Memories of Business Pulse
Business writing sounds like it’s about numbers and products, about profit and loss. After 12 years of writing for Business Pulse, I know it’s about passion.
Over and over, I’m astounded at what businesspeople in Whatcom County accomplish, what they imagine and then make real. As a journalist for Business Pulse, I see a breadth and depth of human endeavor that most people miss. With every story, I witness a level of creativity and execution that often takes my breath away.
Consider Simon Graves, an engineer tinkering in his attic, who designs and markets breakfast-nook furniture, launching his company Northerly Customs; Andi Vann, a young woman who spent all her free time baking, who said, “I couldn’t stop baking,” and founded Pure Bliss Desserts; and Diana Ambauen-Meade, who mixed up her own natural chicken feed in a little rented cement mixer, eventually founding Scratch & Peck Feeds, now a multi-state endeavor.
Consider huge businesses, with thousands of people working toward the same goal, such as bp. We viewed the story of the prosperity bp brought to Whatcom County through a lens of what it meant to three local families. Think of Bellingham Cold Storage, a working waterfront company created to serve local farmers and fishers that now feeds the world. Think of Janicki Industries, headquartered in Sedro Woolley and expanded into Bellingham, creating equipment needed to build spacecraft.
Touring these companies is like getting to watch the pyramids being built.
Business is full of surprises. Hidden in a warehouse on Fairhaven’s waterfront is Northwest Marine Industries, the longest continually operating fiberglass boat manufacturer in the country. I live just a short walk away, but before I wrote that story, I didn’t know they were there. Getting to see a 28-foot Sea Sport Commander arise from the shop floor is nothing short of miraculous.
Writing about A.L.R.T. Corporation, based in Everson, I learned modern logging involves towers capable of hoisting logs to the sky via cables. Lean, fit loggers called choker-setters scramble up steep slopes, hook logs to cable, then get out of the way. I met Bob Diehl of Diehl Ford (now Bellingham Ford), the second oldest Ford dealership in the world, when it’d been continuously owned by the Diehl family for 111 years.
I interviewed Howard Hammer at age 90, who had the vision for the Irongate industrial area. He put $1000 down on a 30-acre parcel with a two-bedroom house and moved in on New Year’s Day 1950 with his young family; it was so cold, there was ice inside the windows. I spoke to Michael Watters, a man committed to serving children, who worked as a land developer so he could afford to found and operate the childcare centers Kids’ World. I met Shiraz Balolia, founder of Grizzly Industrial. He made $6 on his first sale of a drill press; now his Bellingham-headquartered company has sales in nine figures. I talked to Dick Hempler, patriarch of Hempler’s Foods, who as a youngster scrambled under the sawmill at Bloedel-Donovan Lumber Mills, scooping up sawdust to take back and sprinkle on the floor of his family’s sausage business.
From small to big, vintage to modern, old to new: It is a privilege to write the stories of business in Whatcom County.
