BY ARCHIE SATTERFIELD

Who hasn't heard of Tillamook Cheese? No other cheesemaker on the West Coast of America has such a well-earned and enduring reputation.Think of cheddar cheese and Tillamook is the first word that comes to mind. In addition, for decades the Tillamook Cheese plant on the northern edge of the town of Tillamook was the most popular stop for tourists on the entire Oregon coast. Writing the history of this Northwest icon was one of Satterfield's favorite assignments. The book is still selling steadily after more than a decade in print.

"Archie has captured the essence of Tillamook as well as anyone could. I've lived here all my life and reading the book brings back memories I had forgotten." -- Harold Schild, former general manager, Tillamook Cheese

When the small, picturesque town of Edmonds, Washington, neared its 100th anniversary, the centennial committee decided to commission a history of the town that began as litle more than a row of sawmills and grew into an upscale village-by-the-sound. Fortunately Satterfield had been living in Edmonds for several years and the commission was offered to him first.

Alex Haley's monumental book, ROOTS, is probably the most important book ever written about family history, and since its publication genealogy has emerged as a major industry, and a major hobby for millions of Americans of all colors. Satterfield's friend, the late Richard V. Sawyer, was one of the early practitioners of writing family history for people in the Seattle area, and he referred Satterfield to the Chick family on Mercer Island, who wanted a family history written. It was one of Satterfield's most pleasant experiences as a writer. He came to believe in the basic decency of people who love their families enough to hire a professional writer to write their history.

Satterfield also works as an editor on occasion, as he did when the board of the Sahalee Golf and Country Club asked him to help them prepare a history of their world-class golf course and community east of Seattle. The club members wrote most of the book and Satterfield and an associate took over editing, further writing and did all of the production work, including design and shepherding the book through printing and binding.


"Archie was delightful to work with. We are very pleased. Our book is unique."--Harry Wilson, Founder of Sahalee Country Club.

Elton Bennett: His Life and Art. This book, out of print almost thirty years, is enjoying a lively sales on the used market, selling for as much as $150. The book sold very well, especially for a biography of a regional artist. Two printings of 5,000 each sold out in a few months, but before a third printing could be ordered, the publishing house, The Writing Works, was sold to a company with no experience in book publishing. In only a matter of weeks, the company declared bankruptcy and that was the end of the story for this and other books. The author would love to see it back in print with a reputable publisher. Suggestions welcome, as are inquiries by publishers.
During his lifetime, and for many years after he and his wife were killed in a plane crash in Pago Pago in 1974, Bennett was by far the most popular artist in the Pacific Northwest. While the art world tried to ignore him, art lovers, both rich and poor, bought many of his silkscreens and treated them with the same reverence they treated the works of Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Anderson and other Northwest icons. He was as eccentric as he was generous, and never permitted his silkscreens (for you elitists, serigraphs) to be sold for more than $15. If he caught a dealer raising the price, he would not permit them to sell any more of his work. At art shows around the region, in particular the Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair, Bennett never submitted his work for contests and he never bought space inside. He preferred being out on the street where many of his best customers were found. He gave away humorous black-and-white silkscreens, sometimes awarding them to people who could curtesy or who could recite a poem or famous quotation.
Perhaps more than any other artist in the Pacific Northwest, Bennett portrayed the region in the manner we prefer to see it. The author owns all rights to the book.

Many years ago when I was attending St. Louis University a friend invited me go with him one Sunday afternoon to visit his uncle who was an artist. I had never met an artist and it was exciting to watch as that nice man opened flat boxes filled with black and white prints made from pictures of people and places he had carved into wood and linoleum. One was a string quartet he had seen playing in Forest Park. He once lived in Mexico and brought back many stark visions of the troubled country. From North Africa he had an elderly musician playing a wind instrument similar to a clarinet, and he did several portraits of lonely men drinking alone late at night.
This was only a few years since the close of World War II so his scenes from Europe made the strongest impression on me. He depicted stone cities so old they seemed as much a part of the landscape as the cliffs above them and the rivers below. The print that intrigued me the most showed men fishing on what I assumed was a river with a gracefully curving bridge in the background. He corrected me; it was a canal. I thought canals were like the Panama and Suez, big enough for aircraft carriers, yet this canal wasn’t much wider than any of the small creeks where I grew up in Missouri. He said that all across England, France, Belgium and Holland he had seen these shallow, graceful waterways that were hundreds of years old, and that barges were towed on them, sometimes even by men and women in crude harness if they couldn’t afford draft animals.
It was a wonderful afternoon of art and conversation and hearing Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony for the first time. When we left he gave me a manila envelope filled with about a dozen of his treasures, including the canal scene. Europe seemed very far away then, but I was determined to one day see those stone cities connected by canals.
In 1986, almost exactly thirty years after meeting the artist, I went to Britain with a friend and at last got to see one of those canals. We took a train north from London across the gloomy autumn landscape to Leeds in the heart of Yorkshire. There we took a small local train westward to Skipton to meet another couple with whom we were going to spent a week aboard a narrow boat on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. --Diamond Resorts magazine