Over the years, Fred Krueger has been described as a “citizen archivist” and a “true godsend” for his efforts to preserve and share the stories of those who lived and worked in upper Kittitas County.
As a social studies teacher in the Cle Elum-Roslyn School District for more than 29 years, Krueger, who retired in 1996, adopted a hands-on teaching method to bring alive his lessons. This approach to learning, in turn, helped him not only make his instruction more relevant but led to him being able to tap into community history that might otherwise have been lost.
Author Paul Fridlund, who has written several Central Washington history books, said that shortly after Krueger arrived in Cle Elum to teach history, he realized it was a subject his students despised because of how it had previously been taught.
“Mr. Krueger came up with a plan to engage the students and give them a sense of heritage, even if they moved to other parts of the world after graduation,” Fridlund wrote. “He offered the kids a deal, one not every student accepted. In exchange for abandoning the Washington History book the students hated, he offered a class in local history.”
The result was the development of a curriculum, which Krueger created from scratch, that incorporated local history books, simulations, and original research by the students.
The type of instruction, which modern education theorists would probably described as a form of “inquiry learning,” encouraged students to make real-world connections through their personal research and questioning. It was also a style of learning consistent with Krueger’s earlier training at the University of Washington (UW).
Krueger was born in the small town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota in 1939. He attended local schools in the community and earned a BS in Science and Social Studies, with a history emphasis, from Mankato State College (now called Minnesota State University-Mankato) in 1962.
Following his graduation, Krueger taught secondary school in Molville, Iowa and Keokuk, Iowa for three years. In 1965, he decided to further his education and was accepted into the Russian Regional Studies Program at UW.
“I was in the Russian Institute, and there were 25 of us selected in there, and I was the only one that didn’t have a scholarship,” Krueger noted in a 2015 oral history interview recorded for Central Washington University. “They got me a job part-time while I was going to graduate school and then I did so well with my work that Dr. Karl August Wittfogel, who was one of my teachers. He hired me as a teaching assistant because I knew more than the rest of the students did in class.”
Dr. Wittfogel also played an important role in mentoring Krueger in proper scholarship and research techniques required for the serious study of history, including preserving historical records and capturing institutional memories.
Krueger, who is 85, remains as sharp as a man many decades younger. During a recent interview in his Ellensburg home, he recalled that he took the Cle Elum job precisely because the community had such a strong Eastern European identity. He said his interest and background in Russian studies, plus the fact he spoke Russian, served him well in relating to the Eastern European immigrants who had settled in Cle Elum and Roslyn during their mining heydays.
“There were a lot of Eastern European immigrants there. The immigrants are interesting people. Those from Eastern Europe had little education [but deeply respected getting an education]. When school levies were put up for a vote, they all voted yes,” he recalled.
“So, I was a teacher and I was highly respected. More so than what you would find if I was in a community that wasn’t of such an immigrant ancestry,” he continued.
Krueger said once he had settled into his teaching job, he began incorporating the hands-on teaching methods he learned about in his studies.
“I wanted to teach the kids research skills and so we started with Washington History and it progressed to the point where the state said we could give a local history credit instead of the Washington State History credit. So, the state endorsed what I was doing,” he said.
Additionally, a UW education professor, Dr. John Jarolimek, who Krueger had met during his time at the university, invited him to participate in the Tri-University Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
For the project, Krueger researched a variety of teaching styles, methods, and behaviors, paying attention to such things as body language and feedback. He also was instructed in the use of simulation theory in the classroom.
The latter would prove invaluable in his teaching, especially when it came to acquiring and preserving local primary historical resources, like oral histories. In 1969, he received a grant from the state Superintendent of Public Instruction for equipment and supplies, such as tape recorders and cameras, to help his students hone their primary research skills.
Soon, his students were interviewing family members, asking targeted questions about family history, such as immigrating to the U.S., and how they came to settle in the Upper Kittitas County. Many of these projects were later donated to the Central Washington University (CWU) Special Collections.
“Krueger created class projects utilizing primary resources obtained through individual students and their research,” noted Stephen J. Hussman, former Chair of Library Services and University Archivist at CWU.
“Often these projects resulted in locally significant class and school presentations including oral histories, photos, manuscripts, letters, family recipes, recollections of travel to the new country (immigrant experience), and more,” Hussman noted in an article that appeared in the Journal of Western Archives in 2014. “He was credited as one of the first teachers in the locale to utilize simulation and primary resource material in class instruction.”
The self-effacing Krueger remains proud of the fact he was among the first high school history teachers to use simulations to teach the importance of economic factors in history, something standard in most history books today. For example, one of the simulations might have a student designated as a farmer and there would be “fate” cards regarding such concerns as bad weather, a bad year for crops, and other challenges.
