Fuhrman’s Hometown Faces Its Own Crisis

A truck full of noisy youths went barreling through town recently, the kind of boisterous display that might be expected before a big game at Eatonville High School. This time, though, the banner on the truck said “Fuhrman for Mayor.”

On the other side of town, newspaper columnist Dixie Walter, who has carried a “Justice for Detective Fuhrman” button with her for months, got an anonymous phone call when she wrote a column about racism and the former Los Angeles police detective.

“It was somebody who didn’t like the fact that I was sticking up for Mark Fuhrman,” she recalled. “It was a man. And he in no uncertain terms told me not to ever write about Mark Fuhrman again. Or I was going to get it. Period.”

As Fuhrman sat in the center of a storm over racism and justice in a Los Angeles courtroom, the small timber town where he grew up has been forced into its own crisis of identity and history. Fuhrman’s pronouncement that “we have no niggers where I grew up” has unearthed years of painful memories and left Eatonville civic leaders determined to disavow any connection with a son who is alternately seen as hero and villain.

Mark Fuhrman’s Eatonville, a community of 1,650 nestled on the forested hills below Mt. Rainier, is not unlike dozens of other small timber towns in the Pacific Northwest where the counter at the local cafe is the main exchange point for information (Fuhrman’s mother worked as a waitress at Babe’s, now the Tall Timber, for years), almost everyone is white and the Police Department spends most of its time chasing Saturday night domestic brawls and shoplifting at the five-and-dime.

“I always thought of Eatonville when I taught Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ said Margrit Thorvaldson, a retired English teacher who remembers the Fuhrman family. “All the references to small towns and strength in the mountains and so on. It truly was an ‘Our Town.’ Now, it’s growing tremendously. And selfishly, I’m sorry. But I can understand why people want to come out.”

Warm Welcomes and Cold Shoulders

Eatonville, like most any town, resists having its character pinned down in a fleeting anecdote.

On the one hand, Eatonville is a place that elected a young black student as its homecoming king in 1991, named three black teen-agers as cheerleaders and recently gave an open-armed welcome to young Hector Andrade and his wife from Guadalajara as the owners of the Puerto Vallarta Mexican restaurant.

On the other hand, the same town has left Rose Lucas a virtual outcast, and she believes it is because she married a black man and bore three sons of another black. “It’s definitely a friendly town as long as you’re white and don’t have mixed kids,” she said. “They say this isn’t a racist town? I know it. I’ve lived it.”

It is the same town where a downtown shop owner walked out of a local service club during dinner on a recent Martin Luther King Jr. holiday when a boisterous group of patrons declared that “they should have made a holiday for the guy that killed him.” Another one reportedly said, “It’s too bad they didn’t kill more of them, we could have had holidays 365 days a year.”

At the same club only recently, a woman recalls how one man walked over to the TV when Fuhrman was featured and put his ear to the speaker to hear better. “Then he turned to my husband and said, ‘They’ve got it right, the only good nigger is a dead nigger,’ ” said the woman, who would not allow her name to be used because “I don’t want somebody throwing bricks through the front window.”

Now, Fuhrman’s tape-recorded assertions have prompted Eatonville, unlike the other small towns that sprang up in these fertile forests, to ask questions about why it grew up the way it did, who was welcome here, who prospered and who didn’t.

People have stirred up memories of the Fuhrman brothers, stories of Mark and Scott striding through town and getting into confrontations with Daryl and Daniel Blue, from one of the town’s only black families, and they’ve started asking themselves if Eatonville did right by the Blues.

Daniel Blue remembers frequent run-ins with Fuhrman and his brother Scott, who he said got into fistfights with his own brother, Daryl. “They’d see you coming down the street, and they’d say, ‘Here come them niggers, the niggers are in town.’ ”

Blue, 41, who left town when he grew up and moved closer to Tacoma, where he works as a truck driver, is philosophical now. “We were the first ones, and the only ones,” he said. “We were history makers.”

Cassandra Ahearn, who went to junior high school with Fuhrman, said she had frequent run-ins with him because of her friendship with the Blues. Even after they were out of school, she said, he was particularly irritated that her sister was dating Daryl Blue. “One time he came over and Daryl was there and he stood outside my house and called me a nigger lover,” she recalled.

Fuhrman left Eatonville after junior high school for a time, settling briefly in Gig Harbor, a scenic port town for small fishing boats and pleasure craft not far away on Puget Sound. One neighbor, Jack Gardner, remembers a snowy evening when the neighborhood children were sledding down a slope next to Gardner’s house.

