Donated photos to grace Scarborough Building

The Scarborough Building will soon have a new display, thanks to a generous donation by Ruby Martha (Scarborough) Keating.

The exhibit, consisting mostly of old time pictures of Cathlamet can be seen in the display case inside the Scarborough Building indefinitely.

Keating said she was happy to make the donation.

"What else am I going to do with them?" she said. "I'm the last one of the Scarboroughs. At least I would know where they are going."

An antique wooden match holder bearing the face of Sitting Bull once hung in her grandmother's house, Keating said. She explained that the matches were placed in the pockets on either side of the picture with a striker strip just above.

Redmen Hall once sat on the very piece of property where Scarborough Building is now. "This is the original one. It was two stories high," she said; her grandmother lived just behind the building. "You can see just the back of it, right there," she said pointing it out in a picture.

A grocery store, Oxman's, was right across from the tavern on the dock, she said. A skating rink upstairs from the tavern is where she had a lot of fun. A staircase led to the area where skates could be bought. "Nobody had skates they had themselves. You bought them there."

Keating, 86, was born in Cathlamet and delivered by her grandmother on January 22, 1922. Her father wanted to call her Kitty, but her grandmother would have no part of it. "We are going to name her Ruby," her grandmother said. It was Keating's mother who decided her middle name would by Martha. "That was my mother's sister's name," she said.

At the age of eight, she earned 10 cents a day running the books with gasoline sales from Winnie Boyland to Larson's Standard Oil.

"When the weather was real bad, my dad would put me on his shoulders and take me up there to get my 10 cents," She said.

Donna Westlind, administrative assistant to the Lower Columbia Economic Development Council was happy to accept the donation. "I think it's great," she said. "We can put it over in the visitor's center display cases so people can see. This is the Scarborough building; I think it is a perfect, perfect fit."