MILTON-FREEWATER — “All rise.”

So began the city’s weekly municipal court where, on this evening, about a dozen people would stand before Judge Molly Tucker Hasenbank.

From pleading guilty to speeding in a school zone to driving without insurance, from young adults to the silver-haired, the docket continues one by one.

Tucker Hasenbank reminds each group of five defendants who enters her courtroom that Milton-Freewater is a small, racially diverse community. Many who come before her will be known to the judge in other ways, she said, and to avoid appearance of bias, the fines she imposes will not change from person to person.

Tucker Hasenbank is the first woman to hold the primary appointment of municipal judge, City Manager Linda Hall said.

Hall heralded the new judge’s work ethic and organizing skills, noting Tucker Hasenbank also brings compassion and a sense of humor to the position.

“She is also one of the best listeners I have ever known, which will serve her extremely well in her new role as our judge,” Hall said.

Tucker Hasenbank’s father, attorney Sam Tucker, has retired off the city’s bench after 34 years and overseeing more than 1,800 arraignments. After applying for the position, Tucker Hasenbank formally accepted the role and robe, taking her oath at Milton-Freewater City Council’s April meeting.

That their youngest child has reached this professional moment at 32 years old while parenting two preschoolers and a newborn and carrying a caseload as a lawyer comes as zero surprise to Sam and Sara Tucker.

“Molly was always very opinionated and strong-willed, but she always had a sense of fairness,” Sara Tucker recalled. “She was never one to let anything drop if she had a question. When she was young we had a T-shirt made for her that just said ‘Why?’”

When Sam Tucker took his teen daughter off to his law office on summer days, Sara Tucker discretely blessed her husband for the sanity he was providing, she said, laughing some 18 years later at the memory.

“I told him, ‘I know she isn’t easy, so thank you,’” she said.

Yet that energy, that drive to topple challenges, continues to serve Tucker Hasenbank as an attorney, a volunteer and mother.

It would be simple to imagine the bench appointment and more has been handed to the young woman. Tucker Hasenbank essentially interned at her father’s legal practice starting at age 13. In adulthood, she’s joined many of the same community organizations as Sam Tucker has been engaged with for years.

She now lives with her own family in her grandparents’ house, owned by her folks and straight across the road from them on Weston Mountain.

“There’s just been a lot of opportunities for me, a lot of doors opened for me,” Tucker Hasenbank said while nestling her son, Tucker, on her lap in her front yard.

The scene was bucolic. As white clouds skittered through blue skies over the greening homestead land, Tucker Hasenbank’s other children played “Lift the 3 year-old” nearby. As the game increased in silliness, peals of laughter from Hattie, 5, and Lena, 3, echoed off the surrounding hills.

Clell Hasenbank, 32, was happily supportive as a voluntary fence post for his daughters to afford his wife a chance to talk.

Turning around from checking on her people, Tucker Hasenbank expanded on her explanation.

“Committees are looking for women to be on them and I fit the mold there,” she said. “There are not a lot of young female lawyers in this area, so I fit that mold, too.”

A closer look at Tucker Hasenbank’s resume, though, reveals that two decades of hard work and determination is more likely what opened those doors.

There’s the summer legal and clerical work at the Monahan, Grove and Tucker law office, then graduating from high school in 2006 with honors and from University of Idaho in 2010 with a degree in political science.

In 2013, Tucker Hasenbank finished at her alma mater’s College of Law, graduating with high distinction and fourth in her class.

During law school she interned at legal aid and public defense offices, learning first hand about matters related to criminal law and child dependency cases.

A few months after leaving law school, Tucker Hasenbank passed the Oregon bar exam on her first attempt and went to work full time at her father’s practice.

Three years later she worked her way up to partner.

Numerous accomplishments fill the in-between spaces, too.

The attorney has served on multiple committees boards, from steering Oregon’s agricultural law to reviewing pay for Umatilla County elections officials to the county planning commission to serving as president of Milton-Freewater Rotary Club.

The whole package can look to others like an echo of her father’s career to this point, Tucker Hasenbank conceded.

“There have been a number of challenges in following Dad,” she said. “I want to be as good as he is and I put a lot of pressure on my own performance. It’s self imposed, my inability to recognize he’s almost 40 years ahead of me.”

Sam Tucker suggested his daughter wait to apply for the judgeship, but Tucker Hasenbank, who attended Weston-McEwen High School in Athena, instead listened to her husband.

“Clell wanted me to go for it. He knows me,” she said. “And if I didn’t take it now and they got someone who is 65, who knows when it would come open again?”

It might not look like the best moment, said Hasenbank, a lead oncology pharmacist at Providence St. Mary Medical Center.

“We have a newborn. But she’s worked very hard to get where she is and she deserves it,” he said.

With few exceptions, their couple and career timeline has gone according to plan, Tucker Hasenbank and Hasenbank agree.

It began, really, in their senior year at Weston-McEwen High School in Athena. The two friends began dating in 2005.

They attended University of Idaho together, marrying in 2011 while in graduate school.

Newlywed and graduated, the two moved into their 1905 farmhouse, where Tucker Hasenbank’s grandfather was born in 1919, and proceeded with intentional life goals.

Now those include following family farming roots, using a skill set developed as a child by moving irrigation pipes, relocating hay bales by hand and driving tractor.

Since 2015, the Hasenbank family has been growing their own cattle operation and have amassed about 80 head.

“We try to do it together,” Clell Hasenbank said.

“We feed them together, haul them together, the girls lick the salt blocks,” his wife added.

“We try to be busy.”

Occasionally the animals are used in preschool lessons — Tucker Hasenbank added teaching Hattie’s preschool learning pod one day a week onto her resume during the COVID-19 pandemic.

One small student was not amused when she joked that the class would be “preg checking” the cows for credit, Tucker Hasenbank said with a laugh.

The family skies in winter, camps in summer, often incorporating the Tuckers from across the road.

“We always knew we wanted to live here,” Hasenbank said.

“I think Molly and I are very good at long-term goals.”

As her gaze encompassed the 2,000 or so acres of the family homestead, Tucker Hasenbank said she’s living the kind of life she’s always wanted.

“We’re kind of living out our childhood fantasy,” she said. “So far I’ve gotten everything I wanted, so I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Sam Tucker is not very worried about that. His own plan calls for working until “I tip over and they drag my body out of here,” he said from his office last week.

“But seriously, I want to be there for Molly as long as I am able and be of help to her.

“Because that’s what fathers do.”