Duncan Munro

 

 

Duncan Montgomery Munro was born November 4^th, 1892 at the family home at Crystal Springs. Alexander’s brother and great-grandfather were both named Duncan Munro, and Janet’s older brother was Duncan Montgomery. His early childhood was divided between Bainbridge Island and Victoria. In the spring of 1900, the family returned to the Island and Duncan started school at the Crystal Springs School. He graduated from eighth grade in about 1906.

Duncan was hard working and industrious. The pier known as ‘Gibson’s Landing’ had recently been built just south of the Munro property and neighbors were congregating there to pick up their groceries and supplies as they came in on the boat from Seattle and Bremerton, or to buy eggs and produce from the Munro family. Duncan’s uncle was a carpenter and together they built a small store on the beachfront and stocked it with merchandise ranging from coffee to candy to coal oil. Duncan ran the store with help from his brother Bill and others in the family. It served the greater Crystal Springs neighborhood and neighbors across the Bay. On a still day, a man at Illahee could call his order over with a booming voice, and Duncan would deliver it by motorboat.

 

Duncan, Bill & George Munro in front of the Munro Store

He would make a trip to Seattle once a week to deliver eggs and to buy wholesale goods for the store. He would also bring back three gallons of ice cream packed in ice and rock salt, and on Sunday afternoons neighbors would walk down to the store after church services for ice cream.

His younger brother, George, was about six when the store opened. He remembered it in detail:

Well at all the other wharfs around the Sound, at the head of the wharf or close to the wharf or sometimes on the wharf, was a grocery store. We had all these things that my dad was planting in the garden and we had cows and people were coming to our house and getting milk, and getting potatoes, and getting eggs. And the heck of it was, ya know, the boat came along there at about ten after seven and some of them were coming there so they could get an egg and some milk and some other things, so they could cook their husband breakfast to go on the boat, which was about ten after seven. So they were disturbing us pretty early, so ah, since we had these products, apples and carrots and spuds and milk and all kinds of apples and plums and cherries and things.

Well then somebody got the idea that, well maybe all the brothers could run a store, a grocery store. So my uncle, who was a ship’s carpenter, he and my dad and my brothers made a store. We stocked it with groceries, and we had the produce around the place there and we had a motorboat. We had staples, groceries and certain vegetables and oranges and bananas and all those kinds of things. We had a shed for hay and grain and feed, and we had an icehouse. So we had those things. And we had, out on the wharf, we had oil drums. Standard Oil Company used to land in a big boat called the “Petroleum” and they would put off barrels of gasoline and coal oil. The coal oil was for the lamps and things like that. So we were pretty busy.

We’d get ice from Seattle Ice. We had an icehouse there and we stocked the house with a couple a ton of ice and threw a little salt on it. We had an ice saw and we’d cut up chunks of ice. Twenty-five pounds. Fifty pounds. The big chunks of ice came 200 pounds in a big sack. It was about twice as big as a gunny sack and about twice as thick. We would pull it ashore with a horse and a sled, and cut it up on the beach there and deliver it to people who had ice boxes. Some of them had ice boxes big enough for fifty pounds and some of them had ice boxes big enough for 25 pounds. I liked the 25-pound ones the best because we were putting the ice that we would cut up into the motorboat and taking it along. There was no road, you see, from Crystal Springs to Westwood. And we just went along the beach and carried the ice up to the ice boxes up little trails.

And we delivered milk in the morning. We had some cows and we delivered milk in the morning and took orders for groceries. And when the boat came in, why people would stop by the store and give us orders for groceries and sometimes people up the Westwood way or up to that area would, if we went out onto the wharf to catch the line and help the boat land, why they would give us orders for groceries. In the afternoon we’d chuck the groceries into boxes and deliver them along the beach there, carrying it up the trails to the houses.

And we also picked up eggs from some of the farmers that were around and boxed them and sent them into the Seattle market. And we delivered groceries over to Enetai, which is about halfway to Bremerton, and up to Illahee. There wasn’t any store at Illahee at that time.

So that was kinda the life of what took place at Gibson Landing. That went on from about 1906 until 1917. By the time 1917 came along, why ah, we were pretty well in war with Germany, because the Germans had sunk the Lusitania. So my two older brothers went into the Navy.

