A Methow love affair

Shirley Haase was devoted to friends, family and the valley

By Ashley Lodato

When Shirley Palmer Haase passed away at Jamie’s Place on Jan. 23 at the age of 92, she left behind a legacy of commitment to family, friends and community, to working hard, and to treasuring the backcountry of the North Cascades.

Born in Tacoma in 1928, Haase moved with her family to Winthrop in 1944. Soon after, as she was walking to school with girlfriends, they encountered Sandy Haase, a few years older and newly returned from the war. After Sandy departed, Shirley, then 17, turned to her friends and said “I’m going to marry him someday.”

They wed in 1946, and the former city girl learned to be a country wife and mother, bringing John (1948), Sandra (1950) and Doug (1953) into the world and into the hard-working and fun-loving fold of the Haase family.

Homestead life

Haase took to homesteading life like a duck to water, say longtime friends Thom and Sherry Talbot. “She was not tall, just a little thing, but boy was that woman ever tough,” said Sherry. “She used to talk about all the canning and preserving and baking and cooking, the gardening, hauling water, the hay work, the cattle drives. I’d just be amazed at all the work she did.”

The ranching lifestyle was fraught with calamity. In 1948, the historic flood swept away the house and outbuildings on the Haases’ Methow River property, just downstream of what is now the Blues Ranch. But the Haases accepted misfortune as the price to pay for the freedom of the life they chose.

“Sandy and Shirley had a dryland homestead up in the Rendezvous,” said Sam Lucy, who was close with the Haases’ late son, Johnny. Lucy recalls Haase telling him about that Rendezvous homestead. “Boy, we were sure glad to have a roof over our heads,” Haase told Lucy. “I remember lying in bed that first winter and looking up at the ceiling and telling Sandy ‘Aren’t we lucky to have such a nice view of the stars.’”

“They did it all,” Lucy continued. “One winter Shirley just about got her hand torn off. Another time they had just harvested this huge dryland hay crop, and they got it all stored in the barn, and then lightning hits the barn and it burned down. ‘It was the only time I ever saw my dad cry,’ Johnny told me.”

A few weeks later, the community held a barn raising and built the Haases a new barn. “We think we have community now,” Lucy said. “That was real community.”

Another time, Lucy said, “Shirley was picking raspberries and she kept thinking she heard a rattlesnake. She looked around but didn’t see anything, but as she picked she kept hearing it. One of the kids came out to the raspberry patch and said ‘Ma, look, there’s a snake up there!’ And there was a rattlesnake, coiled in the raspberry canes directly above Haase’s head.”

“She was tough,” said Signe Shaw, who maintained a close friendship with Haase for two decades. “She had so many hard things in her life, but she had such spirit; she always found a way to keep going and be grateful.”

Community

Haase was legendary in her acceptance of people for who they were at their cores. “If you were a good person she was willing to be your friend,” said Shaw. “Some of the pioneer stock here were a closed club, but Shirley was very accepting of a wide variety of people.”

Shaw said that Haase welcomed her and her family, as well as others, when they first moved to the valley. “We were country people wanting to be even more rural. She got a kick out of our families and our kids.”

If you were out in public with Haase, Shaw said, “You couldn’t go five minutes without someone walking by and telling her how much she had helped them. She loved people. She was so connected to every walk of life.”

“Shirley kind of adopted us,” said Don and Sara Ashford. “When we arrived in the Methow Valley we figured we had found the place we wanted to stay. We were these hippies with three young kids and a bunch of horses. We didn’t even have a place to live at first. But Shirley had friends in all the different circles. It was great getting in with someone like that.”

Widely known as “Ma,” Haase embodied the essence of “it takes a village to raise a child.”  Said Shaw, “You couldn’t go anywhere without someone saying ‘Ma,’ and she’d turn around. She loved kids, her own and others. She was willing to take anybody’s kids in if they needed something. She was a mom for the whole valley.”

“Shirley was so sweet and friendly,” said horseman and longtime family friend Claude Miller, who was a generation younger than Haase. “She always liked the cowboys, even the little cowboys. She used to call [my brother] Carl and me her little cowboys. She taught us to dance at the old barn. Everyone in town called Shirley and Sandy ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa.’”

Lucy talks about Shirley teaching his own children to make fudge. “She had such a warm heart for people,” he said.

“Shirley definitely had opinions about people,” said Talbot. “But if she liked you, she loved you.”

Native roots

A member of the Snohomish tribe, Haase grew up hearing a story of her Native American ancestry. Both paternal grandparents were half Native, and one of them was descended from a Bella Coola/Nuxalk ancestor, from coastal British Columbia.

As a child, the ancestor allegedly escaped a raid on his Canadian village by paddling a canoe down the western North American coastline before landing in southern Washington, where he wound up in an orphanage.

The narrative passed from generation to generation until Haase took a trip up to the Bella Coola River Valley area and went into a small library to try to verify the story.

After describing her situation to the librarian, Haase was told “Wait here.” A while later, the librarian returned with a tribal elder. “We know your story,” the elder told Haase.

“It made Shirley so happy to hear that,” Don Ashford said. “Her family kept that story alive for generations.”

Storytelling

Stories were integral to Haase’s life; she eventually even wrote a memoir and distributed a limited run of the manuscript to family and close friends. Haase was a consummate storyteller, drawing on her vast experience with life on Methow Valley homesteads and ranches, Shaw said.

“I spent one or two days a week with Shirley for nearly 20 years and never once did she tell me the same story,” Shaw said. “If she started to, she’d correct herself and tell me, ‘I already told you that one.’”

