What’s the Ritzville Connection
What’s the Ritzville Connection?
“So you live in Ritzville?”
“I heard you moved back.”
“Who the f*** are you again?”
“Does your family farm?”
My attorney and business colleagues are perplexed by my connections to my tiny hometown in eastern Washington. They don’t get why I’d invest time into such a small community. They don’t understand why a place they view as a truck stop in the middle of nowhere is a reasonable home base for a business. They don’t see the vision.
Let them wonder! For now, I want to speak to the locals.
It’s been 10 years since I graduated from high school. The sands of time and the growth of a lot of hair have rendered me forgotten in the eyes of many locals (though perhaps many never knew me). When I’m walking around Ritzville, I run into a mix of folks.
Folks who’ve known me all my life.
Folks who used to know me, but don’t recognize me.
Folks who think I’m new to town, a foreigner walking among them.
What I’ve realized lately is that even the people who’ve known me all my life have little clue just how deeply I’m connected to Ritzville or how long my family has been around.
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My great-great-grandpa, Harry Thompkins (born in 1902), moved to the general vicinity of Ritzville while he was still quite young (probably a teenager). While the timing is a little foggy, he moved to Odessa, WA, after a brief military deployment to the Philippines (at an age where he certainly would have had to forge some paperwork to get into the military). He ended up meeting his wife, Mary Kissler, while working on her family’s farm. They eloped and moved to Hatton, WA. He learned to be a carpenter, working on grain elevators and warehouses in Hatton (despite having lost the tips of both thumbs in the Philippines).
By the 40s, the family moved to Ritzville. At one point, Grandpa Thompkins worked for a construction company called “Sign Builders” and participated in the construction of what is now Jake’s Café. His most noteworthy job is probably working as a policeman and eventually serving as the Police Chief for the City of Ritzville.
Harry’s son-in-law, Howard Ragsdale, was a mechanic, “a damn good one!” That’s a direct quote from a mean old cowboy who mentioned it while disparaging me for being a useless city boy – so I know it has to be true. Howard worked for some different farmers, then as the lead mechanic for “Farmer’s Supply,” which I’m told had a storefront in what is now the Ritzville Drug Store and a shop in the Richter building over on Adams Street. After a long stint in Ritzville, he finished his career at Modern Machinery in Spokane, WA.
Sometime around the 60s, my great-grandparents on the other side, Opal and Bob O’Brien, bought a local restaurant, “Hands Café.” They renamed it “O’Bs café” (a play on their last name and first initials).
Howard’s daughter, Cheryl, is my grandmother. As a teenager, she worked at the Ritzville Theatre and a few local restaurants, including O’Bs café. She eventually married Opal and Bob’s son, Bruce, and they bought the café from my great-grandparents. They ran the café and a sister restaurant in Odessa until they divorced. After that, my grandma served for a time as a secretary at the local elementary school, then called “Evergreen Elementary.”
Of my grandma’s children, my dad is the only one who has stayed in town. He started working for Adams County after a brief stint at Central Washington University and made his way from a temporary employee to Public Works Director. He stayed in that role for around 30 years before taking a job with the Washington State County Road Administration Board this past fall.
My mom, a Ritzville transplant who met my dad at Central, started off as the town’s kindergarten teacher, then taught 5th grade. After several years, she became the middle school principal …while I was in middle school (dark times in our household – I had anger issues and swore like a sailor … she gave me in-school suspension several times). She eventually served as the K-12 principal before moving on from public education.
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Ritzville is an agricultural community. Without our wheatfields and cattle ranches, there wouldn’t be much reason to have a town in the first place. For that reason, families who are involved in agricultural endeavors get a great deal of reverence and respect in my community.
Personally, I have an immense amount of respect for them. It takes a lot of work to keep an agricultural enterprise open in the first place, let alone across several generations. I love agriculture enough that I served as our FFA chapter president in my senior year of high school.
However, on rare occasions, there are some “pillar of the community” types who engage in a little too much self-reverence, sit a little too high on their horses, and let a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking regarding local affairs slip out from somewhere underneath those tightly curved baseball caps.***
Every once in a while, I want to remind them that while they’ve been busy “feeding the world” for the past 100 years, families like mine have been building their grain elevators, keeping their community safe, fixing their broken-down combines, building their roads, feeding THEM, and teaching their kids. Don’t worry, though! I never actually say that.
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By and large, I love my hometown and I like the people in it.
Maybe, after about a hundred years and 5 generations, it’s indicative of a genetic predisposition to that particular set of geographic coordinates (with the amount of cousins I have floating around town, there’s probably something to be said for that). Perhaps, there is a familiarity that surpasses what I’ve seen in my lifetime. In any case, it feels like a place worth spending some time.
-Tyler O’Brien-
P.S. Will I ever live there? The short answer is no. Unless some sort of biopharmaceutical plant magically pops up, my lovely wife, who I’m proud to say has her PhD in Chemical Engineering (and whom I love even more than my hometown) wouldn’t find a fulfilling job there.
But that doesn’t mean my businesses can’t live there!
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The joke goes:
“Why is a farmer’s baseball cap curved so tight?”
“Because he’s always looking in the mailbox for the CRP check!”