1947 Honorary Member Profile : Mae Dennis

Mae E. Dennis in 1947 was the first woman-and eighth individual-named an honorary Spokane Mountaineer. It was one of numerous honors in her life, including Stevens County Teacher of the Year in the 1960's and later Senior Citizen of the Year. The club bulletins of the 1930's show why. The Dennis name pops up again and again. Mae climbed, hiked, skied, snowshoed, served as trustee, chaired committees, led trips, hosted meetings and social events, and more. Ed was president in 1932-1934 and 1942-1943. "We went to almost everything the Spokane Mountaineers did," recollects Mae's daughter, Lethene Parks, born in 1931. "Mom climbed most of the major peaks, Rainier three times." Oregon's Mt. Hood was first, on Labor Day, 1933.

Mae was as likely to make valentine menu cards (for the 1934 progressive dinner) as to climb (bagging eight summits on the 1937 Canadian Kokanee Glacier summer outing). She was a hostess for the first club fireside educational/social party and snowshoed 5 miles to Mt. Spokane's summit Vista House on successive New Year's Eves for the traditional overnight celebration, preparing dinner for everyone there.

"The great, deep depression of the thirties was watching as we joined the Spokane Mountaineers in the time of many hours and little money and no gas. These conditions inspired a period of activity that made history in the outdoor clubs," Mae wrote in a spring 1970 Kinnikinnick historical piece.

The Dennises became Mountaineers in January 1930, after a move from Yakima where Mae was a Selah school teacher and Ed a newspaper reporter. Romance bloomed when they met in the Cascadian Mountaineering club and marriage followed in 1928. A job as assistant editor of the Cowles Publishing Company's "Farm Trio" (Washington, Idaho, and Oregon farmers) lured Ed to Spokane. He also wrote a weekly mountaineering column for the Spokesman-Review.

Nature and the out-of-doors were Mae's lifelong passion, says her daughter, with teaching a close second. "She was a great student of natural history- flowers, birds, insects." Schools still use Our Neighbors the Plants, the book Mae and Colville 4th and 5th grade students researched on nature hikes. The book describes 95 northeastern Washington plants, with illustrations from Mae's pen for most of them.

The Mountaineers were a good fit. Mae identified 149 species of flowers and plants and 23 species of birds on the 1936 summer outing in Montana's Cabinet Mountains and topped 8634-foot A Peak, too.

Born in 1897 on her father's fruit-growing homestead in Ryderwood (then called Little Falls) in Cowlitz County, Mae was the third of nine children, six girls and two boys. Her father, Hiram Fredelick Stalder, came west from Missouri in 1881 on the Southern Pacific's first "immigrant train." In 1901, the family bought a 320-acre ranch high above Cedonia, near Hunters, from the original homesteader, and set to work tending the cattle, orchards, gardens and fields. Mae, no doubt, developed her stamina and endurance during those years, plus a life-long affection for the family homesite, where Lethene and her husband live at the end of the gravel road today.

"Mom had lots of sisters to help with the home, so she helped her dad with the farm work," Lethene says. "It was kind of subsistence farming." Th one-room Bissell School was a 4-mile hike or horse ride away, sometimes through deep snow. Later Mae, who didn't drive until 1948, would trudge 7 miles to the highway to catch her bus. Right out of high school in Colville, where Mae earned her room and board with a local family as a "mother's helper," she was hired to teach at Addy. Seventeen years old and 5 feet, 1 inch, tall, Mae "found some of the boys as high as she was," Lethene chuckles.

After earning a 2-year degree at Cheney's Eastern Washington Normal School, Mae taught and lived in Rice, Ward, Kettle Falls, Springdale, Colville, Peach, and Hunters in Stevens County. In the late 1950's, she was acting county school superintendent. "I can still find people who had her as a teacher," her daughter says. "She taught three generations."

She didn't teach in Spokane, though; the Spokane School District would not hire married teachers. So she taught informally, doing a newspaper column and weekly radio show on bird identification; servng as nature lore chair for the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs; taking neighborhood kids on nature hikes; examining Boy Scouts for nature badges; and working with the Campfire Girls as leader, Camp Sweyolkayan nature counselor, and writing for their national publication. The Campfire Girls bestowed its highest rank of "Torchbearer" on her, the first awarded in Spokane, for her nature study efforts, and the "Waka" award for working out the story of her Campfire career in Indian symbols with 1,000 beads on a ceremonial stole.

Mae was an active environmentalist for the club and the Federation, advocating the addition of the seashore strip to Olympic National Park and wilderness designation for the North Cascades. (It's too bad the club didn't push forward with her 1943 annual meeting idea to make the Rocks of Sharon/Browne's Mountain a state park.) She was vice-president of the Spokane Native Plant Conservation Society, formed by the Mountaineers in 1938.