“Later in life when she wasn’t so comfortable driving, I’d take her over to Omak,” Shaw said. “I’d hear about riding into the hills to go get cattle with Sandy. She had so many stories about that time in the valley. The stories were so rich. For me they were endlessly fascinating.”

Several years before she passed, Haase mentioned to the Ashfords that she’d never taken a helicopter ride.

The Ashfords made a call to North Cascades Heli co-owner Paul Butler, who “was totally down with it,” said Don Ashford. “So Shirley got to go up in a helicopter and see her old stomping grounds from the air.”

When the chopper landed, said Ashford, “Shirley got out and said ‘I didn’t mean that I actually wanted to go up in one of those things!’” But what a story she had to tell afterwards.

“When we were trying to put off having Shirley move to Jamie’s Place toward the end, we formed the Pajama Club,” said Talbot. “We took turns spending the night with her. We’d make dinner and then spend the night at her house. We did that for nine months, and for me that were some of the neatest evenings of my life. I got to hear her stories – I learned so much about her life and history, her great love with Sandy, and her shenanigans.”

“She had such a spirit, such spunk,” said Sara Ashford. “She was a real character. You could tell that she was the life-of-the-party kind of person. She used to be in a band called the Kitchen Band, with a group of ladies who played on pots and pans and marched in the ’49er Days parade. She had such a young spirit; it was like she was a teenager.”

“There are some stories there,” Miller agrees. “But maybe some of them should stay among friends.”

Whiskey Wednesdays

Whiskey Wednesday was “started by accident,” said Shaw. “In the dead of winter, I’d go get Shirley and we’d have a whiskey at [Three Fingered] Jack’s and then go home. It turned into a regular thing for us, and then it became a group thing. At first it was just in the winter, but then we started doing it year-round. Up until COVID we went all the time, even when we had to take Shirley in her wheelchair.”

The Ashfords became regulars at Whiskey Wednesday “because it was such a nice way to get to see Shirley every week,” said Don Ashford, who owns the KTRT-FM radio station. “She was such an interesting person. Sometimes I’d turn on my phone in my pocket and just record my talks with her.”

“Sometimes it was just the three of us ladies at Whiskey Wednesday. It was like we were carrying the torch,” said Sara Ashford of herself, Haase and Shaw. “We were three mothers who had experienced things like loved ones passing away. Two of us had lost a son. We were all three united in that unique way. We were tough ladies who spanned a few generations, and we loved the valley as Home, capital ‘H.’ We planted our love here.”

The Barn

Haase’s contributions to the Methow Valley community were vast, chief among them her championing of the reconstruction of the Winthrop Auditorium, known as “the Barn.”

Originally a wooden Quonset structure, the gathering space collapsed under the weight of the 1971 snow load, leaving the Methow Valley without a large community venue. Haase, along with six other women from the American Legion Auxiliary, spearheaded the rebuilding effort, from fundraising through construction.

“We seven donated $1,000 each to get started,” Haase said in a 2019 interview. “That was a lot of money in those days.”

Haase said that she and the other women­—who became known as the “Auxiliary Seven” —as well as scores of other community members, would wrap up their day jobs and head over to the Barn to work until dark.

“Everyone pitched in,” Haase said. “We all helped with everything, even if we hadn’t done that kind of thing before. Everybody wanted to have our place back. There was no question about not rebuilding.”

Love

The Haases’ courtship had a fairy tale beginning, and long past when death parted them the marriage retained the rare and precious qualities of freshness and devotion. Even long after Sandy passed, said Shaw, “You couldn’t spend a day with Shirley without her talking about how much she loved and missed Sandy.”

The marriage and the love story always came up for Haase, said Don Ashford. “She meets Sandy when she is 17 years old and she’s just struck­—she knows she’s going to marry him. That’s how she thought about him, even into her 90s.”

Haase used to tell Miller, “One thing about that old Sandy is he sure can make a nice nest on a hillside.”

“I bet Shirley was a shiny-looking girl at 17,” Miller continued. “Sandy used to sing ‘Wings of a Snow White Dove’ to her, and ‘Red River Valley,’ in their private time. They were very happy together. They had a great marriage. Hard workers, hard players.”

Land

The Haases were bound to the land through farming and ranching life; they spent hours and days riding up into the hills moving cattle and exploring the country. After 1998, when Sandy passed away, Haase still went out into the woods whenever she could. She even worked for the U.S. Forest Service until she was 80 years old.

“It kept her busy, and took her mind off the loss of Sandy and then Johnny,” Shaw said.

The Haases were big hunters and loved to go into the mountains, Lucy said. “They were always very connected to the Methow.”

Later, Shaw said, when Haase had more trouble getting out, they’d drive together up 30-Mile. “That would make her day.”

Sara Ashford, too, remembers taking Haase out for drives. “We’d go out the Chewuch and Shirley would point up into the hills and say ‘Look out there. That’s where we’d go every summer with the cows.’ She was so attached to this place.”

Don Ashford said, “With Shirley you got this feeling that she loved it here and never wanted to leave. We all like it here, but Shirley had a depth to her connection. I worry that too many people don’t have that depth now.”

Sara Ashford agrees. “There was something very connecting about it, between us and the place. It was just something we could all feel. It was very special to us all.”

Haase’s friends say she never stopped remembering or talking about her “cowboy days” out in the hills. Said Shaw, “I’ve heard her say many times, ‘I’ve had a good ride.’ If she were here today, she would say that for sure: ‘I’ve had a good ride.’”

The Haase family said that a memorial for Shirley Haase will be held in the future, when the community can “send her off in style.”