NOTE from the HUMBOLDT HISTORIAN: This article contains the text of a speech given by the author to the American Association of University Women at the Eureka Presbyterian Church on March 1, 1997. The AAUW had honored Kate Buchanan as “A Woman Making a Difference in Humboldt County” for its Women in History project.

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My sister Kate Buchanan died sixteen years ago. I am more than delighted and moved by your honoring her after all those years. Many in this room probably knew and remember Kate, but I’m sure more are present who did not know her — who only know the “Kate Buchanan Room.” I hope in these brief minutes to capture the essence of her personality, so that when you hear that name, you will feel acquainted with her.

Kate Buchanan with her brother Edgar Buchanan and Humboldt State College President Cornelius Siemens in June 1961. Photo via the Humboldt Historian.

Kate was born in Humansville, Missouri in 1904, joining a three year-old sister, now 95, and a two-year old brother, Edgar Buchanan, who became a character actor appearing in over 100 movies and several TV series before he died in 1979, two years before Kate. Kate and Edgar were always very close. Together they were a comedy team.

When she was 3, the family moved to Pleasanton, Kansas, and when she was 4, another sister arrived, pretty, sweet little Lova, who is now 88. Kate cared and played with her as if she were a doll. Eight years later, out west in Ashland, Oregon, I arrived, and Katie, now 12 years old, took me on as her new doll — and continued to mother and spoil me and my family until the day she died.

Kate always knew who she was. Even her baby pictures capture her strength. In grammar school and high school in Ashland, she and my brother were engrossed in theater, either putting on shows in the barn or attending movies, road shows, and programs in the great circular, dome-roofed, sawdust-floored Chatauqua building that now houses the outdoor Shakespeare theater in Ashland.

One play in the barn on a stage with a gunny sack curtain was attended by the neighbor ladies seated on apple boxes. As part of the action, my brother Edgar shot a gun. The frightened ladies fell off their boxes, and the red cow broke its rope and ran. From his upstairs dental office window my father saw his own cow running down Main Street.

Kate always had money that she earned. Our big yard was filled with cherry and almond trees. Each summer she picked cherries and took them to the train station to sell to the passengers. Edgar would say, “I’ll take you to the movies if you’ll buy the tickets.” In later years, she’d say, “Wasn’t I a fool to let him do that to me!”

One night the folks were gone for the evening, and Katie and Edgar enlisted my other sisters to stage a murder to frighten our parents when they came home. Kate was the victim, lying stretched on the hall floor with catsup for blood spilled on her back. A “bloody” butcher knife lay by her. Being three or four, I took the grisly affair seriously and to this day cannot eat catsup. When our parents came home. Mama walked right past Kate, saying “Get up, Katie, and clean that mess.” I guess the folks were used to their shenanigans.

Like George Washington, my first character lesson involved a cherry tree. While Kate was high in the tree, picking, I, probably four, had been told to fill my bucket with the ones that had dropped to the ground. I decided it would be easier and faster to fill my bucket with handfuls from Kate’s full buckets. She saw me, slithered down and roared, “That is called CHEATING, and don’t you EVER do that again.” I’ll never forget it. She could wither and dissolve you with her character lessons. She knew RIGHT from WRONG and throughout her life was fierce in her moral teachings to me, my sons and the hundreds of young people she directed.

Kate always knew her own mind. When she finished high school in Ashland, she told our father that now she knew everything there was to know, and she would not go with the family to Eugene, where we were moving so everyone could attend the University of Oregon. Instead, she wanted to teach — you could then with a high school diploma — and she did, in the one-room. Green Springs Mountain school for one year. She lived with a farm family with four sons and no electricity. Every night “old father Davis” read a chapter from the Bible by lamplight. That year was one of the richest in her life. She talked about it as long as she lived.

Kate had a powerful imagination, a rare sense of humor and was an artful story teller and mimic. When you were with her, the world was always big and wonderful. No one was more fun to be with. My earliest memory was being sick and Katie entertaining me with stories about the little man who lived in the stove flue. At the dinner table, she dramatized every event of the day.

When she went off to teach, she would regale us with vivid, dramatized stories, mimicking and quoting the people she worked with, her students, her landlady — everyone.

At the University of Oregon, she and my brother were the stars in the campus theater and Kate, an English Major, eamed a teaching credential. In 1927 she started teaching at Roseburg High School, where she directed all the plays and taught English for eleven years. She was more than successful — students worshipped her. When she retired in 1968 from Humboldt State University, forty-seven years after Roseburg, about twenty of her former students from Roseburg came for the retirement party. Following Kate’s death, several of them have continued to correspond with me.

