LETTER: Nokomis Club building should be saved

I am a long time resident of the city of Redmond. My family has called the greater Redmond area home for over 100 years. The growth that I have seen in the last 50 years has been positively mind boggling with the change from a sleepy little town of 500 populated mostly by farmers and loggers, to a bedroom community for Boeing and finally to a center of High Tech businesses that have a world-wide reach.

I have long watched this growth and seen some of the pains associated with it but generally have accepted it as the price of progress. However the story of the Nokomis Club building has touched me through to my core. If you do a little Internet research you will discover that the Nokomis Club was truly ahead of its time. Up through the early 60’s Redmond had its own library as the KCLS had not yet moved into town. Due to that the city was responsible for funding and maintaining a library. The Nokomis Club was quite involved in providing financial support for the Library in the early days. My Grandmother Jessie Adams Norman, who was a school teacher was active in Nokomis and was one of the wonderful women that helped support our library in those days. As a youth, a visit to the library was always an event that I looked forward to as there were many different places I could visit just by reading the volumes contained within those walls.

Currently the Nokomis Club building is going to be demolished in order to make room for new construction in the area that surrounds the building.   The contractor plans to use a small amount of the materials salvaged from the demolition in the construction of the planned new building, which hardly pays homage to the women who stepped up to provide a needed service to this Community. Sadly there is no interest at the highest levels of City government to do anything to prevent this building from being demolished.

Please take a moment and visit this website to learn more about the Nokomis Club and its impact on the history of Redmond.[ http://nokomisclub98052.org/library.html ]. This is the story of a group of forward thinking women on a philanthropic mission to help our town.

The Nokomis Club is a part of my heritage and a very important part of our City’s history. Let’s not allow this landmark to slip through our hands and be lost forever.

Russell L. Norman

Redmond, WA