Lol, I just found this very interesting site and I wanted to amend my email above, just a bit. The Old Settler poem was not based on The Eulogy of Amariah Kalloch III. I constructed that sentence sloppily. What I meant was that when eulogizing Amariah, his friend quoted the entire poem. I remember Ivar so well from when I was a child and my dad would drive the family down to Seattle in the old 1946 Plymouth to sup at Ivar's on the waterfront when it was still in a ramshackle old building. And the naughty treat for adults was to drink clam liquor, spiked by Ivar himself. He enjoyed hearing my dad's tales of being a Pearl Harbor survivor and would sometimes play his banjo or mandolin for us. I remember an interview Ivar gave in his later years, talking of camping in lean-tos in "Hooverville," the homeless camp located on the present site of the stadiums, back during the Depression. "I could have been a f****ng Communist," he roared to the interviewer. There will never be another one like him. I wonder if one of his ancestors sat Ivar on his knee and recited the old Settler to him.

Skagit River Journal of History & Folklore

Noel V. Bourasaw