These Times

Rayonier’s research lab created a culture

Kirk Ericson | May 23, 20240

Kathryn Hamilton Wang remembers the dinner parties in their Shelton home on Grant Avenue. The plates were of fine china, bracketed by sterling silver, and their guests’ lips cusped the elegant rims of Waterford Crystal.

“Appetizers and drinks were served ahead of time,” Kathryn, now an Olympia resident, wrote me in an email. “We girls [Kathryn is the oldest of four sisters] helped pass the hors d’oeuvres which might include stuffed mushrooms or ham and egg balls. We’d fill trays with these as well as carrots, celery and olives (I can still picture the glass and silver tri-split dish into which we’d put the olives in a specific section.) Toothpicks had to be put into the smoked oysters and we might be assigned to help broil fresh oysters in butter and Worchester sauce in the smaller of the two ovens.

“Dinner and serving plates were always warmed in the small oven before dinner was served on them … Depending on the time of year, a rhododendron truss or a dahlia from our garden was always floated in a cut glass bowl on the dining table.”

Kathryn’s father was Kelvin Hamilton, who in 1954, bearing a doctorate in agricultural biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, started working at what was then called the Olympic Research Division of Rayonier. The lab had a Harvard Avenue address, near the southern tip of Oakland Bay in downtown Shelton. He ended his work at the lab as the director, retiring in 1986.

That lab started in 1926 and did globe-spanning research on wood pulp, including crafting chemical processes that created and refined uses for rayon, a semi-synthetic fiber used in manufactured products, including clothes and car tires. During World War II, the lab’s researchers focused on nitrocellulose, used as a propellant to eject lethal projectiles rapidly and safely from cylinders aimed at the enemy.

“From their test tubes emerged pulp with a wide range of uses,” according to the book “A Brief History of Shelton, Washington.” “The finest sulphite book and bond papers. Rayon silk to fire the imagination of apparel designers and supply America with a top-to-toe wardrobe. Plastics products of light weight, durability and fascinating colorings. Serviceable cellophane. Fabric for the daintiest gowns in the Easter parade or cord for the heaviest duty truck tire on the highways.”

By the late 1970s, the lab employed 180 people locally, the June 15, 1978, edition of the Shelton Mason County Journal reported.

I’ve heard from a handful of people around town that because of the lab’s population of highly educated researchers, Shelton at some point had the nation’s highest per capita rate of people with doctorates. I asked Liz Arbaugh, executive director of the Mason County Historical Museum, whether she could chase down the claim. It cannot be proved.

“We haven’t found anything regarding the PhD tale,” Liz wrote in an email. “Berwyn Thomas, who was involved with the historical society and was a chemist at Rayonier, made a kind of oblique reference to it in his book ‘Shelton, The First Century Plus Ten,’ but it isn’t spelled out. Maybe it was because he couldn’t verify his facts. Both Jan [Parker, museum researcher and Journal columnist] and I have heard it, but that doesn’t make it true, of course.”

Let’s settle on this: Shelton had lots of people with doctorates in the 20th century.

“The lab was an interesting cosmopolitan mix of people that included heritages such as Austrian, British, Canadian, French Canadian, Greek, Hungarian and Italian plus more which I’ve forgotten,” Kathryn said. “For several of the people English was not their first language. It all made for interesting conversations for the adults while we girls did our homework upstairs or watched a bit of television in the basement.”

The presence of so many doctorates had its own benefits for the town.

Kathryn mentioned Reta Loudermilk, her chemistry teacher at Shelton High.

“She was tough and terrific,” Kathryn recalled. “She’d have PhDs come into the class and give lectures.”

The lab hired students of employees for summer work, and Kathryn said she spent some time monitoring zooplankton, phytoplankton and copepods.

For lab director Kelvin Hamilton, his tenure was marked by a devastating duty. Word came from corporate in the early 1980s — the era of junk bonds and the “greed is good” characters Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken — that he needed to lay off many of the lab’s employees.

“He didn’t want anyone to harm themselves, so he made sure every worker had someone with them,” Kathryn recalled of her father. “He didn’t want anyone left alone.” Her father died a few years after those layoffs, and Kathryn said she believes that experience shortened his life.

A book published after the layoffs at the Rayonier Research Center, titled “Outplacement & Inplacement Counseling,” is inscribed to her father:

“For Kelvin Hamilton, my friend as you are with so many, a concerned executive. If I had the credentials, I would consider it a privilege to work with you … Frank E. Humberger”

His first name comes from a statue of Lord Kelvin that his mother would see when she lived in Belfast, Kathryn said. His mother thought the person had a kind face. She vowed if she had a son, she’d name him Kelvin.