Safe climbing and preparedness were the priorities she practiced and taught/ She amd Ed were "very proud always of the club's good safety record,: Lethene emphasizes. "About as close to disaster she ever came was on Mt Stuart" where avalanching snow caught Mae and her rope mates in a couloir. Another rope team pulled her onto the rocks, and all she suffered were rope burns around her waist.

Tragedy struck in 1943 when Ed succumbed to leukemia, diagnosed in 1941 when he was an Army Air Force captain. "There were too many memories in the house in Spokane for her," Lethene says. So Mae, with daughters Lethene and Janet, headed for a 4-year teaching stint in Monroe. Mountaineers showed their affection at a farewell potluck, where Mae was presented with a "lovely wall mirror" and the girls small packsacks.

Back she came to Stevens County in 1949, after a 1-year contract in Pullman, to teach full-time until she was 75. "They called her back," Lethene explains. Mae and her bachelor brother raised cattle on the farm, a whopping 1100 acres at one time, until his death. She also wrote area history-a book entitled Pioneers of the Columbia -and was active in the Grange. Mae was alone on the farm for 5 years. Though she'd sold most of the cattle and leased the fields, she still split the kindling, built the fires, sprayed the weeds, gardened and canned, crocheted and embroidered, and read history. "She didn't want to live anywhere else," her daughter says.

Her family always came for home cooking. Lethene will never forget arriving from her Bremerton home to find Mae, then about 80, "putting the turkey in the oven with her broken leg propped on a stool." She'd slipped on the ice carrying firewood, crawled to put up a notice in the window for passer-by to see the next day, and went to her bed for the night. Mae did acknowledge some inconvenience, taking the plane instead of the bus to New Mexico to visit daughter Janet, a weaver with her own studio and who worked in the state museum. (Janet died in 1989.)

Cancer surgery slowed Mae down in 1979 and took her from the farm to Lethene's Gig Harbor home to recuperate.

What was it like, growing up with a mother who, through her 70's,"could always outhike me...and never get me to rappel!"? Daughter Lethene, a retired librarian who heads both the Northwest Chapter of the Oregon-California Trails Association and the Northeast Washington Genealogical Society, shares glimpses.

• "She was always big on what you OUGHT to do; work came first." Though usually cheerful "if she got angry, you knew it!" When seven grandchildren came for summer visits, "Mother already had the chores lined up." Lethene's younger son claims he "learned his good work habits there."

• "She taught us kids to ski, when 7 or 8, on the Manito Park hill, wearing galoshes and toe straps made from old inner tubes. You could drive as far as the Mt. Spokane Ski Club cabin, then we climbed, carrying our skis. They thought it was wonderful when the club got its first rope tow."

• "Mother loved to play pinochle. I learned at 10 at a Spokane Mountaineers annual meeting at the Sons of Norway hall. She taught all the grandchildren."

• "From the time we were toddlers, we went on a lot of stuff"-games and races at the "breakfast hike"...the "beefsteak hike" at Mt. Spokane...the "bandit hike where Dad was the 'bad guy'"...carol singing and steaming chocolate at the "Xmas tree hike" where "Santa handed out gifts and the 'mysterious hermit' had the fire waiting for us." "But when our parents went on major climbs and the summer outings that were their summer vacation, we stayed with an aunt."

Mae left a legacy of memories. Jeff Ferrier, son of 1943 president Earl Ferrier and wife Dorothy, says "their house on the south side of Spokane was a real focal point of Mountaineer events...Mae, to me as a young person, was super friendly, smart, a lover of the outdoors, and very kind to her brother, who was a REAL character!" Jeff learned "a great deal about the day-to-day reality of the life of a 'poor' farming operation and the beauty of that area" from visits to the ranch after Ed died. Jeff's sister, Jane Adams, remembers playing in the barn "and being in awe of living in such a wonderful place and of her in general, especially after hearing about the year she broke her leg." Brother Chris Ferrier remembers Mae "for her energy and clear thinking."

And anyone who came to the Dennises for a "song book party" when Mae chaired the committee that produced Songs for Trail and Camp in 1933 will recall the insistence on originality. Groups were shut into rooms or hallways and told, "You are not to come back until you have written a song." Twenty of the 79 songs were composed by members.

Mae showed her continuing interest in the Mountaineers when she was one of the first-and generous-contributions to the Chalet fireplace fund in the 1960's. She was a smiling, avid presence in 1965 at the 50th anniversary festivities. In the 1970 Kinnikinnick article she wrote of her active years. "Those were good days. We became one big, happy family. And now you know why old-time Mountaineers rushed to each other like sisters and brothers at that memorable reunion you new-time Mountaineers staged for us."

She died in May 1980, a few weeks after sitting on the deck watching her cousin plow and plant on her beloved family ranch in the hills above Cedonia, where today you can stand on the sunny deck and visualize Mae cheerfully striding around shooing stray cattle, harvesting her vegetables, hunting out knapweed, or setting off on a "little walk" of 10 miles or so.

Lorna Ream