Nellie Lida Thomas, John R. Westrick

know one another "talking through the (post office) boxes" there. "She was an amazing woman," Robinson said. "The things she could tell you about Santee."
  Mrs. Wade volunteered in local classrooms, and at one point bought a headstone for Cowles when she found out he was buried in an unmarked grave.
  Mrs. Wade was feisty, energetic and deeply devoted to her city, but her health had been on the decline in recent years, friends said. She became homebound several years ago, slowed by old age and hip pain from years of riding horses, Robinson said.
  Mrs. Wade lost some of her "zest" after she was forced to move from her 11-acre ranch on the western side of the city in the 1990s to make way for state Route 125, Robinson said. She moved to a home on 4 acres near City Hall.
  Mrs. Wade was born in North Dakota in 1914 and was one of seven siblings. She moved to Santee in 1940. Her brother Charles Gilmore Hatch, 83, said he hadn't seen his sister in about two years, but that she was drawn to Santee because of its hills, which she called her "hills of home."  She kept her Arabian horses in those hills, he said.
  Mrs. Wade's interest in local history was such that she spent hours reading through newspaper archives with her husband, William Arther Wade, before he passed away in 1982.
  "It's my history, my past, and I love it," she told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2000. "I like Santee. It's a nice little town at the end of the road."
  Councilman Jack Dale remembers Mrs. Wade attending many City Council meetings. She would bring candy and sit with newspaper reporters. She wrote a column for a local paper called "Wade's Window." "If she didn't like what we thought, she'd make sure we knew it," Dale said.
  Snacks were a theme for Mrs. Wade. In addition to the candy, she brought bags of peanuts to her beloved Padres games, which she attended for years as a season-ticket holder. "She brought food everywhere she went," Robinson said. "She just thought she was supposed to. You never went hungry with Harriette around."
  Mrs. Wade joined forces with former Councilman Jim Bartell, with whom she was very close, to restore the town's polo barn and in the unsuccessful effort to protect the Bottroff-Bliss House, which was demolished in 1989.
  Survivors include her brother.

By Michelle Clock, Staff Writer, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7/16/06


JOHN ROBERT WESTRICK, 79


  John Robert Westrick was born April 13, 1927 in Hutchison, Kansas to Samuel and Mary Westrick. He was their only son but had an older sister Katy and a younger sister Margaret.
  He graduated from Hutchinson High School in 1944, joined the Navy and was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. He was trained to be a Navy Corpsman and was stationed at the San Diego Naval Training Station

(Continued on page 8)

HARRIETTE M. WADE, 92


  Harriette M. Wade felt proud of Santee's development in recent years, with its new shopping centers, but her interest remained in the city's roots as a small farming town.
  She would spend hours digging through newspaper archives in search of information about her city's past. A stickler for details, she would collect and pass them along to others, including generations of Santee schoolchildren. She was even known for correcting others' mispronunciations of town founder George A. Cowles' last name (pronounced COALS).
Mrs. Wade, who was known as Santee's historian, died July 2. She was 92. Dementia and Alzheimer's disease were listed as the causes of death, according to the county Medical Examiner's Office.
  She was the first and only president of the Santee Historical Society. She was at the heart of many efforts to preserve the city's past, including threatening to stand in the way of a bulldozer set to tear down Santee's oldest dwelling, the Bottroff-Bliss House, in the 1980s.
  "Basically, her whole life was Santee," said Santee Post Office clerk Sally Robinson, 59, who said the two got to

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