Debbie Hazen-From Reporter to Mother of Triplets to Restoring a Castle

Today’s guest is Debbie Hazen, a long time Clatskanie Oregon resident. She grew up in a family of newspaper reporters and later became owner and editor of the Clatskanie Chief.

She has always loved being involved in her small town community, volunteering and  she doesn’t let anything stop her to make things happen- even while raising triplets. 

As a long-lost relative of the Birkenfelds, she was able to access funds to restore the old event center and later to restore and manage the Flippin Castle.

This woman knows a lot of history!

Roughly 45 years as reporter, editor, publisher of The Clatskanie Chief
Also has written for The Oregon Journal, Ruralite Magazine; grant writer, poet and lyricist.

Mother of triplets, grandmother of 8.

President of Clatskanie Foundation
President of Clatskanie Historical Society
Board member of Clatskanie Senior Citizens, Inc.
Board member of Columbia Economic Team

Newly restored to its late Victorian splendor, The Castle, located at 620 SW Tichenor Street in Clatskanie, Oregon, is now open by appointment for tours, historic research, overnight stays, and as a venue for small weddings, receptions, teas, garden parties…

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Find me on my website: jan-johnson.com

Transcript

Jan: Are you looking for an inspiring listen, something to motivate you? You've come to the right place. Welcome to Women of the Northwest, where we have conversations with ordinary women leading extraordinary lives. Motivating, inspiring, compelling.

Jan: Debbie Hazen And welcome to Women of the Northwest.

Debbie: Thank you, Jan.

Jan: Nice to have you here with me today. You have all kinds of stories of things that you've done in your past and things you're doing in your retirement. We're going to have fun listening to that. Have you always lived in Clatskanie?

Debbie: I no, not always, but about 62 of my 72 years I lived in class. And I have to start out this way. My good friend Margaret Mcgruder, she always teases me that I start every story with I was born on November 13, 1950, in Astoria, which was my it was my father's 27th birthday, and my father worked for the at the time was sports editor of the Daily Astorian. Okay, well, it was the Astoria budget at the time, but his parents had owned and operated the Clatskanie Chief newspaper since 1922. And before I was one years old, we had moved back to Clatskanie and I and my father joined his parents working at the newspaper. And that was where we lived, and that's where I went to grade school up until the 6th grade. But my mother had respiratory issues, and the doctor at the time thought that a drier climate might be better. So my father got a job as the editor of the Madras Pioneer in Central Oregon. And so that's where I went to. We moved on spring vacation of my 6th grade year, and then we spent six years in Madras. And then actually my father moved back to class and I to rejoin his parents since they were getting older on the staff of the Chief. And the drier climate really hadn't helped that much. So I graduated from Madras High School in end of May 1968, and my mother and I then moved back right after I graduated. And I worked that summer for the Chief before I went to college my freshman year in New York State. Bard College. I wanted to go to far away.

Jan: Like, mostly, yes, I want to go far away from this little town.

Debbie: Exactly. And I wanted to go to a small private college. And at that time, colleges were on the East Coast. They were doing this geographic distribution thing. And so Bard offered me a scholarship. And so I went there, and I actually did learn a ton, and I was able to spend quite a lot of time in the city, but for variety of reasons that I won't go into came back the next year and then went three years to Portland State. And then your major was English? My major was like English lit. But when I got back to Portland State, I had been editor of my high school newspaper in Madras because you.

Jan: Came by it naturally.

Debbie: Yeah, it just kind of happened that way. And at one time, my father was well, I was editor of the Madras High School White Buffalo. My sister was editor of the whatever, the Oregon College of Education, then the campus newspaper was, and my father was editor of the Matters Pioneer, and my grandparents were editor and publisher of the Clatskanie Chief.

Jan: That's like my family, we're all artists, and so, I mean, we didn't have a chance.

Debbie: Yeah, right. But I actually earned tuition at Portland State by working on the Vanguard. The Portland State newspaper? So I got a lot of good experience in journalism there. I have to say that as far as academic learning, I probably did more in that one year at Bard, which was kind of it was like a rank below the Ivy League schools, but it was into a classical education. We had a year of Greek philosophy, a year of ancient history from the original text of Herodotus and Thucydides and all of these people. But anyway, right at the end of my senior year at Portland State, my grandmother, who I was very close to, my father's mother, died very suddenly. So I suffered a heart attack at the age of 68 at her desk at the Chief office, basically. So my grandfather asked me if I'd come and take her place on the paper, and I wasn't really knowing what I was going to do, and I thought, well, and I was upset by my grandmother's death, and I just kind of needed to spend some time at home. And I thought, well, I'll just do this temporarily.

