All three of our children were born during the time we resided in the Mansion. My
husband, Gary Locke, was Governor for two terms, from 1997 through 2005.
Since I was a television reporter, I had been in the public eye and that made the
transition easier for me. After Gary got elected, I met with two of the former First
Ladies Jean Gardner and Mary Lowry, and they spoke about their biggest difficulties
with life in the mansion and some things to expect as First Lady. Jean really stressed
the fact that once you become First Lady, people don’t want to bug you. So actually,
if you want to continue with your friendships and really keep them, you have to
do the reaching out, because people don’t want to feel like they’re imposing on
you. She said it really becomes your role to make an effort. That’s what we tried
to do. We opened the mansion up to our families and friends and said it was for
all of them to come in and join, to really be part of the family. It helped us,
I think, to get through eight years.
For many of the First Wives, the biggest challenge was dealing with the loss of
privacy. So we tried to reach a balance between knowing what the media wanted versus
what we wanted to give, and how to reach that balance. An example being, after our
first child was born, we knew they wanted a picture, so we allowed one photographer
in to take photos and to disseminate them to everyone else. That way, everyone had
photos of Emily and it wasn’t an imposition.
There were a couple of other instances of lack of privacy. You have troopers outside.
You have five staff inside. All of a sudden your life changes from private to being
around people virtually twenty-four hours a day. We were driven everywhere by troopers.
Often in my speeches I talk about how great it was to be First Lady and it was.
But while being driven around everywhere sounds wonderful, there’s always someone
in the car with you and your husband.
When we went into the supermarket, the troopers would come in with us. We would
go home on the weekends and the troopers would sit outside our house. If I chose
to drive, they would follow me. There was that sense that someone was always around.
That of course was good for security but bad for privacy.
On the other hand, it works out well when the people around you are like family.
We had hired Mary Charles, who was one of our dearest friends, to come in as our
Mansion Coordinator. That gave us a big sense of comfort, especially as we went
into office and a month and a half later had our first child. The mansion staff
really became integrated into our lives. It was important that we, as a family,
thrived in the mansion and be surrounded by people we thought of as part of that
family, rather than as employees.
We tried to really live as we would as a regular family. Gary and I would go to
Costco. We’d do our shopping. We just tried to be ourselves. People either accept
you as you are, or they don’t. You really can’t pretend to be anyone else. We had
young children and they had fits and they cried and they laughed just like any other
kids.
The bat trapped in the ballroom! I think maybe we were more infamous for the bats
than anything else in our two terms in office. It was interesting. Gary had come
running downstairs one night from the attic, which was really a big playroom up
on the fourth floor of the mansion. The cats were kept up there and were fed there.
And he said, “I was feeding the cat and there was this bat flying around.” I laughed,
and I thought, you locked the door with my cats in with those bats? That’s when
both of us went upstairs to retrieve them. When he opened the door there were no
bats. So I laughed it off. “Honey,” I was teasing him, “I think you’re just imagining
it.”
The next day, my husband was changing Emily’s diaper in our bedroom, on our makeshift
changing table. I was in the closet area, and all of a sudden, I heard, “Honey,
the bat! The bat!” And I came running out of our walk-in closet, and there was a
bat flying around the bedroom with Gary, one hand holding the baby and one hand
trying to fan it off and keep the bat away. That was the beginning of our bat saga.
We had nine bats in thirteen days come into the house. And the more they tried to
seal off any openings around the mansion, the more it drove the bats that were caught
inside to find a way out. They would come out of radiator vents. They were everywhere.
You never knew when a bat might suddenly fly into your room.
I learned a lot about bats. I learned a baby bat could fit through a space a quarter
of an inch. So when we thought oh, we got the bat trapped in the ballroom, the next
day, it would be gone. Because they just scoot right out, squeeze right out. They
were extremely evasive. They have sonar instead of sight. We found that you really
can’t shoo them out with brooms or anything solid, they know you’re coming. We moved
out for a few days, until the last of the bats vacated the premises.
When we moved into the mansion, we were told it was furnished. The public spaces
were beautiful, but then the private spaces were in a little need of some love and
care. I think that they [the State] had not remodeled since I don’t know when. The
rugs were very old and moldy. It was not in the best condition. Mary Charles referred
to it as a “frat house in ill repair”.
