The sun was shining on Kirkland Saturday morning as friends, family and Kirkland council members (past and present) assembled at a ceremony to rename Houghton Beach Park to Doris Cooper Houghton Beach Park.

In the late 1960s, Cooper, along with Judy Frolich and Delores Teutsch, decided that the former Standard Oil fuel tank site would make a great park.  The three housewives used tenacity and a secret high-tech weapon of the day – the telegram.

“They orchestrated a ferocious telegram campaign aimed at our congressional delegation in Washington D.C. and they succeeded in securing the funds for Houghton Beach Park,” said Kirkland Mayor Joan McBride.

Cooper, who passed away in 2011, moved from the public activist role to serving seven years on the Board of Adjustments for the City of Houghton. In 1973, she joined the Kirkland City Council.

“What Doris brought to the council was the fact that we pretty much ignored the neighborhoods and she made sure that the neighborhoods had a voice,” said former Kirkland Mayor Bill Woods.

In 1985, Cooper was elected Kirkland’s first woman mayor and served three terms.

According to former City Manager Terry Ellis, Cooper was a strategic thinker and considered decisions in the long term, such as “what is this going to be like in 50 years?” Ellis remembers doing a master plan with Cooper on the Kirkland Cemetery.

“She explained it like this: We need to expand the cemetery. You know that I don’t plan on spending my life in Kirkland and my eternity in Bellevue,” Ellis reminisced. “That was long-term thinking.”

Cooper was also a strategic thinker when it came to park lands.

“It was Doris and her fellow council members who took the ‘buy now and develop later’ stand,” wrote Loita Hawkinson, Kirkland Heritage Society president, in a newsletter. “Doris realized that our parks are Kirkland’s biggest asset and lack of money was a poor reason to lose them to commercial development.”

The 3.8 acre Houghton Park was a former steamboat dock for the Curtis family in the 1890s. Later it was the site of Standard Oil’s fuel tanks to supply fuel to the neighboring Lake Washington Shipyard and Eastside businesses and homes.

Cooper’s husband, Ralph, and 23 family members were in attendance on Saturday to accept a plaque from McBride.

“We need to remember that all that we treasure about this city many had to fight for and many had to pay for. Our beautiful city, which is well run and ringed by spectacular parks, wasn’t just by accident,” said McBride.

More information

Doris Cooper Houghton Beach Park is located at 5811 Lake Washington Boulevard.