Henry Wilburn “Harry” Lobb

1890s

Born 30 December 1891 in the Holmesville area of Huron County, Ontario, the fifth of thirteen children of Thomas Lobb and Lorena Gill Moore. In 1893, when he was eighteen months old, the family moved west to Vancouver.

1900s

Grew up in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver, and attended Mount Pleasant School. His older brother Clarence died in 1907 of appendicitis after being kicked by a horse, a loss family memory says hit Harry hard. That same year he left school to work as a helper for Campbell & Campbell Electricians.

1910s

Moved to Chilliwack with his family in 1910 and stayed on as an electrician with Sam Pugh when they returned to Vancouver. Played baseball, taught Sunday school, and courted Gladys Kipp. Enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915 and served at Ypres and the Somme with the 1st Canadian Pioneers (later the 9th Canadian Railway Troops), rising to corporal. Came home in 1919, crossed into Blaine, Washington, that July, and married Gladys in August.

1920s

Worked in Bellingham, then moved to Ferndale in 1921. Became the power company's resident manager there in 1924 and opened Lobb Electric Company.

1930s–1940s

Grew Lobb Electric into a hardware and appliance business and was active in nearly every civic group in town. Naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1939. Sold the hardware stock in 1944, and that December broke his back in a fall from a utility pole.

1950s–1960s

Sold the business in 1951, led the Lions Club and the county March of Dimes drive, and wintered with Gladys in Arizona. Toured Europe in 1964 and returned to Ypres, where he had served.

1969

Died 19 January 1969 in Bellingham; buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Ferndale.

A Big Family on the Move

Henry Wilburn "Harry" Lobb was born on December 30, 1891, in the Holmesville area of Huron County, Ontario, the fifth of the thirteen children of blacksmith Thomas Lobb and Lorena Gill Moore. When he was eighteen months old, a depression closed his father's shop, and in the summer of 1893 the family took the train across Canada to Vancouver. Harry grew up there in Mount Pleasant as part of a noisy crowd of brothers and sisters, several of whom later played together in a brass band billed as "the Lobb Family Band." The children made darts from corks, horseshoe nails, and pheasant feathers, and Harry once planted one in his brother Alvin's ear lobe, then pulled it out before Alvin could reach the house to tell their mother. Around 1898 the family became Advent Christians, through the influence of Sam Pugh, who would later be Harry's employer.

Harry attended Mount Pleasant School and idolized his oldest brother, Clarence, whom he followed around "like a puppy dog," in his sister Raye's words. In February 1907 Clarence died of appendicitis at twenty-one after being kicked by a horse, and the loss hit Harry hard. That year, at fifteen, he left school to become a helper with Campbell & Campbell Electricians, and by 1908 he was an electrician himself. Family memory says he saved his wages and gave his father $1,000 at Christmas to make up for Clarence's death.

Chilliwack Years

In November 1910 the family moved up the Fraser to a farm in Chilliwack. When the rest of them gave up and went back to Vancouver the following October, Harry stayed. Sam Pugh taught him the electrical trade, and from 1911 to 1915 Harry wired homes for Pugh's Electrical Emporium and eventually became his partner. For a time he boarded with Ed and Sarah Kipp's family, whose eldest daughter, Gladys, he would one day marry.

They were busy, sociable years. Harry played left field for the Chilliwack Tigers, and in 1913 he and his friend Jack Patterson went down to the Rose Festival in Portland, Oregon, and took part in a hot-air balloon ascension. He was vice-president of the Young People's Temperance Union, missionary for the Baptist Young People's Union, an officer of the Orange Lodge, and, from February 1915, superintendent of the Baptist Sunday school, which averaged sixty-eight children a week.

The First World War

On March 11, 1915, Harry enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He joined the 47th Battalion at New Westminster, trained at Vernon, where he spent one afternoon picking cherries beside Okanagan Lake, and in October transferred to the 1st Canadian Pioneer Battalion, later the 9th Battalion, Canadian Railway Troops. He crossed the Atlantic on the SS Metagama in November 1915, spent the winter at Hounslow seeing London (he walked off with a piece of brick from the Tower as a souvenir), and landed in France in March 1916. He kept three diaries through the war, and they survive.

In April 1916, in trenches at Ypres only thirty yards from the German line, where the men had to whisper, he saw his first comrade killed, "both legs practically blown off." That June he joined the counterattack at Ypres, choking on tear gas. On the Somme that September he dug cable trenches under shellfire; a chunk of shrapnel missed his head and tore through his friend Fred Snow's ammunition pouch, and one night their dugout caved in and buried them both. On September 15, 1916, he watched the first tanks ever used in battle, the new "landships," lumber toward the German trenches, and followed them forward over ground strewn with the dead. He was made lance corporal in November 1916 and corporal in December 1917. He was twice attached to the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade and was hospitalized with a fever in 1917. He spent one stretch as caterer for the mess, came through the rollover of a Ford Model T with nothing hurt but the car, and in the last year of the war helped build and then dismantle railway lines across northern France and Belgium.

He sailed home on the Carmania in February 1919 and reached Vancouver in the middle of the month. His family, who were living there by then, met him at the CN station with a rented limousine. He visited Chilliwack the following week and was discharged in Vancouver on March 10. Years later, as a Ferndale Legionnaire, he gave talks about the horror and the grandeur of his three and a half years overseas.

A New Life in Washington

On July 6, 1919, Harry arrived at Blaine, Washington, on the Great Northern, intending to stay a month. He stayed for the rest of his life. On August 23, 1919, he married Gladys Myrtle Kipp in Mount Vernon, Washington. She finished out her work in the operating room at Vancouver General Hospital and joined him that November. They started out in Bellingham, where Harry worked as a millwright electrician at the Bloedel-Donovan sawmill, took courses at Wilson's Business College, and in March 1920 was knocked off his motorcycle by a truck near the Bloedel-Donovan box factory. He filed his first papers for American citizenship in 1921 but did not take the oath until October 3, 1939, before Judge Jeremiah Neterer in Seattle.