She loved teaching English and American literature and I think this must have been her greatest contribution. Her dramatic ability, her humor, her enthusiasm for life and literature, her intelligence, and keen interpretive skills were her tools. From memory she could recite reams of poetry and brought Shakespeare, “Idylls of the King,” Hawthorne — all the great pieces — alive in her classrooms. She was a strong disciplinarian and demanded much from her students. She built character through literature — but she was close to the students and their personal problems and always kept them laughing and enjoying school.

Kate wanted to move on, so in 1939 she went to the University of Oregon to serve on the Dean of Women’s staff, and from there she went to Portland to Lewis and Clark College as Dean of Women and Professor of English. A summer in New York with graduate work at Columbia University and seeing Broadway plays was a high point for her.

When the war came, she applied for a position with the DuPont Company to work on The Manhattan Project at Hanford, Wash, where the atomic bomb was made, but of course then no one knew what was going on. When she applied for the job, the interviewer asked her why she was leaving her current job. She said, “I just looked him right in the eye and said, ‘How would you like to be Dean of Women in a Presbyterian College!’”

She was in charge of the housing of the thousands of women workers. We all relived that period through her colorful accounts of events and the amazing people she met. Kate was fearless in managing these women who were older, often rough, tough, worldly laborers, unlike anyone she’d ever known. In August 1945, when the bomb was dropped, she was shocked and troubled to think she had been a part of it. After the war she was offered a permanent administrative position with the company, but declined.

Kate always had many male friends, some quite seriously smitten. She collected several proposals, a few from impressive, talented, successful men. But she remained single by choice. I think she was simply too independent and never found a man who was as strong as herself. She used to laugh and say, “Every day in every way, I give thanks for my state of single blessedness.” Being a wife requires waiting and accommodating — she could never do that. She had her own goals, priorities, and life, and wanted to live it freely her way.

She loved to cook and feed people — popcorn, cookies, bountiful meals with huge portions. Her cooking was a metaphor of her personality — nurturing, generous, giving, big portions of warm and pleasant comfort. She served as confidante for so many people. Her door was always open, and she would always listen. With a compassionate heart, she soothed and instilled confidence. She made you feel important, gave good horse-sense advice that made life seem easier. She was direct, honest — but always with a sensitive heart.

My second son was born the summer of 1946, and Kate, who adored babies and children, was on hand. She came to Arcata from the University of Oregon where she was on the English faculty. President and Mrs. Gist invited us for dinner one evening, and Kate charmed them so that Gist offered her a teaching position. The temptation was too great. “I’ll stay a year just to be with the children.” She joined the faculty at Humboldt State College in the fall of 1946, That January I became seriously ill, and Kate stepped in to take charge and stayed.

My children became hers. My husband Don and the children and all their little friends adored her. She drove the children and their friends to school in her Ford, which became a magic airplane. Each child had a job — radio man, navigator, copilot, mechanic — there were motor sounds, hurried orders, SWITCH ON, CONTACT!, urgent conversations, all in make-believe. As 50-something adults, these children still talk of the fun of it.

I always admired Kate and Don’s ability to work so closely together and share so many responsibilities at home and at school. They did not agree on many issues, but each respected the other. I was doubly blessed

Kate’s politics were mostly conservative. She was religious, but as an adult did not attend a church. She would quip, “Cast your bread upon the waters and it will come back sandwiches.” She planned her own memorial service, which included four friends: a Catholic priest, a Hebrew colleague, an Orthodox Greek friend, and a Protestant minister. She explained, “I want to cover all bases — just in case.”

Cars were a passion with Kate. She taught herself to drive at 15 by observing our Dad and brother. On her first trip she took my mother to town, ripped off the barn door, took out the front gate post, and when parking diagonally on a hill in downtown Ashland, continued on through a store window. She owned a succession of cars, but the greatest was her first, a dark green Buick roadster with a rumble seat. She had waited until she had enough money to pay cash — $700. She did all business on a cash basis. A silver, naked, winged Victory figure graced the radiator cap. My beautiful sister Lova taught at Roseburg too, and the two of them were a smashing sight in that car.

We had a family orchestra. Kate loved music but was tone deaf. She could not sing, but did. She also chose to play the violin and was always just a shade off. Her rendition of “Humoresque” was excruciating to listen to. It always puzzled me that she could so accurately imitate people’s speech, but could not hear musical notes.

She devoted all her summers to caring for our aging parents.

Kate was not an idle chatterer. She did not speak unless she had something to say. Although she was a clown, she was always discreet in her joking. Any humor with a barb was aimed at the pretentious, the pompous, and the arrogant who she thought deserved it!

Kate was fiercely moral, but not self-righteous or saintly. She was a strong, life-loving, humorous, warm and compassionate human being. My family and I thank you very much for this occasion to remember her.

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The story above is excerpted from the Winter 1997 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.