Editor’s note: The following is an edited excerpt from the new book “A Will to Serve,” by visionary Seattle civic activist Jim Ellis, with contributions by Jennifer Ott (May 2024, $29.95, HistoryLink; available from the University of Washington Press). Ellis, a longtime lawyer in Seattle, was a driving force behind many of the campaigns to address the region’s environmental and livability challenges. He died in 2019 at the age of 98, before he could finish his memoir. Ott, the executive director at HistoryLink, completed the manuscript. This excerpt details the wartime loss of his brother Bob, which inspired the civic work of Ellis and his wife, Mary Lou.

IN THE WINTER of 1943, my brother Bob and I were supercharged with patriotism, and impatient for the Army to call us up. We read every scrap of information about the military campaigns, and I took a temporary job loading gas cans for the Pacific War. Mary Lou, a young woman I was dating and who eventually became my wife, was equally impatient, dropping one of her classes at the University of Washington to increase her part-time work at the Aircraft Filter Board.

In early March 1943, Bob and I both received our orders, reported to the Armory in Seattle and were taken by truck to Fort Lewis, 50 miles south of Seattle. We were issued uniforms and, as Army privates, we were given aptitude tests to classify us for assignment. After a few weeks, Bob was sent to Camp Hood, Texas, for tank destroyer basic training. As he waved goodbye from the back of an Army truck, I found myself brushing away an unexpected tear. Bob seemed much too young and vulnerable for tank-destroying. He was just out of high school and had never been away from home.

ONE SPRING 1944 AFTERNOON, sitting on a beach wall on the shore of Lake Michigan, near my cadet training at the University of Chicago, I said to Mary Lou, now my girlfriend, “In a couple of weeks, all of us are going to be shipped somewhere. I don’t know where I’m going or how long I’ll be gone.” I slipped my arm around Mary Lou’s waist. “I promise not to marry anyone else, Beaver. Will you promise not to get married until I get back?”

Mary Lou shook her head. “I think you’re wrong about waiting to get married. Not being married to someone you love is just wasting precious days.” Then she looked straight at me. “But I’m willing to wait until the war is over if that’s what you want.”

We agreed that after my cadet graduation, she should go back to Alaska to spend the 1944 summer with her family, in Fairbanks. She had grown up in Alaska and spent time there and in Seattle. This was a hard decision because the possibility of getting together again before the end of the war seemed painfully remote. Fighting was accelerating on all fronts, and the end was nowhere in sight. The cadets had been told they would be sent overseas immediately. My brother was already in England waiting for Normandy.

One Friday in June, a TWX military telegram came through transferring me to Gowen Field in Boise, where I would use my meteorology training as a weather officer.

WEATHER FORECASTING WAS becoming familiar now, and I was learning the tricks of the trade. The main problem was sleeping. Our barracks was located next to the airplane warm-up apron, and every morning at 4 a.m., four-engine B-52 bombers fired up with a tremendous roar outside the window. After a few sleepless nights, I finally got used to the noise and slept.

Mary Lou had promised to come to Boise on her first break from the University of Washington that fall. The bus from Seattle arrived in the evening while I was working. Mary Lou registered at the old Owyhee Hotel and telephoned me at the Gowen Field weather station. Referring to the previous missed opportunities to meet up, she said, “Your bad penny, Jinx Earling, has shown up again. I can stay until Sunday.”

“Hurray, Beaver, you made it. We’re going fishing tomorrow.”

The next morning, we left for an overnight trip to Lowman, located in the Boise National Forest. We went with my fishing partner and his wife. After a two-hour drive to the south fork of the Payette River, the four of us agreed on a meeting place for lunch. Mary Lou and I were dropped off to cross the canyon on a rickety hand-pulled cable operated by an old trapper.

Everyone caught good-sized trout and had great fun. Mary Lou climbed rocky banks, fell in the river, saw two bears and slept close to me that night in a tent at Lowman. The next morning, we hitchhiked back to Boise on a sheep truck. Mary Lou laughed about how much work it was chasing me all over the country.

The night we returned from the fishing trip, I lay in my bunk after work listening to the roar of B-24 engines and imagined talking to my brother Bob. Years earlier, I had given him the nickname “Roph.” “Roph,” I said, “she passed the hiking and fishing test with flying colors. This is the absolutely right girl.”

‘A Will to Serve’ Panel Discussion

What: A discussion of the life and legacy of Jim Ellis , featuring Sally Jewell, Eric Liu, Gary Locke, Girmay Zahilay and moderator C.R. Douglas.
When: 2 p.m. Sunday, June 2, 2024.
Where: Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave.

MARY LOU AND I walked around town the next afternoon, talking about ideas for dream houses. In the evening, she wore a pretty blue dress, and we had dinner in the Owyhee Hotel dining room. I couldn’t stop looking at her. Those big brown eyes were working their magic again. Putting the menu down, she smiled. “The fishing trip was really fun, and I had a beautiful time today.”

I handed a sealed envelope across the table. “You never know what’s coming next, Beaver.”

“My dear Mary Lou, I have loved you for a very long time. Will you marry me?”

Mary Lou started to cry, and people in the dining room stared at us.

“Jim!” Then, after a pause: “Yes, I’ll marry you.” She was sobbing and laughing and wiping her eyes with a napkin. “Yes. YES! I’m saying ‘yes’ before you change your mind!”

