She liked telling stories, mostly about family.

She spun historical yarns about long-dead Irish and Norwegian ancestors who'd crossed seas and borders and pushed ever westward before settling in a fertile valley in a far corner of America.

She held court about growing up the daughter of educators near a rough-and-tumble timber town at the edge of the Pacific, from where she'd escape each summer to bucolic exploits on a family farm at the delta of the Skagit River.

But mostly, Wilma Crogstad Kamb regaled her guests with tellings and retellings of the triumphs and travails of her own ragtag gaggle of children, peppered in vivid detail pulled from a steel-trap memory and, at times, cast in the favorable glow viewed through the eyes of a proud mother.

Even in her final days, Mrs. Kamb continued sharing the tales that made up her extraordinary life – typically underselling her own role in them – when championing her late-husband, her nine children and two dozen grand- and great-grandkids.

Just last week, when recounting key moments from her own narrative that she assumed, correctly, would soon be published, she remarked: "You can edit a lot of this out."

Mrs. Kamb, a philanthropic fixture in Mount Vernon's civic and Catholic communities for seven decades, and selfless matriarch to a sprawling family dating back seven generations in the Skagit Valley, died peacefully in her sleep on Sept. 3.

She was 94.

Early life

Born February 22, 1930, in Raymond, Washington, Wilhelmina Louise Crogstad grew up the younger of two daughters to Lewis J. and Mary (Ryan) Crogstad, schoolteachers who lived in nearby Menlo.

While growing up in the unincorporated Pacific County town with a population of about 100, the green-eyed, curly-topped girl called "Babe" by her parents learned the power of communal generosity, she later told grandchildren.

To get through the lean times of the Great Depression, her family and neighbors shared vegetables grown in backyard gardens and venison from deer hunted in the surrounding wilds of the Willapa Valley, she said. Her mother gave odd-jobs to transients who showed up on their doorstep, paying them with hot meals shared at the family dinner table.

She earned pocket money for the year by competing for blue ribbons and the modest cash prizes that came with them in sewing, cooking and livestock contests at county fairs. At 16, she won the regional 4-H bake-off, earning a trip to compete at the program's national contest in Washington D.C.

At the Valley School, where her dad served as superintendent, taught science, math and shop classes, and coached the football and basketball teams, Miss Crogstad excelled in her coursework. She lettered in basketball and played the clarinet, flute and piccolo in the school band.

All the while, she and her sister, Mary Jane, and their parents regularly traveled 150 miles to Skagit County to work on the Crogstad family farm on Fir Island, where her grandfather lived and father grew up. She picked peas and berries in the summer and spent weekends in the fall filling sandbags to shore up dikes along the flood prone river.

"Our fathers were inseparable, and while they were playing cribbage inside the house, we'd be outside running around, playing kick-the-can or wrestling around in the haystacks in the barn," said Nancy (Good) Delanty, whose family lived nearby. "We always had the best times together. Wilma Lou was a wonderful person."

Miss Crogstad graduated from Valley High School in 1948 as her class valedictorian, earning all As – except for one B in a Chemistry class.

"I was really mad that I got that B," she later recounted to her grandkids.

So much so that later that fall, when she enrolled at the Holy Names College for Women in Spokane, Miss Crogstad opted to major in Chemistry – displaying the quiet grit she'd rely on time and again to face her life's challenges.

Marriage and family

In 1950, when she heard a young man at a parish dance at Gonzaga University mention that he hailed from Mount Vernon, Miss Crogstad asked if he was John Kamb – a law student she'd heard about from a mutual friend in Skagit County.

The next morning, when her roommate asked if she had a good time at the dance, Miss Crogstad responded, "Yeah, I met the guy I'm going to marry," she recounted later. "I don't know what made me say that."

Her unexplained statement proved prescient a year after she graduated from college with a Bachelor of Arts in Science, when the couple who started as friends married in Spokane on Aug. 29, 1953.

Later that year, after her husband was drafted into the U.S. Army, Mrs. Kamb began working as a medical technician in Skagit County, drawing and analyzing blood at local hospitals. She became president of the Skagit Hospital Auxiliary, and helped establish the county's bacteriology laboratory.

In 1955, she gave birth to her first child in Mount Vernon while her husband was stationed abroad in Japan. After he returned from military service and finished law school, Mrs. Kamb welcomed six more children, one every few years, through 1965.

The family settled into a house on North Seventh Street in a tight-knit neighborhood a half block from the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. Mrs. Kamb and her family attended mass every Sunday. She enrolled her kids at Immaculate Conception school and managed its bazaar and dinner auction for 15 years.