It was all dark wood and the furniture appeared to be old office surplus furniture.
The couches were all tattered, as a result of a previous occupant’s pet. You know,
I think when you live in the Governor’s Mansion, you don’t feel comfortable going
to the legislature and asking for money for furniture, or to redo the private quarters.
You feel it’s already your privilege to be there.
One of the legislators, Ed Murray, was in the House of Representative at the time.
Now, he’s a senator. He had heard, probably through Mary Charles, about these conditions.
He brought a group of legislators through, and they toured our living space and
saw the conditions themselves. They saw something had to be done. Thanks to them,
they spearheaded the remodel of the mansion which turned it into a beautiful living
space.
When you come up from the public areas, the staircase leads to a hallway separating
the public area from the private. On the public side, there are two bedrooms open
to tour groups. The private side had a wide-open hallway that separated our bedrooms
from the rest of the area. After we had children, it was very difficult. All of
our kids were very colicky. Sometimes the babies would be crying, and I’d wait until
the public tours went into the public bedrooms and then run down the hall to get
to the nursery, hoping no one saw me. Our main living space was visually wide-open
to everyone. We were just running back and forth between the tours when we could.
Then we relocated for eight months or so while our quarters were being repaired
and updated. That made a big difference in both the conveniences and in our family
comfort. Until the earthquake in February 2001.
The earthquake was scary. We were in the upstairs family room. Everything started
shaking. One of our staff, Hai Vo, was in the kitchen near our daughter. I was in
the TV room with our son. I just remember everything started shaking. Things were
crashing; our TV fell over and crashed through our glass coffee table. It must have
lasted for something like forty-five seconds. When it’s that duration, even in a
large house, you just hear things crashing right and left. I had this vision the
entire house was going to crumble. Luckily it didn’t.
My son had a fever that day. He had the flu. The minute it stopped, the troopers
ran up and everyone grabbed us and we ran down and out. We couldn’t grab anything.
They put us in the car. My son had been throwing up. We couldn’t go back in the
house. They wouldn’t allow us to do that. So, we sat in the mansion parking lot
for, I think, an hour or so with this very sick child. Then we went to one of the
state trooper offices and stayed there for a couple more hours. We had nowhere to
go with a very sick boy. So I remember we ended up sitting for quite a while at
McDonald’s.
After the earthquake, we moved out for maybe a week or less. They had to do a lot
of repair work on the façade. A lot of the older bricks had come down and some had
cracked and they needed to remove the entire front part of the house. Internally
there were a lot of cracks, but there was nothing major. So it held up pretty well.
A few months later, the country suffered the tragedy of 9/11 and there were strict
security measures put in place for the mansion. State Troopers were on guard 24
hours.
But our time in the mansion was not all about bats and earthquakes.
Let me tell you about some of our favorite memories. Every year at Christmas, Gary’s
parents and four siblings and their families, would come from wherever they were
across the country to visit us and be together. We celebrated the holidays in the
mansion with at least 28 relatives from the Locke side of the family. We infiltrated
the whole house for four days. There were people on the fourth floor and in sleeping
bags. Family members would cook prime rib and turkey in the kitchen.
Santa would come and visit on Christmas Eve. One year I remember that my daughter
and all her cousins tried to stay up as late as they could. I actually have on videotape,
one of them saying, “I think I heard Santa.” And so, they all came downstairs on
tiptoes. The kids would tiptoe up to the closed family room door and start screaming.
“I think I see him! I think I see him! I think I see him!” They tried opening the
big outside door. Then, “He’s gone!” It’s very cute. Every year they would try again.
They loved spending the holidays together. That was perhaps one of the most difficult
parts of moving out. We had nowhere for all the family to go. The cousins could
no longer be together to look for Santa. It was very sad for us the first holiday
after we left.
At Halloween, we really dressed up. The first couple of years, I chose the costumes
and I think the first year was simple. The first year, after the whole bat scare,
Gary was Batman and I was Bat Woman. The second year, he dressed up as just a dog
because Emily loved dogs. It was funny, because Gary would answer the door and trick
or treaters didn’t believe it was actually the Governor. He would get on all fours
and his costume covered his face. In response to the kids’ questions, he would “woof”.
