30 Years of FISH
As the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery (FISH) celebrated its 30th anniversary (1993-2023), long time volunteer Grace Reamer compiled the historical accounts of the people who founded the organization.
In 1992, as the State of Washington listed the Issaquah Salmon hatchery for closure, a group of community members rallied to save the hatchery. Built in 1936 as one of many public works projects carried out during the Great Depression, the hatchery was in dire need of repair. City and county officials, business leaders, teachers and students began a letter-writing campaign that eventually got a reprieve for the hatchery and funding for another year. By the summer of 1993, FISH was incorporated and the first board members were generating ideas for sustaining the hatchery. Eventually, city officials committed up to $500,000 of matching funds to renovate the hatchery. As FISH Founder, Steve Bell explains, at the time that was a lot of money for a town of 10,000 people!
Click on the photos to read the accounts of our key founders. A special thank you to Grace Reamer for collecting and writing their stories.
Brodie Antipa: Promoting Partnerships
The Issaquah Salmon Hatchery didn’t have much to recommend itself back in 1995, when Brodie Antipa first arrived. The aging incubation building needed a new roof and new equipment, and the old asphalt holding ponds were inefficient and difficult to manage adult spawning salmon.
“It was quite a bit more sterile than it is now,” with no signage or art or gardens or educational exhibits, Antipa said. “It was kind of dark and dreary.”
But change was starting. The old wooden weir – the fish passage barrier across Issaquah Creek – had just been replaced with a high-tech variable-height weir, thanks to matching funding from the City of Issaquah and the State of Washington. After it was threatened with closure, the hatchery was rescued through a community-wide lobbying effort to rebuild the facility as an education center. The first phase of the transformation had begun, and Antipa had been hand-picked to manage the hatchery and shepherd the next phases of the remodeling project.
“Mike Lewis had just left (as hatchery manager), and they knew what an important position it was,” with the new mission of the hatchery to deliver an environmental conservation message, Antipa said. “I knew how important it was going into it, and I knew that failure wasn’t an option. It didn’t take me long to realize that the hatchery was unique in many ways.”
At just 25 years old, Antipa was the new blood that the state Department of Fish and Wildlife sought to breathe new life into the 60-year-old hatchery. He practically grew up in the Fisheries Department, following the lead of his father, a state fisheries pathologist with a doctorate from the University of Washington.
Growing up in the Seattle and Olympia areas, “I always loved to be outside fishing and working with the fish,” Antipa remembered. Just like his father, he completed his fisheries degree at the UW, and immediately went to work as a biologist at the Cedar River Hatchery, where DFW’s Sockeye program was just getting started. In fact, he continued his Sockeye work on the Cedar part-time while managing the Issaquah hatchery.
He remembered being awe-struck by the huge support network he found surrounding the Issaquah hatchery – with city officials, state politicians, businesses, the Muckleshoot Tribe, non-profit organizations and community volunteers all working together to save and promote the hatchery.
“I don’t think of any other time in my career when I’ve seen such a collaboration,” Antipa said. “The volunteers were so awesome back then – a lot of laughter and a lot of smiles. We simply couldn’t do it at Issaquah without volunteers.”
He has fond memories of the volunteer business owners mobilized by Chamber of Commerce Director Suzanne Suther to plant flowers and spruce up garden beds at the hatchery. Issaquah Salmon Days Festival Director Robin Kelley always helped him get the hatchery ready for the annual festival that hosted up to 200,000 people on the first weekend in October.
He also credits Steve Bell, founder and first executive director of the non-profit Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, for mentoring him, lobbying for grants and funding, and coordinating exhibit installations as well as the educational programming. Antipa learned to focus on the partnerships and the team effort that would make the hatchery and its messaging so successful, he said.
“We’ve known for a long time that hatcheries are necessary if you want to have cities and urban development,” Antipa said. But the state didn’t have a way to share that message with the public, until the proposal to use the Issaquah hatchery for outreach about environmental stewardship. “It was a real wake-up call for the department. Society has traded the habitat for development, and that’s the story that the hatchery can tell. Issaquah was really the first place to do it that I’m aware of in Washington.”
But it was a challenge. In the economic downturn of the mid-1990s, it wasn’t easy to justify the $6.5 million that the state eventually dedicated to three phases of redevelopment at the hatchery. The partnerships that Antipa and Bell cultivated kept the project moving forward, replacing the underground fish ladder with a longer ladder and underwater viewing windows. The old shallow holding ponds, where volunteers waded into the water with big nets to corral fish for harvesting eggs, were replaced with deeper ponds and automated crowders that improved fish survival. A new pedestrian bridge, twice as wide, was dropped into place by crane over Issaquah Creek, and new coho rearing ponds were dug on the south side. Best of all was the remodel of the historic incubation building, with its long row of windows and high-pitched roof, which got new equipment and roofing while maintaining the original appearance of the building.
“These old hatchery buildings just have a certain character that you can’t replace with a metal building,” Antipa said. “You almost feel a spirit within the building.”
In his nearly five years at the Issaquah hatchery, Antipa worked with the city on a partnership with the Darigold plant a few blocks away. That effort resulted in the installation of a waterline carrying pure well water that Darigold used to chill its butter to the hatchery, instead of just dumping it in the creek. At the hatchery, that pure water is mixed with creek water and used to incubate millions of salmon eggs, reducing the amount of sediment and pollutants bathing the incubation trays.
In 2000, Antipa was promoted to the complex management position for the Lake Washington drainage area, and then went on to serve as a hatchery reform coordinator. He’s now moved up to hatchery operations manager for all the facilities from Tokul Creek in Fall City down through the Green River system, where he works on reform efforts and changing policies based on new biological opinions and science.
So in 2020, it was Antipa who Kelley called in her new capacity as FISH’s executive director when the pandemic shut down public access to the hatchery. Because of the need for 24-hour on-call status for the three-person staff, complete closure was deemed necessary to reduce the risk of life-threatening illness. But Kelley proposed limited tours of small groups, with masking required, to meet the huge demand for safer, outdoor activities.
“This is going to be a hard sell,” Antipa told her. But his previous experience with the FISH organization assured him that they could do it safely, and he eventually got state permission for the tour program. “It took some time,” he said, “but Issaquah was then the only place in the state giving tours, and that was because of FISH.”
When he arrived nearly 30 years ago, FISH had a small core of volunteers helping with spawning and leading tours for students in the fall. Since then, with DFW support, FISH education programs have expanded to year-round, including spring science fairs and summer camps and a gift shop, along with a roster of more than 100 volunteers.
“I think there’s a huge value in what FISH has done to tell the story of salmon to the masses, to the people who wouldn’t normally hear it,” especially in how students learn about the links between salmon and their environment, Antipa said. “FISH is filling a niche and creating that value that wasn’t here before. You think about the magnitude and the number of people who have got exposure at the hatchery – it’s monumental. We can’t put a price on that.”
Brodie Antipa
Former Issaquah Hatchery Manager
Steve Bell: Forging FISHy Alliances
In 1992, as the State of Washington listed the Issaquah Salmon hatchery for closure, no one expected a community uprising of outrage. The sudden threat brought together a coalition of diverse people and interests, from real estate developers to environmentalists – factions accustomed to waging policy battles with one another rather than pitching for the same team. In the 5th Legislative District encompassing Issaquah, the Democratic senator and two Republican representatives agreed on very little, until the hatchery brought them together with a common cause.
“It is very rare that almost everyone in a community is sharing the same vision,” remembered Steve Bell, one of the founders and the first executive director of the non-profit Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery. “FISH was the opposite of polarization.”
Bell already had experience with public engagement through his service on the Issaquah Library Board, working on the effort to build a new King County Library in Issaquah, which now sits across Sunset Way from the hatchery. And then came four years of service on the Issaquah City Council, working on land use and groundwater issues and intergovernmental relations. Although the population of the town was less than 10,000, “Issaquah was always in a whirlwind of regional activities,” thanks to traffic woes in its crossroads location, Bell said. “It had big-city problems with a small-city budget.”
He already visited the hatchery often, thanks to its central location two blocks from City Hall and just a half-mile from his home. “I was fascinated by the salmon run,” Bell said. “It made Issaquah special and different.”
It also was the most-visited hatchery in the state, open to the public year-round, and the center of the annual Issaquah Salmon Days Festival. That’s why it came as a “total shock” when the state announced the impending closure of the hatchery due to budget cuts.
The dismay was immediate and galvanizing throughout the city, Bell said. The news was “like the evil lightning bolt with the stench of sulfur that came from Olympia,” and it felt “almost like Shakespearean betrayal.”
Along with city and county officials, business leaders, teachers and students, Bell jumped right into the letter-writing and testimony that eventually got a reprieve for the hatchery and funding for another year. That gave time to come up with a plan. By the summer of 1993, FISH was incorporated and the first board members were generating a multitude of ideas for sustaining the hatchery. But most of the board members were busy civic leaders who didn’t have time to track down funding sources or to fish for sponsors. Bell did have time, and he volunteered to take the lead on the efforts, putting his public service experience to work.
He admitted he had no experience with private fund-raising or with putting together the kind of coalition needed to turn around a state government bent on budget cuts. “But I knew there was all this positive energy,” and that inspired him to try something that hadn’t been done before with a hatchery in Washington. He pointed out that “the city was a little crazy about salmon. The Chamber of Commerce’s Salmon Days office had been doing wonderful, fun things for years celebrating the salmon – the Salmonchanted Evening dance, information volunteers call Salmbassadors. It was endlessly creative.”
Now retired and living in Arizona, Bell spoke by phone and reminisced about meeting with state lawmakers about how to add education to the core fish propagation mission, and by so doing, persuade the state to create a partnership unlike any other in Washington. Sen. Kathleen Drew pushed the concept of getting a commitment for matching funds, because “legislators wanted to be able to pitch this to their colleagues,” Bell said. He worked with city officials on a plan to commit up to $500,000 of city matching funds to badly needed renovations at the hatchery.
“The match was the big thing, and the council got widespread acceptance for that rather extraordinary allocation,” Bell said. “That was a risk for the councilmembers,” including hatchery champions Harris Atkins and Ava Frisinger. “They had to justify it.”
Next, he had many discussions with state Reps. Brian Thomas and Phil Dyer about the political process, and they outlined the “absolutely critical” importance of developing a facilities master plan, including cost estimates and timeline. They were able to get state funds allocated for the first part of a three-phase remodeling plan. Sen. Dino Rossi shepherded the final phase with a $3 million budget.
Eventually, the city and the county contributed funding to FISH to hire staff, and Bell was among at least 10 applicants for the executive director job. The board kept him on, and Bell quickly built a relationship with the Department of Fish and Wildlife staff.
“They (DFW) got religion about this working-with-the-community thing,” which was saving their facility and demonstrating how they were working with the community in a new way, Bell noted. They made space for him to move a desk into their hatchery office. But the busy office was not an ideal place to curry the favor of sponsors and donors, so FISH was granted the use of a fertilizer storage room in the hatchery garage. Bell had a desk and a phone and a portable space heater in the unheated room the size of a walk-in closet. Nonetheless, he said he was happy to have an office at all.
