Alice Hubbard

Before my soundtrack began

For nearly twenty years, I worked at a law firm housed in the historic Charles Brown House in downtown Vancouver, Washington. By day, I drafted pleadings and organized case files, and in the quiet hours I wandered backward through time. I had the rare privilege of researching the house’s history, its architecture, its former inhabitants, the lives lived in its rooms, and I was fortunate to publish several pieces about those discoveries.

My Substack, Be Kind, Rewind, is rooted in the 1980s and 1990s, in the pop culture, music, headlines, and small town moments that shaped my childhood. It is about memory and the way certain eras cling to us, and how a song or a news story can take you right back. Researching the Charles Brown House reminded me that nostalgia is not limited to our own lifetime. Every generation has its soundtrack, its upheavals, its quiet revolutions, and its defining events.

One resident in particular stayed with me, Alice Hubbard, a school principal who lived in the house from 1925 to 1935. Long before my era of mixtapes and MTV, she was navigating her own world of change and expectation. Writing about Alice was not a departure from Be Kind, Rewind at all, it was an extension of it. It was still about identity, about place, and about the forces that shape us whether we realize it or not.

When I saw a call for submissions from hankycode Magazine, I knew her story was the one to tell, and it felt right. It became a way to blend my love of genealogy and local history with the same instinct that drives my childhood essays, to preserve what time so easily forgets. Click on the orange hankycode below to read.

(Photo: Charles Brown House circa 1950)