Jan: Yeah, just for a while, figure out.

Debbie: What I'm really going to do. Right, exactly. So that was the summer of 1972, and then actually in the fall of 1973, I got married and I had a fight with my grandfather, and I quit the Chief. And that's when I then got a job as a staff writer with The Oregon Journal, which was the other daily newspaper in Portland until it merged with The Oregonian. And I covered Columbia and Classic counties for the Journal. But I mostly worked out of my home. Occasionally I go into the office, but during that time, then from that was from 1973 until 1979, then I did get pregnant and give birth to triplets, two girls and a boy in May of 1975.

Jan: That always switched things up a little bit.

Debbie: Right. So that was my main focus, although I did continue to do some writing for the Journal during that period of time. And my mother  was very good about coming and taking care of the of the triplets. And then when they were four years old, then I went back to work part time for the Chief, and then that gradually worked into full time.

Jan: Yeah. And so have any of them become journalists?

Debbie: Well, actually, one of my daughters Erica has a master's degree in nonfiction writing.

Jan: Okay.

Debbie: And she taught journalism and writing at the University of Portland for a couple of years. But now she is because she has two boys, one of them with special needs at home. She is now employed as a grant writer.

Jan: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Debbie: And then actually, all of three of them are good writers. All of them worked for me at the 

Chief at various times. When I did decide to retire and sell in 2014, two of them were actually working for me, and I would have happily given it to them. But unfortunately, the business community in class can I has just gone away. Basically, it can't compete with the big box stores in Longview, and newspapers only have two ways of making money, and one is through selling papers, which basically circulation kind of just pays for itself. Everything's online. Yeah. So they knew that they really couldn't make much of a living at it. I'd been working for free for three or four years, and it could no longer exist as it was under independent ownership. So I did sell it to a chain of small newspapers because at least they have some economies of scale that total independent didn't have. I have always been, as were the two generations of my family before me, very involved in community service work. I would go to cover a Heritage Days meeting for the 4 July celebration as a reporter, and they would just be, they'd need a volunteer for this, and they'd need a volunteer for that. 

Jan: Ask Debbie. 

Debbie: Exactly. So I'd say, Well, I could do that.

Jan: You enjoyed it too.

Debbie: Oh, yeah. I mean, it just has always been natural for me. I've always as a kid growing up, my parents were involved in everything, and I was involved. I had the longest list of activities in my class. Yeah. I'm just overachiever.

Jan: Something needs to be done.

Debbie: Right. So in 2005, for several years prior to that, I had kind of become acquainted, reacquainted. We had met a few times at long intervals with a distant cousin of mine whose name was Keith Birkenfeld.

Jan: Okay.

Debbie: He and I are both descendants of one of the two Birkenfeld brothers and their wives who came to this area in the early 1880s. They were German immigrants, and they worked their way across the country. And one of the brothers, Anton, he started the general store over there, and that's where they delivered the mail. And so the mail stop was called Birkenfeld, and that's how the name Birkenfeld got to be there. The other brother, the one that I'm descended from, Ben hard as I understand it, their farmhouse burned down somewhere in the late 1890s or very early 19 hundreds, and they moved into the big metropolis of Clatskanie and lived here, as did then, their children and grandchildren. Keith Birkenfeld's father and grandparents and great grandparents all lived in Clatskanie. But when Keith's father was an adult, then he lived in Bremerton, Washington, and that's where Keith grew up. So he had never really lived around here, but he had relatives here and a fondness for the community. He was a bachelor and even though he was not born with money, he was a teacher and a school administrator, had to retire in his 40s because he had a heart condition. But then he invested very wisely in the stock market and in Bainbridge Island real estate. And he made, by the time he was 68 when he died. And he lived very modestly and nobody knew he would drive basically a new or newer Cadillac all the time, but nobody knew that he had anywhere near the $20 million plus that he had when he died. And he was active actually in philanthropic things when he was living and had served on, I believe it was on the board of the Seattle Foundation. But he left a trust at the Seattle Foundation. Keith Birkenfeld Memorial Trust at the Seattle Foundation. And before he died, he appointed a committee of his friends, his two stockbrokers who neither one knew the other one existed, and some distant relatives, including myself, to the committee that would distribute this money. And he left very detailed criteria of how he wanted it used and where he wanted it. He also, in his 18 page will, left, I think it was 34 specific bequests outside of this trust. When he and I would visit mostly on the telephone, he knew that I was on the board of directors of the Classic and I Foundation, which had been founded in in 1998, basically to serve as to receive funds and then distribute them to the community for various worthwhile community projects, but with an emphasis on education. So he had talked to me about that and we visited about that. Because he had experience on philanthropic boards, he had given us several suggestions. So anyway, when he died, the second largest of these 34 separate bequests that he made in his will was a $500,000 bequest to the Clatskanie Foundation that had to be used not for scholarships or to fund the Heritage Day celebration, but for a bricks and mortar physical capital improvement project. And he was very interested in the arts, culture and theater and museums and history. So we had this big ugly building half a block off the intersection, highway 30 intersection in Clatskanie that had been built in 1926. And it had once been a grand building and been the center of the where the theater was and where the post office was and where all of the community dances were. But it had fallen into really horrible disrepair. So the foundation board looked around and we finally decided, well, that is where we can best spend this. Yeah, exactly. With that 1st $500,000. Then we called in an engineer, an architect. Did studies give you 500,000, right? Well, actually so he did. So with the first $500,000, we bought the building from an unwilling seller who had filled it up with a hoard, and we did these engineering and architectural studies, and we did the facade improvements. So we fixed that so it looked decent from the outside again and was safe. And we did a seismic upgrade. And so that building is now probably it'll be the last one standing when the big one hits. While we were doing all of this research, we found out that the building had been built by a prominent or the plans had been done by a prominent architect named Ernst Kroner, who had done a lot of grand lodge building churches, libraries, that kind of thing, in the 1920s. 

