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Historian, writer, and musician – Dana Lohrey Plays Mean Honky Tonk Piano By Jack McNeel Gold rush era history surrounded Dana Lohrey as he grew up in the small town of Clearwater south of Kooskia, which was established in 1861 to supply miners and prospectors with the necessities. Though never very large in population, Clearwater had a good-sized business community. As a youngster in the 50s, Dana was fascinated with stories of those gold rush days. “I used to sit on the porch with the old storekeeper at the general store and drink pop and he would tell me stories about Clearwater and the freight wagons and teams and passengers that came through
town on their way to the goldfields,” he says. “Listening to the stories of old Fred Murphy just inspired me and I’ve always been interested in the local history.” The population of Clearwater had dropped to about 50 at that time, roughly half what it was during its heyday. “During the gold rush era there were two general stores, a church, a log schoolhouse, livery stable, blacksmith shop, and a saloon for a short period of time,” he relates. After high school, Dana took a job in a Lewiston bank for a couple of years until he received a draft notice. “I was given a choice to enlist in some branch of the Navy or be drafted into the Army. I had 48 hours to make that decision.” His mother had been an aircraft controller as a Navy WAVE, and all five uncles had served in the Navy during World War II and the Korean War, so that helped Dana make the choice. “I wanted to keep that tradition and went into the Navy for six years.” This was during the Viet Nam era. He returned to the Lewiston bank for a year, then to a Kooskia bank until 1978. That October he applied for a job at Washington State University in the Department of Applied Mathematics where he worked for nearly nine years, then transferred to the College of Pharmacy where he would become Director of Pharmacy Student Services, “an office that I created,” he adds. He spent 21 years in the College of Pharmacy and retired in October, 2008. But that local history bug never left him. In fact since 1991, he has been affiliated with the Friends of the Elk City Wagon Road, a volunteer historic preservation group. Dana began writing (Continued on page 20)