Seventy years ago in Cushing, Oklahoma Bud Haskins and his cousin Ed
flipped a coin to see who would get to take out Viva Minor and who
would get stuck with her kid sister Connie. Bud lost the toss but ended
winning big in the end. For Connie it was meant to be.
"The first time I saw him at school I told my sister I was going to go
with him," Connie said recently in her soft Southern drawl that 60
years in Spokane has not erased. " She said he would never go with you,
he's the captain of the football team, I said well I was." Bud and
Connie were secretly married two years later when she turned 16. "He
asked me to marry him when I was 14, but I said no," she
said.
In 1947 Bud took a welding
job with Kyle Welding and brought his wife and two small children to
Spokane. When his boss, Lennis Kyle was killed on the job a year later,
Bud rented the shop and started the Haskins Company. By 1950. he bought
a lot on Main off Freya and moved his operation.
"I remember he
told me that someday we would own the whole block and I said balony,"
she said, shaking her head with a smile. " Now we own four blocks."
Connie was reluctant to help with the company because she wanted to
devote her energy to her children but when the bookkeeper died shortly
after the move to Main, Bud turned to Connie. "He said he just needed
me to help out for a few months," she said, rolling her eyes. Connie
ended up working full time doing the books until May of this year, 11
years after Bud had passed away.
"I don't know where Mom got the
energy," her son Sterling told me. "Every morning my shoes would be
shined for school and Mom would make us breakfast and then head off to
work. After school my sister and I would go down to the office and she
would bring us home at 6 and make dinner. She usually brought home book
work and worked on that until 11 and then sew until 1 or 2 and then be
right back at it the next day."
As the years passed and Bud and
Connie's extended families moved up from Oklahoma, Connie made them
Sunday dinner every week for years. "Mom fed 25 to 80 people every
Sunday and no one could bring a thing. She did all the cooking," he
said, adding the house always full for holiday meals as well.
It would seem that Connie's plate would have been full with the
business and her family but she had another passion to which she
devoted her boundless energy: her church.
For 25 years Connie
taught Sunday School at Pines Baptist Church.And for many more years
than that she was church hostess which meant she attended every
service, business meeting, every revival, every everything. You did not
got to a service at Pines without seeing Connie sitting two pews back
next to the middle aisle.
"I don't think anyone ever went to
the hospital from Pines without Mom visiting them," Sterling said,
adding that Connie herself spent a lot of time in the operating room. "
Mom really never had great health. I think she had something like 14
operations through the years."
But nothing slowed her down
for long and everything she devoted herself to prospered from her
efforts. Today Haskins Steel has 93 employees and more than a 1,000
customers throughout the Northwest . The Haskins Company employs
several more constructing grain facilities all over the West and
commercial buildings in Spokane.
When Elaine and I went to visit Connie at her beautiful suite at
Courtland Place we were amazed to see the dozens of cards displayed on
her large dining room table sent from friends and family for her 86th
birthday. It reminded me of all the Christmas cards she had sent us
year after year and how big her list must have been considering all the
hundreds of people she knew from Pines and her company.
It turns out that Ed was also a big winner in the coin toss as well
because he wound up marrying Viva, moving to Spokane to work with Bud
and was always a welcome guest at Connie's Sunday family dinners.
