Ode to the Mizzus
[Speech introducing Karen to the Save the Schoolhouse breakfast where she was honored for her work on Camano History]
When they asked me introduce the mizzus, I knew I was taking a terrible risk. More nights in the doghouse — or in my case, the old shack — with the mice and the spiders, sleeping alone, cold and exiled.
But… I said I’d do it. Mighta been bad moonshine, but a man is only as good as his word … and I sure don’t need any more ratings drops.
Karen and I go way back to 1973. She came out here to Camano in 1981. For you mathematicians, that’s 32 years ago. For the rest of us, it’s a hell and gone long time ago. She left her librarying job back in Minnesota — I assumed, to pursue a new career in Romance. There weren’t a whole lot of libraries on Camano back then. About what it’ll be soon enough again, looks like… Between looking for work and getting her PhD in Romance, she took up Local History. Living on the South End, she could see there wasn’t much written down, just stories and lies, what we illiterates call Oral Tradition. She joined the Stanwood Area Historical Society and immersed herself in everything a good librarian can find on a given subject.
Needless to say, it became a full time job. Since it didn’t pay anything, it’s what we call PASSION. That’s romance lingo for Below Minimum Wage. Meanwhile she worked at the Univ. of Wash. Library, even became a Department Head there for a year. The commute in her beat up cars got a little old after a few years and soshe opted to work for Sno-Isle Libraries as a part-time sub. They wouldn’t hire her full time, probably not qualified enuff I suppose, so later she took a job – the one she’s got now — up at Burlington Library’s fancy Biblioteca. But … in all those years she kept digging out the history of Stanwoodopolis and Camano. Wrote a few pamphlets, edited and wrote the Hysterical Society’s newsletter which became way more scholarly than the old meeting minutes and who brought the cookies, helped the Society catalogue photos and artifacts and set up museum displays, wrote a history of Camano, served three years as President of the League of Snohomish Museums and still spends every spare minute and hour she can on research and writing. She’s passionate about this history, trust me.
I know a little something about Passion. And I don’t just mean Poverty….. Karen Prasse IS the Historian of this Area. She knows where the old river channels were and when they changed, she knows the old pioneers and their families that are still here. She can find photos of long lost shingle mills and bootlegger stills or lumber yards or seafood canneries or nettle farms, what that building used to be and when the old Volunteer Fire Station got moved across the highway, how the Stanwood library was once the Stillaguamish Band’s meeting hall once IT got hauled into town and is now the Gun Club up at Cedar Home where it got hauled last, who’s granddad was mayor and whose son’s were ne’er-do-wells, what year the old oyster company started up and why it closed down.
Karen knows where most of the bodies are buried and what skeletons are in whose closets. She’s like the fireman in Fahrenheit 451, one of those people who memorize a book after they were banned and burned and in doing so become that book . She’s a Living History.
When the folks who follow after us look back for their precedents, for what led up to their Here and Now, for some of the Causes and maybe the Effects, the person they’ll be reading, the knowledge that was saved, a lot of it will be Karen’s. Most of us don’t leave much legacy. We’re just the folks history forgets unless someone cares enough to write it down and catalogue it and give it some kind of persepective, put it in the proper flow of Time. I know this: we owe a lot to those who do.
It gives me no little pride to be here today to honor Karen Prasse for giving us a solid footing in the past, showing us where we’ve been and making this a richer place to live.
you are both so lucky to have such good friends in each other and the phd in Romance. What a story. Brings a tear and a laff