It was on the hatchery footbridge over the creek one day that Bell happened to meet Muckleshoot Tribe fish biologist Mike Mahovlich, who was watching the returning adult salmon. They quickly realized they had a shared interest in saving the hatchery, for education as well as fish production. “They have deep cultural reasons to try to maintain their fisheries,” Bell pointed out.
His efforts sent hundreds of letters to the governor from local officials, businesses, civic organizations such as Kiwanis, school district administrators, teachers and tribal officials. Most convincing, he said, were the letters and drawings from students, thanking FISH volunteers for teaching them about salmon and environmental conservation.
In his nine years leading FISH, Bell is proud of his work to incorporate educational exhibits on the hatchery grounds, as well as some unique art that is used for teaching. A giant mural depicting salmon predators and spawning now covers the curved walls of the water tower, designed and painted by local muralist Larry Kangas. In front of the incubation building is a pair of the most-photographed coho salmon in the state – the 8-foot-long bronze statues dubbed “Gilda and Finley.” The realistic sculptures were created by Chimacum artist Tom Jay, who also built an entire stream environment of plants, rocks, logs and gravel around the installation. Bell suggested the sculpture also could serve as a donation collection station, similar to Rachel the Pig at Pike Place Market. Jay agreed and installed a coin slot next to Finley’s dorsal fin. The cash, sometimes damp and moldy, poured in.
But even more than the thousands of dollars he raised and the political will that he fostered, Bell treasures the memories of students learning about salmon and their habitat – up close and personal. One day, he heard a tour of students screaming when a huge chinook salmon jumped out of the holding pond. Bell jumped into action, literally saving the salmon by wrestling the squirming fish back into the water. The kids cheered and Bell was a hero – at least for a moment.
“Yes, it was complicated at times,” said Bell, who moved to Portland and new challenges in 2002 after the hatchery remodel was completed. “But I had so many good people and good vibes and good ideas to work with. Everybody was activated about the project. There was all this positive momentum. Many, many people wanted to be part of something wonderful that was happening right in front of them.”
Steve Bell
FISH Founder & First Executive Director
Saving the Hatchery Around the Corner: Debbie Berto
When Debbie Berto learned about the proposed closure of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, it hit a personal note for the publisher of The Issaquah Press. The historic hatchery was just around the corner from the weekly newspaper office. Just a few steps out of the back door and through a gap in the fence, the hatchery was literally in the backyard.
She vividly remembered that day in 1992 when editor Andrew McKean was going through the mail and came across a press release from the state Department of Fisheries about proposed budget cuts, including hatchery closures. One line buried in the notice would change the future of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, as well as the entire community.
“It was 10 days before Salmon Days, the annual festival that regularly attracts 200,000 visitors to Issaquah to witness the salmon migration and celebrate the annual spawning season,” Berto said. “We came out with a front-page story right before Salmon Days, on Wednesday, with this screaming headline about the possible closure.”
In the Sept. 30 edition, just below the masthead, The Press announced in ominous bold letters, “Salmon Hatchery slated to close. Budget cuts responsible for probable closure next spring.” On page 4, Berto’s editorial implored, “Issaquah so far has only one aggressive economic development plan – tourism. At the head of the attractions list is the Washington State Salmon Hatchery. Now more than ever, its worth to the city must be recognized, and fought for.”
Below the editorial, Berto printed a petition and urged readers to sign on in support of keeping it open for the educational and economic value of the 1936 facility. A few days later, Issaquah Chamber of Commerce volunteers carried copies of the petition around during the Salmon Days Festival and collected signatures. Students of teacher Doug Emery, who had been hatching salmon eggs in a school aquarium, put up butcher paper on the hatchery fence and collected more signatures and pictures. Support soon coalesced around the educational aspect of the hatchery’s operations.
“The real shock is that the state fisheries staff has not bothered to consider the educational value of this interpretive center that is has worked hard to develop over the past 10 years,” Berto wrote. “The Issaquah hatchery is the closest one to a metropolitan area, and no doubt has the most visitors, from school groups and area families to international tourists.”
The community mobilized immediately. Just a week later, in a public hearing at South Seattle Community College, at least 70 students, business people, politicians and citizens flooded the fisheries staff with testimony about the hatchery, The Press reported. They delivered stacks of petitions and unrolled a huge sign full of student drawings and community messages. That grassroots movement was the beginning of a 30-year effort to create a center where salmon could teach a broad audience about environmental conservation. Berto and The Press were there the whole way, capturing the community’s rescue of the hatchery in gripping stories, photos and more editorials.
By then, Berto already was personally involved with salmon through her volunteer work with the city’s tourism committee. Years earlier, the committee was granted funding to bring in a speaker and put on a seminar for local business owners about how to “Seek Unique” and promote tourism, she said.
“It gave us the motivation, prioritizing what we’ve got,” she remembered. “The hatchery was high on the list, obviously.”
Berto and her husband, Tom Norton, volunteered to bring attention to the hatchery with some visual enhancements. “The first priority was to get the lobby fixed up,” with some signage and an aquarium showcasing salmon fry, she said.
She remembers their project to draw attention to the old round adult salmon pond, used to display salmon in the fall. During the off season, when the ponds were empty, Berto and Norton painted colorful stripes on the asphalt around the ponds, and then used a stencil to spray paint silver salmon on them. While the parents painted, their 2-year-old son played in the middle of the empty pond – and kept out of trouble.
As a newspaper publisher as well as a community volunteer, Berto had a unique perspective of the town’s values and resources. Fresh out of Central Washington University, and armed with degrees in journalism and sociology, she spent a legislative term working in communications for the House of Representatives in Olympia. There, she met Sen. John Murray, who happened to be the publisher of The Press at the time, and he steered her to a job in Issaquah in 1973. She spent nearly 41 years at The Press before retiring in 2014.
Along the way, she founded Issaquah Women Professionals in 1983 and also served as vice president of the Issaquah Chamber. She got involved with the Issaquah Kiwanis in 1987, the first year that they allowed women to join and is still a member. Her community leadership list is lengthy and she was named to the Issaquah Hall of Fame in 2013. She credits the town’s long-standing tradition of volunteerism with much of its success, including the rescue of the salmon hatchery.
Just as important was The Press coverage of the hatchery rescue efforts and then the formation of the non-profit Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery. She kept the story in the weekly headlines, and the community responded. The Press even printed the annual FISH reports about the number of volunteer tours provided and eggs collected at the hatchery each year.
“I always said, ‘The reason this town is so strong is that it has such a great newspaper,’” she recalled. Although The Press closed in 2017, another victim of declining print media revenue after 117 years in business, community volunteers still keep the hatchery running.
It was only natural that Berto would volunteer with the formation of FISH in 1993, and she served on the board of directors for 10 years. She even gave tours to school groups occasionally, as the buses unloaded just a few steps from her office. And she still maintains her membership to celebrate the program she helped build.
“Your heart can’t leave something that you’ve put your whole self into,” she says.
Debbie Berto
Former Publisher of the Issaquah Press
When Randy Harrison moved to Issaquah in 1989, it was a small, sleepy town in the hills east of Seattle, with just 6,700 residents. that was a big change for the guy from Orlando, moving all the way across the country with his family. but Issaquah offered something he couldn’t get just anywhere – quality of life.
The Issaquah salmon hatchery was a big part of that connection to community and the environment that Harrison sought. He took his kids to visit the hatchery soon after arriving, and they learned to appreciate the remarkable migration of the fish returning every fall.
Now 79, tall and lanky, Harrison made early connections with the natural environment working as a foreign correspondent in the 1980s for the Orlando sentinel. He wrote about war in Africa and Israeli patrols in Lebanon, and then he spent six months researching the destruction of rainforests around the world. Summer vacations to Hood Canal (his then-wife was from Washington) were spent hiking at Hurricane Ridge and watching Chum spawning in peninsula streams. the lure of the Puget Sound area was strong and they decided to relocate.
But journalism jobs locally were in short supply back then. after getting rejections from the Seattle Times and Seattle P-I, Harrison found work with the Boeing co., and he soon moved into media relations and became a spokesman for Boeing. Now retired, he still lives in the Squak mountain house on acreage filled with wildlife that the family bought when they arrived in town.
Always a fan of local news, he remembered reading in 1993 about the impending closure of the hatchery in the Issaquah press. He followed the story of the volunteers who lobbied in Olympia and successfully saved the hatchery. Perhaps the most influential factor was the city of Issaquah’s pledge to spend $500,000 rebuilding the hatchery, he said. it was a huge sum for a small town to contribute toward a state-owned facility.
“The more I learned, the more wonderful – as in, full of wonder – it became,” he said. “You get your foot over the threshold and you get drawn into, “what can I do?’”
By 1995, Harrison was volunteering with the newly formed FISH, after taking a class with a dozen or so other volunteers, including his neighbor, crash Nash. Both of them soon were serving on the board of directors as well as leading tours for school students.
“One of the earliest recollections I have about the board was about messaging,” Harrison said. “how many key messages can we have?” his experience with public relations helped the board narrow its focus down to, “this is the site of an annual miracle. we’ve altered the environment so completely, hatcheries are necessary, and here’s the reason why.”
“It wasn’t so much saving the hatchery,” he said, “but why does it matter? It was about the absolutely fundamental key role that salmon play in the entire environment.”
In his leadership role at Boeing, Harrison was able to enlist company support for FISH in the form of a $25,000 grant to outfit the new theater with video equipment, cabinet, and benches. His legacy is the theater and its ongoing video presentation about the amazing salmon migration during spawning season, which helps turn the hatchery into a year-round educational facility.
He also advocated sharing the salmon story with students, and the addition of the salmon curriculum to the Issaquah school district’s elementary grades “may be one of the most underappreciated long-term benefits,” he said. The salmon in the classroom program that lets schools hatch salmon eggs in class and then release them in local streams, combined with FISH’s salmon biology, lifecycle and habitat lessons, leaves a lasting impression on young people. Those students then grow up to be the voters and leaders who will value the vital role of salmon in the environment.
“The mere act of witnessing this miracle has a transformative effect,” he observed. One of Harrison’s most meaningful hatchery memories occurred during the annual salmon days festival, about 20 years ago. He was just walking onto the hatchery grounds, getting ready for his volunteer shift in the morning as early visitors were arriving. He spotted two young men in purple-and-gold University of Washington jerseys walking up to the bridge with a young woman between them. He heard her complaining loudly, “I can’t believe you dragged me out here just to see fish!” Intrigued, Harrison stood by to see her reaction. After looking over the bridge and into the Chinook-filled waters of Issaquah Creek, “she said, ‘do you mean all these fish are here to make babies and then die?’ they said, ‘yes,’ and she just burst into tears.”
Two decades later, you can still find Harrison hanging out on the bridge in his trademark hat, instilling visitors with a sense of wonder about salmon.
Randy Harrison
Former Boeing Spokesperson
Adopting an appropriate acronym: FISH
Volunteering comes naturally to Rowan Hinds. Maybe that’s why he fits in so well in the City of Issaquah, where volunteerism has been a community ethic for generations.
