“It was a cold and stormy night”, so the story begins in the Peanuts comic strip. And this night happened to be just that. I was at Betty and Warren Williams’ home above their family business, Forest Park Grocery, a couple of blocks from the Kitsap County courthouse in Port Orchard, WA.
We were all a tad tired having been in the club’s predicted log contest the day before at Bremerton Yacht Club. But dedicated to club business as all of the members of our small club were. We were still meeting at a makeshift building on our club’s property on Bay Street between the Port Orchard Railway and vacant land, which at one time was occupied by a sawmill.
It really was a cold winter evening, that night in January 1970. Warren, who was rear commodore of Port Orchard Yacht Club at the time, and my husband, Charlie, fleet captain, were assigned the daunting task of putting together the first yearbook for the club. Charlie had to work that night at Boeing so the three of us gathered all the pictures and advertisements we had and began making notes and spreading out pages. We were about an hour into the paper shuffling and discussions about where to place certain features of this virgin task when the phone rang. Betty answered it and came back with the news.
“That was Thelma Powell. Fred Cohen was just shot.”
Ross, Thelma’s husband, was partner in the local Hannah & Powell Pharmacy, was called by Katherine Cohen’s physician, the late Bob Merley, who had just received a call that Katherine needed a sedative.
Port Orchard was still a relatively small town in those days and everybody went to the same doctors and dentists and pharmacists in town --some of whom were members of the club. The local grapevine was at work and news spread quickly.
I was working for The Bremerton SUN in those days and wanted to make sure that our editor, Gene Gisley, was told. He was a friend of Cohen’s and had been an observer during the race aboard the Lady Katherine the day before. Gisley sounded distraught when he answered the phone so I knew he had already heard the news. He said, “Travis just called me. He heard it on the police radio and we’re already on top of it.” He thanked me and then said, “I said goodnight to Fred last night on the very spot where it happened”.
We quickly wound up our yearbook planning session and sat around the table, trying to make small talk about the troubling turn of events.
Charlie and I only knew the Cohens socially through yacht club functions and I recalled one night after a dance at the club we had all pitched in to clean up the mess and put away the chairs. Charlie invited Fred and Katherine to come to the house for breakfast (about 4 a.m.) We had bacon and eggs and toast at our little dining area picnic table, and after some small talk they left. I remember Charlie saying after they drove off that he thought Fred was a pretty nice guy. ‘Course he was still a little buzzed.
Having been at The SUN for a few years I had heard all the gossip about Cohen and his bizarre courtroom performances, his affairs… His first wife, Marguerite, died some years before we met Fred and Katherine. I knew he had a couple of daughters from his first marriage, but never met them. As part of my job at The SUN I did feature stories about local cooks. Readers liked the recipes. The one time I ever set foot in the Cohens’ home, on Marguerite Ave. in Bremerton, was to do a story about Katherine’s bread baking expertise. She baked bread almost daily. Fred liked home baked bread so it gave Katherine motivation to indulge her passion. The house smelled wonderful when I walked in and after filing my feature with photos I promised myself I would give bread baking another try. (Prior attempts were so bad I finally threw out my muffin tin. Actually I nailed that pan still holding the rock hard burned dinner rolls to the pump house wall).
We knew that Fred Cohen, the attorney, used his boat on many occasions to meet clients in Seattle. Tax write-off? Maybe.
I knew his brother, Jordan, for whom the store in Port Orchard was named, and often saw his mother who worked at the store for many years back in the days before it was mostly dedicated to Western Wear.
Jordan wrote a self-published book about the family business and his mother an eccentric person in her own right. The Cohens were an interesting family and Fred was one of its most famous or infamous members.
I had no idea how many people disliked the man until I read Chuck Stark and John Wallingford’s story in the Kitsap SUN’s Sunday edition. Tonight I heard a news feature on the final Law & Order police drama and thought: The Fred Cohen murder would have been a great segment…if they had found the killer.
Maybe I’ll be around when Chuck and John write about the case when it is finally solved.
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