A panorama of Dungeness, taken from the Dungeness Dock (no longer in existance). Photo courtesy of the Museum & Arts Center in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley

Art Rogers is a featured presenter in the Museum Lecture Series. Photo by DJ Bassett

As a youth growing up in Dungeness in the 1940s, Art Rogers recalls days spent on his grandfather’s 42-acre farm and log paddling with friends from Cline Spit to the Dungeness Lighthouse. In those days, the Dungeness School brimmed with classrooms full of schoolchildren, traveling to Sequim was considered a treat, and for Rogers, summers were spent working for $30 per month plus room and board on the small family farms once plentiful throughout the Sequim-Dungeness Valley.

The lifetime area resident will share these and other memories of his youth in Dungeness on Friday, Jan. 7, at “Remembering Dungeness,” part of the first entry in the Museum Lecture Series presented by Peninsula College and hosted by the Museum and Arts Center in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley at the Dungeness Schoolhouse. Rogers will lead the first hour of the class starting at 10 a.m., followed by noted area historian Doug McInnes, who will discuss “Sequim Yesterday.”

Museum Lecture Series classes are held from 10 a.m.-noon on Fridays, Jan. 7-Feb. 25, at the Dungeness Schoolhouse, 2781 Towne Road in Sequim, and presented by local historians.

Registration for this noncredit community education course (#S-SF 041) is through Peninsula College by calling 452-9277 or its website at http://pc.ctc.edu/. The complete series schedule, including class topic details, is available on the Museum and Arts Center website at www.macsequim.org. Additional topics for the eight-week lecture series include “The Manis Mastodon Archeological Site” with Clare Manis Hatler, “Barns & Farms: Then & Now” with Catherine Bennett and Bob Clark, and “Clallam County Schools, East to West” with Irene Wyman, Kathy Monds and Esther Nelson.

For Rogers, discussing his childhood brings back a flood of fond memories of a Dungeness in which “everybody knew everybody” and entire families would go ice skating on Pettett’s Pond in the winter. Rogers said that during his presentation, he plans on discussing the events, people and places that helped shape his boyhood experience, including the Dungeness River flood of 1949, the U.S. Army detachment at Dungeness in the 1940s, the Dungeness Dock and Dungeness School, and his farm days.

“It was probably the most interesting life you could lead, being out in the dairy farmland. It was seven days a week, 12 months out of the year,” recalls Rogers, who still lives in Dungeness and is proprietor of Art’s Barber Shop in Sequim. “It was just a very wonderful life."