Area icon Helen Paulsen dies at 96

Helen Paulsen, who watched downtown Spokane’s transformation over the last half century from a 16-story vantage point, died Monday after a battle with acute leukemia.

Paulsen, who died on her 96th birthday, was some 50 years ahead of the downtown condo craze, living for decades in the penthouse of the building complex that carries a family name stretching back to her late husband’s father, August Paulsen, an early Spokane resident and North Idaho silver magnate.

In their early years, Helen Paulsen and her husband had a life that could have been the stuff of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

She was born Helen Baines, on a moving train; her mother was traveling from Philadelphia to California and went into labor just outside Tucson. “She’s been on the move ever since,” her grandson, Clarence “Cip” Paulsen III said.

Her husband, Clarence I. “Cippy” Paulsen, was the son of a silver mining millionaire, a track star at Harvard University and an Olympic hopeful in the 1920s. By 1925, he was described by local newspapers as a “sportsman” interested in hunting, golf and aviation, and married to Mary Genevieve Andrews, the daughter of an Eastern steel executive.

In 1929, he bought what a newspaper account called the most expensive car built by Ford, an Aero-Lincoln Phaeton, for $10,500. He’d paid $16,000 for a house across from Cannon Hill Park just the year before, another newspaper account reported.

Mary Gen sued for divorce in 1930. Cippy, at the time the head of Mamer Aviation, didn’t contest the divorce. On Feb. 6, 1931, the day the divorce was final in Spokane County Superior Court, he married Helen Baines Phillips in Tacoma.

Helen was 19, the product of a Santa Barbara finishing school and the widow of an aviator who had died in a plane crash.

Helen had a 2-year-old daughter from her first marriage. She and Cippy had a son, and they were involved in everything from aviation to mining in Alaska over the decades that followed. They spent summers on lakes in North Idaho and British Columbia, and on their boat at Bayview. They were members of the Spokane Country Club, the Spokane Club and the Hayden Lake Country Club.

Their marriage lasted 50 years, until he died in 1981.

In 1957, Cippy and Helen moved into the Paulsen Building’s penthouse after his mother, Myrtle Paulsen, died. From that perch, they watched the transformation of downtown Spokane, from its tangle of railroad lines crossing over the river, to Expo ‘74 and Riverfront Park, angular bank buildings, and later the Riverpointe campus and the convention center.

From the tea room at the old Crescent department store to Ankeny’s atop the nearby Ridpath Hotel, to symphony concerts and services at Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral, in the skywalks and on the sidewalks, Helen Paulsen was a well-known figure. She was a longtime member of the Junior League of Spokane, served on the board of the Campbell House and was a supporter of the Poor Clare Sisters.

A funeral Mass is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Augustine Catholic Church, 19th and Bernard, with a graveside service to follow.

Memorials to the Poor Clare Sisters or the Campbell House can be made in lieu of flowers, Cip Paulsen said.