Olympia has been home to many interesting and talented women over the years. One of these women is Goldie Robertson Funk, a national writer active in the area’s women’s club movement at the turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Alberta Goldie Robertson, who went by her middle name, was born in Iowa on January 15, 1871, to James and Sarah Cox Robertson. The Robertson family moved to Nebraska, settling in the community of Ashland (near Omaha) where her father taught school. Goldie and her sister Myrtle became school teachers in rural schools nearby.
Their father eventually moved the family to Olympia in 1889, however, attracted to the Far West’s burgeoning economy. The Robertsons arrived a few weeks before Washington achieved statehood on November 11, 1889, and Goldie attended the inauguration of Washington’s first state governor, Elisha P. Ferry.
Photo courtesy: Washington State Library
Goldie immediately sought employment as a teacher. She taught at Rocky Prairie, Chambers Prairie and Delphi schools in Thurston County before spending nearly five years as a teacher at Olympia’s Lincoln School, teaching sixth through eighth grades. When Goldie first began, she taught about 73 students for $75 a month. She also served as the assistant principal at the local Garfield School for part of a year.
In 1899 Goldie married George H. Funk (1865-1955). George was a prominent attorney in Olympia, serving two terms as Thurston County prosecuting attorney, and was one of the lawyers in the lawsuit that resulted in the state’s Supreme Court ruling that ordered all state government agencies to be headquartered in the capital (later expanded to the communities of Tumwater and Lacey), cementing the large role that the state government plays in Thurston County’s economy.
Goldie and George had two children, Clara May (Raymond) and Norman. The Funk family home for many years, 1202 Olympia Avenue NE, is now on the national, state and local registers for historic places. One of the most elaborate surviving Queen-Anne-style houses in Olympia, the house was built by Bradford and Ann Pattison Davis in 1892 or 1894 and sold to the Funks in 1909.
Photo courtesy: Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons
Retiring from teaching, Goldie Funk dedicated her time to her growing family and to community groups. She was active in the Eenati Club (Olympia’s female intellectual club), Women’s Club of Olympia and Congregational Church. She was also involved in the local and state Parent-Teacher Association, serving on staff as advertising manager of the Washington State Parent-Teacher Association in the 1910s and ‘20s.
However, Goldie’s passion lay in writing. Although she started by providing jokes for magazines such as Lippincott’s, she went on to write short stories for children and adults and short articles for women on parenting and household management. Sometimes Goldie used the pen names of Jane Wakefield and Louise St. Clair, but many were written under her own name.
Goldie’s articles were published in a wide-ranging number of magazines including: Pacific Monthly, Mothers’ Magazine (where she also served on staff), Life, Table Talk, Etude, Modern Priscilla, Holland’s, Sunset, Evergreen Magazine, Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, Parent-Teacher Magazine and The Continent. Goldie also became an amateur local historian. One of her historical articles, “Captain Doane and His Oyster Pan Roast,” was published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly in 1952.
Goldie’s writings are good examples of typical popular writing in the women’s magazines of the early 20th century. Her articles about home management are especially revealing of social and economic conditions at the time. Certainly Goldie portrayed herself as a lifestyle expert and even gave a series of home food product demonstrations at the Olympia Women’s Club in January, 1920.
Goldie’s concern for the proper management of meals and other domestic activities is always apparent in her articles. In the Woman’s Home Companion issue of August 1913, for example, she vividly describes a lunch on a boat:
Everything bespoke the outdoors. The full-length inset mirror in the saloon [ship cabin, not a tavern] was framed in a thick mat of Oregon grape leaves. A brown pasteboard frame had been made a little larger than the mirror, and graceful, many-leaved ends of the short branches were sewed to the false frame, and the whole fastened to the wall over the flat frame of the mirror. Sprays of red huckleberry rose from the jars set in deck corners….The first course was hot deviled clams, baked and served in clam shells. Baked salmon, caught that morning in the river, was served next with potatoes au gratin and pea patties, and delicious wild blackberry cobbler topped off the luncheon. Cubes of red huckleberry jelly flavored sharply with lemon were served with the fish and coffee with the cobbler.
Goldie Robertson Funk’s body of work is little known today. However, this dedicated author is an important part of Olympia’s literary tradition, and her articles offer a window into popular female writing of the day.
