There is no pool at Pete's Pool

On Friday nights in the fall, Enumclaw plays football at a swimming pool.

Nobody has swum in it for a very long time. The water is under the parking lot, the man it was named for is long gone, and the name is attached to a stadium beside a log field house that the Works Progress Administration was still building in the spring of 1940. Ask anyone in town where the game is and they will say Pete's Pool without a flicker. Ask them where the pool is and you get a pause.

Pete

Pete Chorak arrived in Enumclaw in 1911, seventeen years old, from Brestica, in what would later be Yugoslavia. He went into the coal at Bayne, north of town, and stayed until the strikes of the 1920s closed the mines. Then he did what a coal miner does when the coal stops: he built a place to sleep and a place to drink, the White River Cabin Camp and Tavern, on the Naches Highway.

That is the whole published biography, and it comes to us through Louise Poppleton's 1980 town history, quoted by a local blogger who did the reading. One hiking write-up adds that Mount Pete, the other name for Pinnacle Peak, is his too, crediting the idea to the Harvey Manning school of trail lore and citing nothing. File that under local tradition.

The spring

In 1935 King County moved the highway up the hill. Below the new road there was a spring, and below the spring there were children with shovels.

They dug it out. A truck driver rounded up men with bulldozers and enlarged it into a big rock-bottomed pond, and when it was done Pete threw an old-country barbecue. In time the pond covered 150 by 300 feet along the edge of Highway 410. Then the mothers of Enumclaw objected to the mud, the Lions Club raised the money to pave it, and the paved pool came out smaller than the pond had been and a good deal cleaner.

Poppleton remembered it the way you remember cold water: the glacial chill, logging trucks roaring past, and the smell of fresh pickles, because Farman's pickle plant stood a little way up the road on Roosevelt Avenue. In 1972, wedding directions to a ranch outside town still told guests to drive past the dump, the pickle factory and Pete's swimming pool. The Seattle Times, in 1995, said it was believed to be the largest open-air pool on the West Coast. Believed is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The gift

Pete gave ten acres, spring included, to what was then King County's recreation park, and then talked the town into raising the money to buy the Ringard Farm next door in 1939 so the park could grow. The WPA went to work: a log field house, a ballpark and a football grandstand. A state archives photograph dated April 1, 1940 shows the field house still going up. The ballfield carries 1940 as its founding year, and the Courier-Herald has said the football field was originally graded with horse-drawn teams, which is the sort of detail that is either true or too good to check.

The hump

Enumclaw High has played football there since the 1960s. By 1995 it was, in the Seattle Times' assessment, the worst field in the South Puget Sound League's North Division, and the reasons read like a cheerful indictment. It was the only grass field in the division. One end ran uphill. There was a hump in the middle that, as the Courier-Herald later put it, made receivers disappear from a quarterback's line of vision, and cheer squads dodged sideline ponds. Visiting teams got a meeting room instead of a locker room, and one night the lights went out at 8 p.m., because somebody forgot to switch off the timer, and stayed out for twenty minutes. After first-round playoff games there in 1982 and 1983, the state association made Enumclaw play its playoffs at Auburn's Troy Field.

Ron Miller, who played on the field in 1960 and coached on it in 1995, put the home advantage plainly: "They're going to die when they come to Enumclaw."

In the fall of 2010 the grass gave out for good and Enumclaw played two home games out of town. The rescue, in 2011, was turf, and the money came from everywhere at once: $300,000 from a state recreation grant, $200,000 from the NFL through the Seahawks, $75,000 from King County, $50,000 from Mutual of Enumclaw, and $10,000 each from the Muckleshoot Tribe, the Kovacevich Foundation, Gamblin Motors and Fugate Ford. Ground broke on June 29, 2011, with a completion date set before September 2. A booster named Rick Bathum put the result more simply: "Gone are the visiting teams excuse for losing."

The wading pool

By then the pool itself had shrunk to a wading pool beside the field house, and a federal law finished it. The Virginia Graeme Baker Act, signed in December 2007, set new drain and safety rules for public pools. A 2008 inspection by Seattle-King County Public Health found the fencing and circulation deficient. There was no money to fix it, so the city closed it. By June 2013, after five years of standing empty, the plan was to backfill it with gravel, pull the fence and landscape the spot. A visitor in 2025 found a tiered half-circle that looks like it was meant to be a fountain, with no water in it.

That is what remains of the largest pool on the West Coast, allegedly.

What it is now

The stadium is owned by the City of Enumclaw and maintained by the school district under an interlocal agreement. It is the only turf field and the only lighted field available to the town's athletes, and the lights still fail: the district's facilities director told the Courier-Herald in 2023 that students and coaches very commonly arrive for practice to find a few of them out.

The district's answer was a new stadium, between Sunrise Elementary and the Boise Creek Six Plex, inside a $253 million bond on the February 2023 ballot. School bonds in Washington need 60 percent. That one got about 25. A slimmer $103 million bond that November, built around a new Byron Kibler Elementary rather than a stadium, got about 35. So the WPA grandstand is still the stadium, the 2011 turf is due for replacement whether or not anyone builds a new one, and the ballfield next door got its own $75,000 state grant and a new backstop in May 2022, for the four hundred or so kids who play there.

What a name is worth

A town keeps names longer than it keeps things. The tavern is gone, the coal is gone, the WPA is gone, the water is gone, and Pete's name is on the stadium. The next time the district asks for a new one, the argument will be about money and it should be. But the thing being replaced is a gift from a coal miner, dug by children, paved by the Lions, built by the government in a depression, and turfed by the Seahawks, and it has outlasted most of them. That is a lot to tear down.

Poppleton's book, There Is Only One Enumclaw, is where the Pete story lives, and it is the source under most of what this town knows about itself.

If you go

Go to a home game this fall and look at the field house before kickoff. It is the log building, and it is older than nearly everybody in the stands. Then walk around to the parking lot side and find the half-circle.

That is the pool.