A Cure for Lumbago

Housewife Peggy Nelson stared moodily at the mosquitoes swarming up out of the stagnant pond near her home in the little lumber town of Snoqualmie, Wash, and came to a decision: either she or the wretched puddle must go.

Last week--three years after decision day--bulldozers were rooting out the wild blackberry bushes and leveling the ground for a new housing development where ''Peggy's Puddle" once stagnated. Elsewhere in Snoqualmie (pop. 1,059), Peggy's fellow citizens had cheerfully waded into no fewer than 75 other "action projects" designed to make their town a better place to live in.

Rich Rewards. Fortunately for them and their future, Peggy Nelson had precisely the ally she needed when she set out on her swamp-draining expedition in 1953. The ally: the University of Washington's Bureau of Community Development, a $50,000-a-year agency which has produced an impact on life in Washington out of all proportion to its budget. Its updated Jeffersonian objective: to help urban Washingtonians discover that self-reliant, creative citizens not only can solve many of their own problems but also enjoy rich rewards in the process.

Once Peggy Nelson had set the ball rolling, bureau consultants helped Snoqualmie's townspeople organize 18 study committees with memberships ranging from bankers to lumberjacks. Each group diagnosed a Snoqualmie ailment. When one of the innumerable "buzz sessions" established that Peggy's pond and the town's irksome high-water level rose and fell together, an improvement district was organized, and a $12,000 drainage ditch eliminated both health hazards. As the study committees pinpointed other problems, action groups took over. The littered railroad right of way through town was cleared of underbrush; downtown business houses were being repainted according to a master color scheme; vacant buildings were torn down to make way for new; a combination town hall-library-fire station was built. Involved in the project at one time or another: almost 70% of Snoqualmie's residents.

Bust to Boom. Gratifying as the Snoqualmie story was, it was nothing new to the university's Community Development Bureau. Founded in 1950 under the direction of crusading Community Planner

Richard W. Poston (now directing the same kind of program at Southern Illinois University), it has in six years lifted 22: communities (see map) out of one kind of municipal morass or another.

Anacortes, a Puget Sound town with a boom-and-bust history, was busting all over in 1953, with 1,800 of its 6,700 residents on or asking for relief. Then two major oil companies opened big refineries in the area, and Anacortes was suddenly riding the biggest boom in its history, But the town took it in smooth stride the usual headaches of sudden expansion averted by shrewd, bureau-directed advance planning.

Port Angeles' problem was in some ways more difficult. Its economy was sound, its future secure, but its location on the remote Olympic Peninsula cut it off from the main current of Washington life, and its community life was stagnating. The Bureau's solution: broad-based citizen participation in cultural and sociological programs. Today Port Angeles (pop. 11,850) not only feels itself a part of Washington but of the world. One prime civic project: some 200 of its citizens regularly exchange correspondence, art and books with those of Rosenheim. Germany, and in the last year, high schools in the two communities have exchanged students.

Tiny (pop. 975) Winlock, one of the bureau's early success stories, rose above the peril of a cutback in local timbering operations, went on to find a modest new industry, i.e., a $750,000 cedar-shake processing plant, and to pay for a wide range of community improvements with more than half a million dollars worth of bonds. It also reaped considerable nonmaterial bonuses: attendance at church and community functions has tripled, and election turnouts of 90% are common.

As the renaissance list has grown, so has interest in the program. Today the bureau has study requests from 165 Washington towns; 60 have already organized informal study groups of their own. In the 22 communities where rejuvenation is accomplished or underway, 700 new jobs have been created, a total of $10 million worth of improvement projects financed. Says lean, intense Jack E. Wright, 37, Poston's successor as bureau director: "You can't have community lumbago when

citizens unlimber their spiritual and intellectual muscles in town affairs."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.