← The founding

Ada Merrick

Schoolteacher

Hollowfield Grade School, 1938 to 1971. Called the first meeting.

Driving back from Cle Elum on the evening of 4 November 1949, Miss Merrick stopped for what she took to be an elk standing in the road. It straightened up. She reported it to the county sheriff, who wrote it down, and to the school board, who suggested she had been working too hard.

She spent the next four years quietly collecting other people's accounts in a school exercise book. By the winter of 1953 she had thirty-one, and no idea what to do with them, so she invited everyone whose name was in the book to a room above Pruitt's hardware store.

Eight came. Three more heard about it and turned up anyway.

She kept the Institute's ledger for eighteen years and never once wrote down what she personally thought any of it was.