Through the lens of time: Kim Cunningham reflects on Bellingham’s history

Kim Cunningham has worked at Western since 2001, but her love of the campus began at a much earlier age.

“I remember Western in the ‘60s,” she said. “Lots of long hair and lots of bare feet.”

Cunningham, a Bellingham native, used to visit the campus with her sisters when her dad was a student.

“He used to drop us off in the VU, and we would just hang out. There used to be really cool shuffleboard tables,” she said. “Campus seemed huge to me at the time, but it’s a lot bigger now.”

Cunningham works as a communications consultant for University Residences. She works on the assignments team and she does a lot of customer service for current, incoming and perspective families.

“My job is very cluttered,” she said.

In 2015, Cunningham invested her time in researching and putting together a collection of Throwback Thursdays of residence halls for Western’s On-Campus Housing Facebook page. She found photos from old Western yearbooks that she keeps in her office, and in Western’s Special Collections library.

“I would think, ‘this is really fun, I probably shouldn’t be spending my work time doing this,’ but it ends up being the most exciting thing for students. People love it,” she said.

One of Cunningham’s favorite things about Western is that it is like its own town, she said. She doesn’t have to leave to go get lunch, she can go on walks around campus and get exercise, and there is a lot of room for professional growth.

Cunningham’s office is in Edens Hall, which is the first residence hall that was built on campus in the '20s.

“When you see Edens North when it was brand new, or you see photos of women in Edens Hall in 1925 and what they’re wearing, and they are looking out the same windows we see every day, it is really cool,” she said.

Being a history buff and a Bellingham native, it is no surprise that Cunningham is a member of the Bellingham Historical Society. She joined a few years ago when a woman in Woodring heard that her husband was a writer. He was an English major at Western, and he likes to write about music, and cars, and history – specifically Bellingham history.

Every year the Historical Society publishes a journal, and anyone can do their own research and submit their work. It can be a story, a memoir, someone’s family history, even the history of an old Bellingham building. The journals are then sold at Village Books in Fairhaven.

Cunningham was asked by the society to design the layout for the journal.  When they first asked her to be the one to put everything together to create the book, she saw this as a fun and interesting opportunity for professional growth. She hadn’t designed a book layout before, but she agreed to volunteer to do it.

“I thought, this will help me develop my skills, plus I have enough skills that this is how I could give them away,” she said.

The experience designing layouts ended up leading to another opportunity for professional growth.

In November 2014, the Historical Society approached her with the opportunity to design another layout, this time for a novel they were publishing by Western Professor of English Laura Laffrado. The book was a collection of work by Ella Higginson, a Bellingham-based writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and the woman that Higginson Hall is named after). Laffrado wrote the book with the intention of using it as a textbook for her classes.

By this point Cunningham had a few Historical Society journals under her belt, but designing an entire book is something she hadn’t done before, and was also a 300-hour commitment.

“I decided to do it, and just tried to think of it a as a really, really long journal,” she said.

She began designing the book in November, with her husband working on the proofreading team. She took all of her vacation time to work on the book, eight hour days at a time, and also worked on weekends. She decided not to keep track of her hours, because she didn’t want to know, she said.

Cunningham says designing the book was a great experience.

“I don’t think I’d want to do it as a living, but it was a really good experience,” she said. “We have so many opportunities to volunteer, especially when you work on a campus and your awareness for volunteer opportunities is very high, it’s easy to find one that you can also benefit from.”

After months of designing, Laffrado’s book was published in July of 2015.

Cunningham’s passion for Bellingham history is evident when she talks about the book.

“It brings back the voice of this amazing writer that needs to be heard again. Ella Higginson lived in a house right across the street from Edens for 50 years,” Cunningham said. “Her writing was published out of New York and all over the world, but her stories take place in Bellingham, when she mentions Sehome Hill we know where she is talking about.”

Since she has lived in Bellingham her whole life, she has been able to observe the changes that have taken place on Western’s campus.

The number of students on campus has doubled since Cunningham used to visit with her dad in the ‘60s, and the campus itself has also expanded.

“Being here I have seen change. The best way to get a different perspective about anything is to look at it through the lens of time,” she said.

[ Editor's note: This article is one of a series running this week in Western Today in conjunction with the state’s Classified School Employees Week March 14 to 18. ]