Helen Sommers: An Oral History

Yona Makowski
Seattle so we could go out for lunch. I don’t recall
the name of the restaurant, but it was wonderful.
It sits very close to the Fremont Bridge and it was
a great place. She just loved to take people around
and show them the ins and the outs of her district.
The Troll statue beneath the Aurora Bridge
After lunch, she took me to see something very
unique. There’s a colossal Troll statue that sits
under the Aurora Bridge. It is clutching an actual
Volkswagen Beetle, as if it had just swiped it from
the roadway above! The vehicle has a California
license plate. Pretty hysterical! The Troll statue is
located on N. 36 th Street at Troll Avenue N., under
the north end of the Aurora Bridge. (Aurora
Avenue North was renamed “Troll Avenue” in its
honor in 2005).
When we were in Olympia, Helen, Barbara Baker
and I would often go to dinner. She loved to go out
to Xinh’s Clam & Oyster House in Shelton. Xinh
just loved Helen. So right before Helen retired from
the House, we had a special gathering out there.
The food is phenomenal, and Xinh really gave us
special treatment when she knew Helen was coming.
I think many people were sad Helen was gone
when the 2009 session opened. She had been here
for 36 years, so some things were just a little bit
different with Helen’s absence. For example, when
Helen was chair and we had a pension bill in the
House, most people in the caucus didn’t really want
to get deep into the details of what was in the pension
bill. Basically, all they wanted to know was:
“Is Helen Sommers in favor of it? And, is Steve
Conway in favor of it?” Conway would always take
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more the labor view of the world and Helen would
always take the more fiduciary view of it. So, if
everybody in caucus knew that both Sommers and
Conway were in favor of this pension issue, then
it must be okay!
Helen really cared a lot about bills. She actually
read them all; and she really wanted them to
be well-written. Maybe policy was okay; but the
bill was poorly drafted. She couldn’t stand the idea
that a poorly written bill could become law, even
if she agreed with the goal.
Sometimes Helen took a very strong stand on
an issue. One good example was the Constitutional
amendment for a “Rainy Day Fund,” which requires
one-percent of the general state budget to go to a
budget stabilization account that can’t be touched
without a 60-percent vote of the Legislature. Helen
was strongly opposed to it and she voted against it.
She gave one of the most passionate speeches she
ever gave on the floor against the bill. In fact, she
wrote the statement against the “Rainy Day Fund”
in the Voter’s Pamphlet. It passed, but she was not
afraid to go against the tide.
Helen had a love for this institution and she had
a deep understanding of state government and the
way it worked. She wasn’t prone to taking stands
on things because it was expedient. In her way, she
always tried to do the right thing. For example,
when it came to state employees, she recognized
the need for people to actually do the work, and
she tried to defend state employees.
She once made an amazing statement during
debate in the House Appropriations Committee when
some members were trying to cut large numbers of
state employees. She said “They’re not faceless.”
She sees the Child Protective Services worker, the
prison guard, the teacher, the state trooper and
state employee as a valuable service to the state. I
remember it gave me goosebumps when she spoke
that evening.