He met his Danish wife, (Lee and Dobby's grandmother) Laurie through the local lighthouse keeper. At the time, Laurie was an indentured servant for a local family. In 1883, having only met her three times, Heinrich paid the family to release Laurie from her servitude, and married her. Lee's father, Fred Wiegardt, was born to Heinrich and Laurie several years later, in 1887, one of three sons and three daughters.

"They had a child every 18 months, just like clockwork," Lee notes. "In 1897, they moved to Nahcotta and into a new six bedroom house. It cost $905. It didn't have plumbing or electricity and just an outhouse in back." That house, now complete with modern amenities, is still in the Wiegardt family, sitting on the corner of Bay and Z Streets in Nahcotta, where Dobby's son Eric has a watercolor gallery and studio.

It was during Lee's father's lifetime that the eventual demise of the Olympia oyster occurred. The first big crash in the population took place in 1878, but it wasn't until the 1930s that commercial Olympia harvests out of Willapa ended entirely.

Fred joined forces with his brother John and their company brought Eastern oysters into Willapa, cross-country via railroad. At first they thrived, but after almost a decade of success, the population mysteriously died off en masse. It was around 1928 when the Wiegardts began planting Japanese oyster seed. The "Pacific" oyster as it came to be known, "grew like weeds," according to Lee.

In the 1920s the Wiegardts started a cannery to handle the bounty of oysters they grew. "They couldn't get rid of them fast enough," Lee explains. In addition to Olympia and Pacific oysters, they canned almost anything else fit for canning including salmon, beef, crab, razor clams and blackberries.

In those days, businesses depended on the railroad to move product. Lee and Dobby remember old photos that show signs posted back in the 1920s: "Invest in Willapa and make your fortune!" The railroad brought the promise of growth and prosperity. When railroad service to Willapa ended suddenly in 1931, the plank roads used by the few cars didn't fill the transportation gap. Unable to easily transport live oysters to the marketplace, the Wiegardt cannery became an even more critical component of their business.

Eventually, John left to search for gold in Alaska, and Fred stayed behind to keep the family oyster farm running. There is an old photo of Fred standing beside what Lee and Dobby refer to as his "marine fleet," a small leaky wooden rowboat. Fred married Lee's mother Winnie in the 1920s and Lee made his arrival in 1927. His earliest childhood memories include watching workers sack oysters, and walking out on the dock to the sink float.

"Technically, I guess you could say I was the last one to harvest natives (Olympias)," Lee says. "I'd get 75 cents per gallon can." The Wiegardts did not have a shucking house in those days. "We'd hold the harvest in the sink float, then ship it off to Portland for processing." Lee conjures up other childhood memories, like the distinctive steam whistle at their cannery, as it announced the eight o'clock hour every morning, and the beginning and ending of the lunch hour every day.

Immediately after graduating from high school, Lee moved across the state to attend college in Eastern Washington's Walla Walla. "I decided to major in psychology because their tests were easier than the ones for chemistry majors!" he quips. Plans for college were temporarily thwarted when he joined the Navy during World War II, moved to Chicago and studied electronics, including what was the just then emerging top-secret radar technology. When World War II ended, Lee returned home, and divided his college career among the University of Washington, Whitman, and Lewis and Clark.

Lee's long and happy marriage to his wife Virginia (Ginny), may have never occurred had it not been for a sprained ankle. A chivalrous Lee drove her home to Portland. He married her two years later.

Dobby tells a favorite story about Lee in his early days of courtship with Ginny. Dobby and his family were driving through Walla Walla on their way to Pullman to check out the college. They rounded a corner on the highway, and coming towards them was Lee in his convertible roadster, on his way to visit Ginny. "He was flying so fast his tires were three feet off the ground," Dobby remembers.

Lee graduated from Lewis and Clark College with a degree in psychology in 1949, the first in his generation to graduate from college. That summer, on August 15, he made Ginny his bride.

At this point, Lee and Ginny came back home to take up the oysterman's yoke. "I always planned to come back home," Lee explains. "This is a beautiful life, a good place to live. We all grew up fishing, hunting, clam digging. It's the way of life here that brought me back."

Lee talks about the changes in the oyster business over his lifetime. "When I came home from college, there were 13-14 oyster opening houses on the west side of Willapa Harbor. Then there was just one—Wiegardt's. The rest all got bought out, or quit, or consolidated."

In the 1960s, Lee's cousin John left the family business to strike out with his own oyster business, founding Jolly Rogers. "He was always the smartest one of us," Lee says and Dobby adds: "John and I were the same age, but he jumped ahead of me by two grades."

"He spent a fortune trying to roll shrimp out of the ground," Lee says, referring to the invasive burrowing shrimp that plague Willapa growers. "He bought all this surplus Army equipment—enough to invade Japan! He had an Army half-track snow-cat and a 'weasel' with wheels in the front and a track in the back designed for hauling 75mm rifles."

"He'd take this old tank, fill it with water for freight, then pull it across the flats. It got rid of the shrimp, all right, but it also got rid of the oysters! It disrupted the substrate, and the silt just floated away. It didn't leave anything for the oysters to grow on!"

"John was tall on smarts and short on good sense." Eventually, when John experienced financial difficulties, the Wiegardt Brothers leased Jolly Rogers from him, which is still part of their business today.

Like most oystermen, Lee has involved himself in local politics and water quality issues. He was the first member of the Willapa Alliance, formed to grapple with environmental issues critical to the shellfish industry and others.

Lee must hold the highest record of any oyster grower for the number of trips to Japan, which he visited at least 100 times between 1958 and 1980 to purchase seed. "I used to bring back the seed then sell it through PCOGA, who got to keep the profits. I was responsible for about $25,000 a year going into the PCOGA coffers!"

If you hang around the oyster growers for any length of time, inevitably wild stories about Lee, oyster grower peers and PCOGA conferences emerge—jumping out of a third story balcony into a pool below, dancing girls, evictions from hotels, to name a few. Lee laments that the conferences "just aren't as much fun as they used to be."