Over the years, he has volunteered with the city’s Traffic Task Force, the Issaquah Food and Clothing Bank, the Issaquah History Museum and Nourishing Networks, among others. So in 1979, it seemed like the next thing to do was volunteer for the Issaquah City Council.
“I had never even been to City Hall before,” Hinds admitted. But his neighbor, whose daughter was a babysitter for Hinds’ three girls, was relocated for his work with Boeing and had to give up his City Council position mid-term. Hinds was the only applicant to fill the seat on the seven-member council. He got the appointment.
By 1992, and four elections later, Hinds was serving as the city’s part-time mayor when the news broke that the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery was slated for closure. From his City Hall office just three blocks away, he knew the city would need to take action and find a way to help save the facility that brought so many visitors to town and served as the heart of the 22-year-old Salmon Days Festival.
“The community was growing fast back then, and anything that involved the school district was important to the city,” he said. “Anything that involved Issaquah Creek was important to the city.”
He remembered when the Inaugural Flood of 1990 inundated Issaquah will the muddy waters of Issaquah Creek just after Hinds was sworn in as mayor, following 10 years serving on the City Council. The historic flood damaged homes and businesses and shut down Newport Way as well as other roads and schools. At the hatchery, nearly a million coho fry were washed downstream when flood waters overwhelmed the rearing ponds.
Less than three years later, the new threat came in a flood of budget cuts from Olympia. The community started mobilizing, and the effort to save the hatchery united diverse public and private groups. Business owners, philanthropic organizations, educators and public officials all promoted the benefits that the hatchery brought to Issaquah and the broader community – from education to economic development.
For the Issaquah Chamber of Commerce, its Salmon Days Festival was the annual fund-raiser as well as the biggest community celebration. What would Salmon Days be without salmon?
It was the Chamber that chartered a bus and filled it with business owners, city officials and school district teachers and students, all headed for Olympia with signs and strong words of support for keeping the hatchery open. Mayor Hinds was part of the delegation riding south to meet with state lawmakers.
Part of the planning on the trip was coming up with a name for the support effort as well as strategies for continuing salmon culture in Issaquah.
“I’ve always liked acronyms. I guess I’ve always had a thing about words,” Hinds said. “The thing is to come up with an acronym that actually describes the activity.”
Once he realized that the first letters of Issaquah Salmon Hatchery spelled I.S.H., it didn’t take long for him to suggest adding Friends to the name. Thus was born the most appropriate acronym – Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, or F.I.S.H. The name was adopted immediately and quickly gave a very vivid identity to the volunteer effort.
Hinds went on to work with state officials on funding ideas for the hatchery. State Sen. Kathleen Drew suggested that the city as well as other agencies might partner and contribute to the costs of remodeling the 1936 hatchery to modernize and repair the facility. The city eventually offered to match state funds up to $500,000, a proposal that City Administrator Leon Kos crafted, Hinds said.
“There was pretty much, I think, unanimity because it was the right answer,” he remembered. That offer was a big commitment for a small town of fewer than 6,000 people, but it helped change the direction at the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
“Government should be a facilitator,” Hinds observed. “Government needs to be effective, not efficient.”
He didn’t start out as a candidate to become a public official. Originally from California, he studied at Oregon State University and did three years in the Army before going to work for Northern Pacific Railway in Longview. Following the upheaval of the merger with Burlington Northern, Hinds moved on to work as a logging supervisor for contractors with Weyerhaeuser. That brought him to Issaquah in 1971, and he and his wife, Barb, built their house in 1972. They still live in it.
By the late 1970s, “I was looking for a new challenge,” he said. The seat on the City Council proved to be just the ticket. After 10 years of legislating, he jumped into the race for mayor upon the retirement of A. J. Culver. Unlike many other small towns, Issaquah has a strong-mayor form of government, in which the mayor is elected separately and serves as an administrator, rather than the more common method of electing a mayor from among the councilmembers.
It was a part-time job then, Hinds recalled. He would finish a day of work at Weyerhaeuser, arrive at City Hall around 4:30 p.m., and then head home after 7 p.m. On City Council nights, meetings sometimes ran until after midnight.
Those years of rapid growth brought with them plenty of problems for the mayor to tackle. Land use, zoning and development were at the top of the list, along with traffic and a bypass proposal, flooding and the fire department. Right in the middle came the sudden and shocking hatchery closure announcement. Even with his hands full, Hinds took on the challenge and led the city’s successful effort to partner on the remodeling project.
“I always saw myself as a catalyst,” he said. “Wonderful things happen if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
Honored with Issaquah’s annual Hall of Fame Award in 2016, Hinds still embraces the town motto that he popularized decades ago: “Issaquah – a special place where people care.”
Rowan Hinds
Former Issaquah Mayor
Just two years into his new job in fisheries management with the Muckleshoot Tribe, Mike Mahovlich got a desperate phone call. It was Steve Bell from Issaquah on the line. News had just broken that the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife planned to close the historic Issaquah Salmon Hatchery. City officials, Chamber of Commerce members, students and citizen volunteers were mobilizing to save the hatchery. Would Mahovlich and the Tribe be able to help?
Immediately, Mahovlich realized the stakes involved. Without the Issaquah hatchery supporting survival of chinook and coho stocks in the Lake Washington basin, the runs would likely decline and disappear within a few years. By 1992, evidence of the environmental damage created by urban development was showing up in local waters.
“Especially in the Lake Washington watershed, we started to see things crashing with the sockeye run,” Mahovlich remembered. “At the same time, the state was giving up on the Issaquah hatchery.”
Now serving as assistant director of harvest management for the Muckleshoot Tribe, Mahovlich remembered those years in the early 1990s as the Tribe’s fisheries work expanded following the Boldt decision assuring tribal treaty rights to half of the harvestable fish runs. Tribal operations were very small then, but he started projects such as fry trapping in the Cedar River to assess survival rates as well as expanding the hand-counting of returning adult salmon at the Ballard Locks. Among all of the non-native predation, warm water conditions and pollution, the proposed closure of the Issaquah hatchery was a new threat to the Northwest’s iconic fish.
“You never walk away when things are bad; you do the exact opposite and dig your heels in,” Mahovlich said. “The Issaquah hatchery is the heart and soul of the chinook and coho runs for the whole Lake Washington basin.”
He jumped right into the Issaquah community effort to save the hatchery. “We had just a small group, but I knew I could get the Tribe involved at the policy level including a strong lobbying effort approved by the council,“ he said. With treaty rights to harvesting salmon throughout its historical fishing grounds, the Muckleshoot Tribe serves as a co-manager of the salmon runs and has a great interest in their survival.
“We told the state early on not only that the hatchery was not going away, but we were going to rebuild it better than ever for the salmon, both adults and juveniles, along with a very strong educational program, which hadn’t been done at any state facility. I got right into the middle and came up with the master plan in phases.”
Those phases – starting with replacing the migration-blocking weir, followed by a new fish ladder and holding ponds, then rearing ponds and a watershed science center – helped convince the state to maintain and rebuild the community and regional resource in Issaquah.
“The final powerful message that was being carried (to Olympia) was the need to start educating the public,” Mahovlich said. “That was a huge missing link at state hatcheries.” Because of Issaquah’s close proximity to a major urban area and its easy access in the middle of old town a short distance from I-5, the Issaquah hatchery was promoted as the best place in the state for public outreach about salmon and habitat conservation.
“It’s an investment into the next seven generations,” Mahovlich said, referring to the Native philosophy of managing natural resources so that descendants seven generations away will still benefit from the same environment. “We need to be not so short-sighted. The salmon habitat is not coming back.”
He said he believes that people can learn to live alongside fish while mitigating the habitat damage done by urban development.
“How do we make sure the cities embrace it? How do we keep the fish alive for the next seven generations?” he wondered. The rebuilt hatchery, combining fish culture with education, was the answer. “There should be sustainable, harvestable fish for everyone. You have to work with what you got in hand, and that is not much when it comes to salmon standards in this urban concrete jungle of a watershed. You can’t go to Target and buy a new watershed.”
As the hatchery promotion efforts heated up, Mahovlich moved from Seattle to Issaquah and joined the board of the newly formed Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery. For years, he helped steer the new non-profit agency as it developed education programs and solicited grants and donations. He trained volunteer recruits to interpret the salmon story and explain their biology, lifecycle and habitat needs to the many thousands of visitors arriving at the hatchery to view the annual migration spectacle.
“What I am most proud of when it comes to the education side of the hatchery is that the final rebuilding master plan incorporated my idea of putting in glass walls so all visitors could get race to face and inches away from these magnificent adult salmon,” Mahovlich said. “This is a learning experience for everyone young and old to enjoy.”
His passion for fish started very early in life, growing up in Coquitlam, B.C. and fishing for trout in his backyard stream. As a teenager, he turned to athletics and earned a scholarship to the University of Washington in track and field, where he threw the javelin. His prowess in the sport even earned him two trips to the Olympics with the Canadian team, and he continued to compete, working through an Achilles tendon injury, retiring in 1990 after the Commonwealth Games in Aukland, New Zealand.
After college, he returned to Canada and worked with the Pacific Salmon Commission and Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Vancouver, B.C. Eventually, he applied for a job with the Washington Department of Wildlife (before it merged with Fisheries). He was offered a volunteer position. Disappointed, he continued looking, and two weeks later, in the autumn of 1990, saw the posting for the Muckleshoot job. As he prepared to go in for his interview, he saw one of his college professors walk out ahead of him, and once again was prepared to be disappointed. Instead, he ended up as the 77th employee hired by the Tribe.
Thirty-four years later, he’s constantly called upon to develop policies and strategies in the ongoing efforts to save struggling salmon populations. As threatened Puget Sound chinook were experiencing pre-spawn mortality and not making it through the lakes and rivers to their spawning grounds, Mahovlich devised an experiment that transferred a few adult chinook from the Locks where they entered fresh water directly to the Issaquah hatchery. It worked.
Encouraged by the success, he proposed to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) extending it to the decimated sockeye run. In June of 2021, as Seattle experienced a heat dome and record high temperatures above 100 degrees, the co-managers started the transfer by dip-netting live sockeye at the Ballard locks fish ladder, placing them in a live tank on a boat, then hauling them to a Port of Seattle landing station. The fish then were loaded in truck tanks to drive to the Cedar River hatchery at Landsburg. They devised three different acclimation processes during the six-hour trip to help the fish adapt to the varying water temperatures.
Over the past three summers, the program moved more than 3,000 sockeye without one enroute mortality. All the fish made it to the hatchery safely and ripened in holding ponds over the next four months, finishing their life cycle with a very high spawning success rate. Now known as BLAST (Ballards Locks Adult Sockeye Transfer), the program has given the co-managers hope that the Tribe and local residents will again enjoy sockeye fisheries in Lake Washington where, a few years ago, it looked like extinction was likely to happen in the very near future.
