Doris Hinson Pieroth served the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild in many capacities for many years, including as its president. For years Doris was, along with Jane Sanders, an organizer of the annual conference. She started a much needed newsletter. According to past president Chuck LeWarne, she was a person who did the “grunt work”–even storing and organizing in her garage generations of the Pacific Northwest Quarterly which the Guild acquired to sell. She received the Guild’s award for significant contributions to Pacific Northwest history in 1992. She also received the Washington State Historical Society’s highest award for lifetime achievement in 2008.
Doris became an historian after her first career in physical education. She played field hockey, basketball, volleyball, and softball as an undergraduate at the Oklahoma College for Women. She went on to teach at Smith College, the University of Colorado in Boulder and the University of Washington. In 1968 she returned to graduate school and received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in 1979. Her dissertation was a valuable account of desegregation in Seattle schools, 1954-1968. Her subsequent work focused on the history of women in the Northwest during the interwar period.
Their Day in the Sun, published in 1996 by the University of Washington Press, recounted the experiences of the 37 American women sent to the first U.S. hosted Olympics in Los Angeles in 1932: 17 swimmers, 17 track and field participants, and three fencers. The women competed a year after the International Olympic Committee considered eliminating women’s events. They included Babe Didrikson, Tidye Pickett, one of only two AA women who represented the U.S., and Helen Madison, winner of three gold medals in swimming. Pieroth interviewed eleven of the athletes, their family members, other Olympians of the era, and witnesses of the games. According to reviewers, “Pieroth’s admiration for these athletes is infectious,” and she presented “an oddly touching compendium” with “vivid portraits. ”
The Hutton Settlement: A Home for One Man’s Family, was also published by the University of Washington Press in 2003. It describes how Levi Hutton built and endowed a home for children in need of a secure shelter in Spokane, Washington. Levi and May Arkwright Hutton had earned their wealth in Idaho mines.
Seattle Women Teachers of the Interwar Years: Shapers of a Livable City followed in 2004, giving a picture of the day to day lives of teachers in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. According to her publisher, Pieroth’s interest in Seattle’s women teachers went back to her own education in Seattle’s grade schools. The book received an ALA Award in Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2005 and was described as a “warm and rather intimate examination of teachers,” “a careful study of a topic that has received limited attention.”
In 2008, she published a biography of Les Habegger, basketball coach at Seattle Pacific University, We Still Call Him Coach. She wrote articles for history journals and edited the journal of an adventurous relative.
In Chuck’s words, Doris was “a conscientious, hard working historian.” Joan Burton described her work as always accurate and specific. Lorraine McConaghy recalls that “Doris Pieroth was one of the first people who greeted me at my first Guild meeting, in probably 1985. She was kind and thoughtful, inquiring about my work in history at U.W. She was such a stalwart of the Guild but never made the old-timers seem like a club that excluded newcomers.”