Many stories about the Munro family recall ‘Duncan’s Launch’ and it was spoken about in almost reverent tones. Duncan’s Launch was a lifeboat that Uncle Lachlan fit with a “shaft log, Gray Marine engine, propeller shaft and propeller.”  It was one of the first motorized vehicles owned in the Munro family – the original station wagon. It was also the work vehicle for the Munro store, delivering groceries and ice up and down the Bay.

 

While running the store, Duncan was also one of the first school bus drivers on the Island. The new school opened at Pleasant Beach in 1912.

When I was 18 or 19, I was the bus driver for the kids to the new school. I used my own horse and buggy. I would take them to and from the old [Crystal Springs] school. I got $25 a month for being the bus driver. I never transported more than eight or ten kids a day.

 

Duncan ran the Munro store for about ten years. Then for a time he worked as a Longshoreman in Seattle, off-loading cargo from sailing ships. The cargo was taken off using a large sling and donkey winch. A lot of the cargo was ceramic tile and whiskey from England. On Friday night, the last sling of the whiskey would always have some sort of accident – maybe drop four feet or so, and each of the Longshoremen would get a bottle of spirits for the weekend. Later he worked as a painter, sometimes for a painting company and sometimes working for himself. The family was very proud when he got the contract to paint the naval radio tower at Keyport.

 

Duncan registered for the draft on June 5, 1917 and enlisted in the Navy the same day. He was twenty-four years old, living at Crystal Springs and working as a painter for Hord Brothers in Seattle. His draft card describes him as medium height and build, with blue eyes and dark brown hair. It also shows that he was a member of the ‘Naval Coast Reserves.’ 

He served on a Submarine Chaser during World War I. It patrolled half the Alaskan coast with another Sub Chaser alternating the other half. He recalled:

I was in the Navy twenty months on a 110-foot submarine chaser ship during WWI. I was subject to the draft like anyone else, and I didn’t want to go in the Army, so I enlisted in the Navy. I enlisted at the same time as my brother Bill did, but he went through the Panama Canal and up and down the East Coast. I was stationed in Juneau, Alaska.

The U.S.S. SC-309 was built by Puget Sound Navy Yard and commissioned in 1918. It was 110 feet in length with a 14.8-foot beam, 5.8-foot draft and displacement of 85 tons. It was powered by three 220 hp standard gasoline engines. Its armament consisted of one 3 inch/23caliber gun mount, two Lewis .30 caliber machine guns and one depth charge projector “Y gun”. It had a complement of three officers and twenty-seven enlisted men.

 

 

 

 

Duncan and Bill served during dangerous times. The day the War ended, their mother ran out and rang the big bell in their yard. Her two sons were safe!

All the Munro kids loved to go to the local dances. They were huge social events, held at schoolhouses and dance halls in every community around the Sound, and Duncan would often travel by boat to dances as far away as Tracyton. At Foster’s Dance Hall on Fletcher Bay, he met Isabel Holm. Isabel lived a few miles from the hall and Duncan would take her to dances on his bicycle. Isabel would sit on a cushion on the handlebars while Duncan pedaled. They were married on November 9, 1918. Their son Duncan Montgomery Munro, Jr. was born in 1919, followed by Isabel “Jean” in 1921, James McKenzie in 1922, Maryann in 1925 and John Stewart in 1927.

 A short time after the war, Duncan and Isabel bought a ten-acre farm on Central Valley Road in Tracyton and started Munro’s Dairy. Isabel’s father, Gustave Claus Holm, gave them two cows and Alexander Munro also gave them two cows to get started. Duncan worked as a shipfitter in the shipyard for several years, until the dairy became profitable. He was milking about thirty Jersey cows twice a day and he sold bottled milk and cream on a daily milk route and delivered it throughout the Tracyton and Bremerton communities. Over time he bought more acreage and cleared it for pasture until his farm totaled 100 acres.

Dairy farming was hard work, with long hours, seven days a week. On a typical day Duncan would get up at 5 a.m. and go to the barn, call in the cows, feed them and milk about thirty Jersey cows by hand. Then he would carry the warm milk in buckets to the milk house and run it through the cooler. Isabel would wash bottles and bottle the milk once it was cooled.