Thanks to his work on partnerships with the Tribe, WDFW and non-profit organizations, other projects are making progress on protecting the Lake Sammamish kokanee as well as Cedar River sockeye through extended rearing of fry at the Issaquah hatchery and reducing non-native predators such as bass and perch. He pointed out that the importance of the work at the Issaquah hatchery extends well beyond the community and the watershed, because so many people and species depend on hatchery origin salmon, such as the Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) or orca populations – the J, K and L pods – which prefer the large chinook salmon for food.
Mahovlich still mourns the loss of the steelhead run in the Lake Washington basin, which includes Lake Sammamish and the Issaquah Creek watershed. The Issaquah hatchery at one time raised steelhead to release into the watershed, but eventually, federally protected sea lions cornered the returning fish in tight quarters as they entered the fish ladder at the Ballard Locks, and ate most of them.
“I don’t want to lose another species on my watch,” he said.
Mike Mahovlich
FIsheries Manager of Muckleshoot Tribe
The Original Guide
For Suzanne Suther, her love affair with the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery all started about 50 years ago, when she was hired in 1974 as a step-on tour guide for a tourist bus tour company in Seattle. For the day-long tour, she had to learn quickly about the small-town sights in Woodinville, Snoqualmie and Issaquah, including Gilman Village, Boehm’s Chocolates and the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery.
As a gregarious and enthusiastic guide, Suther learned the basics of the salmon life cycle and enchanted her tourists with stories of the amazing migration of the Chinook and Coho back to the stream of their birth. She already had history with fishing, after catching her first fish at age 10. She loved to share fishing stories, including the time she caught a 45-pound Chinook. Her experience and passion were a perfect fit for her tour to the hatchery.
“Having done that, I became very, very, in love with the hatchery,” she remembered. People from all over the world joined her tours, and the salmon were “the thing they wanted to know about most. Their awe – that was all they talked about. That left a tremendous impression on me.”
But the hatchery back then was not a very welcoming place. The staff were not interested in talking to visitors. The bathrooms were locked. The trash cans were beat up and dirty. It was a fish production operation rather than a public park. Suther soon joined the board of the Issaquah Chamber of Commerce and worked on ways to improve the appearance of the hatchery. She made a deal with a local nursery for a large batch of geraniums, then planted the flowers around the hatchery grounds and got staff to agree to water them. That was just the beginning of her promotional and educational work.
She went as far as Olympia to get attention for the hatchery. On a trip back from visiting her sister in Portland, on a whim, she pulled off I-5 at the state Capitol and made her way to the state Fisheries Office. She asked to speak to someone about the Issaquah Hatchery. That’s how she met Will Ashcraft, a fisheries manager who happened to have started his career at the Issaquah hatchery. She talked to the sympathetic administrator about how the Issaquah facility, with its easily accessible location, could be used to promote salmon conservation. With a month, she remembered, the unaccommodating hatchery manager was transferred, and a new manager arrived carrying the mission to make connections with the community.
Back in the early 1970s, Issaquah was still a small town in the Cascade foothills, looking for a way to distinguish itself. The annual Labor Day Festival and Parade had just finished its decades-long run as the town’s main civic celebration. City leaders sought a new way to show their civic pride.
Members of the Chamber and the Kiwanis Club met to discuss what they could do to promote Issaquah, Suther remembered The Issaquah Press editorialized about the need for an effort to bring tourism to town to support the local economy. That soon led to the City of Issaquah forming an ad hoc Development of Tourism Committee, with Suther as the chair.
“We determined what we had that was tourism-worthy, and of course, the hatchery was on the list, and we developed a five-year plan,” Suther said. They got some money from the state to help promote tourism. Along the way, the small Salmon Days Festival, started in 1970 on the first weekend of October, became a Seafair-sanctioned event and started to bring tens of thousands of people to town. Salmon had become the city’s signature draw.
That’s why it was such a shock in 1992 when the headline in the Issaquah Press broke the news that the hatchery was slated for permanent closure, said Suther, who by then was serving as executive director of the Chamber.
The community quickly mobilized. Teacher Doug Emery, who taught his students about salmon by hatching eggs in a classroom aquarium, created a mural of the pictures and signs drawn by children to take to Olympia. Businessman Skip Rowley offered to fund buses to send school students to Olympia to testify. Issaquah Press Publisher Debbie Berto kept the issue at the top of the front page, and her editorials called for saving the hatchery. The tourism committee worked with 5th Legislative District Rep. Brian Thomas, who got money allocated for a study to determine what needed to be done to upgrade the aging hatchery. That study formed the foundation of the remodeling plan.
That effort spawned the formation of FISH, the non-profit Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, with the mission of saving the hatchery and developing an educational program around the facility.
“The educational factor here at the hatchery is so basic to the whole protection of the world around us,” Suther said. “Learning about fish here has such a meaningful impact on the lives of students. It’s a magnificent story.”
She remembered that the Thomas Wittington Law Firm donated services to draw up and file the FISH incorporation papers. She and founding member Fred Kempe signed the incorporation certificate on Aug. 16, 1993. She credited Issaquah Mayor Rowan Hinds with suggesting the name for the new non-profit, creating the best acronym ever – FISH. She went on to serve on the FISH Board of Directors for many years and guide the organization through development of educational and volunteer programs and the remodeling project.
After 50 years of dedication to the hatchery, 85-year-old Suther still returns from her Bellevue home to volunteer with FISH at the annual celebration of Salmon Days. “I have such a sense of pride and ownership in this place.”
Suzanne Suther
Former Executive Director, Issaquah Chamber of Commerce
Three Generations of FISHing in Issaquah
When Jake Magill decided a couple of years ago to move back to the community where he grew up, it really was a homecoming.
After living in Seattle for several years following graduation from the University of Washington, he found just the house he wanted on Squak Mountain. “When I was looking for a house, I thought Issaquah would be my dream location,” he said, mostly because it would be closer to family and to nature. “I found this great house, and it’s in the forest, and it’s a 10-minute walk into downtown.” He put down the deposit.
His family was excited to have him returning to town, and his grandfather drove by the house. Then he gave Magill some unexpected news: “Your great grandfather built that house.”
With its signature cedar-walled closets, the house was easy to identify as the work of legendary Issaquah builder George Rowley Sr., said his son, Skip Rowley, also known as Magill’s grandfather. Now Chairman of the Board, Rowley led the family property development and management company, Rowley Properties, in constructing the Hyla Crossing and Rowley Center neighborhoods among many other commercial and residential projects in Issaquah.
So after Jake got settled in his new Issaquah home and wanted to get involved in the community, he didn’t have to look further than his family’s other passion – FISH. While his grandfather helped save the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery from closure 30 years ago, his aunt, Rowley’s daughter Kelly Richardson, was just retiring from 11 years on the board of the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery. It didn’t take much convincing to recruit Magill to join the board as a third-generation salmon advocate. In 2023, he followed in the grand family tradition, based on stories of the hatchery’s rescue before he was born.
Always immersed in community-building efforts, Rowley was serving as president of the Issaquah Chamber of Commerce while running the family business following the death of his father. He remembers the day in 1992 when he arrived at the Chamber office for a meeting with Executive Director Suzanne Suther, and she screamed and waved the latest edition of the Issaquah Press with the headline about the proposed hatchery closure.
“At first, I didn’t believe it,” Rowley said. “You would never have expected that anyone would want to shut that fish hatchery down. That was a real shock.”
Now known for its high level of citizen involvement and volunteerism, the community in Issaquah wasn’t always like that, he observed. Before 1992, it was a small town with about 7,000 residents, an historic downtown and a growing commercial center that served as a bedroom community for Bellevue.
“There wasn’t a spirit of cooperation here,” Rowley remembered. “There wasn’t an idea that we need to do anything special.” The businesses, the city government and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife all operated in their own spheres. But that all changed when the hatchery in the middle of olde town was threatened.
“We realized that for anything good to happen, we had to all work together,” Rowley said.
“Suzanne told me we needed to have the whole community involved,” and she started making calls, he said. They planned to get as many people as possible to attend a public meeting the state was conducting about the closure plan. But the meeting was only a few days away, just after the Salmon Days Festival that weekend – the Chamber’s biggest event of the year. It was going to be a challenge to mobilize dozens of people so quickly and get them to the meeting at South Seattle College to show support for the hatchery.
With his vast network of connections, Rowley came up with a plan. He used to serve on the Board of the Empty Space Theatre in Seattle, and he had organized theater trips using tour buses to transport groups from the Eastside into town for dinner and a show. He called up the Bellevue tour bus company, where he already had an account, and was able to order two buses on short notice for the trip to the meeting.
About 70 business owners, politicians and Issaquah citizens climbed aboard those two buses with signs and speeches, and they descended on the hearing room.
“The (Fisheries) commission was not expecting us,” Rowley said, but they did grant time for at least 10 of the advocates from Issaquah to testify about how important the hatchery was to the community and to salmon survival. “We had to drag the Fisheries Department along.”
Then came years of meeting and lobbying as he worked with state representatives Brian Thomas and Phil Dyer, as well as Sen. Dino Rossi to secure broader political support and funding for the hatchery rebuilding plan. Following the successful efforts, Rowley continued to support FISH with grants and donations, such as funding educational exhibits and the establishment of the FISHop Gift Shop in 2012.
His connection to salmon goes back to childhood, when he went fishing with his parents on their boat out of Edmonds, and he also took part in fishing derbies on Elliott Bay. “I realized as I was getting older that there were fewer and fewer fish,” he said, and that sparked his interest in saving salmon and the hatchery.
“I grew up going to the fish hatchery with my grandmother,” Richardson remembered. “I always had a curiosity about the salmon.” Back then, the hatchery wasn’t a much of a welcoming place, and it had a very industrial appearance, she said. Rowley described it as “a white blob with pools.”
The hatchery also operated a dam on Issaquah Creek about half a mile upstream that diverted water to an intake structure and gravity-feed line to the rearing ponds at the hatchery. Built in 1936 when the hatchery was constructed, the dam had a very inefficient fish ladder and a concrete apron in front of it that stranded many salmon trying to migrate upstream and created a deadly barrier. That intake dam was located along land owned by Rowley Properties, adjacent to the Wildwood Apartment complex they had built.
“We didn’t want the dam,” Rowley said. “We knew it was a huge liability.” But the hatchery had to have the water for raising fish. Eventually, they donated the property to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and helped work with the City of Issaquah to create maintenance access.
After joining FISH in 2010 as a volunteer docent, Richardson moved up to the FISH Board and started advocating for replacement of the intake dam with a more natural environment. “It was very important to us that more fish were able to get upstream and spawn naturally,” she said. After years of planning, the dam finally was removed in 2013 and replaced with a series of low weirs built of river rock that allow better fish passage.
Richardson also worked to get the FISH Board more involved in recruiting people and corporate funding. “Bringing in more people who aren’t regulars is a passion of mine,” she said. She helped start FISH’s locally focused Salmon on Sunset celebration in 2022 and also spoke to community groups about salmon and the important role of the hatchery. She most recently served as the board chair and described her volunteer efforts as “engaging with the community and highlighting the hatchery as Issaquah’s treasure.”
