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By Root 1072 0

for the jet age. King County was booming. On Mercer Island, bulldozers and cement mixers rumbled along Island Crest Way, the road that traced the island’s backbone like a zipper. The first big apartment complex opened in 1949, and subdivisions followed. Young professionals were moving in, looking for moderately priced housing, good schools, and an easy commute into Seattle. Many were college-educated, successful and affluent, and committed to creating opportunities for their children. “Newcomers’ Club Welcomes Eight Residents,” read a headline on an article in the Mercer Island Reporter that greeted newly arrived women by their husbands’ names: “Mesdames Richard Friedenrich, Paul Hindman,” and so on. Kathy Powell’s father, who moved his family to Mercer Island the year the Dunhams arrived, was a Lockheed engineer turned insurance company manager; her mother had been trained as a nurse. Chip Wall, who had arrived two years earlier, was the son of the commanding officer of a Nike missile battalion that was setting up a missile perimeter defense for Seattle; his mother had gone to stenography school. Susan Botkin’s mother was sent west from Missouri by the Girl Scouts organization, Susan told me, to research how to develop scouting in the area. Beyond Mercer Island, the civil rights movement had begun, the birth-control pill was in development, and John F. Kennedy would announce on January 2, 1960, that he was running for president. “There was change in the air,” recalled Bill Byers, a classmate and friend of Stanley Ann’s. “And we felt it in high school. We didn’t know what we were feeling. But that was at the end of the Eisenhower years, and everything was so extremely stable. It was just too quiet. And young people can’t stand it when it gets too quiet.”

Mercer Island High School had all the energy and ambition of a brand-new school. Until the mid-1950s, there had been no high school on the island; students had commuted to Bellevue or Seattle. The class of 1958 was the first to graduate from the new school, which sprang up among the Douglas firs near the new subdivision, Mercerwood, close to the center of the island. The faculty tended to be young and committed. “Everything was fresh, everybody wanted to work hard, all the parents wanted it to be good,” said Jim Wichterman, who arrived in the mid-1950s as a part-time social studies teacher and football and track coach. “It was just, ‘Let’s have a good educational system.’” Maxine Hanson Box, a close friend of Stanley Ann’s who went on to teach elementary school in Bellevue and Renton for twenty-seven years, told me the Mercer Island High School curriculum was conceived to be challenging. At the time, individual school districts could raise money from local taxpayers to raise teachers’ salaries and build facilities, and Mercer Island taxpayers enthusiastically went along. Parents turned out in force for back-to-school nights. They organized graduation parties and knew whose children had gotten into Harvard. The newspaper carried articles about the latest National Merit semifinalists. Maxine’s parents, whose own education had been cut short by the Depression, moved to Mercer Island in 1957 in part for the schools. Like other parents on Mercer Island, they made their expectations clear to their children. “You would do your very best, and you would accept a challenge and do the work to get there,” Maxine Box told me. “It made a lot of difference to where the kids applied to go to school, and it broadened their horizons about what they could be. There were no limits.”

The Dunhams moved into the Shorewood Apartments before school started in 1956. The first large rental apartment complex on the island, it had opened seven years earlier, designed for middle-class living. Two- and three-story brick and wood-trimmed apartment houses stood on broad lawns sloping down to a meandering private waterfront. The apartments had hardwood floors, crown molding, and views of the Cascades. Front doors opened directly onto lawns. The complex had its own tennis courts, community center, and convenience