JULIE ROSEBRAUGH
By Terry Mosher
Editor, Sports Paper
There have been drastic changes to the Kitsap Family YMCA in Bremerton ‑ including a name change ‑ since what used to be an independent Y merged with Pierce County YMCA and the Haselwood YMCA in Silverdale.
But one of the few constants has been Julie Rosebraugh at the renamed and remodeled Bremerton Family YMCA. If you get there fairly early in the morning on certain days you will be checked in by Rosebraugh, who has been behind the Y desk for what seems like eternity.
Although she has had her hours cut back since the merge in 2011, Rosebraugh, 77 (she will be 78 on July 8), continues to hang on, but not for the money but because it gives her something to do, especially now without her husband, Tom, who passed away three years ago.
Rosebraugh has been with the Y since 1968, or 45 years and counting. She has seen many people come and go through the Y doors since then, including Tinnie Johnson, a former Washington State basketball player who was a coach and athletic director at Bremerton/West Bremerton High School (his 1953 Bremerton High baseball team won the mythical state championship, going 29-1).
“He was quite the character,” says Rosebraugh of Johnson, who died in 2008 at the age of 94 (his friends still meet once a month for lunch at area restaurants in what is called the Tinnie Johnson Monthly Lunch).
“He’d tell the same stories over and over, but we’d still laugh at them,” says one lunch member, Bob Fredericks, who says the group refuses to add memorial to the title. “It’s the Tinnie Johnson Monthly Lunch, even through he is dead.”
Rosebraugh grew up in Grass Valley, which is almost a twin sister to Nevada City up in the Sierras in northern California. Her family was originally from southern California, but her father wanted to get his family out of there so they moved north when Rosebraugh was 10.
“I was raised on a ranch,” says Rosebraugh, who played basketball and softball in high school, although like many activities related to females back in that time it was mostly play-day sports.
“In basketball at that time the guards were not allowed to cross center court,” says Rosebraugh. “They cancelled that rule for a while, and we started running full court. Then they put the rule back in.”
It really wasn’t until Title IX came in 1973 sports equaled out between boys and girls, although Rosebraugh said that one of her two daughters even ran into the glass ceiling in music while coming through school.
“She played trumpet in elementary school, but when she got into junior high her music teacher said she couldn’t play it because it was a boy’s instrument,” Rosebraugh said.
Rosebraugh graduated from San Jose State with a degree in education and taught elementary school at Santa Clara and San Luis Obispo, putting her husband through school at Cal Poly. The couple then moved to Bellevue in 1962 when Tom went to work as an engineer for Boeing. Four years later they moved to Bremerton and Tom went to work at PSNS.
It was in 1966 that Rosebraugh began volunteering as a swim instructor at the old Bremerton YMCA that was in a tall brick building where the Bremerton Ferry Terminal is now located.
She did that for two years before being hired as a swim instructor and part time desk person.
“She is a really nice lady,” says former YMCA executive director Glen Godfrey. “She helped with the handicap swim program for 20 years. She actually taught my wife how to swim. There are a whole bunch of people in there 60s who now have grandchildren that she taught to swim.
I ’m glad you are doing something on her. She is an unsung hero. She has done a lot for the community, and for kids. Most people would have no idea who she is because she is under the radar.”
Since the Bremerton YMCA moved to its current location in east Bremerton, Rosebraugh has been stationed behind the desk, welcoming people to the facility.
“Right now I’m kind of a Wal-Mart greeter,” Rosebraugh says only half-joking. “I just hope to keep busy. If it was about money I wouldn’t even be here.”
The job takes her mind off things and allows her to get out of the house. It’s been tough without Tom, who had COPD.
“He had a real serious illness,” says Rosebraugh. “It was a horrible way to die. His lungs hardened up and he couldn’t breath.”
So Rosebraugh motors on without him, glad to be able to be of some help, glad to see people, many of them friends, as they pass through the front desk before heading to their workouts.
“I’m kind of hanging out by myself,” she says.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Maybe when she isn’t at the Y. But at the Y, she is around people who know her as a friendly face, willing to make the start of their day a good one by giving them the proper help.
So nothing has changed, really.
Rosebraugh has been doing that for almost a half century.