Submitted by the Polson Museum
On Sunday, June 12 at 2:00 p.m., the Polson Museum invites the public to join in honoring longtime Harborites Gene Stensager and Lou Messmer as Pioneers of the Year. The event will take place at the Grays Harbor College HUB and the public is invited to attend this celebration.
The Polson Board’s naming of Stensager and Messmer was in part inspired by our 1981 Pioneers, Ruth Birks and Frances Rosenberg, who together were honored for their pioneering work as Hoquiam school teachers.
Though their fields of study differed — Stensager in music and Messmer in life sciences — the pair seemed a natural fit to share this year’s award as pioneering instructors at Grays Harbor College. Both men were hired, not long after each served in World War II, to run one-man departments at the college. The pair were instrumental (no pun intended in Stensager’s case…) to the expansion of the college with its move to the current south side location in the late 1950s.
Stensager was born in Poulsbo on July 21, 1923 but moved to Hoquiam as a boy when his dad found work at the North Western mill as a carrier driver. During the Depression, Gene’s father tended the navigational buoys on the Harbor while Stensager regularly assisted, developing a lifelong love of boats and being on the water. Gene graduated from Hoquiam High School in 1941 and soon entered the Army, serving four years during WWII. Aided by the GI Bill, he sought higher education at the Universities of Washington and Oregon, majoring in music with a minor in psychology.
Messmer was born in Forsyth, Montana on June 5, 1920 but moved to Aberdeen at age 3 when his father took a job as a finish carpenter. Lou lived at Finch Farms on Aberdeen’s south side, attended a two-room primary school house there, and ultimately graduated from Weatherwax in 1937. He completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Washington before joining the Navy during WWII. Following the war, Lou pursued his master’s at UW and then began his teaching career as one of the first instructors hired at the Simpson Logging Company’s newly formed Camp Grisdale.
