Betty Lou Anderson Diaries, 1938-1949

Betty Lou Anderson was born on January 15, 1924 on a farm near Hoquiam and Aberdeen, Washington. The diaries in this collection were written by Anderson between the ages of 14 (1938) and 24 (1948). She began keeping the diaries while a high school student at Hoquiam, recording her everyday experiences. She lived at home with her parents for almost the entire duration of the diary entries, finally moving to her own apartment in Aberdeen in March of 1948. Her father held various jobs in the logging industry of western Washington, working both day and night shifts at paper pulp, railroad tie mills, and plants at the port of Aberdeen, and also as an independent logger who owned multiple parcels of land, including the family home (five acres) in the country, and also a ranch (forty acres) which was built later in the 1940s. Mr. Anderson also worked in a number of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps during the 1930s and 1940s. He raised his own stock of trees, mostly fir and pine, harvesting them for wood production. The diaries reflect the Anderson family's rural existence, with a multitude of subsistence chores on the family lands that included the growing, harvesting, and marketing of the following staple crops: beets, peppers, carrots, beans, lettuce, cherries, pickles, cucumbers, peas, radishes, corn, potatoes, apples, tomatoes, and strawberries. Anderson's father also raised a number of farm animals both at the family home and their ranch: pigs, geese, cows, chickens, horses, and sheep. Betty Lou Anderson was also personally responsible for the raising and care of chinchillas in order to sell their fur, and the family owned a number of ponds on the properties, breeding and raising various stocks of fish to sell at the local farmers' market.

Anderson attended Hoquiam High School and graduated in 1942. She attempted to go to Aberdeen Junior College, but instead ended up working several jobs in the Hoquiam-Aberdeen area over the duration of the diary entries, and she provided income for her immediate family. She had enough extra spending money to attend movies, visit the local soda fountain, buy clothes, and to go on the many short and longer trips detailed in the diaries. Her jobs included working at the local variety store and soda fountain, Fairbairns, and several years at Espedal Photo in Hoquiam. Her hobby involving photography and home movies probably evolved from her job at Espedal's. Near the end of the chronological coverage of the diaries, she found a full-time clerical job at the Port of Aberdeen. She recorded her travel experiences, including several trips she took on the railroads during this period with her family to Seattle and Portland, as well as a lengthy vacation she took to Texas and Missouri in 1945 on a version of the famed "Twin Star Rocket" that ran from 1945-1964 and served the longest north-south train route in the U.S. She also recorded the local weather conditions on a daily basis in her diary.

Besides several entries noting the developments of World War II, Anderson also recorded her social interests and cultural observations about her community. She served as secretary for the local chapter of Beta Sigma Phi, a non-academic sorority organization devoted to the social, cultural, and civic enrichment of its members. It served as a valuable cultural organization in small towns such as Hoquiam, where women met on a monthly basis during the Great Depression and World War II.

One of Anderson's most avid interests was popular motion pictures, which she often watched on weekends at the Seventh Street Theatre in Hoquiam. This building is now a historic landmark, and one of the few remaining examples of an "Atmospheric Theatre," a historical type of movie palace that presented a fantasy world and relief from the economically difficult times of the 1930s and 1940s. It was the first theatre in Washington State to show "talkies" (films with sound). The films she saw included Gone With the Wind, We're in the Army Now, China Girl, Tom Sawyer, Blondie, Shadow of a Doubt, I Walked with a Zombie, Squadron Leader X, Dangerous Blondes, City That Stopped Hitler, In Old Chicago, With a Banjo On My Knee, Wild Women, Paris After Dark, Lassie Goes Home, Winged Victory, Sunday Dinner For a Soldier, Our Hearts Were Young, Dangerous Journey, To Have and Have Not, Meet Me in St.Louis, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, National Velvet, Tarzan and the Amazons, Yellow Rose of Texas, Burma, China Sky, Back to Bataan, Heaven Can Wait, Ernie Pyle's Story, Rhapsody in Blue, State Fair, Take It Or Leave It, Road To Utopia, The Virginian, Jesse James, The Return of Frank James, Notorious, Crossfire, Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road, The Al Jolson Story, California, Love of Andy Hardy, and multiple films starring Abbott and Costello.