A man walks into a parks department office and says:
“I want to donate my forested five-acre property up the hill to the city for a park. It could be the last undeveloped five-acre plot near Downtown Burien.”
“How much do you want for it?”
“Free.”
That is close to what happened.
Since 2006, people in multi-cultural east Burien have enjoyed Mathison Park, a tranquil forested neighborhood setting.
Unfortunately, the Port of Seattle, operator of Sea-Tac International Airport in the city of SeaTac, wants to seriously damage the environmental integrity of a park in the neighboring city of Burien.
In a previous article, I outlined the reasons why this proposed action is a vast overreach attempt by the Port that makes no sense.
I won’t relitigate the controversy here but I think readers might be interested in the fascinating history of how my idyllic boyhood home became a city park. It’s a story about an amazingly resilient and principled married couple, my parents, Ted and Bernadine Mathison.
I’m sorry, but very briefly, I must start more than 100 years ago.
Bernadine Phillips’ mother died of the 1918 Influenza when Bernadine was eight years old. She was shipped off to be raised by an alcoholic aunt. Attending Washington State College (now Washington State University,) she met a guy. Ted Mathison was the son of poor Norwegian immigrants who farmed in Snohomish.
Ted graduated in 1930 and was hired by Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Being hired at prestigious Bell Labs right out of college would be the equivalent of being hired by Amazon or Microsoft today.
They married in 1932. The orphan girl and poor farm boy had achieved the American Dream.
But this was in the middle of the Great Depression. Ted was laid off. Bernadine completed her undergraduate degree at WSC and Ted earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering.
With his master’s degree, Ted repaired radios during the Depression. One day, on his lunch break from the Perry West appliance store in Burien, he went out to Boeing Field to watch the airplanes. “That’s what I want to do,” he decided.
With the Depression easing and war raging in Europe and Asia, Ted hired on at Boeing in 1941. He stayed until he retired 31 years later. Most of the time, he was a supervisor in the flight-test instrumentation division. The farm boy became a respected aeronautical engineer.
My parents lived in West Seattle with Don, born in 1934 and Phil, born in 1938. They wanted to be closer to Boeing. But they also wanted more space and most important, Mom wanted to live among trees.
In 1942, they purchased five hilltop acres from the owners of the Sunnydale Goat Dairy Farm. That lot eventually became the majority of Burien’s Mathison Park.
They didn’t move “out to the country” until 1944, the year Stephen was born.
Dad built a temporary 440 square-foot house for the five of them with attic space for the boys’ bedrooms. Make that six of us when I appeared in 1947.
Dad set about building the primary house. Evenings after work at Boeing, he set 10-12 pumice stone blocks for the exterior walls. The number of blocks he could do depended on how much mortar he could make with one bag mixed in his wheelbarrow.
Dad and Mom didn’t rely on credit so the house was built as time and money allowed.
We didn’t move in until the day in 1951 that baby sister Susie arrived home from the hospital. Susie was the only girl so she got dibs on a bedroom while us boys doubled-up. The 1,000 square-foot house still stands in Mathison Park.
At the Mathison Park dedication, brother Phil commented:
“Can you imagine growing up here? We had a basketball hoop on that tree and a baseball diamond in this field. We climbed trees, dug holes to China, and made cities, played with little cars with rivers and lakes using the hose.”
I remember the big kids constructing a tunnel in the woods with dirt on top of thin plywood, having a favorite tree look-out, playing badminton over the clothes line.
But not all was perfect in this idyllic setting. I also remember playing in “The Dirt Pile” with our little cars and old bricks that we used for our houses. Let me try to describe “The Dirt Pile.” It was…umm… a dirt pile.
Every so often, a huge, shiny-new Cadillac would make its way down the curvy driveway while we were playing in “The Dirt Pile.” We knew exactly who it was. It was developers/real estate agents trying to talk our parents into – what we kids thought of as – paving paradise and putting up a parking lot.
A great historylink.org article, which goes into even more depth about Mathison Park’s creation and ties it in with the larger history of the Highline area, explains my parents’ attitude:
“Giving up the profit they could have gained from selling the land fit with the Mathisons’ values and lifestyle. They lived very frugally in order to buy and keep the land, send their children to college, and devote many hours of service to their community.”
But maybe what I remember most from growing up there is Mom’s Mantra – “The Trees are the View.” Dad carefully negotiated a careful trimming of branches so we could get a peek view of Mt. Rainier’s peak from our living room.
Mom died in 1989. Eight years later, Dad married her best friend, Nina Mae Miller. For many years, Mom and Nina Mae talked on the phone daily. Nina Mae knew exactly what Mom wanted.
One day, Nina Mae said, “Ted, why don’t you donate the property to the city for a park? We can stay here as ‘caretakers’ until we leave.”
A man walks into a parks department office…
