Picture it: the year is 1922. Warren G. Harding is president. Howard Carter discovers the tomb of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. A gallon of gas is 25 cents. And two long-time Thurston County residents are born. They are Jeanne Pitt and Joe Baque, who both celebrated their 100th birthdays in 2022.
Jeanne Pitt
Jeanne Pitt’s family and friends also recently gathered for her 100th birthday celebration, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lacey. Some traveled from as far away as Boston, Colorado, Florida and Australia. Pitt has seen lots of changes in Thurston County since moving here in 1960. “It’s gotten bigger, that’s for sure,” Pitt says. “It was real small when I first got here.”
And in that time, she made an impression. Lacey Mayor Andy Ryder declared her birth date, February 25, “Jeanne Pitt Day.” In fact, she says Pope Francis, President Joe Biden and Governor Jay Inslee also recognized her birthday.
Pitt’s parents emigrated from Ukraine and settled in the St. Louis area, where they met and married. Pitt was the fifth of their seven children and the first in her family to attend high school, graduating in 1939. “You didn’t think about it (more education),” she says of those times. “A lot of kids had to support their families and help with jobs.”
Her father worked in a factory making ice blocks to preserve meat. Pitt and two siblings learned Ukrainian dancing while growing up. She says she believes some relatives may still be in Ukraine and subject to the recent fighting there.
Pitt met her husband Roy at the former G.H. Walker & Co., a St. Louis investment firm where she was a cashier and he worked with stocks. Walker was the grandfather and great-grandfather of Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush. Pitt says she was among several female employees there in the 1940s and 1950s. “There were two men working in the cashier’s cage with me,” she recalls. “Other women worked in the front office where the big bosses were.”
Pitt says her husband later took a job here in Washington. She remembers the cross-country drive, which lasted five days. After her five children had grown, she worked 22 years for the Washington State Highways Department (now Washington State Department of Transportation). She volunteered with Sacred Heart, where she is the longest-serving member, and with a governor’s committee on disability issues. Albert Rossellini was governor during her state employment and she remembers him well. “He always wore a red rose in his lapel,” she says.
Joe Baque
At the gathering in his Olympia home in honor of his March 1 centennial birthday, well-known local jazz pianist Baque played one of his two grand pianos while accompanying family members in song. Playing the piano is a gift Baque has been sharing for decades. Baque grew up with two sisters in New York City, near Queens and Brooklyn. He began playing piano at age six. He worked his first gig at about age 13 when a pianist booked for New Year’s Eve showed up inebriated, and Baque, the talented kid up the block, was tapped to play. The rest, as they say, is history.
Baque and his wife Carol’s home is a cross between an art-filled New York apartment and a Pacific Northwest forest glen. “I take New York with me wherever I go,” says Baque, who did studio work in New York City and has been a musician in Olympia since 1984, accompanying singers and bands as well as providing instruction and vocal coaching all around the area. “The nature of the business is, wherever the business is, that’s where I would go.”
Baque’s son John says his dad’s birthday brought friends and relatives from around the country. “He is crazy talented,” says John. “And, he has a zest for knowing what’s out there.”
Carol says singers knew they were lucky to be performing with her accomplished husband, who the Washington Center for Performing Arts recognized in 2017 with the Achievement in the Arts as a jazz pianist. While modest about his prodigious talent and his extensive musical repertoire of jazz and Great American Songbook standards, Baque has played with some of the century’s best musicians including Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong. And although he did not perform directly with Duke Ellington, Baque jammed with his band members and Ellington is an artist Baque admires. “He was an all-around musician, composer and instrumentalist,” Baque says. “He had an enormous effect on thousands of musicians. He carved a part of the fabric of the culture.”
Baque says that his favorite type of musician is one dedicated to their craft in what is a tough line of work. “It is frustrating, wonderful and terrible by turns,” he says of the music business. “Yet, I would not stop.” For more on Baque’s interesting life and music, see his website.
