During the planning stages of the 2010 SAR Conference held in Skamania County, Sheriff Dave Brown posed the question:  “What was the first year of the conference?”  A small discussion followed but no real conclusion was found.  The Sheriff followed up with a request to research the topic and create a display that could be shown at the conference.  His hope was that the display would continue to grow through the years and travel to all of the future conferences.  I agreed to the Sheriff’s challenge and started to do some home work.  It took a while, but we learned that the first year of the conference was in 1969 and we also managed to collect some “artifacts” from the conferences of yore.  The display at the 2010 conference proved to be quite popular.  Unfortunately, I have fallen short of continuing to grow the display in the last two years and I also failed to get the display to the conference in 2011 held in Cowlitz County…my apologies for that.  
This year’s conference will be the 43rd and the history display will be present.   In an effort to grow the display this year, we need your help.   I have spent many hours searching on the internet and have had several of our SAR elders look through their personal archives to come up with what we have so far.  Unfortunately, there are still some things we are missing.  Details like conference location, dates, attendance numbers, and cost are just a few examples.  Of course, we could use more shirts or other items from any of the conferences.   Lastly, we would like to collect more of the unique logos for each conference.  We have a few of them from the 1990’s but none prior to that.  Hopefully some of you may know someone who still has a program that includes a logo we could scan.
My many thanks to the folks that have already looked through some dusty old shelves and contributed what they found.  I especially want to thank Smitty (Grant Smith) for his contribution.  He donated over half of the shirts, hats, and other items that we have collected so far.

Please contact me via email (liedtke4@embarqmail.com) if you can help.

Thank You for the help,
Your Unofficial WA State SAR Conference Historian,
Brad Liedtke