Fire district commissioner has seen Mattawa grow, change

MATTAWA — Paul Parker’s introduction to the fire service in Mattawa came not long after he and his wife Bonnie moved to town.

“When I got here in 1957, into the trailer court, a guy came over to welcome us and told me, ‘You’re on the fire department and you’ve got to have a shovel and a garden hose in your car at all times,’” he said.

Parker has been involved in the fire service ever since, first with the Mattawa Fire Department and later with Grant County Fire District 8 as one of its founding commissioners. While he has given up answering fire calls, he’s still part of the distinct.

“I retired from volunteering in 2008, after 51 years,” he said. “I’m still a commissioner, and have been since 1967.”

Mattawa was a different town back in 1957, when Parker, fresh from a few years of military service, and his wife came to visit her parents. Priest Rapids and Wanapum dams were under construction.

“When we came to Mattawa there were probably about 150 house trailers here for the construction workers, and only a couple dozen stick-built houses that they moved in, surplus buildings from Hanford,” he said.

A lot of the land around town, now orchards, vineyards and row crops, was under the jurisdiction of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

“Right here on the edge of the town they had big flashing lights and a sign up that said, ‘If the lights are flashing, don’t go out there.’ The Army was still in here then - their (installation) was 13 miles out of town,” he said. “We’d go out there jackrabbit hunting and stuff like that, but if you were out there at night, usually an MP would come in.”

The Hanford reservation was the highest of high-security areas.

“They had all of the land around here, clear down to Tri-Cities. Every five miles there were surface to air missile sites,” Parker said.

Nevertheless people were living in and around Mattawa, working on dam construction. And a young guy just out of the army needed a job.

“I wasn’t union, so I couldn’t get on the dams,” Parker said. “But then I finally got hired by the outfit that ran the construction for the (Grant County Public Utility District). I got on with them as a surveyor,” he said.

After the construction was completed, Parker said he bought his own business in anticipation of the arrival of irrigation water in the Mattawa area. But that was premature by about a decade, and he sold the business and went back to work for the PUD, retiring in 1988. Parker stayed in the business for about another decade, he said, before retiring for good.

Back in the day Mattawa needed fire protection, and its residents saw to it that the town got it.

“We had a Jaycee club here in town; we held bingo games and made quite a bit of money. We bought the city of Mattawa a huge crash truck, they called it, from down in Oregon. The Jaycees can’t own anything, so we bought that truck for $1,000 and gave that to the city. It was a 1941 or 1942 International crash truck from an airport,” Parker remembered.

Parker found a truck himself, a half-track at a military surplus store in Wenatchee. A Mattawa business owner worked a deal with a Wenatchee-area orchardist to build a 1,000-gallon tank for it.

“Through volunteer help over the years, we finally got that tank mounted and a small pump on it, and we used it here for brush fires. Once (Grant County Fire) District 8 got established, the city gave us that truck,” he said.

“We had an all-volunteer group,” Parker said.

The district still owns one of those first trucks - it’s on display outside the GCFD 8 fire station, 20643 Road 22.5 SW, which opened in 2021.

The Mattawa area was still very sparsely populated back in 1967.

“There were only four families that lived out in the rural area,” Parker said. “Our first year, our budget was $1,223.”

But then, Mattawa had lost population with the end of dam construction. Parker also served on the school board, and then as now, the state funded teachers based on the number of students in school.

“At one time you had to have 50 students to qualify for four teachers,” he said. “We used to tease the head teacher about running kids through the hall twice to count them.”

The area around Mattawa eventually was opened to development, and irrigation water arrived in about 1972, Parker said.

The town needed an ambulance service, and city and GCFD 8 officials took the same approach they had taken with those early fire trucks.

“After we got where we got a little bit of money, actually, we needed an ambulance. So we hunted around and found a Chevy Suburban and we bought it,” he said. “We got permission from the state, because it didn’t meet the ambulance qualifications. They came and gave us a variance on it, and that’s when we started our EMT program. Six people signed up.”

Bonnie Parker became the district’s first female EMT, and volunteered for ambulance service for several years, Paul Parker said.

Summoning volunteers had its challenges.

“At one time we had five fire phones that were put in different houses around,” he said. “If you dialed the fire number all five phones would ring.”

Eventually, the construction of the former GCFD 8 fire station in downtown Mattawa solved the problem of notifying people by installing a siren, Parker said.

He said he kept volunteering for over half a century because it provided a needed service.

“It was one of those things. You live in the neighborhood, you help out,” he said.

He’s surprised by the way Mattawa has grown, he said. Currently the city has a contract with the fire district for fire protection, but the two are working on a deal to annex the city into the district, he said.

Parker said his wife had a similar motivation for her EMT training.

“There was one woman who lived in town who was a nurse. She’d always get called for anything,” he said. “But we got bigger and bigger and needed more support.”

Cheryl Schweizer may be reached at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.