And actually, one of my daughters, Erica, who was she was studying for a master's degree, and she was doing research at the Oregon Historical Society. And at the end of one day, she'd kind of finished up her project. But she thought, well, just for the heck of it, I'm going to put Class Can I into the search engine. Two things came up. The minutes of the Christian Women's Temperance Union from about 1900, and the blueprints for this building, for the Cultural Center building. Yeah. The odd fellows hall. And so we actually ended up purchasing some of those views. And then basically 2010, when we finished the well, everything I said so far. And then we kicked off a second phase of fundraising, and we went back to then the Birkenfeld Trust at the Seattle Foundation, and we got another $500,000. That was a million dollars. And then actually, we've gotten a couple of other small grants from them. So Keith Birkenfeld's contribution to the building is more like a million 500,000.

Jan: And hopefully there's a plaque.

Debbie: Well, the theater there is a donor wall, which he is the central highest place on, but also that we named the theater inside the Clatskanie cultural center. The Birkenfeld Theater. Okay.

Jan: Yeah.

Debbie: So it's a 175 seat theater. And we have live performances there. The Clatskanie arts Commission has existed for over 30 years, but they didn't have their own performance space. They always use the high school, and sometimes they only get crowds of, well, even less than 100, sadly. And so in a 450 seat theater, that looks this is a very intimate, comfortable theater space. And then upstairs in what was once the Odd Fellows Lodge Hall, we have a 2400 square foot ballroom. And then we also the city of Classic and I. Their City hall was in an old fire truck garage converted. That was boldy. It wasn't AD compliant. It was full of asbestos. It had all of these.

 So we basically brokered a deal with the city of Clatskanie that they would give us their building and their lot, which we tore down and took care of all of the asbestos issues. And their lot, and that gave us a parking lot area. And then in exchange for that and $175,000 contribution from the city, then the city got a 2600 square foot suite of offices, including a council chambers in the cultural center. Yeah, for 30 years. I mean, they don't have to pay rent for 30 years. So really it comes out to I figured out, I mean, it's less than $500 a month rent that they're paying for a beautiful suite of offices. Well, for everybody. Right? And now we have in the retail space and downstairs that was originally a post office and later businesses, it's now a dance studio.

Jan: Oh, okay.

Debbie: Volunteers run that. Elsa Wooley and another outstanding woman, northwest Oregon and I and our husbands, Dee Woolly and my husband, Phil Hazen, we are the volunteer operators of the cultural center. But getting back to the funding for that so the project actually totaled about $3.3 million. After we got that million from the Birkenfeld Foundation, then we were able to go out to other nonprofit private foundations because that really gave us our project credibility. And so we got $500,000 from the Ford Family Foundation, 295,000 from the Meyer Memorial Trust, 250,000 from the Murdoch Trust, $200,000 from Dr. Grayson in his will, a man who had lived here. 

So my daughter Erica, by this time was working as a professional grant writer with a professional fundraiser. And we actually paid the fundraiser a bit in order to tell us who we should apply to and what points to stress with them. But then my daughter, she volunteered her skills, so she and I did the grant writing, and we were then able to by early 2014, then we were able to put together what totaled $3.3 million from grants. And one thing that was the idea of this fundraiser was if you go to someone and say, well, Jan, can you donate $1,000 to this project? You say, well, no, I can't donate $1,000. Well, can you donate $250 a year for four years? Yes, they can do that. And we knew this project was going to take a while. So started that in 2010, and then we really started working on the interior restoration in early 2014, and we finished then and opened up in early fall of 2015. 