Her experience with the natural environment started with working at the family business in the sixth grade. She pulled weeds and did landscaping at Rowley buildings. She moved on to the reception desk, leasing storage, running a marina and hotels in Port Townsend and selling real estate in Spokane before returning to the family business in Issaquah, where the town “is all about community spirit.” She’s now the director of commercial properties at Rowley.
Then, when her sister Kari Magill’s son Jake moved to Issaquah, she didn’t hesitate to get her nephew involved with the family salmon interests. He was already a board member at Rowley Properties, and he works as a coder for Redfin, but he still has great memories of visiting the hatchery as a child.
It was in the third grade at Sunny Hills Elementary when his class took a field trip to the hatchery, Magill said. Back in the early 2000s, all of the Issaquah School District third graders studied the salmon lifecycle, biology and watersheds, and most were treated to the guided tours with volunteers at the hatchery as well. On the day his class visited, Magill said, as they were walking past the underwater viewing windows, an adult salmon jumped out of the holding pond right in front of them. The tour guide was able to pick it up and get it back in the pond, but not before eggs spilled all over, he remembered. Those vivid memories of an 8-year-old, in addition to his aunt’s recommendation, brought him back to the hatchery in his new role as a FISH Board member. He brings his expertise and knowledge of technology to the organization.
“I’ve seen the full human experience about the salmon lifecycle and education programs,” from student to board member, he said. “The hatchery is such a core, crucial identity to the city.”
His grandfather agreed: “This hatchery is the centerpiece of our town. I cared so much about Issaquah that I got pulled in.”
For Richardson, the salmon odyssey is an inspiration and a way to connect people with their environment.
“It is amazing that despite all the challenges out there, they still come home and spawn,” she said. The hatchery and the educational partnership between FISH and DFW “builds up for our visitors and volunteers a sense of pride. It’s about doing something bigger than yourself and helping to make this planet a better place.”
Skip Rowley, Kelli Richardson, Jake Magill
Rowley Properties
For Phil Hamilton of the Muckleshoot Tribe, salmon fishing is a birthright. He remembers when his grandmother was the tribal chair during the “fish wars” of the early 1970s, until the federal court Boldt Decision affirmed tribal rights to half of the harvestable salmon. He remembers how his father worked on the legal issues surrounding fishing rights guaranteed by 100-year-old treaties.
Today, after 43 years working with the Muckleshoot Tribe, Phil serves as a member of the tribal Fisheries Commission, overseeing management of the Fisheries Department. That includes raising salmon at tribal hatcheries as well as supporting the state-owned Issaquah Salmon Hatchery. The chinook and coho raised in Issaquah populate the Greater Lake Washington Watershed and historic fishing grounds for the Muckleshoot Tribe.
His reverence for salmon goes further than fishing. Hamilton also expresses his heritage and talent in traditional tribal artwork through painting and embroidery, often focusing on images of the iconic Northwest salmon. That’s why it was natural that Steve Bell, the first director of the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, would contact Hamilton more than 20 years ago about including a native art installation in the hatchery rebuilding project. Bell asked him if he could share any traditional salmon origin stories, and Hamilton suggested just the thing.
The Muckleshoot story of The Salmon People and Raven “has been handed down over many years,” Hamilton said. “It shares how, in the past, tribes recognized how salmon are having a difficult time surviving.” The story of how the trickster Raven and his sidekick Mouse visited the Salmon People and brought back salmon to their village includes the ritual of returning the bones of the first fish back to the river to ensure renewal of the species.
That ritual demonstrates the natural cycle of spawning salmon that contribute the nutrients they brought from the ocean to nourish the entire ecosystem around the rivers. It also serves as a metaphor for the need to supplement fish populations to support humans as well as the natural environment, Hamilton noted. That made it a perfect story to illustrate the importance of hatchery operations as well as the cultural connection between salmon and the Northwest’s first people.
Hamilton illustrated the story with line drawings and intricate designs of Salmon, Raven, canoes and the people of the salmon village. Those drawings were then etching onto the faces of seven granite boulders, along with the text from the story, and installed in a semicircle on the hatchery grounds in 2002, as part of the third and final phase of redevelopment. A grant from the Issaquah Arts Commission funded the installation. Today, it is a tranquil corner when some come to make rubbings of the etched art, others stop to read the story aloud, and children climb and play on the boulders.
The sculpture also recognizes the role of the Muckleshoot Tribe as co-managers of the local salmon runs, along with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. In addition to managing the fish counts at the Ballard Locks, the Tribe also reviews permits for development and logging to make sure they are protecting salmon habitat, and advocates replacement of fish-blocking culverts under roads to open up stream habitat that has been blocked.
“It’s been a real fight to get tribal science recognized when it comes to fish,” Hamilton lamented. In the 1980s, the state reduced hatchery fish production to save costs but also because outdated hatchery practices were considered to be part of the problem with wild fish survival. Hamilton pointed out that it wasn’t long before Lake Washington salmon populations declined and the Puget Sound chinook were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
That’s when the state proposed closing the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, and the Muckleshoot Tribe got involved in the community-wide effort to keep it open.
“We didn’t want to see the production go,” Hamilton said. “The facility was supporting the strays feeding all the streams in the system.” For instance, chinook from the Issaquah hatchery were turning up in the Cedar River and spawning there, where wild populations had declined significantly and were in danger of disappearing. Salmon can stray for several reasons, such as a change in the chemical signature of the home stream water while they are in the ocean that makes it difficult for salmon to smell their way home.
Hamilton credited FISH’s focus on education programs, as well as local communities and politicians, with convincing the state to rebuild the aging hatchery back in 1993. He remembered that Sen. Dino Rossi especially was a champion of finding state funding for the three-phase rebuilding project.
“We live in a metropolitan area, and without hatcheries, we wouldn’t have any fish,” Hamilton noted.
By 2000, after several years of complete closure of the chinook fishery, the kings started returning in good numbers to the Green River. At that point, the Muckleshoots proposed reopening a limited fishery for chinook, but politics got in the way. King County had invested a lot in salmon recovery efforts and Executive Ron Sims opposed the renewal of fishing for chinook – until Hamilton explained why it was good news.
“You should be excited to have a chinook fishery here in your front yard,” he told Sims, “not only for the tribe but for the sport fishers, too.”
More recently, the Tribe has been focusing on reducing predation on juvenile salmon in Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish, where non-native bass and perch feast on the smolts as they are migrating from the hatchery and their river nurseries out to the ocean. The Tribe also has been working to restore coho populations to small tributaries in the watershed by transporting adult salmon in the spawning phase from the hatchery to waterways such as Tibbetts Creek in Issaquah.
After years of adult planting in Tibbetts, “We are seeing fish being produced there,” Hamilton said. “We are beginning to see the coho population bounce back.”
Phil Hamilton
Muckleshoot Tribe
FISH’s friend in Olympia
Newly elected to the Washington House of Representatives, Brian Thomas was a freshman lawmaker in early 1993 without a lot of political clout in Olympia. “I was just kind of trying to find the bathrooms,” he remembered.
Steve Bell from the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery called him and asked him for help saving the hatchery from closure. As a Republican in the minority, during a period of economic shortfalls in state financing, tackling a change of direction in the Fisheries budget was huge challenge. Thomas found some assistance from a few veteran lawmakers, including Democrats Tim Sheldon and Clyde Ballard, who helped guide him through the political process.
“I’d always kind of prided myself, even as a freshman” for reaching across the aisle to Democrat lawmakers, although he admitted, “I made some enemies by being bipartisan.” He credited his prior years of work on the non-partisan Issaquah School Board and his years of volunteering with the moderate wing of the Republican Party for his ability to negotiate bipartisan compromises. That resulted in a phased plan, starting with funding for a study of the hatchery remodeling plan before the state committed capital funds for three separate building phases.
It took years of effort to change direction, and Thomas was the driving force promoting the hatchery in Olympia. Phil Dyer was the other representative during that time in the 1990s. While Thomas and Dyer, both Republicans, were pushing for continued funding of the hatchery by the state, their counterpart in the Senate, Democrat Kathleen Drew, favored alternate funding options such as investments by outside entities. That dual strategy complicated the efforts to find a solution in Olympia, Thomas said.
Thomas got familiar with the hatchery while he was campaigning for the Legislature in the fall of 1992, as the state proposed closing it. He remembered that the facility was underproducing at the time, and so it became a target for closure. At the same time, he heard talk at the City of Issaquah, which owns the hatchery property in the middle of Old Town, that the property might be better used for development. But Mayor Rowan Hinds regaled him with the importance of Issaquah’s identity built around the annual salmon run.
While Issaquah Mayor Hinds was promoting the economic benefits of the hatchery to the community, Thomas focused on the educational prospects.
“My elevator speech was, what a wonderful opportunity for educating kids, and the way to save salmon is for people to understand what they need.”
Thomas also found support from the Issaquah School District, where he had served on the board since 1989. He shared his hatchery education concept with Superintendent Bill Stewart as well as fellow board member Mary Scott, who were excited about the possibilities of using the facility to enhance science education in district schools.
Thomas learned from Socrates that “education is lighting a fire, not filling a vessel,” and he thought the hatchery experience had the potential to ignite some fires of environmental conservation in young minds. But not everyone agreed.
“The Fisheries Department just bluntly told me that education is not in our mission. Economic development is not in our mission,” Thomas said. Fisheries administrators were not interested in expanding their mission beyond fish production. “They were pretty adamant about sticking to their mission,” Thomas said, and department officials even opposed his proposed study of rebuilding that hatchery.
Thomas explained that he sees himself as a marketer, selling his ideas by finding common interests, rather than as a warrior, like so many other lawmakers who just want to beat the other side. With Democrats in control of both houses and the governor’s mansion in Olympia, he had no choice but to work with them. He remembers bringing up the topic of the hatchery with House Speaker Brian Ebersole as well as the chairs of the Capital Budget and Natural Resources committees.
“I was just kind of stumbling through it,” Thomas remembered, as he learned how the committees and legislation worked in Olympia.
“Every little thing helped with it,” he said. “What really helped was various folks from Issaquah getting involved. It caught fire, but there were a lot of people fanning the fire.”
He can’t prove it, but he thinks the governor might have had something to do with the success. Thomas remembers chatting with Gov. Mike Lowry, a Democrat, at a social gathering, and he brought up the hatchery proposal. He framed the concept as a vibrant place for students and the public to go in person to learn about salmon and habitat protection, instead of just learning from a book. He said Lowry expressed interest in the idea. A few days later, the budget proposal suddenly included the hatchery funding. Maybe a coincidence? Maybe not.
At that point, Thomas was working closely with FISH Director Bell on strategies and proposals. Bell contacted the University of Washington and got some fisheries professors and lobbyists involved. Along with Issaquah officials and citizens, as well as newly supportive fisheries officials, the testimony at public hearings in the Natural Resources Committee was compelling, with little opposition.
“It was like an army of ants. We all attacked at once,” Thomas said. “We had the combination of a huge coalition and a few little pokes. The department had a sea change and decided not to oppose it.”
