REMEMBER WHEN. That's the heading on a column in the Kitsap Sun recalling events of days past. Problem this morning was the first item said "10 years ago" and gave the year "1935" .

Okay, I can forgive that because they apparently did away with the proofreading department years ago at the Kitsap (Bremerton) Sun. That alone stuck in my craw because when I was working in that glass-enclosed newsroom in the '70s one of the reporters would call out almost daily, "How do you spell..." Sometimes I would answer because even though I was just a lowly editor of what was laughingly referred to as the "Women's Department", I was the best speller that newspaper ever had since Julius Gius! Reporters couldn't spell their way out of a paper bag in those days. It's somewhat better today, thanks to the Spell Check button on the computers they use. That button, however, doesn't replace the brain.

What I can't forgive is the writer(s) getting the name of the judge wrong in the story. They said he was H.O. Sutton. I knew the gentleman to whom they referred: He was Superior Court Judge H. G. Sutton. His full name, which he seldom used, was Handy Gilpin Sutton. He organized all the employees at the courthouse a month before my second child was born and threw a baby shower on my last day to work there. I was an employee of the Kitsap Title Company in Bremerton but traveled to the county courthouse every day to search the daily records. I didn't have a car in those days and women who worked in offices dressed up and wore high heels. I caught the little ferry at Bremerton and walked to the courthouse up Sidney Road (now Avenue). It was harder walking back down the hill in those heels after I had completed the daily search.

Judge Sutton was a remarkable man and one you would never see as hosting a baby shower! I remember one story about Handy Gilpin: A law clerk who worked for him wanted to be a lawyer. Helen Graham learned everything she needed to know to pass the bar exam from her boss. She never spent a day in the classroom, the story goes. She later became Helen Graham Greer and as next door neighbor to my husband's family in Sheridan Heights she hired their teen aged son, Charlie Rook, to help her shovel cow manure on the base of Madrona and Douglas Fir trees on her property. He already knew they would grow without the extra help, but she was paying him to do it so he shoveled.

In closing, the child born to me March 7, 1951, Phyllis Atkinson Counts, celebrates her 59th birthday today. In 1935 I was five years old. You do the math.

Rosie