WASHINGTON: A Cure for Lumbago

Housewife Peggy Nelson stared moodily at the mosquitoes swarming up out of the stagnant pond near her home in the little lumber town of Snoqualmie, Wash, and came to a decision: either she or the wretched puddle must go.

Last week—three years after decision day—bulldozers were rooting out the wild blackberry bushes and leveling the ground for a new housing development where ''Peggy's Puddle" once stagnated. Elsewhere in Snoqualmie (pop. 1,059), Peggy's fellow citizens had cheerfully waded into no fewer than 75 other "action projects" designed to make their town a better place to live in.

Rich Rewards. Fortunately for them and their future, Peggy Nelson had precisely the ally she needed when she set out on her swamp-draining expedition in 1953. The ally: the University of Washington's Bureau of Community Development, a $50,000-a-year agency which has produced an impact on life in Washington out of all proportion to its budget. Its updated Jeffersonian objective: to help urban Washingtonians discover that self-reliant, creative citizens not only can solve many of their own problems but also enjoy rich rewards in the process.

Once Peggy Nelson had set the ball rolling, bureau consultants helped Snoqualmie's townspeople organize 18 study committees with memberships ranging from bankers to lumberjacks. Each group diagnosed a Snoqualmie ailment. When one of the innumerable "buzz sessions" established that Peggy's pond and the town's irksome high-water level rose and fell together, an improvement district was organized, and a $12,000 drainage ditch eliminated both health hazards. As the study committees pinpointed other problems, action groups took over. The littered railroad right of way through town was cleared of underbrush; downtown business houses were being repainted according to a master color scheme; vacant buildings were torn down to make way for new; a combination town hall-library-fire station was built. Involved in the project at one time or another: almost 70% of Snoqualmie's residents.

Bust to Boom. Gratifying as the Snoqualmie story was, it was nothing new to the university's Community Development Bureau. Founded in 1950 under the direction of crusading Community Planner

Richard W. Poston (now directing the same kind of program at Southern Illinois University), it has in six years lifted 22: communities (see map) out of one kind of municipal morass or another.

Anacortes, a Puget Sound town with a boom-and-bust history, was busting all over in 1953, with 1,800 of its 6,700 residents on or asking for relief. Then two major oil companies opened big refineries in the area, and Anacortes was suddenly riding the biggest boom in its history, But the town took it in smooth stride the usual headaches of sudden expansion averted by shrewd, bureau-directed advance planning.