YAKIMA, Wash.- The Yates family moved to Yakima in 1942 and now, after Dorothy’s death in 2021, the family’s legacy is being told with the Yakima Valley Library.
Papers including yearbooks, coursework and love letters were donated to library historians from Dorothy’s friend, also named Dorothy.
Dorothy Tsuruka met Dorothy Yates in the 1970s in San Francisco, after Yates had moved to study at Louis Salazar School of Dress Design.
The two met at Grace Cathedral Church when Tsuruka saw immediately Yates’ kindhearted nature.
“I was walking in the building and my youngest son was a toddler, trying to hold his hand and trying to hold the other one a little bit,” tells Tsuruka. “She just picked up the other hand of the toddler. You know you like people who are good to your kids.”
That interaction led to a long friendship between the two, including Tsuruka being named to Yates’ estate. Inheriting a story to be told, she went to Yakima to preserve a story of a Yakima family.
“It’s great to show that everybody’s history is being preserved here at the library,” says Yakima Valley Libraries Archive Librarian Carlos Pelley. “It’s just fantastic to have this opportunity to have this collection that was all the way in San Francisco and ends up making its way back here.”
In going through the Yates Family Papers, Pelley has found everything from Yates’ Yakima High School yearbook to her schoolwork she did in California.
When Dorothy Tsuruka went through her friend’s estate, she found out more than her friend had told her in her lifetime.
“I met Doe, and we all called her Doe,” says Tsuruka. “Nobody in Yakima knew that and we didn’t know her nickname in Yakima was Honey.”
Tsuruka says Yates moved out of state to experience the big city. As a black woman graduating in 1957, Doe’s yearbook only showed loving messages from her classmates, leaving Yates to want to be buried back in Yakima next to her parents.
“Dorothy remembered Yakima fondly,” says Pelley. “She did not talk about running into obstacles in Yakima, which is wonderful to hear.”
After her studies in San Francisco, Yates stayed and built a home at Grace Cathedral. When she retired as a Foreign Labor Certification analyst in 2009, she spent the next three years working to become a deacon of the church.
In 2012, she became the first black woman to become a member of the clergy for that congregation.
Even after collecting the Yates Family Papers, Tsuruka is working on putting together a tale of her friend’s life including messages from members of the clergy Yates served on.
“My memories of Doe are from her time as deacon at Grace’s. How spirit filled her proclamation of the gospel was, how her smile could bright the vestry and our dining table, how her sharp wit and remarkable generosity danced together. But mostly, I remember her deeply sealed nobility, how that suffused her manner of speech, her bodily movement, and her spiritual present.”
Tsuruka says her friend took what she learned with her parents at Mount Hope Church in Yakima to San Francisco to mesh into a soulful career.
Also found in the Yates Family Papers are letters written to her mother Odessa from her father McKinley who was stationed in North Africa during World War II.
Written from “Somewhere in North Africa,” McKinley writes back to Yakima:
“Hello wife,
How is everything this time fine and dandy I hope. You know that every thing is going swell with me because I got some mail today and I am quite alright now I know you are doing just fine. But you can bet your life that you had me worry for a while I did not know what to thank I could not get any mail. I was thinking you had put the rush act on me for the duration but now I see that you are not too busy to drop a line like you have alway done.
This one I hope will find you well in the best off health and having a grand time and just think about me in your spare time just the time when you are idle and don’t have anything to do that’s good enough for me.”
Pelley is still working on digitizing the Yates Family Papers and creating a display for them. For now, they remain available in the Northwest Reading Room at the Yakima Central Library.
Tsuruka says she also donated dress designs from Yates’ time in San Francisco and those will be on display in the future.