Then, following the conservative wave of the 1994 mid-term election, “Everything shifted.” Republicans took a healthy majority in the House of Representatives. While Democrats remained split on the hatchery issue, Thomas found support in his own party for the hatchery budget recommendations.
“I was surprised that the Republicans really embraced that whole thing without really saying anything,” Thomas said. In fact, Fisheries administrators had included the funding in their budget proposal, thinking that the budget-conscious Republicans would throw it out. That didn’t happen. It sailed through both houses.
“The study was so compelling,” he said. “They had sketches and the artwork, and it was good. I think it really caught people’s imaginations.”
Although a Renton resident, Thomas had long been involved in the Issaquah community through his volunteer work with Rotary and the Masonic Lodge, as well as serving on the school board during his career with Puget Sound Power & Light, which was the name of Puget Sound Energy at the time. He was the director of research there until the utility merged with the natural gas company and the administration was reshuffled in 1996. That’s when he retired, after a career of 33 years.
The Legislature kept him busy, as chair of the powerful House Finance Committee, until he retired from public office in 2000. Since then, he and his wife, Judy, keep busy with Friendship Force, and non-profit founded by President Carter and his wife, that promotes international understanding through home stays. They host club members from other countries and have traveled extensively through the organization. Even outside of politics, he’s still reaching out to different people to improve understanding and cooperation.
Brian Thomas
5th Legislative District state representative and former Issaquah School Board Member
It was a beautiful fall day at the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery when Bill Conley and his son backed up their pick-up truck to the adult holding pond, loaded a 300-gallon plastic tote in the back and started slinging fish. With several dozen adult coho splashing around in their spawning red and pink shades, they prepared for a grand experiment in salmon recovery.
The concept was to transplant the live fish, as they were ready to spawn, into a new stream, in the hope that they would lay their eggs in the foreign environment, even though the water did not match the smell of their home stream. But would the salmon go ahead with spawning? Or would they just head back downstream in search of the unique chemical signature that was imprinted in their brains as juveniles?
“Moving live adult salmon to another creek as a way of rehabilitating was on nobody’s radar when we did it,” Conley said. As a board member of Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, he spent years of negotiating with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, Muckleshoot Tribe, non-profit Trout Unlimited, King County and many officials to finally get approval for the transplanting experiment. “Everybody said it was a good idea.”
They started with Tibbetts Creek, located just west of Issaquah, and draining the valley between Squak and Cougar mountains before emptying into Lake Sammamish not far from the mouth of Issaquah Creek. Salmon migration up Tibbetts Creek had been severely limited by the 1940 construction of Interstate 90, which diverted the creek into a culvert under the freeway.
What they didn’t expect was the TV crew from KING-5 that just happened to be at the hatchery that day filming a story about the salmon spawning season, and they wanted to know about the truck loading up live coho. A school group touring the hatchery at the same time also was excited to learn about the transplanting project. They all followed the pickup full of fish over to Tibbetts Creek. But as a pioneering event, volunteers weren’t quite prepared for how to transfer fish from the truck on the road down to the creek.
“Fish were falling out of the nets and flopping around on the concrete,” Conley remembered. “And then all the kids were screaming and yelling.” But eventually, the fish all made it into the creek, and the whole operation was featured on the TV news that night.
Later, redd counts, fry trapping and marking with spaghetti tags all proved that the experiment at Tibbetts Creek was working. Since then, the adult salmon transplanting has been replicated on many other streams, including Little Spokane River, where Conley grew up. “It’s the coolest thing in my life,” he said.
Conley, known since high school as “Buffalo Bill,” moved west to Issaquah in 1983 to open a sporting goods store that bore his colorful nickname.
“The reason we moved here to Issaquah was because I was standing on the bridge at the hatchery with my son, looking down at the salmon, and he said, ‘Dad, we gotta move here,’” Conley recalled. Thanks to his new realtor and banker, Bob Catterall, Conley soon got involved with the Kiwanis Club. For decades, Issaquah’s business and civic leaders have got public projects done as volunteer Kiwanians.
Conley remembers well hearing the news of the impending closure of the hatchery in 1992. Kiwanis members soon mobilized to figure out what they could do to save the hatchery. Some called for the city or a non-profit to take over the hatchery from the state and continue operating it. City Administrator Leon Kos suggested that Kiwanis form an environmental committee to pursue hatchery solutions. Conley volunteered, along with Issaquah Press Publisher Debbie Berto, Issaquah Chamber of Commerce Director Suzanne Suther, and Issaquah City Councilmember Ava Frisinger.
That team put together an audacious proposal to the city council: contribute local taxpayer money to match state funding for updating and remodeling the hatchery. For a small town with fewer than 10,000 residents, offering to pay for refurbishing a state facility was unheard of, Conley said.
But it worked. The City of Issaquah pledged $500,000 to match state funding, thanks to the efforts of 5th Legislative District Rep. Brian Thomas. That $1 million was used to rebuild the fish-trapping weir across Issaquah Creek, allowing for fish passage past the hatchery. That was just the first step in the state’s commitment to spend another $6 million to rebuild and modernize the hatchery while preserving and restoring the original 1936 incubation building.
“It could not have been done without some flaming left-wing liberals there, as well as some real conservatives,” said Conley, who went on to win election and serve on the Issaquah City Council. “It was just a kick in the butt for me.”
In late 1993, the committee celebrated its success by recruiting a lawyer and drawing up incorporation papers for the non-profit Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery. As a founding member, Conley invited the group to meet upstairs at Buffalo Bill’s Sporting Goods, and after signing incorporation documents, they toasted with sparkling cider in champagne flutes.
Conley went on to lead student tours and coordinate volunteers for FISH as well as serving on the Board of Directors, before retiring and moving back to Spokane, but he continues to return to Issaquah every fall along with the salmon to celebrate the amazing migration. He credits the work of FISH with helping to change the public perception of hatcheries as part of the solution to dwindling salmon populations.
“The best way to get someone to care is to put a live adult salmon into a stream in their back yard,” he said. “That’s how you get people to become lifelong protectors of the environment.”
And if you ever ask Buffalo Bill what the best salmon is, you can be sure he will still give the best answer ever: “One on a grill.”
Bill Conley
Issaquah City Councilmember
As a non-profit organization, the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery has managed to continue its educational work for 30 years with just one to three staff members. But the vast majority of the work is done by volunteers, and over the years, many hundreds of dedicated community members have lent a hand to FISH. In fact, volunteering is a proud tradition of the City of Issaquah, and volunteers kept the hatchery operating long before FISH was formed.
But what keeps volunteers coming back year after year to lead school tours, answer questions from visitors, staff the hectic and crowded Salmon Days Festival and help hatchery staff collect eggs and milt?
“Educating the public – not only the school kids, but the whole community – about the salmon is so important,” said Norb Zeigler. “Salmon are such an important part of our Pacific Northwest environment, and this is where you can see it and learn about it.”
Norb started volunteering with FISH in 2008, shortly after retiring from his career at the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. He remembered visiting a community volunteer fair in 2008 and talking to a FISH member at their table.
“I knew nothing – NOTHING – about salmon,” he said. He and his wife, Mary had moved to Issaquah from Chicago in 1995. But the salmon story was so compelling that he signed up for training. Soon he was leading tours for the hundreds of elementary school students that visit the hatchery on field trips every day during the fall spawning season.
“I tell my friends it keeps me young because the kids have so much energy,” said Zeigler, now age 85 and still leading tours. “They are so excited about what they are seeing.”
It was a little different story for another long-time volunteer. David Waggoner moved to Issaquah as a young child and grew up with salmon. He remembers visiting the hatchery on a Cub Scouts field trip in the 1950s. Back then, his grandparents had a farm south of town on Cedar Grove Road, and he remembered that when the creek flooded once, he saw salmon swimming through the pasture. He left Issaquah to join the military, but after his career, he returned to town in 1996 and found the hatchery still operating. He heard about the threat to close the hatchery and the effort to save it, and he joined FISH, then started volunteering in 2002.
“I was doing four tours a day when I started, and close to five days a week,” Waggoner said. More than 20 years later, he has had adults recognize him from when he led their school tour, and they have come back to the hatchery with their own kids.
“You touch their lives for those few minutes,” and that feels like he’s making a difference, Waggoner said. “It puts a face on this thing we call salmon in the Northwest.”
He and Zeigler remembered the day following the 2012 spawning season when they got together with FISH Volunteer Coordinator Bev Lee to review what worked and what needed improvement. They agreed that the aquarium in the lobby of the historic building was the biggest upgrade that would improve the tour and visitor experience. The aquarium was old and needed maintenance and cleaning, and they suggested removing the goldfish.
The two volunteers agreed to take on the project, and with staff help, they found funding and got donated time and materials from contractors, who had to open up the wall, reframe the aquarium stand and build out the space. They tracked down mural artist Larry Kangas, known for his Darigold mural and the hatchery water tower wildlife painting, who had moved to Portland. He was commissioned to create a natural mural backdrop for the new, larger aquarium.
“We wanted the aquarium to represent the Issaquah Creek habitat, with the predators and the vegetation,” Zeigler said. “It must have been one of the last things he did.” Three months after Kangas installed the mural with a pulley system he designed to roll up for aquarium maintenance, they learned he had died.
When the new aquarium full of salmon fry debuted in 2013, Waggoner said, “It was the first place to show the whole lifecycle with live fish in the state.” He remembered a young girl on his first tour walked into the room and exclaimed, “Wow!”
“Now I’m in the sunset of my years, and the fish are still coming up the creek,” said Waggoner, who is still giving school tours at age 80. “I hope after I’m gone, the fish and the kids are still coming.”
For Kim Stanley, the draw of the hatchery is keeping up with the changes over time – at the facility and in the ongoing research about salmon. He has been sharing updates with visitors at the hatchery since 1995.
“Many people don’t realize why the hatchery is where it is and how the whole process works,” Stanley said. “Some people think the hatchery is where farm-raised salmon come from.” He gets to explain to them how hatchery salmon spend most of their lives swimming free in the ocean, and also about how volunteers get in the holding pond with the adult fish and select the salmon by hand for spawning.
In fact, Stanley was volunteering with spawning work well before the facility remodeling project that replaced the old round asphalt ponds with the new fish ladder, underwater viewing windows, and automatic crowders. Back in the early days, he explained, volunteers in waders wielded a big net in the ponds to corral the fish for spawning. Those ponds were shallow and easier for wildlife to access. Stanley remembered hatchery manager Rod Henderson explaining to him that the state used to issue shotguns to hatcheries to scare off birds of prey.
As a facilities maintenance technician for the City of Issaquah, Stanley could be found at the hatchery mostly on weekends. Now retired, he still enjoys greeting visitors and answering the many questions they bring to the Salmon Days Festival.
“After a couple of hours, you are saying the same things over and over. You have to kind of read your audience and see if they want more depth,” he said. “It’s fun seeing people from different cultures,” especially those who haven’t witnessed the live salmon runs before.
