A note from 2023 Ag Parade Grand Marshal Cheryl Driggs Elkins

MOSES LAKE — I go to all the Moses Lake parades with the Ag Parade being a favorite because it features the hard working men and women who farm now and those in our history who helped Moses Lake become the town that it is. It was totally unexpected when I was asked to be the Grand Marshal this year, but pride in my family’s past allowed me to accept as a way to honor and respect them.

My grandfather, Sam Driggs, came to Moses Lake in the late 1930s and started clearing the endless sagebrush from the fields on Potato Hill Road, as it was soon to be called. He planted potatoes and irrigated them with water from the lake, having huge redwood pipes installed up the hill. Onions and peppermint were soon added. His sons, Percy and Delbert Driggs, along with my grandmother, Lottie, and mom Nadine both very strong women, soon joined him with other crops being added, including apple and peach orchards on the peninsula.

I worked the fields from a young age, weeding onions, changing siphons and sprinklers, standing 12 hours a day on a dusty, loud potato digger. I drove truck when I could barely reach the pedals as men tossed hay bales on the bed. I burned huge piles of thistle and tumbleweeds and my cousin and I planted the endless row of trees on Highway 17 near the Grange Hall in block 42 that were sadly chopped down a few years ago.

When I turned 16, I added waitressing at Woo’s Chinese restaurant for two years and at 18, I moved to Seattle, lived at the YWCA and worked at Boeing. I then worked for a year in Alaska where I was given a top-secret secretarial position while assigned to an Air Force base in the middle of nowhere, while we were keeping an eye on missile activity in Russia. 

From there, I took a bus and got off in Santa Barbara, Calif., because when I passed through it as a teenager, I thought it looked like a beautiful place to live. I got a job as a radio dispatcher with the sheriff’s office where I also was acting matron on the night shift when they needed a woman to go on arrests of women and book them. Consequently, I got to take judo and go to the shooting range with the officers, but I was too short to become a deputy, which had been my goal.

I returned to Moses Lake and raised my two children, Mark Elkins, who lives with his wife, Becky, in Kentucky, and Tami Berry, who lives in Poulsbo with her husband, Dan, and my two grandchildren, Dylan and Makayla. 

I worked for 25 years for Mick and Judy Hansen as their bookkeeper for several businesses and in Accounts Payable for the Moses Lake School District for 24 years before retiring at age 75. During the last 25 years, I researched the Columbia Basin Herald past issues for historical subjects my cousin (former Columbia Basin Herald columnist) Dennis Clay used for his Friday Bit & Pieces page. He called my section “Email from Cheryl.” Having lost Dennis and all the older generation recently, at 80, I am now the last of my family in Moses Lake and I try to represent them proudly.

I have so much to be thankful for and I’m grateful for the very early values I grew up with, with responsibilities that come with living on a farm. I think we need to remember the pioneers that first came and paved the way for irrigating farming, broke out this raw land and helped to establish our town. My grandfather, Sam Driggs, was one of those pioneers and he and my family are the reasons I’m proud to be this year’s Grand Marshal.

The Ag Parade is an annual tradition in Moses Lake and is hosted by the Downtown Moses Lake Association. This year’s event is this Friday at 7 p.m. and is preceded by a street party at 5 p.m. hosted by businesses in downtown Moses Lake. For more information, visit www.downtownmoseslake.org.