So many people in the dining room were now looking at us that I felt a need to explain. “I asked her to marry me, and she said yes.” The other diners applauded.

“It’s just like the movies,” said Mary Lou. A few months later, on Nov. 18, 1944, we were married.

FROM THE TIME Bob left for Europe, his letters were carefully written to avoid worrying our mother and father. He was conscious of how deeply they were involved in following the war, and he never forgot how much they had invested in bringing him through his multiyear illness as a child, when he had rheumatic fever from ages 9 to 11. He was very careful not to indicate the conditions around him on the front lines that would put him at risk for illness or injury.

Bob’s letters downplayed the record cold winter in which the 94th Infantry Division was moving back and forth within deeply fortified western Germany. He never mentioned the difficulties of trying to sleep in the snow while under fire from enemy guns. He did not record any description of his day-to-day life on the front lines leading up to and during the battles of the Siegfried Line and the Ardennes Bulge from December 1944 to February 1945.

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One morning in early March 1945, I was working at the forecast table in the Mountain Home weather station, southeast of Boise, where I had been transferred to in November 1944. A long distance call came from my father. “Jim, the worst has happened!” Then he broke down and couldn’t speak. My younger brother John came on the line. “We just got a wire that Bob has been killed in action. Hym, you’d better come home.” I could only say, “No, no, no,” in disbelief, and then, “I’ll be home right away.”

Overhearing, a lieutenant said, “You can leave in two days.” I replied, “I’m leaving now,” walked to the Red Cross office and received approval for immediate emergency leave with train tickets to Seattle.

I cried on the bus all the way back to the apartment at Mountain Home and kept repeating, “No, no, no.” Once in the apartment, I started pounding the walls and shouting that it wasn’t true. When Mary Lou heard the news, she rushed home from her job. “I know it’s wrong, Beaver,” I said desperately. “They’ve made a mistake. But we have to go home.”

“You’ve got to help your mother and dad over this hump. They will be crushed,” said Mary Lou, trying to pull me together.

“Yes. Dad can’t talk and hasn’t told my mother. He wants me to do that.”

We caught the Union Pacific that afternoon and were in Seattle the following evening. My father’s face showed the impact of the news. My mother knew something was wrong.

“Why are you home? What’s happened?”

I told her as gently as possible, but she still collapsed.

THE FAMILY WAS shaken to its core but was held together by performing the customary rituals — notifying the newspapers, arranging for a memorial service, and responding to visits and phone calls. My father told me Bob would have liked for me to give the eulogy. I gave an emotional tribute at the Mount Baker Presbyterian Church, where Bob and I had attended as children. The church was full, and “Taps” was played by one of Bob’s friends in uniform.

In a phone call from Spokane, Gramps Reed, my maternal grandfather, had confessed, “We’re pretty shook up over here.” After the memorial service, the family agreed that Mary Lou and I should stop in Spokane on our way back to Mountain Home and comfort the grandparents. Mary Lou retrieved her old Chevy coupe, The Green Dragon, from her uncle’s garage. We drove through some snowy weather to the Reed home in Spokane and spent the night with the dispirited grandparents. As we were leaving the next morning, Grandmother Reed said, “Jim, you’re going to be all right. You have such a wonderful girl.”

Yes , I thought to myself, but Mary Lou can’t replace my brother. I hardly know her .

Mary Lou was sympathetic, understanding and unobtrusively helpful during these emotional days, but I could not accept her sympathy any more than I could accept the reality of Bob’s death.

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with the death of a family member proved to be devastating. When the full reality of that terrible event in Germany sank in, I found I was not prepared to handle the loss of the closest person in my life. During these days of shock and disbelief, Mary Lou watched with growing concern as I became depressed, disoriented and even self-destructive.

I tried every device to get transferred overseas — to get into some kind of fighting. I volunteered to perform assignments for which I was not qualified. To Mary Lou’s gentle sympathy, my standard response was, “You don’t understand.” Instead of taking walks with her, I sat in the room and looked at the walls.

One day I walked in unannounced to the Base Commander’s office and asked to be transferred to the unit then finishing its training and about to head overseas. The colonel reacted sharply, “How did you get in here, Lieutenant? I’ve heard about you. You’re not worth [anything] right now. I wouldn’t make you part of any unit going into harm’s way. Go back to the station, and do your job.”

Word of this latest episode passed around, and when I came back to the unit that evening, Mary Lou grabbed my shoulders. “You’ve got to get hold of yourself. You’re trying to throw your life after his. It won’t do any good to lose two lives. Why not make your life COUNT for his?”

I reacted with the usual, “You don’t understand,” and walked away, resenting her interference. But during a solitary hike through snowy fields, I began thinking about what she had said. Make my life count for his? Surely Bob’s life should count for something more than bravery in the line of duty. I came back to the apartment.

“What did you mean, Beaver?”

“Well, you have a gift for speaking and leading. What about community work, or conservation, or anything you and Bob believed in? We could take part of our life and give something to others for Bob.”

As the idea took hold, I began to think positively. There were many things Bob would have wanted to do for others if he had lived.

“That’s a heck of a good idea, Beaver. We could devote part of our time to public service for Bob.” “I would like to help you do that,” Mary Lou answered quietly. This conversation planted the seed of what was to become a lifelong commitment of our time to the community Bob loved.