Helen Olsen's New Book, This Time a Novel By Liz Case
Helen Huson Olsen is a third-generation Tahuya native who has now authored her third book, thanks in part to the legacy of her grandmother Effie Knowlton, herself a published writer. Among Helen’s earliest memories was that of waking up at ”the ranch,” her grandmother’s house in Tahuya, to the sound of “Nana" pounding her manual typewriter keys as she wrote her weekly “Tahuya News” column for The Shelton - Mason County Journal. Helen followed in Knowlton’s writing footsteps with the publication of Tales from a Tahuya Log, a collection of Knowlton’s memories of Tahuya at the turn of the last century. That book was then by Tales from a Tahuya Log: Second Growth. Helen’s third book, One Pair of Overalls, was just recently published and is a short novel based on a manuscript of Knowlton’s that Olsen found in a box of her writings. Helen decided that story would make a good novel, revising it and adding to it here and there. The story is set in Tahuya, and Helen makes the disclaimer that, while some of the events actually took place, the names and descriptions and dialogue are fictional. The story is set in the years just prior to the Great Depression. An unkempt bachelor trapper, Marcus Dawson, arranges for the local Tahuya postmaster to find him a bride in the big city of Seattle – and that’s a story in itself. The prospective bride, Adeline Martinsen, arrives in Tahuya with her young son on the motor launch S.S. Potlatch as it makes its regular 70-mile run up the waters of the Puget Sound and Hood Canal. Dawson marries the woman, but it soon becomes obvious to all that she is mentally disturbed. She can’t talk plainly, exhibits strange and peculiar behavior, and at times babbles wildly. The birth of her two children only makes her more erratic, and the children grow up fending for themselves – a situation common in remote areas during earlier times. Helen weaves a few details into her story that only an eyewitness to the era, like Knowlton, could give.		Helen Huson Olsen, who is a third generation Tahyua resident, has released a third book about the little town at the Great Bend of the Hood Canal. Then comes a stormy night when Dawson doesn’t return home from checking his trap lines. When morning arrives, the two Dawson children set out for he schoolhouse to report his absence and a search part is formed – and that’s where this telling of the tale will have to stop. The fate of the older son, of Addie, the trapper and the younger children is for those who want to read the latest of Helen’s Tahuya tale for themselves. Helen Olsen PO Box 75 Tahuya, Wa. 98588 Phone: (360) 275-3188 Email:"Hatchet Jack" Olsen or email me