• Mr. Jerry Key

    Jerry Key is a Cashmere High School graduate of the class of 1957. He played four sports in high school. He was student body president during his senior year along with being his class valedictorian. After graduating high school, he attended Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, where he was also student body president during his senior year. He then studied four years of medicine at the University of Washington, from 1961-1965. The two year following, he did his internship at Marion County Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. He spent the next three years with the United States Air Force as a flight surgeon. This busy man spent the next two years studying at the Virginia Mason Clinic in Seattle in anesthesia. From 1971-1999 he worked as an anesthesiologist at Deaconess Hospital.

    Jerry Key also hosted college exchange students in his home. Various relatives took lengthy stays in his home while they attended college. If you were from Cashmere, and had someone in Deaconess Hospital, you could find a note on your car inviting you to come stay at his house during the course of your family’s hospital stay. He would just look for the Bulldog sticker in the window, or the license plate to know whether you were form Cashmere or not. One woman from Twisp stayed several months while her husband was being treated. Mr. Key considered anyone from our side of the mountains as family.

    He is very helpful with the community and can often be found at a neighbor’s house laying flooring, tile, shingles, building rock walls, or any other chore that needs to be done. He even traveled to California to help a son-in-law put in a second bathroom. In Seattle, he landscaped a yard for a friend.

    One day he met a 64 year old truck driver from New York who could not read. Mr. Key drove to Cashmere, got a mini lesson from Marsha Green, took some materials back with him, and taught this man how to read. Later, the truck driver had called to say that he had finished reading Point of Impact, his first novel ever!

    Jerry Key also grows a beard every fall so he can be the Santa Claus to all of the needy children at the Spokane Mission. He also enjoys spending quality time there just visiting, or working at the mission. He has always had a love for medicine, and learning, but his most impressive accomplishment, has been being available to help others on many, many, occasions. Jerry Key is an incredible man and most deserving of the Wall of Fame award.