In 1968, the couple moved their expanding family into the turn-of-the century Colonial house, built by her husband's grandfather, Thomas Smith, on South Third Street in downtown Mount Vernon, where they welcomed their last two children. It remained her home for the rest of her life.

In the 1970s, Mrs Kamb started the first of several antique businesses – Colonial House Antiques – from her dining room table. She later moved the business into a downtown storefront and became a certified antique appraiser who managed estate sales in northwest Washington with her partner, Bede Donnerberg. In the mid-1980s, she and her daughter, Elizabeth, opened the Pine Square antique and coffee shop, Posh, which boasted what was thought to be the county's first commercial espresso machine.

Mrs. Kamb served two years on the city's library board, was a member of Territorial Daughters of Washington and participated on the committee that founded the Friendship House – a residence providing temporary shelter to the county's homeless population located a block from her own home. She served five terms on the directors' board as the nonprofit expanded to offer clothing, food and additional housing services.

Over the years, Mrs. Kamb also took into her own home several of her children's friends who faced uncertain homelives, treating them as family.  "She was like a second mother to me," said Troy Mallory, who for a time as a teenager stayed with the family. "No joking, she kept me under her wing."

She doled out checks written in the textbook cursive of a teacher's daughter, or cash from a wad stashed in her brassiere – what she called her "mad money"– to a parade of down-on-their luck characters who dropped by her shop.

She gave friends in need of a paycheck jobs ironing clothes or cleaning house. She adopted stray cats, a few dogs and once let her daughter keep a horse in the front yard of the family home.

In her spare time, she worked New York Times crossword puzzles in pen, drank her coffee black and, when fighting to beat her chief vice, chewed nicotine gum while simultaneously smoking her Kent Golden Light 100s.

She picked up competitive bridge from her husband, eventually amassing enough masterpoints to attain a Ruby ranking as a life-master six times over. She arranged family trips around bridge league competitions held across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, and yearly in Hawaii.

She traveled Europe and Asia extensively, taking voyages on the Concorde, the Queen Elizabeth II and the Orient Express. She attended a mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II at St. Peter's Basilica and cruised through the Panama Canal. She ventured to Norway with her sister and eldest children, tracking down dozens of relatives she'd never met.

From her travels, she gleaned even more details that became part of the family lore – about kids who'd become trapped mistakenly in hotel elevators and whisked off on baggage conveyor belts, or who'd hidden a prank load into a cigarette that exploded when she lit up a smoke in a crowded bridge hall.

A benevolent survivor

Family pranks aside, Mrs. Kamb was a bonafide survivor. She beat oral cancer, advocated fiercely for her kids as she deemed necessary, and carried her family after burying three children. As a parent, she counted her two greatest accomplishments as introducing her children to her Catholic faith and putting them all through college.

When doctors told her she faced certain death after suffering a massive pulmonary embolism in 2013, Mrs. Kamb sought emergency treatment from a different hospital and lived for another 11 years – long enough to see three grandchildren get married, welcome one more grandchild and five great grandchildren into her family, and to tell countless more stories.

She was preceded in death by her parents, Lewis and Mary Crogstad; her husband of 69 years, John G. Kamb; two sons, Robert and Thomas Kamb; a daughter, Elizabeth Kamb Mitchell, and a daughter-in-law, Mary (Hayes) Kamb.

She is survived by a sister, Mary Jane Vetter, of Surprise, Arizona; three daughters, Mary Louise Kamb, of Atlanta, Georgia, Rosemary (and Hagos) Kidane, and Angela (and John) Conijn, of Mt. Vernon; three sons, John Kamb, Jr., of Fir Island; Michael (and Lindsey) Kamb of Burlington, and Lewis Kamb (and Angela Galloway) of Seattle, 18 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

A Rosary will be held Tuesday, Sept. 10, 7:00 p.m. at Hawthorne Funeral Home.  A funeral mass will be held Wednesday, Sept. 11, at 12:15 p.m., at the Immaculate Conception Church in Mt. Vernon, immediately followed by a reception at the St. Joseph Center.

Private burial services will be held Sept. 12 at Pleasant Ridge Cemetery in La Conner.

In lieu of flowers, family members ask donations to be made to the John & Wilma Kamb Scholarship Fund at Mount Vernon High School, the Skagit Historical Museum or the Skagit Friendship House.

A few weeks before she died, Mrs. Kamb told family members: "Ninety-four years is a long life. Most people don't get to live this long. I feel pretty lucky."

And so do we, Babe, to be part of your epic tale.