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-- About Rex Hargadine --
Rex
Raymond Hargadine was born May 30, 1911, to
Raymond Franklin and Jeanettie (Zimmerman) Hargadine in Ematon, Stevens
County, Kansas,
born
about two years after his sister, Hazel.
During his boyhood, prior to the general use of automobiles and
electricity, the Ray
Hargadine family farmed a homestead connected with three others held by
the Zimmerman
family in Colorado, raising sorghum to feed cattle. Rex's mother died
of rheumatoid
arthritis when he was twelve years old, and he and his sister went to
live with their
mother's older sister Floy and her husband Al Nichols in Chelan,
Washington.
Rex worked in the Nichols family home-building business doing lath and plumbing while he finished high school, but concentrated his hopes on a farm of his own which he hoped to build with his own hands.
He also learned, as his father had, to play the guitar, the banjo, the mandolin, and the fiddle. He graduated with the Chelan High School class of 1930.
A very energetic and diligent worker, he embarked upon his career with jobs in the local apple orchards, and supplemented his income by playing in dance orchestras at night, but he found his ambitions seriously compromised by the onset of the Great Depression. Work was scarce and pay was poor. The general economic condition of the country deteriorated, and like many others of his generation, he did go on the road in search of employment, but a harrowing experience in Montana in mid-winter forced him back to Chelan to make the best of things as they were, he had learned, nationwide.
When the Roosevelt administration's Civilian Conservation Corps reached Chelan, Rex enlisted and went to work in the national forest as a fire fighter, but his enlistment was never completed because of his musical ability. A band leader named Glen Rice was playing in Chehalis when someone told him about Rex, and arranged an audition. Rice offered Rex a job with his band, and Rex obtained a discharge from the "CC's," as they were called by the enlistees, to travel the Pantages-Orpheum theater circuit, which extended from San Diego to Vancouver B.C. as a guitarist, singer, and arranger. The nine-piece band, called the Beverly Hillbillies, also had a nearly new tour bus, and a recording contract with Brunswick Records. But, as with so many other showbiz phenomena, the Hillbillies exhausted their market, and Rex was back in Chelan and out of work again by 1935. However, his valuable experiences with Glen Rice enabled him to play Saturday night dances at the Chelan Pavilion weekly for about seven years thereafter, and to capture some trade as a guitar teacher in a music store in Wenatchee for a time. His uncle Al still had some work for him, and he gradually got more work in the orchards by becoming knowledgeable about irrigation methods.
In 1935, he married Daisy Fleming, and his first son, Robert Rex, was born. The marriage ended in divorce after about a year and a half, and little Robert was adopted and raised to adulthood by his great-aunt Aunt Floy, who enjoyed good health for almost all of her 105 years of life. Aunt Floy was very good to Bob; we all thought she spoiled him rotten, and he calls her Mom to this day.
Rex was never subdued for very long by
any misfortune. His father had
followed the wheat harvests through Eastern Washington for several
years and had remarried
Orpha Jane (Janie) Higley, a widow with three sons, in about 1930.
Rex associated cordially with his
step-brothers and saw them regularly
for the remainder of their lives.
On July 16, 1939, he married Hazel Evine Erickson, also of Chelan; and in 1940, the young couple moved to their present home at Carson Junction, Skamania county, Washington, having contracted to buy it over the next five years. Rex went to work for Carson Lumber Company as a timber faller, and set out to build his farm in his spare time. He acquired horses, cows, goats, chickens,and rabbits, cleared a pasture, installed a water system, and put in boysenberries and fruit trees, but the commencement of World War Two reduced the farm to a Victory Garden and sent him to work at the Vancouver Shipyard as a Steamfitter. He commuted to Vancouver throughout the war, becoming a journeyman Steamfitter, a member of the Steamfitter's union, and later a state-licensed Building Trades Journeyman as a result of that experience, but also incurring the liability of pulmonary asbestosis from the insulation which was applied to the steam pipes in the ships.
At the conclusion of the war, he bought a sawmill and set out to
enlarge his house, as he
now had three children and was living in two rooms with wood heat and
no indoor plumbing.
The house was expanded, another child was born, and the farming agenda
was recognized as
unrealistic, so Rex obtained employment with Keller Electric in
Stevenson for a time, then
with E. C. Rutledge Plumbing & Heating, also in Stevenson. By
1953, he had built a new
3-bedroom home and moved into it, developed a love of flower gardening,
and set about
landscaping his yard and building another new house for his father to
live in. The fifties
were spent raising vegetables, roses, iris and peonies by the hundreds,
hunting, fishing,
camping, picking huckleberries, square dancing, and building other
buildings on his
acreage.
The failure of his employer's health
forced him to establish his own
plumbing and heating business in (approximately) 1957, a business which
was successful and
served the community until his retirement in 1973.
Rex's enormous drive and short stature enabled him to be a prodigious worker with astonishing endurance, but by his own confession, he "might have overdone it a bit," and he also suffered a smashed shoulder in an auto accident and a broken back in a fall from a ladder during his plumbing career. His ambition was such, and his heritage sufficiently German, that he for a time increasingly relied on beer as an antidote to fatigue and pain, so that he could go on realizing a succession of goals.
But he came to see the consequent distortion of his personality as a liability, and in 1973 he finally found a sincere desire to stop drinking and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He went on to stay sober, one day at a time, for 21 years and eight months before his death. He devoted his retirement to gardening, lapidary work, the maintenance of his buildings, the needs of his large family, camping, fishing, and travel throughout Washington and Oregon with special emphasis on flower gardens, rock shops, and National Forests.
He was one of Skamania County's earliest A.A. members,and was instrumental in getting meetings established in Skamania County. Others know this story better than I, and I will leave it to them to tell, but from my perspective as his son, I can vouch for the frequency of his involvement. He got involved, and he stayed so involved that I seriously doubt that there were more than three weeks that went by in a year that he didn't do something with or for this program, for the entire 21 years.
He attended the Stevenson United Methodist Church regularly and was a devoted member of its choir. He was an appointed member of Skamania County's Mental Health Advisory Board, and served on it for many years.
He was preceded in death by his parents, his stepmother, his three step-brothers, Verl, Dane, and Al Higley, his half-brother, William Franklin Hargadine, and by a son, Eugene, who died four hours after his birth in 1940. He was survived by his sister, Hazel Klontz of Yelm, WA, who has since passed away, his half-sister Ave O'Keefe, then of Mesa, Arizona; since moved to Washington State, by his wife of 55 years, Evine, and five children; Bob Nichols of Chelan, Ed Hargadine of Stevenson, Dale Hargadine of Stevenson, Diane Hargadine of Tacoma and Sharon Lee Hargadine-Dolan of Carson; nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
He died February 20, 1995 of an intestinal hemhorrage consequential to a very sudden acute thrombocytopenia, and was buried in Carson, Washington a few feet from his Father and his Mother-in-law.