“The kids were playing in the snow, and they were all littler than Mark,” Gardner recalled. “He was about 17 and they were between fifth and eighth grade. He was bullying the kids around, knocking them down. You know, being kind of king of the hill. So I went out and told him, ‘Hey, let’s knock it off.’ And he said to me, ‘How’d you like to be knocked down the hill?’ I said, ‘Well, you better not try it.’ I told myself, if he takes me down the hill, he’s going with me. So he takes a flying shot at me, and we both go rolling down.”

“I was no kid at the time, about 40,” Gardner continued. “And he was this husky young fellow. I didn’t want to have a tussle with him, but I said we’re going to stay right here till this thing is settled. I had him in a chokehold and his younger brother Scott was on me, too. So I finally said, ‘It’s done,’ and he said, ‘It’s done.’ We got up, started to dust ourselves off. And when I turned around, he hit me square in the eye. Then he ran off for home.”

A few days later, Fuhrman’s mother, Billie, came by Gardner’s house “and said they were going to have to sell the house because Mark couldn’t get along with people in the neighborhood,” Gardner said. “And then they were gone.”

When he came home to Eatonville briefly after a stint in the Marines, Fuhrman is said to have been embittered about his brother smoking marijuana with friends. One day, Ahearn said, Fuhrman’s brother telephoned her brother, Richard Hurley. “Scott called my brother and wanted to come down and get high, and he said, ‘Sure, come on down.’ And when they got there Mark was with him and literally kicked open the door and held my brother [and his friend] at gunpoint,” Ahearn said. “He was upset about marijuana and his younger brother.” The situation remained at an uneasy standoff until Hurley called the police.

But Walter said that for every bad story, she has heard two from Fuhrman’s admirers. “So many people have talked to me, people that I know and trust, telling me he was such a neat guy.

“People have been very upset. Very angry. They all believe that O.J. Simpson is guilty. They believe that Mark Fuhrman was doing his job,” Walter said.

A Detour to Eatonville

Eatonville Police Chief Rick Armstrong remembers Fuhrman coming back to town only a few years ago on his way to Canada for a drag race with two Los Angeles Police Department-marked racing cars in tow. Fuhrman, he said, took the time to visit three Eatonville schools and talk to the students about his success as a police officer and the importance of staying away from drugs.

“On his own time, at his own expense, he detoured and came over here. I thought he was a heck of a nice guy,” Armstrong said. “When all this came out [about Fuhrman’s remarks], I was hoping I’d hear that he was doing a script or something. I had a very, very hard time making myself believe that he was the same man I talked to up here.”

Now, he said, the entire town has had to live down a reputation for racism that it never deserved. “Maybe when Mark was here 25 years ago the town was like that. But I have been here 25 years, and I have never seen what’s classified now as a hate crime,” the chief said. “Oh, you could talk to some smart-aleck students over there and I’m sure that there are people here who could be called racists, but trust me, the majority of people do not feel that way.”

“I think if it would’ve been a racist community, I would have seen some of it, or at least been exposed to it,” said Mayor Kirk Heinz, owner of Kirk’s Pharmacy downtown, who has lived in Eatonville for more than a decade and has watched it grow from a dying lumber town--the mill that built Eatonville closed in the 1950s--to a bedroom community for the suburban areas growing up outside of Tacoma.

The Fuhrman family is still popular in Eatonville. Scott’s ex-wife, Sue, works at the local Chevrolet dealer. His son is on the high school football team and his daughter is on the high school’s May Day court. Scott Fuhrman, until recently living in a local trailer park, drifts in and out of town these days. Someone who talked to him when he came in the local gun shop a few weeks ago said he was working as a flagman for a highway repair crew.

The Blues are long gone. Lucas’ sons have mostly left school and moved away, but two other black families are living on the hill on the north edge of town. Mostly they keep to themselves, townspeople say, though one of their members, Russell Harris, a popular football player, was named homecoming king in 1991.

Luther Walter Mobley, the head of the other black family on the hill, said he is comfortable and at home in Eatonville, though he, like everyone else, has watched Fuhrman on TV with dismay.

“This talk of his is doggone foolish, and they don’t like him back in this town,” he said recently. “Even down to the cops and things, they don’t like him. Me, I knowed him and I didn’t never like him. [His] words wasn’t never right. Talkin’ a lot of junk. But Fuhrman’s about the only one to start that, to tell you the truth.”