Ethel Mccaw Had Selfless Concern For Others

It seems that every one of Ethel McCaw’s seven brothers and sisters had a story about Ethel and an aquatic adventure.

Onabell Litzenberger’s just might be the best: Onabell was maybe 11, she said, and she was out in the family’s favorite swimming hole on the Yakima River on an inner tube. One of her four brothers was trying to coax her into the deep, swift part of the river.

“He finally talked me into it,” Litzenberger remembers. “I went out there, and then he pulled the tube away.

“I started screaming.”

Sister Ethel to the rescue.

The 3-year-old Ethel had been sitting on the bank, with a little white dog who followed her around everywhere.

When Ethel saw Onabell’s crisis, she leapt off the bank and charged into the water as fast as her little legs could get her there.

Onabell saw Ethel, and panicked, paddling herself to shore to stop the girl.

Little white dog to the rescue.

The dog leapt off the bank and charged into the water, grabbed Ethel by the dress with its teeth and convinced her to wade backward to safety.

“It was so cute,” Litzenberger said.

But it also points at an unbreakable bond the two sisters formed from the moment Ethel was born.

And it demonstrates a quality that stuck with Ethel for the rest of her life - a selfless concern for others.

That water incident happened before McCaw learned to swim. Her brother, Troy Stiner, remembers when Ethel took her first strokes - or paddles.

“I threw her in,” Stiner said. “I said swim or drown.

“She was awful mad to begin with, and then she really got over it.”

The bond between Ethel and Onabell formed years before, when Onabell was popping around the house minding her own business as her mother was giving birth to Ethel.

“My father started yelling. He said `Get the blankets! Get the hot water!”’ Litzenberger said. “I went in there, and he handed me the baby. That was her, my sister Ethel, and from then on, she was my baby.”

Ethel followed Onabell around endlessly.

“She’d try to crawl in the car with me when I first started going out on dates,” Litzenberger said. “It was kind of hard for me to lose her.”

On Oct. 20, Litzenberger did lose her sister. It wasn’t what she wanted.

“It just doesn’t seem possible that she could be dead,” Litzenberger said. “I’m still not over it.”

McCaw quit smoking 9 1/2 years ago. But lung cancer still claimed her life. Three weeks from the day she was diagnosed, McCaw died at 71.

By all accounts, Ethel McCaw was a saint. Anytime someone was in need, Ethel’s heart went out to them.

She bought her sister a mobile home when a flood ravaged the trailer she lived in. When Onabell got sick, Ethel took care of her two children - for an entire year.

McCaw’s children miss a wonderful mother, the kind who cooked better than a professional chef and warmed blankets on an oil stove to wrap the children’s feet in after they’d been outside in the winter.

“Every time I had a baby - I had two - she was always there,” said Connie Hazelton, McCaw’s daughter. “She would tell me to go to bed and rest.”

Hazelton’s 6-year-old daughter, Alex, wrote this after McCaw died: “Grandma, thank you for the prizes at Easter. I give you hugs and I give you kisses and I really love you. I know you’re watching me from Heaven. You’re a pretty angel and you’re smiling down at us and I’ll give you hugs when I see you again. I love you, Alex.”

The man who misses Ethel most is her husband Don, 62. The sun doesn’t set on any day before he’s stopped in his tracks to think about his wife.

“The kids have propped me up,” McCaw said. “It’s going to take a while to get over it.”

The house is filled with reminders.

Even its location, at the crest of Beauty Bay hill, was picked at Ethel McCaw’s behest.

To the northeast, the kitchen window reveals a stunning crack between the hillsides of Beauty Bay. To the northwest, a similar glimpse of Lake Coeur d’Alene, with Tubbs Hill in the foreground and Mount Spokane farther north.

Ethel McCaw treated the house’s walls herself, giving the finish a rustic feeling. A prolific crocheter, McCaw’s work coats nearly every item inside, from child-size dolls to the arms of couches, to table-tops.

But for everything she left behind, there’s so much that’s gone, says her husband.

Her exquisite cooking - especially on Thanksgiving; her music - Don sawed short a guitar many years ago so he could teach her how to play, and they became regulars at local pubs; her love of antiques - the couple perused shops, looking for treasures like the 1950s jukebox that still cranks out tunes; and the simple, comfortable moments that only the love of your life can provide.

“Even just when we were together, just sitting down. We didn’t have to talk,” McCaw said. “She was just good company.”