Duncan would let the cows out of the barn and go in for breakfast at about 7:30 a.m. After breakfast, he would do a little maintenance on the Ford Model T truck he used for deliveries. Sometimes he would pump up the tires (using a hand pump) or take the cover off the transmission and tighten the bands. Then he would load the bottled milk (pints and quarts) and cream (l/2 pints) into the Model T for delivery. He sold the milk for about ten cents a quart.

The milk route usually ran from Tracyton through Manette (now East Bremerton). Once the old Warren Avenue Bridge was completed, he delivered milk to customers in West Bremerton as well, including his sister Mary Munro Black. One of his sons, Jimmy or Duncan Jr., would go along on the route, riding on the running board and running the bottled milk up to the customer’s screened porch and putting it into the ice box. They would deliver a gallon of milk a day to the Apex Bakery in exchange for day old pastries.

Duncan would complete the route and return home around one o’clock for lunch. He spent the afternoon cleaning the barn and other farm chores, would have dinner around 5:00, and then head back up to the barn to milk the cows again.

They didn’t have refrigeration on the farm, early on. So, in the summer months he would make a second milk delivery run or the milk would sour by morning. He would come home after dark in the Model T, dodging the one policeman in Manette since he had a taillight out. At times he had to back up the steep hills as the band was almost out in the Model T’s transmission. His son Jimmy remembers falling asleep on the floorboards of the truck on the way home.

The roads along the milk route were pretty poor at times. Some ruts were so deep that they could count on someone being there with a horse to help pull out the vehicles that got stuck in the muck.

Duncan bought $3 worth of gas each day for the milk delivery truck. He would alternate between the two gas stations in Tracyton. At the same time, he would supply the store with milk.

He would return home around 9:00 or 9:30p.m. Go to bed. Get up at 5:00 a.m. and do it again…

 

Duncan Jr. recalled:

When we moved to the Tracyton farm, Dad was working in the Navy Yard. Dad also had cows on the ten-acre farm. We started bottling the milk and soon Dad was making more from the milk than at the Yard. I was very young when I started riding on the milk truck with Dad. Just a little guy maybe three or four. I was still riding the milk truck when I was a teen. We would stop and see Mary at Fitz Men’s Shop. She worked there doing alterations.

Uncle Jimmy Munro worked on the farm and stayed with us one summer when he was in law school. I remember him demonstrating to me one time about smoking. Dad smoked and rolled his own cigarettes. Jimmy lit one and inhaled the smoke. Then he blew it into a cloth and said “There, that’s what you get when you smoke.” 

Duncan Sr. was always willing to help a neighbor out, especially during the Depression years. Often, he would hire men to help out on the farm to offset their family’s milk bill. His brother James recalled that during the Depression Duncan would hire men for a ditching project, paying them an hourly wage, plus a credit against their milk bill. The job was a Godsend for many of them.

And Duncan always found a job for a local boy to do to earn a little money… maybe just digging out thistles or picking up rocks in a field. He had a saying, when hiring boys to help on the farm: “If you hire a boy, you got a boy. If you hire two boys, you only have half a boy”.

He plowed the fields with their one plow horse. The plow would cut about six inches deep and ten inches wide. He would plow each field every three years or so and replant it, so it would be good nourishing grass for the cattle. Otherwise, it would convert to the native grass which was thin and poor feed. Occasionally, he would borrow a neighbor’s horse which paired up well with his. Prior to plowing he would first spread manure by six-tined pitchfork over the field he was planning on planting. Once the field was plowed, he’d go over it again with the horse pulling the disc, then once again with the harrow (two single – spike tooth). Then he would sow the new grass by hand…. tucking the bucket of seed inside his elbow and use the other hand to sow it. He would follow his footsteps back and forth across the field. It had to be a very calm day, or the wind would blow away the light grass seed.

Isabel and Duncan lost their home to a fire in July 1927. It started up on the roof and probably was due to the wood stove and cedar shakes. Duncan was away on the milk route at the time. The rest of the family escaped safely, but the home was a total loss. Isabel recalled:

I pushed the baby buggy with sleeping four-month-old Johnny away to safety, then stood helpless as the clothes on the clothesline crumbled, one by one, consumed from the fire.

They rebuilt quickly and, for the first time, they had electricity in their home. Duncan remembered:

We lost everything we had. I was out delivering milk (with seven-and-a-half-year-old Duncan Jr.) and didn’t get back until 12 or 12:30 p.m. It was all gone when I got there. A new house was framed in two weeks and that’s when we moved in. We stayed in the shed until then.

