# One Family at Last **Vern and Charlotte** Petrie • Daubel When Vern Robert Petrie married Charlotte Anne Daubel in Spokane on 6 July 1957, two family lines that had traveled long and separate roads into the Inland Northwest came together at last. Everything recorded in the pages before this — the migrations, the small towns, the working lives, the households reorganized on short notice — converges in the household these two built at the northern edge of Spokane. This chapter belongs to them and to the family they made. ## Two Roads into Spokane County **Vern Robert Petrie** was born on 16 May 1936 in Bemidji, Beltrami County, Minnesota, the son of **Robert Petrie** and **Gladys Cooper**. The Bemidji country of the 1930s was a region of lakes and northern forest, and the decade of Vern's birth was one of hardship across rural America. Like many families of that era, the Petries went looking for a better foothold. Around 1939 they set out from Minnesota in a "house on a truck" that became a family legend, making their way west, living for a time in Conrad, Montana, and spending a stretch around 1942 in Wallace, Idaho, a mining town in the Silver Valley, before at last settling in Spokane. Spokane became the anchor of Vern's life. Though the family lived in the Lewis and Clark district, he attended Rogers High School, from which he graduated. His brother Dale went to West Valley, and another brother, Milton, did not finish high school — small details that sketch the ordinary texture of a working-class family finding its way in postwar Spokane, a family that also kept a dog named Jack. While Vern's people arrived in Washington by way of Minnesota and the mining towns of the mountains, **Charlotte Anne Daubel** was already a child of the country north of Spokane. She was born on 28 November 1939 in the small railroad town of Elk, in Spokane County, the daughter of **Herman Daubel** and **Thressa Strong**. Elk in those years had real momentum, a bustling community shaped by the rail line that carried timber, freight, and people across the surrounding farmland and forest. By 1940 the household was recorded there, in the town of her birth, and the pattern of her childhood carried the family through a series of homes in the country north of Spokane. Charlotte's people had roots in Chattaroy, a small community in Spokane County, and records place her there through much of that decade — in 1950, and again across 1953, 1954, and 1955 — during the years she was coming of age. She attended school in Elk in her younger years and went on to Riverside High School, the regional school that served the scattered farming settlements of the northern county. For a young woman growing up in Chattaroy in the 1950s, the world was measured in familiar distances: the town, the school, and the city of Spokane not far to the south. ## A Marriage That Began by Accident Vern's marriage began almost by chance. His brother Dale had been dating Charlotte, but when Dale fell ill and did not feel like going to a dance, Vern took her instead. The courtship was not without incident — on one of their early dates Vern got into a fight with another man, pinning him down before letting him back up only to get cold-cocked, a flash of the physical temperament that would serve him through a lifetime of hard labor. Whatever the rocky beginnings, it held. Vern and Charlotte were married on 6 July 1957 in Spokane, Charlotte then seventeen years old. A record of a residence in Spokane in mid-June of that year, shortly before the wedding, suggests their lives were already turning toward the city as they prepared to begin a household of their own. Together they raised four sons: Steven Robert, Gregory Ross, **Darren Robert**, and Alan Richard Petrie. Charlotte was living in Spokane in 1958 and 1960, and the work of raising four boys filled her days through the 1960s and beyond. By that decade the family had settled in Mead, a community just north of Spokane, where they would remain for many decades and where Vern would spend his later years. ## A Working Man and His Land Vern was a working man in the fullest sense, moving through a series of jobs that mapped the industrial and transportation economy of mid-century Spokane. He worked at United Buckingham, Ringsby United, Silverwheel, and Goodyear, and at a rendering company; he pumped gas; and he served in the National Guard. He also took a job at Vermiculite that would prove fateful, for the vermiculite trade of that period exposed workers to asbestos, and that exposure would in the end destroy his lungs. But it was on his own land that Vern's daily life found its fullest expression. In 1967 he bought eighty acres out near Mount Spokane, and there he built a rural life that clearly gave him deep satisfaction. He grew alfalfa on fifteen cultivated acres and raised cows, horses, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits. He butchered his own cattle, hanging and skinning them in the barn — labor remembered vividly by his family, down to the smell of an accidentally cut cow stomach. He loved to cut wood. He hunted deer, and once shot a bear whose rug adorned the home for years before moths finally claimed it. The outdoors ran through the whole of the family's life. They bought a boat and fished for trout and walleye at lake after lake — Liberty, Davis, Lake Roosevelt, Sacheen. At Sullivan Lake they panned for gold in LeClair Creek and picked huckleberries by the gallon. Family vacations carried the same spirit of the open road that had first brought the Petries west: a trip to Disneyland in 1977; a journey to the Oregon coast, riding on boards laid across the bed of the truck beneath a canopy — shades of a house on a truck decades earlier — with an intercom rigged between the cab and the back. The trip included a memorable flat tire in Pasco, and visits to Kalaloch Beach, Agate Beach, and Hurricane Ridge. Another vacation carried them south to California and the Redwood forest, with stops at Crater Lake and the lava fields along the way. ## Later Years in Mead Vern lived out his years near Mt. Spokane within reach of the country and the town that had shaped so much of his life. The asbestos he had breathed in during his working years remained with him, and in the end it was his lungs that failed. Vern Petrie died on 26 March 2014 in Mead, Washington, at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried in Spokane — the city that had been the fixed point of his life ever since a boy arrived there in a house riding on the back of a truck. Charlotte's own arc followed the same ground toward the same place: a woman born in a small railroad town, raised across the farming settlements of northern Spokane County, married young, and settled at last in Mead, where she made a home and raised her four sons through the busy decades of family life and where she still lives today. In Mead, then, the long westward journey of the Petries and the rooted country lives of the Daubels finally settled into a single household — eighty acres near Mount Spokane, a boat, a barn, four boys, and the lakes and mountains of the Inland Northwest — the one family in which all the threads of this book at last come together.