Richard Everett Ellingwood Jr.

What Cudge wrote about him in Cudge.

1. As a small boy learning to skate on new single-runner skates at Wingra Park, Dick kept falling and explained to his mother that the skates were not used to the ice yet.

   He came in finally, this time coming up to mother. She said, "How are you getting along?" He said, "Oh, you know mamma, these new skates aren't used to the ice yet."

   p. G18 →

2. After four daughters, Dick was born on 15 November 1929, to his parents' astonishment, and was named after his father, a junior.

   I couldn't believe it when they told me we had a son. Wasn't that something? Ruth said that when the doctor told her she had a boy, she said, "Please doctor, don't joke with me."

   p. G20 →

3. At about three Dick was let down from a second-floor bedroom window on a clothesline by his sisters, who could not hold him, until Cudge came home and pulled him in.

   there was Dick (who was about three years old) hanging from the second floor bedroom with a clothesline tied around his chest.

   p. G27 →

4. As a Boy Scout in a wartime air-raid drill, Dick played a dead pedestrian, was carried off in a hearse under a sheet, and sat up on the way to the roller rink, startling a passing wagon driver.

   Finally, his curiosity got the better of him, and he threw the sheet back and sat up to see where he was.

   p. I16 →

5. Dick spent three frozen weekends helping his father dig up an old 1,000-gallon oil tank to sell for $50, before talking his way out of the rest of the job.

   He had worked like a trooper, much better than I had anticipated, and I admired his ingenuity in figuring out all those reasons why he should be released.

   p. I24 →

6. After high school in 1947 Dick worked a year, studied at Eastern Washington, served in the army from 1951 to 1953 and went on to the University of Washington, where he fell in love with Frances Holbrook.

   And finally in the early spring of 1955, he told us he was finally really in love with Frances Holbrook, and he wanted us to come over and meet her.

   p. I31 →

7. In 1957 Dick went to Detroit for two years to help open up the soft-water market there, leaving the house on South Lee Street in Spokane that he had largely built himself.

   Dick had made a deal with the Remsings, so they built it for him, but let him do all he wanted on it. So he had done much of the work himself.

   p. I33 →

8. In 1960 Dick took over from his father as president of the family's soft-water company in Spokane.

   So I called a meeting of the employees and told them that I was going on a part-time basis and that from now on Dick would occupy my office (and the fine desk chair which the employees had given me)

   p. J3 →