With the Sequim Irrigation Festival kicking off this past weekend, the Gazette continues its profile of this year’s pioneers including Honorary Pioneer Ron Parrish.

This year will be Parrish’s first time in the festival’s grand parade but he was honored at the logging show in 2014 as an honorary logger. He’ll appear during the festival from May 5-14 at different events, too. Parrish said the festival is nice for the area and celebrates the Sequim-Dungeness Valley origins.

“We wouldn’t have much here if not for irrigation,” he said.

Parrish was born in 1925 in Selah to Henry and Leona Parrish. He had three sisters and they all moved to Sequim from Portland, Ore., in 1937. Parrish graduated from Sequim High School in 1942 and married his wife Jeanette 67 years ago. They have five children, 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Parrish worked as a dairy farmer above the old lumber mill from 1949-1956 and as a logger from 1956-1976 under his Parrish Logging outfit.

“I logged when we he had logs,” he joked.

He and his son Gary started Garron Construction in 1978 and later called it Parrish Trucking.

At the time, the company mostly hauled cedar roofing to California, Gary Parrish said, and brought back commodities. Now they mostly haul paper products, he said.

The Parrishes lived in Battle Ground from 1976-1996 before moving back to Sequim upon his retirement.

They did some traveling and lived in Arizona for some winters, but Parrish said “Sequim is pretty hard to beat.”

He finds it to be one of the healthiest places he’s ever been, too.

“My dad used to say in order to have cemeteries in Sequim they have to shove bodies in there.”

For more information on the Irrigation Festival, visit www. irrigationfestival.com.

Ron Parrish is one of this year’s Honorary Pioneers for the Sequim Irrigation Festival. He was named an honorary logger at the festival’s 2014 Logging Show. Sequim Gazette photo by Matthew Nash