Another well known early day man who is fondly remembered as a “character” was Charlie Stover who is claimed equally by Freeland, Cultus Bay, and Langley. He operated his own steam sawmill in Freeland during the 1930s where the bowling alley stands now. He helped build the Adventist church in Freeland and was a charter member there. An interview with him was published in the Everett Herald June 24, 1972.
“Langley—‘I’m a miser, I like to save things,’ says Charles ‘Smoky’ Stover, 74.
“True to his word, Stover saves everything including just about every car and truck he’s ever had. They lie in a state of repose far behind his house and up the hill in a large meadow.
“There are old cars and trucks, some rusting, some tipped on their sides, others with broken windows—relics of another auto age—all in a circle giving the appearance of the place where cars go to die, like elephants who always seek the same dying ground as their ancestors.
” ‘Oh, those cars have just accumulated over the years,’ he says then with a sweeping gesture. ‘I was going to fix that Dodge truck there, going to fix the valves when someone took a log and broke every bit of glass in it … must have been $100 worth of destruction.'”
‘The county commissioner got after me to clean the place up, but I never have the time, they keep me so busy,’ says Stover referring to his firewood cutting business which supplements his $76 a month Social Security pension. ‘A health officer came down and told me to clean it up, that the place was breeding rats. Ho, that was a laugh —ever hear of rotten wood breeding rats?’ says Stover gesturing toward the hundreds of boxes of drying wood stacked in his front yard.”
‘If that was true the woods would be full of rats,’ he says. ‘They don’t hang around where there’s no food. I told him it was the old city dump, that place was just alive with rats when they used it.’
“Stover’s prized possessions now are his record player, (‘I love music’) his thousands of books and magazines (‘I’d like to get them indexed so I can find things’) and his battered yellow truck he uses to haul the firewood he’s chopped for his customers.
Stover can often be seen chugging down Whidbey Island’s back roads hauling wood. ‘I’ve gotten two tickets for going too slow,’ he says angrily. ‘Too slow on these old back roads, can you imagine?’
“A few days later Stover was out in the after¬noon sun, scything a half acre field to ready it for plowing.
“During a rest, leaning on his scythe, Stover tells of the garden he is going to plant—corn, beans, carrots, rutabagas, and turnips—’I’m mostly vegetarian now, you know a vegetarian’s life expectancy is 12 years above a meat eater.’
“Later, wrinkle-rimmed eyes narrow and glow as he thinks back to the days in early 1900’s when he used to help his father on their farm near the Oregon-Washington border. ‘We had 15 acres of oats and hay’ he says. ‘Dad would scythe it just like I am here and I’d rake it into shocks.’
“Stover learned the logging and lumber trade from his father who owned several mills in his lifetime.
” ‘We, my sister and I, wanted to go to school, but the nearest one was eight miles away—it was out of the question.’ Instead they visited the school occasionally, were tested by the teacher, and received books for home study.
“While waiting for school, Stover was nearly drafted into World War I. ‘They were down to choosing alphabetically and my letter was next, but they declared the armistice right then—wasn’t that a close one?’ he says, ‘I’m glad I missed it; don’t believe in carrying guns and killing people. Stir a mud hole and it don’t settle anything—that’s the way war is, it just makes everyone mad.’
“Neighbors finally talked his father into letting the Stover kids go to school and they both moved to Walla Walla to live in dormitories and attend the Seventh Day Adventist School there. Next he transferred to the Auburn Academy, a similar school in Auburn and finished high school while teaching woodwork to the younger students. In the late 1920’s he joined his dad at a sawmill on Cultus Bay, Whidbey Island.
“In 1934 he struck out on his own with a steam sawmill in Freeland (‘Where the bowling alley is now.’) ‘The New Deal lumber laws did me in, it took a lawyer to figure them out,’ he says with disgust. ‘They were thrown out later, but they had already discouraged me and I’d got out.’ Stover regrets that decision now, said he mighl have done all right if he’d kept that mill.
“He spent many years after that milling, but nothing much came of it. He never married— ‘Never happened across the right party, although there was a girl at the academy. I liked her and she liked me, but it never worked out. She finally got engaged to another guy.’
“Stover now lives on his mother’s old farm in Langley. ‘She died, well it was the 23rd of May just a year ago in a Walla Walla rest home,’ he says remembering. ‘She was buried on the 25th at age 101.’
“Stover is expecting to live to be at least 100 like his mother. He is planning to can his vegetables for the winter. ‘Last year I canned over 40 quarts of com alone.’
“What else is ahead he’s not sure, but looking back over the past 74 he is philosophical.
‘I’m not sure I done the right thing, but things just turn out the way they do.’ “Charlie Stover died on March 16, 1982 at the age of 84. He is buried in Langley cemetery.