He’s especially happy to see students who have learned about salmon in school bringing their parents to the hatchery on weekends. “Sometimes, a 6- or 8-year-old kid may know more than their parents.”
Originally from Illinois, he moved to Issaquah with his wife in 1994. He had got into long-distance biking and did a cross-country fund-raising trip starting in Seattle.
“I thought the hatchery was so cool nestled in between the Issaquah Alps,” he said. “Hearing about the dwindling salmon runs and the threat of closing the hatchery, I decided to volunteer.”
Now living in Sammamish, he also volunteers with the Master Native Plant Steward program. But come September, when the chinook start returning from the ocean, he will be back at his post on Sunset Way.
“I like to see how the run is doing, and it’s fun seeing the other docents and helping out the ones who are new,” he said. “I’m always learning new things, too.”
The FISH docents and guides who return to volunteer year after year get to know each other well, and friendships develop over discussions of spawning techniques and tour tips. Some couples even volunteer at the hatchery together. One fishy acquaintance even evolved into marriage.
Kathy O’Neill remembers briefly meeting veteran FISH docent Darrell Wells when she picked up her son, who was volunteering at the hatchery to earn community service hours for a class at Issaquah Middle School. O’Neill and Wells both were married to other people at the time. But over the years, things changed. Their mutual friends also volunteered with FISH, so they occasionally ran into each other.
“Eventually, there came a time that we were both single people, and then we started dating,” O’Neill remembered. That was in 2007. “We used to meet at the Brewhouse,” Wells added, referring to the FISH Guide favorite lunch spot at the former Issaquah Brewhouse next door to the hatchery.
As some other couples also do, O’Neill joined Wells at the hatchery, attending training sessions and volunteering to greet visitors and answer questions. She had already learned a lot about salmon from her son’s school project, but she credits Wells with getting her hooked. Eventually, they worked up to a wedding in 2019.
Wells came to the hatchery through his love of fly fishing. He grew up in Southern California and treasured trout fishing trips to the eastern Sierras. After moving with his family to the Sammamish Plateau in 1993, it didn’t take long for him to discover salmon.
“When I realized we had a salmon hatchery in my backyard, it just blew me away,” he said. He showed up at the first volunteer training session in 1995, which involved about a dozen people on the deck next to the creek. They listened to presentations from FISH ‘s first executive director Steve Bell, hatchery staff and Muckleshoot Tribe biologist Mike Mahovlich, and they took home a three-ring binder with background materials about salmon biology and lifecycle to study.
Wells was eager to jump in the pond and help with handling fish on spawning days. But those salmon are a lot bigger than a rainbow trout. He was thrilled with “just being in the middle of all those fish and how strong they were,” he said. He recalled the first time hatchery staff told him,” Don’t hold on too hard with your thumb.” The pressure can result in a condition referred to as “spawning thumb,” when temporary numbness makes it difficult to pick up a cup of coffee.
Wells soon joined the FISH Board and came up with the idea to track visitors to the hatchery.
“We found out that people locally always wanted to bring their friends from out of town when they were visiting,” he said. “The hatchery was a big draw.”
Wells bought a large paper world map and mounted it on a cork board. Visitors were asked to press a colored pin into the map to indicate their hometown. Within a couple of years, the map was full of pins from dozens of countries all over the world.
Over the years, Wells, now 74, has done some of everything at the hatchery, from rescuing big chinook that accidentally jumped out of the holding ponds, to pushing the FISH Board to establish a gift shop. (The FISHop first opened in 2012, thanks in large part to the couple’s efforts.) He enjoys early mornings on fall weekends, before the crowds arrive, when he can sweep some leaves off the deck, pick up any litter and savor the tranquility of the salmon park in the middle of town.
While other Issaquah residents plan to leave town the first weekend in October, O’Neill and Wells embrace the chaos and jump right into the middle of it. They often can be found at the underwater viewing windows, interpreting the salmon story for the enthralled crowds.
“It’s exhausting, but it’s really fun,” Wells said. “You would answer the same five questions a thousand times. You would go to work on Monday, and you hardly had a voice left.”
“It’s very exciting to be there, especially at Salmon Days weekend, because there are so many people, and they are excited to be there,” explained O’Neill, who arrived in Issaquah in 1995 and settled on Squak Mountain, just up the hill from the hatchery. “The entire town parades by you. It’s a great reminder of what a lovely community we live in.”
“It’s really a unique group of people,” Wells said of the FISH volunteers. “What I enjoy most is just hanging out on weekends and answering questions. About 90 percent of the people who come there don’t know anything about salmon. I just love talking to people about FISH and trout and salmon.”
The experience of sharing salmon with visitors creates a family atmosphere among volunteers. Wells met and bonded with fellow FISH guide Kevin Boze while sharing tips between visitors on the bridge over Issaquah Creek. They’ve remained friends and fountains of fish wisdom since 1999.
“There are so many fascinating things to learn about salmon, and a lot of them verge on the incredible,” Boze observed. “Sometimes, I’ll tell a tour, ‘If you think I’m making something up, raise your hand.’ I never actually make anything up, but visitors still raise their hands. Salmon are fantastic creatures.”
A Boeing engineer and community theater actor, Boze lived just a few blocks away from the hatchery and volunteered to help out there after his wife started working for FISH. Just one season of harvesting eggs and leading tours got him hooked. He served for several years on the FISH Board and was named volunteer of the year in 2004. He even takes vacation days from work in the fall to get in the adult holding ponds and wrangle salmon on spawning days.
“Salmon Days is my favorite time of the year,” Boze said. “We see tens of thousands of people, and they all have questions about the fish. I’m happy to share the remarkable salmon migration story, over and over again, to help people understand how important these fish are to our community, and especially to the tribal cultures here.”
Volunteers often mention a sense of responsibility that comes with the work – responsibility for keeping the hatchery operating 30 years after it was threatened with closure, and responsibility for interpreting salmon behaviors and educating young and old about this keystone species.
“The hatchery is Washington State property, so, in a sense, it belongs to everybody,” Boze noted. “When you volunteer at the hatchery, you really and truly feel like you own it. You care about it, and you have a stake in its future and in the continuation of our salmon runs.”
What all volunteers have in common is their reverence for the Northwest salmon and their remarkable migration and life cycle, and how they symbolize the resiliency and sustainability of the Northwest ecosystem.
“I fully believe in my heart of hearts this is a gift we have been given to take care of until we have no more breath,” Waggoner concluded, “and then we turn it over to someone else who we are teaching daily to become the salmon stewards of the future.”
Thanks to these volunteers, and to these other long-serving FISH Guides:
- Richard “Doc” Andersen – served as docent and spawning volunteer. He was the physician for the Issaquah High School football team and had a practice in Issaquah before moving to North Bend. He also was an avid fisherman. “He could tell you the name of the disease that causes the fungus on spawning salmon,” Waggoner said. Zeigler added, “I was so impressed that he was giving tours and answering questions when he was legally blind, with his wife, Janet, guiding him. He seemed to love that.”
- Eileen Barber – served as board member, docent, business owner and Issaquah city councilmember. As a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis, she was instrumental in collecting donations from the business community to remodel the Aquarium Room, Zeigler said, and she gave many tours as well.
- Bruce Davis – served as docent and spawning volunteer. RIP 1927-2003.
- Doug Emery – served as board president, docent and Issaquah School District teacher
- Ava Frisinger – served as board president, docent and Issaquah mayor and councilmember. “I remember Ava coming over on her lunch hour from City Hall to do a tour,” Waggoner said. “When I found out she was the mayor giving a tour, that blew me away,” Zeigler added. “That just showed her love and dedication for this place.”
- Don McWhirter – served as docent and spawning volunteer. He established a tradition of bringing donuts for volunteers at the weekly spawning sessions, and he became known as the “whack king” for his well-practiced method of dispatching salmon for manual spawning, Waggoner said. RIP 1931-2020
- Don Monchil – served as docent, spawning volunteer and FISH photographer. RIP 1928-2020
- Norman “Crash” Nash – served as board member and docent. He was a retired military pilot who moved to Issaquah with his wife from Whidbey Island. He was a member of the VFW, where he met and recruited Waggoner to volunteer with FISH. Waggoner related the story about how Nash got his nickname, after he survived two plane crashes. RIP 1935-2017
- Charles “Stan” Staniforth – served as docent and DFW volunteer, named State of Washington Volunteer of the Year. “He always seemed to be on the grounds and talking to people,” Zeigler said. “He was very social and asked the kids lots of questions.” Waggoner added, “He just wanted to get out of the house, and the hatchery gave him something to do. There’s nothing Stan wouldn’t do.” RIP 1929-2014
FISH VOLUNTEERS
FISH Guides keep coming back every year, just like the salmon
By Grace Reamer
As a non-profit organization, the Friends of the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery has managed to continue its educational work for 30 years with just one to three staff members. But the vast majority of the work is done by volunteers, and over the years, many hundreds of dedicated community members have lent a hand to FISH. In fact, volunteering is a proud tradition of the City of Issaquah, and volunteers kept the hatchery operating long before FISH was formed.
But what keeps volunteers coming back year after year to lead school tours, answer questions from visitors, staff the hectic and crowded Salmon Days Festival and help hatchery staff collect eggs and milt?
“Educating the public – not only the school kids, but the whole community – about the salmon is so important,” said Norb Zeigler. “Salmon are such an important part of our Pacific Northwest environment, and this is where you can see it and learn about it.”
Norb started volunteering with FISH in 2008, shortly after retiring from his career at the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. He remembered visiting a community volunteer fair in 2008 and talking to a FISH member at their table.
“I knew nothing – NOTHING – about salmon,” he said. He and his wife, Mary had moved to Issaquah from Chicago in 1995. But the salmon story was so compelling that he signed up for training. Soon he was leading tours for the hundreds of elementary school students that visit the hatchery on field trips every day during the fall spawning season.
“I tell my friends it keeps me young because the kids have so much energy,” said Zeigler, now age 85 and still leading tours. “They are so excited about what they are seeing.”
It was a little different story for another long-time volunteer. David Waggoner moved to Issaquah as a young child and grew up with salmon. He remembers visiting the hatchery on a Cub Scouts field trip in the 1950s. Back then, his grandparents had a farm south of town on Cedar Grove Road, and he remembered that when the creek flooded once, he saw salmon swimming through the pasture. He left Issaquah to join the military, but after his career, he returned to town in 1996 and found the hatchery still operating. He heard about the threat to close the hatchery and the effort to save it, and he joined FISH, then started volunteering in 2002.
“I was doing four tours a day when I started, and close to five days a week,” Waggoner said. More than 20 years later, he has had adults recognize him from when he led their school tour, and they have come back to the hatchery with their own kids.
“You touch their lives for those few minutes,” and that feels like he’s making a difference, Waggoner said. “It puts a face on this thing we call salmon in the Northwest.”
He and Zeigler remembered the day following the 2012 spawning season when they got together with FISH Volunteer Coordinator Bev Lee to review what worked and what needed improvement. They agreed that the aquarium in the lobby of the historic building was the biggest upgrade that would improve the tour and visitor experience. The aquarium was old and needed maintenance and cleaning, and they suggested removing the goldfish.