Emily was a Hershey’s Kiss dressed in a costume I hand made. That was a big accomplishment
for me. We still have that costume as a keepsake.
Then we started dressing as a family by theme. There was the year we chose Winnie
the Pooh. Emily was a Honey Pot. Gary was Winnie the Pooh and I was Christopher
Robin. As the kids started getting older, they got to pick the themes. Emily wanted
“The Wizard of Oz” one year, so Gary dressed up as the tin man and I was the scarecrow,
and our son Dylan was a lion. Emily was Dorothy. Mary Charles, our Mansion Coordinator,
came as the “mean” witch. We did “Peter Pan” and “Sleeping Beauty”, too. Our last
year, the Olympia High School drama students actually made all the sets for us.
Halloween was a family participatory event at the mansion. We would get three to
four hundred people a year lining up at the mansion to Trick or Treat. We never
publicized it. They just started coming. The more years we did it, the more kids
came. I think it was a bit of a tradition, not only for us, but for everyone who
would come and Trick or Treat at the mansion. It was fun. I think Governor Gregoire
continues that tradition today.
One of the biggest transitions for me was leaving my career in journalism to being
First Lady. When I first moved to Olympia, everyone wanted to know, “What does a
First Lady do?” For me, with Emily on the way, that was easy – my priority was being
“mom”. But, being mom naturally seemed to lead to my other great passion as an advocate
for “early learning”. Gary appointed Melinda Gates and me to co-chair the Governor’s
Commission on Early Learning for two years. From there, my mission as First Lady
became so much clearer. After the last commission meeting, and thanks to generous
funding from The Gates Foundation, I started the Foundation for Early Learning,
a non-profit dedicated to making sure that every child enters school ready to learn.
Aside from my family, that’s really my main accomplishment as First Lady. The staff,
everyone around me, was engrossed in early learning. As a family, Gary and I practiced
that in every stage of what we did. I think our kids were probably the best guinea
pigs in that we practiced what we preached. We believed that early learning centered
around loving relationships as well as emotional, physical and mental support. And
so we would count the stairs as we walked up them and down them. Emily would sit
in the entry of the mansion where there is a seal of George Washington tiled on
the floor. We would talk about the letters. Soon she could spell out the state of
Washington. She actually ended up reading at third grade level by the time she entered
kindergarten. We can credit that to George Washington.
There were so many firsts that took place with the children in the mansion. The
first time Emily and Dylan turned over and took a step and so many other events.
I remember the birthdays were a big deal because our chef, Kyle Fulwiler (who was
chef for four other governors before us) would bake a special cake each year. The
theme of the cake depended on what the children liked. One year, it was a teddy
bear. Another, Bob the Builder, and of course, a whole string of Disney princess
cakes. Kyle would say, “What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?” And the
kids would put in a request.
Emily’s first birthday was a big deal and the media wanted to be involved. So we’d
let them come in for a little bit. We really turned the mansion into a carnival
setting. In the ballroom, I remember, you could fish for prizes and crawl through
a maze.
Emily and Dylan were born two years and four days apart, so we’d celebrate birthdays
together. One year we rented a train. It actually ran around the mansion driveway.
It was one of those trains that you would load up with kids and drive them all around.
My brother blew up balloons and made balloon animals. Well, he tried and it entertained
the kids. The birthdays gave us an opportunity to invite friends and family to the
mansion. Many of them were friends before Gary was elected Governor; many others
were parents of our kids’ friends. It was a great way to integrate our private and
public lives.
The most cherished part of living at the Governor’s Mansion is by far, all the memories.
It is the celebration of holidays, the times we spent with family and friends there.
It is all of the “firsts” that my children had there. It was the only home we ever
knew in the first years of their lives. It was how the staff and the troopers became
more than employees. They became like family. It is how we were able to make such
a big house a home.
We know the Governor’s Mansion has been, and will continue to be, home to many first
families. We are just thankful to have shared in a small piece of that history and
to be given the opportunity to share our stories with others. I would be remiss
if I didn’t thank the Governor’s Mansion Foundation. Without their hard work and
dedication, none of the first families of the past nearly forty years would have
had this special place to call home.