Last week’s column detailed Dwight Garrett’s early years in Black Diamond and his eventual formation of Garrett Motors, located on Stevenson Avenue in Enumclaw. After gaining experience as a salesman for Collins Motors, in 1945 Dwight started selling GMC Trucks and later obtained a Buick dealership. His showroom was in the modern style, surrounded on three sides by glass allowing complete daylight views for displaying cars and trucks. One newspaper ad showed a new Buick coupe at the “unbelievable low price of only $2,097 delivered to your door.” This photo of the employees of Garrett Motors was taken as part of the same advertising campaign from the July 14, 1949 issue of the Enumclaw Courier-Herald. Shown from left to right are: Ray Mallory, service manager; Dorothea Hart, office; Fred Koenig, parts dept.; H.O. Pease, office manager; Ole Swanson, body man; Dave Garrett, shop; “Shorty” Blair, mechanic; Dean Brevik, body man; Pete Olson, shop; Archie Hill, mechanic; and Dwight Garrett, owner. This photo #LP235 comes courtesy of the Enumclaw Plateau Historical Museum with additional research by JoAnne Matsumura of Issaquah.
Despite a lush ad campaign and a fine line of cars and trucks, Garrett’s automobile business was never particularly successful according to Cal Bashaw, a long-time associate, business partner, and executor of his estate. Bashaw says that “Dwight didn’t meshed well with the old guard of Enumclaw,” particularly those associated with the First National Bank of Enumclaw. They were sometimes derisively referred to as the “codfish aristocracy.” In fact by the mid-1960s, Garrett founded a new bank named Cascade Security. Originally located on Wells Street east of City Hall, Cascade Security Bank grew, prospered, and in time rivaled the old guard’s favored bank. In 1980, Cascade Security built a new bank on the corner of Griffin and Porter, which is now the site of Green River College’s Enumclaw campus. By then Garrett ran one of Enumclaw’s most successful businesses, focused on the manufacture of logging equipment. His articulating Garrett Skidder revolutionized the harvest of second growth stands of timber, but more about that next week.
