Old time fiddler Mary Acocello a Good one

Pat Good earned his reputation as an outstanding cook, most notably when he prepared barbecued salmon for large crowds attending the annual Pioneer Picnic in La Conner.

He came by his culinary skills naturally.

Good’s mom, Mary Acocello (1909-2002), co-owned with her sister, Clara, a coffee shop in Burlington and once ventured to Alaska to cook at a hotel, where patrons told her she “was the best cook we ever had.”

But that’s only half her story. Make that, one-third – as Acocello was also a highly skilled shipyard welder during World War II and later was the first woman to serve as President of the Washington Old Timer Fiddlers Association.

“She was one of a kind,” says Acocello’s granddaughter, Kim Good Rubenstein, of La Conner. “My favorite story is when she applied for a job as a welder at the Bremerton shipyard. The clerk told her, ‘We don’t have any women welders here.’ My grandma replied, ‘Well, you do now.’ Nothing stopped her.”

Which is why, near the end of her long and colorful life, she was described by friend and neighbor Dick Woolsey of Bremerton in a newspaper feature article as being “about the most interesting person I know.”

One of 15 children, Acocello was wed to Pat’s dad, Fir Island dairyman Ronald Good, when the U.S. government launched a program to teach farmers to weld. The idea was to train farmers to make their own equipment repairs since so much of the American labor force in the early 1940s was devoted to defeating the Axis powers.

Ronald Good suggested she also take the welding course, offered in Mount Vernon. Acocello was reluctant at first, telling interviewers for a Seattle oral history project decades later that she would have preferred staying home to bake doughnuts.

But eventually she agreed to give it a whirl. Before long it was apparent that Acocello had a knack for welding. Her disciplined approach and attention to detail were assets. So was having high expectations for her performance on the job.

“You won’t find a pinhole in my work,” she once told a fellow welder.

Despite initial skepticism – and occasional outright hostility – on the part of some male welders, Acocello was hired at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where she established a reputation for consistently excellent work. She started out earning 25 cents an hour.

Still, she had to repeatedly prove herself to co-workers who believed welding was no fit career for a woman. Acocello was more than equal to the challenge.

“I wouldn’t let anybody walk over me,” she explained. “I wasn’t scared of anyone.”

That included the man who once made the mistake of harassing Acocello at her workstation.

“I told him I would take a piece of angle iron and take his head off at his neck,” she recalled.

After that, they got along fine.

Having always been musically inclined, she would at times sing and even waltz a bit on shift.

“There are lots of ways you can make your work more pleasant,” she said.

After retiring from the shipyard in the late 1960s, Acocello returned to her musical roots when invited by friends to play the fiddle at a salmon barbecue.

“I hadn’t touched it (the fiddle) for years,” she told reporter JoAnne Marez of the Kitsap Sun in a 1999 interview, “but I could still remember “My Wild Irish Rose” and “Memories.” They were shocked I could play by ear.”

Before long, Marez reported, Acocello “was immersed in the Washington Old Timer Fiddlers Association,” at one point making a dozen or more appearances a month at Puget Sound area nursing homes. She subsequently brought her fiddle on trips to the Far East and Ireland, ready to play upon demand.

As was so often the case, she rarely missed a beat.

“I’ve had a good life,” Acocello said in April 2002. “I’ve had a lot of different kinds of jobs with all kinds of different people. It’s been very nice. I’ve had a good life, really.”