A few years later, indoor plumbing was installed in the new house. The plumber traded his work for credit on his milk bill.

 

 

Each spring, Duncan would raise and butcher one or two veal for additional income. He would butcher them himself, leaving the skin on, then hanging them to cool overnight. The next morning, he pulled a muslin sack over each one and laid them over the fenders of the Model T truck that was loaded for the milk route. After he finished his route, he would stop at Oscar Etten’s Butcher Shop where he would sell the veal.

His niece, Ann Janett (Becker) Layne, remembered staying on the farm for a week or so when she was a young teenager. “It was the highlight of my summer”. One day she was talking to one of the cows and called it “Cow”. Duncan happened to be in ear shot and exclaimed, “Oh, no, the cows have their names!” He then proceeded to introduce the cow and apologized to it affectionately. Two of the cows were “Rose” and “Brownie”.

Niece Marybelle (Becker) Arthur also remembered visiting the farm:

I never stayed with Duncan and Isabel, but my sister and brother Fred and Ann did. I was there when we picked them up, though. I was about four or five at the time. I remember drinking fresh milk out of an oat straw when I was there. That made an impression on me.

On occasion, Alexander Munro would row across from Crystal Springs to Illahee, and then walk through the wood and old logging roads to spend the day with Duncan and his family. At least once he arrived early enough to ride the milk route. Jimmy Munro remembered his Grandpa picking him up on his lap and the good fragrance of his cigar.

At other times, the family would take the little ferry at Brownsville to go over to Bainbridge Island to visit both sides of the family, the Munros and the Holms.

Duncan was Port Commissioner for the Port of Tracyton for a number of years. The port was very active with deliveries as well as on the Mosquito Fleet route.

Around 1939 Duncan bought the old Tracyton Grade School and property. With son Jimmy’s help, he remodeled it into four 2-bedroom/1 bath apartments. They rented for $35 a month. Jimmy recalls that his Dad bought the property with the bonus money he received from being in WWI. Later Duncan bought a building on 11^th and Perry Avenue in Bremerton and remodeled it into apartments.

After Jimmy graduated from high school in 1940, he took over the dairy and Duncan Sr. returned to the Navy Yard as a shipfitter to help with the War effort. To apply for the job, he went to the shipyard main gate where the Human Resource people were recruiting. One came out and said that they were looking for “shipfitters” and Duncan spoke up. The Human Resource person said, “Are you really a shipfitter or are you a guy from Montana who never saw a ship?” Duncan had his paperwork with him. They hired him on the spot, put him to work, and he didn’t get home until the next day. He worked swing shift all through WW II.

During the War years, there was a dentist outside the main gate of the Navy Yard ready to work on anyone’s teeth during their lunch hour. He would actually do the work right on the street. At about the same time, there was a dentist advertising on the radio as “Painless Parker”.

The day the War ended, Duncan quit his job at the Navy Yard and returned home to the dairy. Soon Jimmy and Evelyn moved to Poulsbo to start their own dairy. Duncan continued to dairy for a number of years and received special recognition in the 1951 Kitsap County Dairy Herd Improvement Association Annual Report for his creativity in constructing a new barn and for his contributions to the dairy industry in Kitsap County. The barn measured 36×72 feet, with thirty stanchions. It was built using timber he cut and milled on his property.

 

 

 

 

 

Duncan would read the Seattle PI daily. He would pick it up on the way home from the morning milk route. He enjoyed going to the Puyallup Fair and an occasional trip to watch horse racing at Long Acres. In the evenings, he would sit in his favorite rattan rocking chair and would sometimes play the harmonica. He thoroughly enjoyed listening to sports on the radio and later watching it on the television. In particular, in later years, he enjoyed listening to his grandson’s basketball games.

He eventually sold his milk route to Kitsap Dairy and switched to raising Hereford beef cattle. He kept active with his cattle and farming until he was about 86 years old.

Duncan Montgomery Munro passed on Aug 11, 1980 at age 87. His ashes were scattered on his beloved farm.

 

 

 

Special thanks to James M. Munro for his work in compiling “Duncan’s Story”, and also to Becky Huff, Donna Munro and Shellie Friedrich.