In the fall of 1921 the young family moved to Ferndale, and that September Harry took charge of the town's Boy Scout Troop 1, succeeding Scoutmaster Miles Cary. The Lobbs crossed the border constantly in those years to see Harry's parents in Rosedale and Gladys's in Chilliwack, a habit of family visits that lasted all his life.

Lobb Electric

In August 1924 Puget Sound Power & Light asked Harry to become its resident manager for Ferndale, and on September 1 he took over the billing, meter reading, repairs, and trouble calls for the whole town, for $40 a month. At the same time he opened the Lobb Electric Company to handle wiring and sales, splitting the profits with the power company for five years while he worked his way into full ownership. At first he and Gladys lived upstairs over the shop. Gladys helped with sales and collections, and Harry always answered the phone the same way: "Lobb talking." In December 1925 he wired the lights on the town Christmas tree on Main Street for free.

The shop wired Ferndale's new First National Bank and Central School, and after Harry bought out the Bollman Hardware Company in 1931, Lobb Electric and Hardware grew into a small-town department store. It sold Majestic and Philco radios, Frigidaires, pumps and water systems, plumbing, farm implements, Wear-Ever pots and pans, and fishing licenses, and once filled its front window with ninety-seven Rhode Island Red chicks kept warm by a Lobb Electric brooder. Around 1943 or 1944 he hoped his new son-in-law, Reginald Moffett, who had business experience with Bellingham Transfer and Storage, would buy the hardware store and carry it on, but Eleanor didn't want to stay in Ferndale; she hoped to become an airline stewardess. In August 1944 Harry sold the hardware stock but kept the electrical and appliance business as Lobb Electric & Appliance until he sold it and the building in March 1951. In 1947 he was president of the county chapter of the Electrical Contractors Society.

He also climbed the poles himself. His obituary remembered how "many an elderly person was assisted, many a farmer made glad when Harry as the manager-lineman would drive through drifts, the worst weather, to try to give service. He climbed poles to restore wires, even in the bitterest northeast winds." On December 19, 1944, just after running service wires to a widow's cottage near the Central School, his spike slipped and he fell fourteen feet, breaking a vertebra. Gladys rode with him in the ambulance, and he spent much of that winter in the hospital.

Family and Home

Harry and Gladys raised five children in Ferndale: Allan and Ray, who both became doctors; Eleanor, who trained as a nurse; Madalyn, who went into psychiatric social work; and Kathleen. They lived for nearly twenty years in the white house with the big tree out front on Sterling Avenue, later on Malloy Avenue, and in 1953 in a new house on Vista Drive, and they kept a summer place on the water at Neptune Beach. Harry kept a leather strap by the wood stove for misbehaving children and warned the family against too much butter, though he liked a late-night plate of fried porridge with butter himself. He loved a practical joke. At his brother Laurie's wedding in 1930, he and his brother Warner arranged with customs officers Harry knew to plant a bottle of tea in the newlyweds' car and then pull them over as rum-runners. The prank fell through only because the couple didn't drive home that night.

A Life of Civic Involvement

Harry belonged to nearly everything in Ferndale. He was Scoutmaster of Troop 1 from 1921, served for years on the executive board of the Mount Baker Area Council of the Boy Scouts, and presided over courts of honor across northern Whatcom County, at one of which his son Ray received his Tenderfoot badge. He was president of the Ferndale Commercial Club in 1931, Worshipful Master of Masonic Lodge No. 264 in 1929 and later its treasurer, first president of the Ferndale PTA when it was organized in 1936, and a lifelong member of the Kulshan Post of the American Legion. In 1941 he was a charter member of the Ferndale Lions Club, which he led as president in 1954. During the Second World War he logged more than five hundred hours as an aircraft spotter and helped run a Lions scrap drive that collected two hundred tons of metal. He led Ferndale's March of Dimes drive in 1949 and chaired it for the rest of Whatcom County outside Bellingham in 1950 and 1951.

He was a deacon and trustee of the Ferndale Congregational Church and, after the 1949 merger, active in the United Church, though for years he also drove the family to the Advent Christian church in Bellingham, the faith of his childhood, to which he returned in his last years. He ran for town council in 1944 on a ticket that lost badly, and in 1956 he was named a Ferndale delegate to the Whatcom County Republican convention.

Travels and Later Years

In the 1950s Harry and Gladys took to the road. They towed a trailer to Washington, D.C., and Florida in 1952, drove through California and into Mexico with friends in 1954, and spent most winters in Phoenix, where in 1959 they bought a cabana in a trailer court. In 1958 Harry spent weeks calling on roofing companies in Arizona and California to sell shingles for his brother Warner. In May 1964 they sailed on the Queen Elizabeth for a six-week tour of Europe. At Brussels they hired a car and went off on their own to Ypres, where Harry drove in through the Menin Gate, watched a parade of First World War veterans, went on to Poperinge to see the chateau where he had been billeted forty-eight years earlier, and left a card in the door of a shop where he had known someone during the war. In 1967 they traveled to Jerusalem.

They sold the Neptune Beach house in 1965 and moved to Bellingham, eventually to an apartment at Orchard Terrace. By 1967 Harry was seeing specialists in Seattle about failing kidneys, which doctors eventually attributed to an overactive parathyroid gland, though that summer he was still taking his boat out on Lake Whatcom. He died in Bellingham on January 19, 1969, of congestive heart failure brought on by kidney disease, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Ferndale, the town where he had spent more than forty years running a business, raising a family, and serving his neighbors.