“Those simulations that I was using were so powerful that to this day [my former students] still remember them,” he said, adding that he conducted post-simulation game discussions because the students would become so emotionally invested in the results.
When talking about his teaching days, Krueger is quick to credit his former students for any success he might have had. He said the most meaningful achievement during his long career was “seeing the kids’ work. The quality was amazing. I had one piece of work that was museum quality for display and unfortunately they put it in the doggone NWI [Northwest Improvement Company] store window which faces south and has direct sunlight and it just ‘pssst’ [faded away].”
Over the years, Krueger’s students were able to become involved in several important historic preservation projects. Among them was their work to clean up and preserve Roslyn’s historic cemeteries.
“That grew out of it [the classes] because they had to do some community service,” he said. “I was the first one to start something like this.
“The Roslyn Kiwanis Club had started restoration of the Roslyn Cemeteries and they needed help. The contacted me to see if the students would be interested in helping to clean it up,” Krueger said. “I asked the kids if they wanted to help, and they agreed. We were able to create a partnership that lasted for more than 20 years.”
Another successful project with which he was involved was the saving of the Salmon la Sac Guard Station in the Wenatchee-Okanogan National Forest. The station, which the forest service wanted to remove, had been built in 1912 by the Kittitas Railway and Power Company, as a depot, which sought to construct an electric rail line between upper county communities.
“I had one student who picked the railroad depot at Salmon la Sac [for his community service project],” Krueger explained. “When I saw that report, I had to go and check everything out to make sure what I was looking at was accurate. Needless to say, it was accurate.”
Krueger said the research started a preservation movement on behalf of the depot in Roslyn and Cle Elum and within a few weeks more than 3,000 local residents had signed a petition to preserve it, which soon gained support from Washington’s U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. By 1974, the forest service had dropped its plans to demolish the station, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places and the Washington Heritage Register.
Interestingly, while Krueger has had a lifelong interest in history, he was more motivated by the desire to teach his students how to perform quality research.
“I was more interested in the process, and local history was a means to an end,” he said. “The way we started out was with the 9th graders, I told the kids you’re going to have to do some work where there is no book, there are no sources, and I said you’re going to have to use your family.
“Roslyn had lost its school, had lost its grocery store, it lost the Number 9 mine, which was the last mine to close, so what did Roslyn have left that people could take pride in and grow with?”
Answering that question also led him to a long friendship with a former Roslyn coal miner named Frank Musso, who was the founder of the Roslyn Museum and its first director. Krueger said he and Musso, who died in 1986 at the age of 95, “used to sit down and we would talk about these things. And Frank could see the best resource for Roslyn was its history, its culture, its heritage.”
Because of that connection Krueger has remained a devoted supporter of the Roslyn Museum, helping it to inventory its historic photo and document collections. During my visit, he even pointed to several boxes of photos that he had recently catalogued for the museum.
Scott Templin, chair of the Roslyn Museum, credits Krueger for “the upper valley holding on to one of the largest local heritage collections in the country.
“While most community’s heritage got sold off or lost bit-by-bit, he managed to get his students to save theirs,” Templin continued. “Everyone should have a chance to know and be proud of their family history, and local heritage. We don’t see that much these days.”
Over the years, in fact, Krueger accumulated a large collection of personal papers, diaries, videos, memorabilia, and local history artifacts, which he donated a few years ago to CWU Special Collections. Krueger estimated he has to date bequeathed nearly 80 cubic feet of files, photos, photo negatives, slides, and other material to Central.
Templin said Krueger has had a major impact on not only the upper county but on his former students, noting, “I would be willing to bet that if you asked the generation of kids that were lucky enough to have him as a teacher, 95 percent or more would rank him as their Number One.”
As someone committed to learning throughout his life, it was no surprise when, from 1988 to 1990, he was selected for a Fulbright- Hayes Grant to study in China. Three years later, he was picked by then-Governor Michael Lowry and the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Judith Billings, to teach in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, from 1994 to 1995.
That desire to keep busy and to have something new to learn has led him to his latest research project—tracing where residents of Roslyn’s once-thriving black community moved on to after leaving the town. His hope is to collect as much information about those families as he can and give that research to the Roslyn Museum.
“He [Krueger] is still doing amazing work for the community, through research for the Roslyn Museum. That impact will take years to fully appreciate,” Templin said. “To see him still get as giddy as a school boy when he discovers a previously unknown piece of the history puzzle is priceless.”
Krueger also still pays pretty close attention to what’s happening in Roslyn and Cle Elum. He’s pleased to see that the economies of the two communities—depressed when he arrived in 1967 because of the closing of the mines—have rebounded, but is concerned about their futures.
“Roslyn has a heritage but it also has a geography that people like, kind of like Leavenworth,” he said, reflecting on some of the new developments that have cropped up in recent years. “Now, Roslyn is getting loved to death.”
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