So we've been operating successfully for seven and a half years. Although COVID took a big since we operate on having major events there weddings as well as live musical events. We do show movies sometimes we have it available for corporate parties. So that did take a hit during COVID but hung in there like everybody else.

Jan: Yeah, you got to the other side.

Debbie: So then when we finished this project, I had been involved in the Clatskanie historical society for a long time. My grandmother was third generation in Clatskanie because she was the Birkenfeld descendant, and her father had come west from Nova Scotia back in about 1880. So she was a great historian but dying so suddenly, there were so many things I wish I would have asked her. But through my years, 45 years working for the Clatskanie Chief I did a lot of stories that related to past historical events and one of my favorite sources was Melvina Barr who's she's deceased now, but she was born in 1910 and she lived yeah, my grandmother's name was Melvina too. 

She lived here, she was a teacher. Her parents had immigrated from Sweden but she married into one of the families that had been one of the first twelve donation land claim families here in 1852 53 the Bar family. There's a number of families here where our grandparents or even great grandparents were friends and we have been had family relationships for four generations. I could go on. My husband's best friend, since basically they could walk and talk, is Eric Evenson, who's the fourth generation of his family to be involved in the timberland and logging. And Eric and his wife Bonnie have grandchildren that are the same age as our grandchildren. And so they're out on the floor playing basketball, and I'm sitting up there. That's okay. Now am I looking at our children or our grandchildren? I mean it just gets so confusing. Yeah history exactly multigenerational small town history. 

Historical society had moved around several different places. We had never had a permanent home thankfully in 2017 the Clatskanie Senior Citizens Board invited us to move into The Castle which was something that I had won because it was already kind of a museum and they could use our manpower such as it is woman power to help operate the place. And also having been successful with the Clatskanie Culutral deck I had promised to help them with fundraising to restore and maintain this building. So I was able to go back to that Birkenfeld and we were able to get 250,000 then a quarter of a million for this project.

Jan: A lot of money.

Debbie: We also got $200,000 for the Senior Center project in Vernonia because making the argument that the people from Brooklyn fell frequently. Vernonia was their community of choice to go to the bigger cities and also a smaller grant for restoration of the old Mist Church. 

The Clatskanie Seniors bought then this building that we call the Castle in 1979. And they'd operate it here for many years. And they'd converted the basement into we have a fully licensed commercial kitchen down there and a dining commons for the seniors. And then this upstairs space had always been used for well, for tours and special events, but it was getting kind of shabby looking. And this place is on the National Register of Historic Places as the Thomas J. Flippin House. But again everybody in class could I refer to it as The Castle. 

The seniors had been given a gift from the Tweets family along residence here who all of the members who are living here have now passed away. But we had a $50,000 gift to the seniors that we'd been saving for maintenance projects. And then we were able to add that $250,000 from the Birkenfeld Foundation and many smaller gifts. We got a $30,000 grant from the Collins Foundation, several small grants that added up to about $20,000 from Betsy Johnson's Foundation, the Samuel S. Johnson foundation, and also Steve and Janice. They're the owners of the high school pharmacy. They actually donated us a building downtown, which we have been leasing to raise money. And actually we're going to complete the sale this summer. And the person that is buying that building is Scott Hadlock, who is an amazing wood refinisher. And so, as part of the deal that we made with him, he refinished. So all of these floors are the original fur floors, and he refinished every inch of these floors. 

So we raised about $600,000. And some of that is in in kind contributions for the restoration of this, which I mentioned earlier. I mean, basically since 2018. We replaced the sidewalks outside, we repaired the foundation. We repaired and repainted the exterior walls, reroofed, and then inside, we've done all kinds of repairs and refinishing and repainting. So was on the committee for the castle capital improvements, along with Rebecca Fisher and Bob Horness and Joy Green. And we're all members of the board of directors, too. And we headed up the committee. And some of them were more thoughtful than I was about taking pictures.

Jan: Yeah, because it's always nice to see this is where it came from.

Debbie: Right. And it is pretty amazing just looking. I had taken when I was going for a grant specifically for repairing the front steps, and I saw those pictures last night and how crumbly and ugly and they looked.

Jan: And you were telling me earlier about the walls in the other room that had all the wallpaper on it.

