Edward Byron Loomis

1890s–1900s

Born 5 May 1899 at home in Skagway, Alaska, during the gold-rush years, to Isaac Hayes Loomis and Augusta Swanson. Spent early years in Washington and Alaska, and lived in Olympia as a boy.

1910s

Moved to Tacoma, clerked at a bank and a bindery, and in 1917 joined the Washington National Guard, then served with the 102nd Field Signal Battalion until 1919. Worked as a Forest Service ranger near Port Angeles and for the Northern Pacific Railway.

1920s–1930s

Married Beulah Grahm on 26 August 1922 and settled in Port Angeles, where Patricia was born in 1926 and Ed was a railroad clerk until the Depression. Joined General Petroleum in Seattle in 1934 and became a star of the company bowling team.

1940s–1950s

Rose through General Petroleum's operations side to field superintendent. Gave Patricia away at her wedding in 1947, moved to Manchester in 1955, and began traveling widely with Beulah.

1960s–1990s

Traveled to Hawaii, Florida, Mexico, and Jamaica, and retired from Mobil in 1965. Widowed in 1969. Kept bowling in senior tournaments into his seventies and died at home in Tacoma on 1 July 1990, at ninety-one.

A Gold-Rush Baby

Edward Byron Loomis was born on May 5, 1899, at home in Skagway, Alaska, during the Klondike gold rush, and was recorded as the first white child born in the town. His parents were Isaac Hayes Loomis and the Swedish-born Augusta Swanson. The family moved with the frontier: in 1900 they were at Humptulips, Washington, and in 1902 back in Alaska at Tonsina and Valdez, where three-year-old Eddie was to appear in a play at Moose Hall and came down with the measles that December. His parents later went their separate ways, and in 1904 his mother married George Lovelace, giving Ed three younger half-siblings, Jo, Fran, and Bud. Ed lived in Olympia as a schoolboy and by 1915 in Tacoma, where he went to Stadium High School.

At sixteen he was already working as a junior clerk at the Fidelity Trust Company, a Tacoma bank. A cashier there later described him as "honest, capable, & endowed with more than average ability" but "of a restless disposition," never sticking to any job for long, and in 1916 he moved on to the Pioneer Bindery and Printing Company.

Soldier, Ranger, and Railroader

On April 8, 1917, two days after the United States declared war on Germany, Ed enlisted in the 11th Company of the Washington National Guard. He was discharged that July with third-degree flat feet, but within a week he was serving with the 102nd Field Signal Battalion, where he stayed until March 1919. His Methodist church in Tacoma honored him and its other new servicemen with a reception in 1917 and a service flag bearing a star for each of them.

After the war Ed spent a season as a U.S. Forest Service ranger at Port Angeles, worked as a warehouseman and check clerk for the Northern Pacific Railway in Seattle, and then from 1921 went back to the Forest Service near Port Angeles. That July he was recommending the fishing on Boulder and Long creeks, tributaries of the Elwha, where in the time it took to drink one beer he had caught six rainbow trout and nine Dolly Varden, all about a foot long. It was in Port Angeles that he met a young schoolteacher, Beulah Grahm, and on August 26, 1922, they were married at the Church of the Holy Communion in Tacoma.

They made their home in Port Angeles, from 1926 in a house on West 2nd Street that Ed's mother gave him after his marriage, and their daughters Patricia and Jean were born in 1926 and about 1931. Ed was a clerk and then chief clerk at the Milwaukee Road railroad depot at the foot of Cherry Street. When the Depression closed the railroad's Port Angeles line, he lost his job, and in 1932 he was manager of the Clallam Adjustment Corporation.

General Petroleum

In 1934 Ed joined the General Petroleum Corporation in Seattle as a clerk, and the family moved to West Alaska Street in West Seattle. He spent the rest of his working life with the company, as chief clerk from 1935 and then on the operations side as district operations supervisor, field manager, and by 1953 field superintendent; in his last years, after the company became part of Mobil Oil, he drove all over Washington inspecting service stations. He was the mainstay of the company bowling team in the 1937–38 season, its top scorer week after week, with a high series of 645. Summers the family took a place on Vashon Island, and Ed got up at five in the morning to make it to work in the city. Around 1938 he took Patricia to a fishing derby, where she won a silver teaspoon for a five-pound salmon.

Ed liked a party and liked to sing. One afternoon in May 1947 he phoned home from Long Beach to say he was bringing twelve crabs and a General Petroleum executive from California home for dinner, with a list of people to invite; by eight o'clock the party was under way, and it went past eleven with singing around the piano, Ed singing "Because." A few weeks later, on June 24, 1947, he sang "Because" again before Patricia's wedding to Ray Lobb, sang "The Lord's Prayer" during the service, and walked her down the aisle.

The Traveling Years

Around 1923, while they lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon, Ed and Beulah went down into an ice cave near the Lava Beds and saw a frozen river with frozen waterfalls. In the 1950s they began to travel in earnest. In August 1952 a small seaplane took them from Chelan to a rough cabin on Domke Lake; their luggage and food came on a later flight that ran hours late. At Stehekin, while Beulah napped on the beach, Ed went off on a free jeep tour and saw a bear and an albino deer. In 1953 they drove down the Pacific coast to Los Angeles, across to Albuquerque to see their daughter Jean, up to Beulah's childhood home in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and home through Yellowstone. In 1954 it was Banff and Lake Louise, in 1956 a coastal steamer to Ketchikan, in 1958 Glacier National Park, and in February and March 1960 a long drive to California and back, by way of Lava Beds and the ice cave they had seen decades earlier, Reno, Virginia City, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, the Salton Sea, Marineland, Disneyland, and Hearst Castle. In December 1960 came a voyage to Hawaii. They built a house on the water at Manchester, where the Lobb grandchildren came to stay, but it proved too far from Tacoma, and in 1960 they moved there. They spent the winter of 1962–63 living in a trailer in Arizona and California, toured Florida and the Bahamas in 1964, drove through Mexico that fall with Jean and Vic, and from November 23 to December 11, 1966, flew to San Francisco and sailed on the S.S. Statendam by way of Los Angeles and the Panama Canal to Jamaica, staying in Kingston, Ocho Rios, and Montego Bay before flying home. Rough seas in the Caribbean left Ed so seasick that he declared they would never take another sea voyage. Ed retired from Mobil in 1965.

Beulah died in November 1969. Ed stayed in Tacoma, where he bowled in the Elks league, rolling a league-high 239 game in March 1972, and in 1973, at seventy-four, he and his partner led the standings in a senior citizens' doubles tournament. He played pinochle with friends, baking brownies for the game, and spent much of his time with his friend Luddie Bloom, whose yard he tended. "When I dig in the yard," he wrote in 1988, "I seem to forget all my problems." By 1985 he had been to Hawaii, where Patricia lived, six times, and his grandchildren came to see him; a granddaughter's visits included breakfasts at the Boathouse at Point Defiance. In May 1990 his granddaughter Cathy came up from Portland with her husband, Greg, and one of their daughters to take him to dinner. Ed died at home in Tacoma on July 1, 1990, at ninety-one, and was buried at Mountain View Memorial Park in Lakewood.