The two volunteers agreed to take on the project, and with staff help, they found funding and got donated time and materials from contractors, who had to open up the wall, reframe the aquarium stand and build out the space. They tracked down mural artist Larry Kangas, known for his Darigold mural and the hatchery water tower wildlife painting, who had moved to Portland. He was commissioned to create a natural mural backdrop for the new, larger aquarium.
“We wanted the aquarium to represent the Issaquah Creek habitat, with the predators and the vegetation,” Zeigler said. “It must have been one of the last things he did.” Three months after Kangas installed the mural with a pulley system he designed to roll up for aquarium maintenance, they learned he had died.
When the new aquarium full of salmon fry debuted in 2013, Waggoner said, “It was the first place to show the whole lifecycle with live fish in the state.” He remembered a young girl on his first tour walked into the room and exclaimed, “Wow!”
“Now I’m in the sunset of my years, and the fish are still coming up the creek,” said Waggoner, who is still giving school tours at age 80. “I hope after I’m gone, the fish and the kids are still coming.”
For Kim Stanley, the draw of the hatchery is keeping up with the changes over time – at the facility and in the ongoing research about salmon. He has been sharing updates with visitors at the hatchery since 1995.
“Many people don’t realize why the hatchery is where it is and how the whole process works,” Stanley said. “Some people think the hatchery is where farm-raised salmon come from.” He gets to explain to them how hatchery salmon spend most of their lives swimming free in the ocean, and also about how volunteers get in the holding pond with the adult fish and select the salmon by hand for spawning.
In fact, Stanley was volunteering with spawning work well before the facility remodeling project that replaced the old round asphalt ponds with the new fish ladder, underwater viewing windows, and automatic crowders. Back in the early days, he explained, volunteers in waders wielded a big net in the ponds to corral the fish for spawning. Those ponds were shallow and easier for wildlife to access. Stanley remembered hatchery manager Rod Henderson explaining to him that the state used to issue shotguns to hatcheries to scare off birds of prey.
As a facilities maintenance technician for the City of Issaquah, Stanley could be found at the hatchery mostly on weekends. Now retired, he still enjoys greeting visitors and answering the many questions they bring to the Salmon Days Festival.
“After a couple of hours, you are saying the same things over and over. You have to kind of read your audience and see if they want more depth,” he said. “It’s fun seeing people from different cultures,” especially those who haven’t witnessed the live salmon runs before.
He’s especially happy to see students who have learned about salmon in school bringing their parents to the hatchery on weekends. “Sometimes, a 6- or 8-year-old kid may know more than their parents.”
Originally from Illinois, he moved to Issaquah with his wife in 1994. He had got into long-distance biking and did a cross-country fund-raising trip starting in Seattle.
“I thought the hatchery was so cool nestled in between the Issaquah Alps,” he said. “Hearing about the dwindling salmon runs and the threat of closing the hatchery, I decided to volunteer.”
Now living in Sammamish, he also volunteers with the Master Native Plant Steward program. But come September, when the chinook start returning from the ocean, he will be back at his post on Sunset Way.
“I like to see how the run is doing, and it’s fun seeing the other docents and helping out the ones who are new,” he said. “I’m always learning new things, too.”
The FISH docents and guides who return to volunteer year after year get to know each other well, and friendships develop over discussions of spawning techniques and tour tips. Some couples even volunteer at the hatchery together. One fishy acquaintance even evolved into marriage.
Kathy O’Neill remembers briefly meeting veteran FISH docent Darrell Wells when she picked up her son, who was volunteering at the hatchery to earn community service hours for a class at Issaquah Middle School. O’Neill and Wells both were married to other people at the time. But over the years, things changed. Their mutual friends also volunteered with FISH, so they occasionally ran into each other.
“Eventually, there came a time that we were both single people, and then we started dating,” O’Neill remembered. That was in 2007. “We used to meet at the Brewhouse,” Wells added, referring to the FISH Guide favorite lunch spot at the former Issaquah Brewhouse next door to the hatchery.
As some other couples also do, O’Neill joined Wells at the hatchery, attending training sessions and volunteering to greet visitors and answer questions. She had already learned a lot about salmon from her son’s school project, but she credits Wells with getting her hooked. Eventually, they worked up to a wedding in 2019.
Wells came to the hatchery through his love of fly fishing. He grew up in Southern California and treasured trout fishing trips to the eastern Sierras. After moving with his family to the Sammamish Plateau in 1993, it didn’t take long for him to discover salmon.
“When I realized we had a salmon hatchery in my backyard, it just blew me away,” he said. He showed up at the first volunteer training session in 1995, which involved about a dozen people on the deck next to the creek. They listened to presentations from FISH ‘s first executive director Steve Bell, hatchery staff and Muckleshoot Tribe biologist Mike Mahovlich, and they took home a three-ring binder with background materials about salmon biology and lifecycle to study.
Wells was eager to jump in the pond and help with handling fish on spawning days. But those salmon are a lot bigger than a rainbow trout. He was thrilled with “just being in the middle of all those fish and how strong they were,” he said. He recalled the first time hatchery staff told him,” Don’t hold on too hard with your thumb.” The pressure can result in a condition referred to as “spawning thumb,” when temporary numbness makes it difficult to pick up a cup of coffee.
Wells soon joined the FISH Board and came up with the idea to track visitors to the hatchery.
“We found out that people locally always wanted to bring their friends from out of town when they were visiting,” he said. “The hatchery was a big draw.”
Wells bought a large paper world map and mounted it on a cork board. Visitors were asked to press a colored pin into the map to indicate their hometown. Within a couple of years, the map was full of pins from dozens of countries all over the world.
Over the years, Wells, now 74, has done some of everything at the hatchery, from rescuing big chinook that accidentally jumped out of the holding ponds, to pushing the FISH Board to establish a gift shop. (The FISHop first opened in 2012, thanks in large part to the couple’s efforts.) He enjoys early mornings on fall weekends, before the crowds arrive, when he can sweep some leaves off the deck, pick up any litter and savor the tranquility of the salmon park in the middle of town.
While other Issaquah residents plan to leave town the first weekend in October, O’Neill and Wells embrace the chaos and jump right into the middle of it. They often can be found at the underwater viewing windows, interpreting the salmon story for the enthralled crowds.
“It’s exhausting, but it’s really fun,” Wells said. “You would answer the same five questions a thousand times. You would go to work on Monday, and you hardly had a voice left.”
“It’s very exciting to be there, especially at Salmon Days weekend, because there are so many people, and they are excited to be there,” explained O’Neill, who arrived in Issaquah in 1995 and settled on Squak Mountain, just up the hill from the hatchery. “The entire town parades by you. It’s a great reminder of what a lovely community we live in.”
“It’s really a unique group of people,” Wells said of the FISH volunteers. “What I enjoy most is just hanging out on weekends and answering questions. About 90 percent of the people who come there don’t know anything about salmon. I just love talking to people about FISH and trout and salmon.”
The experience of sharing salmon with visitors creates a family atmosphere among volunteers. Wells met and bonded with fellow FISH guide Kevin Boze while sharing tips between visitors on the bridge over Issaquah Creek. They’ve remained friends and fountains of fish wisdom since 1999.
“There are so many fascinating things to learn about salmon, and a lot of them verge on the incredible,” Boze observed. “Sometimes, I’ll tell a tour, ‘If you think I’m making something up, raise your hand.’ I never actually make anything up, but visitors still raise their hands. Salmon are fantastic creatures.”
A Boeing engineer and community theater actor, Boze lived just a few blocks away from the hatchery and volunteered to help out there after his wife started working for FISH. Just one season of harvesting eggs and leading tours got him hooked. He served for several years on the FISH Board and was named volunteer of the year in 2004. He even takes vacation days from work in the fall to get in the adult holding ponds and wrangle salmon on spawning days.
“Salmon Days is my favorite time of the year,” Boze said. “We see tens of thousands of people, and they all have questions about the fish. I’m happy to share the remarkable salmon migration story, over and over again, to help people understand how important these fish are to our community, and especially to the tribal cultures here.”
Volunteers often mention a sense of responsibility that comes with the work – responsibility for keeping the hatchery operating 30 years after it was threatened with closure, and responsibility for interpreting salmon behaviors and educating young and old about this keystone species.
“The hatchery is Washington State property, so, in a sense, it belongs to everybody,” Boze noted. “When you volunteer at the hatchery, you really and truly feel like you own it. You care about it, and you have a stake in its future and in the continuation of our salmon runs.”
What all volunteers have in common is their reverence for the Northwest salmon and their remarkable migration and life cycle, and how they symbolize the resiliency and sustainability of the Northwest ecosystem.
“I fully believe in my heart of hearts this is a gift we have been given to take care of until we have no more breath,” Waggoner concluded, “and then we turn it over to someone else who we are teaching daily to become the salmon stewards of the future.”
Thanks to these volunteers, and to these other long-serving FISH Guides:
- Richard “Doc” Andersen – served as docent and spawning volunteer. He was the physician for the Issaquah High School football team and had a practice in Issaquah before moving to North Bend. He also was an avid fisherman. “He could tell you the name of the disease that causes the fungus on spawning salmon,” Waggoner said. Zeigler added, “I was so impressed that he was giving tours and answering questions when he was legally blind, with his wife, Janet, guiding him. He seemed to love that.”
- Eileen Barber – served as board member, docent, business owner and Issaquah city councilmember. As a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis, she was instrumental in collecting donations from the business community to remodel the Aquarium Room, Zeigler said, and she gave many tours as well.
- Bruce Davis – served as docent and spawning volunteer. RIP 1927-2003.
- Doug Emery – served as board president, docent and Issaquah School District teacher
- Ava Frisinger – served as board president, docent and Issaquah mayor and councilmember. “I remember Ava coming over on her lunch hour from City Hall to do a tour,” Waggoner said. “When I found out she was the mayor giving a tour, that blew me away,” Zeigler added. “That just showed her love and dedication for this place.”
- Don McWhirter – served as docent and spawning volunteer. He established a tradition of bringing donuts for volunteers at the weekly spawning sessions, and he became known as the “whack king” for his well-practiced method of dispatching salmon for manual spawning, Waggoner said. RIP 1931-2020
- Don Monchil – served as docent, spawning volunteer and FISH photographer. RIP 1928-2020
- Norman “Crash” Nash – served as board member and docent. He was a retired military pilot who moved to Issaquah with his wife from Whidbey Island. He was a member of the VFW, where he met and recruited Waggoner to volunteer with FISH. Waggoner related the story about how Nash got his nickname, after he survived two plane crashes. RIP 1935-2017
- Charles “Stan” Staniforth – served as docent and DFW volunteer, named State of Washington Volunteer of the Year. “He always seemed to be on the grounds and talking to people,” Zeigler said. “He was very social and asked the kids lots of questions.” Waggoner added, “He just wanted to get out of the house, and the hatchery gave him something to do. There’s nothing Stan wouldn’t do.” RIP 1929-2014