Debbie: Yeah. So most of the walls did have wallpaper on them, but the kitchen, the historic kitchen had actually seven layers. And when we got the 7th layer off, they found, I should say I did not specifically work on this, but Rebecca, she was one of the ones that just bloodied her fingers practically doing this. Anyway, they found this beautiful ship lap siding and then had that sanded down and sealed because more attractive.

Jan: It is. It's beautiful.

Debbie: And in this room where we're sitting now, in the study, they had lowered the ceilings down to the picture rail, and also they had done that in the kitchen as well. And some of the other rooms, and in this room particularly, we didn't know what was up there. We thought, well, maybe there's plumbing pipes or whatever running. But when we took off the old mid-century ugly old tile things, it was basically the plaster needed a little bit of repair and it needed repainting. But it was basically like you see it now.

Jan: Well, that's really interesting, all this work that you've done with two amazing community buildings. I want to ask you one thing going back to your newspaper experiences, do you have any things that you reported on, particularly that stood out to you over the years, either funny or memorable?

Debbie: One thing about working for a small-town newspaper, and I suppose especially one that your family owns or that you own, it gives you an amount of freedom that many journalists don't have. And this is actually when I was working for the journal, but there was a woman here who had a St. Bernard who dug up a bottle of prohibition whiskey or moonshine, whatever the St. Bernard's name was, Brandy. And so I wrote this just kind of a little short feature article, but I had a whole bunch of puns in there about how Brandy the St. Bernard booze hound and doggedly digging. And that story actually was the Journal published it on the front page, and it was picked up by the wire service, and it was and it was published in newspapers clear across the country. Caroline Mcgruder actually had been Margaret's mother had been visiting her sister on Staten island, and she'd seen it in the newspaper back there. So that was kind of a funny one.

 I have also covered a murder trial for both the journal and the chief where the young woman, Vicky Brown, was killed in the school bus garage in rainier, but they never found her body. Anne Rule wrote a story about this case because it was very unusual case because there was no body, but they had enough evidence to believe that she had been murdered. And so I covered that, and that was interesting. 

And then the chief had a tradition going back to the 1930s of front page, signed column that first my grandfather wrote and then actually my grandmother wrote it during the World War II years, and she filled it with news about the local boys who were serving in the war. And then during the either my father or my grandfather would ride it. And then eventually when my father became disabled and had to retire in 1993, then it became mine. And a lot of times I would write about serious it'd be more like a traditional editorial, but sometimes it would be more of a personal essay kind of thing. 

And from 1979 until 2014, I only ever was gone on vacation for two weekly issues, really. We would sometimes my husband and our children when they were still at home, I mean, we would sometimes take leave on a Wednesday after the paper went to bed and then come back on a Sunday night. But we published the paper on Wednesdays. I could not be gone on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. So the first time I was gone was when my father was still active and working all the time and the second time I was gone was when my daughter Erica was going to school in Salzburg, Austria. And I did go over and spend Christmas, but that had taken a lot. I worked for six weeks ahead of time to publish the issue that was coming out at Christmas. But when I got home, Trident is what the name of this column was called. I would usually write it over the weekend and when I was gone on vacation over the weekend, then I would sometimes just write about what we had done. And I wrote about this trip to Europe with my daughter in 1994. For several weeks, that was the Trident. And then other times I'd write about something that was personal to me.

 My husband is a Vietnam combat veteran with the 101st Airborne Division. And I wrote an article about an experience that he had while he was over there during for Memorial Day one year. And actually I wrote it without mentioning who it was. I just referred to him as a point man from Clatskinie. That was very personally moving thing, both for me and for him. That same experience got written up by the Baltimore Sun years later because this friend of his who got killed on this day that I talked about, and he and another friend had carried his body out of the jungle to a landing zone because they'd promised him that if that happened that they would do that. A reporter for the Baltimore Sun was doing a story on veterans who had been killed, who had been born on Veterans Day. And so this friend of Phil's who was a young black man from Mississippi, Elijah Wallace Burkett, his birth was November 11, Veterans Day. And there's a virtual Vietnam wall online where you can leave messages. And Phil had gone on there and said, I kept my promise. That's the message that he had left. This reporter from the Baltimore Sun called that and as a result contacted Phil and wrote an article. I mean, it was mainly about Elijah, but it was in part about this experience of the day that he was killed and that got Phil in touch with Elijah's family in Mississippi who he is still in touch with. And then I later wrote a version of that same story for the Rural Light magazine. That was a story that was meaningful.

Jan: Really meaningful.

Debbie: Yeah.

Jan: Well, thank you for sharing all of this. This has really been fun.

Jan: Thanks again for listening. You can find show notes and more information on my website@jandashohnson.com. I hope you'll join us again next week for another exciting episode. Meanwhile, have a great week.