was a member of a trio of Bothell citizens whose families have been major contributors to the community’s growth from a rural outpost to suburban city. Memorial services in the recent past for Lowell Haynes and Carlton E. (Bud) Ericksen brought attention to the lives of others who also had an impact on Bothell as community.
All three were influential business leaders, all in the field of transportation – Green and Ericksen as auto dealers and Haynes at his service station that also often served as a mini-city-hall where city councilman Haynes would lend an ear to a citizen’s concerns while checking the oil or performing a brake job.
As my column’s valued research assistant, Craig Smith helped gather recollections of the life of Ron Green, Sr., relying on the remembrances of his Bothell classmates of 1963 as well as Ron Green Jr., class of ’61. The Green family’s Northshore roots are deep.
Ron Jr. offered, “he was the son of Sarah Simonds Green, who was in the first graduating class of Bothell High School, 1912, the grandson of Henry Simonds (for whom Simonds Road is named), the founder and first principal of Bothell High School.
“Dad’s father, Charlie, the son of German immigrants, first came to Bothell in 1911 when the Winton Company sold a car to the Elmer R. Ross family–Charlie Green was a mechanic who spent a week with new car purchasers to teach them to drive. The Ross family and Charlie struck up a friendship that led them to drive together east to West Virginia in 1911, a pioneering road trip that crossed Snoqualmie Pass.
”My dad was born in Bothell at the Clara Gardner Nursing Home on December 21, 1916.”
Ron and Eleanor Green, both University of Washington graduates, lived many years on West Hill in Bothell and raised three children, Janet Green Hunter, Ron Jr. and Darrell. Education was paramount in the lives of the Green family and theirs was a world expanded long before global studies and a global society became popular phrases of the day.
Adds Harvard University alum Ron Jr.: “his participation in the Bothell chapter of the American Field Service (AFS) is one indicator of his life-long interest in international concerns. We hosted Yoko Ueyama from Japan in 1962-63, and before that various FIUTS students from the UW came to our house for dinners. My dad’s bicycle trip to Europe in 1938 with his brother Gordon and other students led to a life-long friendship (interrupted by the war) with an anti-Nazi German man Ludger Hoelscher, whose daughter Ursula is like a sister to Jan and Darrell and me, who came to Bothell High School in 1965 and then went on to get her BA from the UW. And Ursula’s daughter Jahel came to stay with me and go to school when I was teaching in Oklahoma. Mom and Dad took a trip to Cuba with the Huskies baseball team in September 2000. He loved to travel and visited many faraway places with my mother over the years of their retirement, including much of Europe, Japan, and Australia.”
Civic life included a stint as president of the Bothell Chamber of Commerce. He was acknowledged by Bothell High School alumni in 2000 as their honored alum. A lifelong active member of the Bothell United Methodist Church, Ron Sr. served in many capacities including youth Sunday School teacher, lay representative to the district church conference, lay leader and occasional sermon presenter, and in later years organizer of the senior group, XYZ (for eXtra Years of Zest).
I vividly recall Ron Sr.’s infectious smile, wry sense of humor and devotion to his hometown .
As evidence (Ron Jr. again): “One year for the Bothell 4th of July parade he dressed all in green and painted his exposed face and skin green, driving a little motorized toy car he sat on through the parade, with the motto, ‘See the Green Man at Green Ford.’ He was an avid stamp collector and had a large multi-volume collection. He was an inveterate punster and loved groan-inducing wordplays.”
Active in the King County Automobile Dealers Association, he was assigned to be the local host for baseball immortal Babe Ruth who was a guest speaker for the group. He drove him to his hotel and bought the fortified “liquid refreshment” the Babe requested. He was a founding member and active participant in the little theater group, Bothell Intercommunity Theater, the “B.I.T. Players” which did many plays from 1949 into the late 1950s. He was a Past Master of the Ashler Masonic Lodge (Ashler Lodge #121 F&AM) in Bothell, and a Shriner. He helped to organize and write the local Northshore history book A Slough of Memories and was a major contributor and fact-checker for the recently published Bothell: Then and Now.
Recalls son Ron, “Dad had a great smile–right to the end, in hospice, when he could hardly say more than a few slurred words, we knew he was with us by his expressive face, especially that loving smile, enjoying us and life even as he was about to leave.”
To close this circle of community, members of the Camp Fire group that Eleanor Green supervised 50 years ago came from far and wide to be with her during Ron’s final hours, a tribute to these parent-like role models and to what Ron and Eleanor have meant to so many whose lives have been and are centered in Bothell as a caring community.
