James B. Strong

James B. Strong, age 89, of Olympia, and former resident of Moses Lake, died on February 2, 2010. He was born in New York City in 1920 and grew up in Grinnell, Iowa, where his father was a professor of economics. Jim graduated from Grinnell College in 1942, then went into the US Army field artillery. He served in Normandy and Brittany in 1944 as an artillery forward observer, radioing in locations for artillery fire. He was seriously wounded in his arm after about a month, and had a long recuperation. In 1945 he married Sylvia Kolden of Portland. They went to Juneau in the Alaska territory in 1946, where Jim served as a field agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, visiting traditional native villages all over the territory. He then went to Yale Law School, and upon graduating in 1952 Jim and his family moved to Washington state. He was in private law practice first in Spokane, then Moses Lake, from 1954 to 1968, also serving as a part-time municipal judge and district court judge in Moses Lake.