A life of service: Lee Blackwell remembered

MOSES LAKE — Lee Blackwell, who passed away July 7 at the age of 88, was among the pillars of Moses Lake.

A businessman and civic leader, there were few aspects of the community that he didn’t have a hand in. He was Moses Lake’s mayor from 2000-2002 and a council member before that, a founding board member of the Columbia Basin Boys and Girls Club, and a member of the Moses Lake Business Association, Rotary International, and a long list of other civic groups and committees.

Whether a visitor or a local, it’s unlikely that a person could pass through town without seeing the effects Blackwell had on his community. Both as an elected leader and as a private citizen, he worked to revitalize the downtown area, narrowing roads and widening sidewalks to increase foot traffic through the central blocks of West Third Avenue.

He also worked to create the downtown park, Sinkiuse Square, where so many community events such as the city’s annual Christmas light display are held to this day.

When the Boys and Girls Club was looking to open a local office, it was Blackwell that worked to help them acquire not one, but two of their first clubhouses, before becoming one of the founding members of the Columbia Basin branch. To this day that organization provides vital services to local youth regardless of their family’s income, and Blackwell believed in that mission, Executive Director Kim Pope said in an interview.

“The philosophy of the Boys and Girls Club across the U.S. is to provide support for families that need us, whether they can afford it or not,” Pope said. “We don’t turn anybody away.”

Though Pope said neither she nor current board members worked with Blackwell during his tenure, they had taken time out of a recent board meeting to express condolences for the passing of a founding member. Pope also noted that in Blackwell’s obituary, his family had asked that any donations be sent to the Columbia Basin Boys and Girls Club.

“Even upon his passing, it was important enough to his family to continue his legacy of giving,” Pope said.

Blackwell was no stranger to the effects that poverty could have on a child. The youngest of four children, he grew up in San Diego during the Great Depression, though in his obituary he is quoted as saying that “We were poor, but everyone was poor.” When his mom, a county nurse, asked him to give his shoes to a child of one of her patients, who was poorer than they were, he did not hesitate to do so.

He married his first wife, Jean Wolf, with whom he had five children, in 1953. He traveled the country developing his management skills, working for companies like Litton Industries, General Dynamics and others both along the West Coast and further afield, like in Pennsylvania. It was there, as a project manager with a nuts and bolts manufacturer struggling with competition from Japan, that he met his second wife, Moses Lake transplant Susan Utsunomiya.

“When I told my parents about him, I described him as ‘as good as they come,’” Susan said in an interview. “That never changed. He was very accepting of everybody as they were and he was happy to help anyone he could.”

“The kindness, the good nature, that was Lee,” she added.

In 1984 he and Susan began to travel further abroad, working in manufacturing, distribution, import-export and consulting in Asia and South America. In 1987, the couple returned to Susan’s hometown of Moses Lake to get married. There they would return in 1994, and there they would stay to this day.

Blackwell opened an international art store in town, Trade Winds International, where he used his expertise in imports to acquire artwork from across Asia, West Africa and elsewhere, and where he learned first-hand the challenges to retailers’ success in the downtown core as it existed then.

During his time as a businessman, then already an active member of the community, he was approached by then-Mayor Darryl Jackson. Jackson, who today serves on the Moses Lake City Council as deputy mayor, recruited Blackwell, first to fill a vacancy on the city’s planning commission, and later to run for a seat on the city council.

“Lee was the kind of guy that did a lot of service for the city,” Jackson said in an interview. “You find someone willing to serve, you get them to do more.”

Recognized for his public service, Blackwell was selected by a majority of the city council to become mayor, a position he held for two years. His portrait still hangs in the council chambers, alongside those of other past mayors, and at a recent city council meeting the current mayor, David Curnel, asked for a moment of silence in honor of Blackwell’s memory.

When he wasn’t volunteering his time, he and Susan were volunteering their house – the Blackwell family home hosted innumerable young adults over the years, whether it was players on the Moses Lake Pirates college baseball team or international students coming to study at Big Bend, where Susan taught English for the Japanese Agriculture Training Program.

Beyond his love for public service, Blackwell was an avid reader, a lover of sports and a gardener fond of the outdoors, Susan said. More than anything else, though, he was a good listener who loved other people, she added.

“You asked about accomplishments of which he was proudest, and I named a few,” Susan wrote in a follow-up email after an interview.

But what he really loved was not so much the end results as the process of creating together with many enthusiastic, dedicated, loving people.

“It brings to mind the book ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho,” Susan added, “who wrote ‘... there was a language in the world that everyone understood ... the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.’”

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.