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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 10, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 13, 2023

Photographer grateful his images can ‘hit the moment in time’

By Clay Eals

You grow up an ordinary guy on the outskirts of Los Angeles. You’re not great at academics, but in the late 1960s you pick up a camera and shoot for the high-school newspaper and yearbook. Later, you work at McDonalds and a Ford plant. You deliver sailboats around the country. In 1979, you move north, bouncing from Granite Falls to Green Lake to the Alaska town of Valdez and, finally, to Shoreline.

All the while, you immerse yourself in enormous concerts by the biggest names in rock, blues, country and folk, your camera a constant companion. Over more than 50 years, you amass a rare archive.

You’re Steve Schneider, whose musically panoramic imagery fills “The First Three Songs: Rock & Roll at 125th of a Second,” a 220-page coffee-table compendium whose title alludes to the brief time at the opening of shows when promoters typically let photojournalists work up close. The tome bolsters Schneider’s uncomplicated mantra: “It’s always been about excitement, about fun. I just want to get the shot.”

The 71-year-old has earned day-job pay from documenting conventions of professional associations and occasional journalistic assignments (UPI had him shoot a 1984 Seattle campaign visit by Democratic VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro, see below). But nights and weekends are a different story.

His “Who’s Who” concert subjects range from CSNY to Pearl Jam, Dylan to Cobain, Bonnie Raitt to Carlos Santana, Willie Nelson to Paul Simon, to McCartney, Clapton, Jagger, Springsteen, Bowie and, yes, the Who. Whew!

Schneider’s most enduring focus, however, has been the trippy Grateful Dead, known for its freeform shows and faithful “Deadheads.” He has seen at least 100 Dead concerts. More than 20 appear in the book.

His Dead shots began with a May 25, 1974, gig at UC Santa Barbara featuring then-beardless leader Jerry Garcia. Exactly 21 years later, Schneider captured a greying Garcia at his last Seattle concert, at Memorial Stadium. Garcia died 76 days later at age 53, and Schneider’s portrait filled a page in Time magazine’s tribute.

The band persisted in various forms, most recently as The Dead & Company, which disbanded in July. Its fourth- and fifth-to-last shows were at The Gorge Amphitheatre. Schneider was there, part of “the family.”

For the Dead, and all of Schneider’s star subjects, the most compelling factor has been the music itself. “It once was all new,” he says. “The songs hit the moment in time. Today you enjoy the song, and it brings back good memories. I just preserve a bit of history, that moment in time that I saw.”

You might say it’s what keeps his Dead soul alive.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Steve Schneider for his invaluable help with this installment!

Below are 26 additional photos (not enlargeable here)  and, in chronological order, 10 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

 

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 3, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 6, 2023

Water cannons evoke big blazes fought by fireboat Duwamish

By Clay Eals

Wildfires often command today’s attention. But how’s this for a different kind of wild?

Early on May 20, 1910, at the foot of Vine Street along Elliott Bay, a kettle of melted asphalt sprang a leak, mushrooming into a “blazing pile of more than 100 tons of inflammable asphalt” and producing “the thickest smoke that ever rolled up from a city,” reported The Seattle Times.

The fire destroyed Independent Asphalt Co. and damaged Occidental Fish Company nearby but could have been catastrophic for the waterfront if not for gushers from “the highest powered fireboat in existence,” the Duwamish. Thousands of tons of water — shot from the vessel’s cannons for more than an hour, aided by two land-based engines along Railroad Avenue (now Alaskan Way) — doused the flames.

Eyewitnesses said the sight of “streams from the fireboat playing across her bow was the prettiest firefighting spectacle ever witnessed in this city.”

The inferno came 10 months after the launch of the steam-driven Duwamish, named for the city’s Native American tribe and only river. The fireboat fought decades of water-proximate fires, many with dramatic smoke plumes from both the conflagrations and the fireboat’s aging steam engine. Dieselized in 1949 and retired in 1984, the Duwamish endures as a city and national landmark at South Lake Union.

Seattle’s first fireboat — and the first one on North America’s west coast — was the Snoqualmie, launched in 1891. Sold in 1932, it became a freighter in Alaska, where it burned in 1974. The city’s third fireboat, the Alki, launched in 1927, lingered for decades at Lake Union and recently was scrapped. Thus, the in-between Duwamish is the sole old-time survivor.

West Seattle’s Bob Carney, a retired electrical-parts salesman who first toured the Duwamish at age 8 in 1968, could be its biggest historian and fan. He is rivaled only by Beacon Hill’s Steve Walker, who traces his maritime affection to “The Sand Pebbles” (1966) starring namesake Steve McQueen, “the king of cool,” as a military steamship engineer.

Walker, a state ferry retiree, helms the Duwamish, moored permanently at the Historic Ships Wharf next to the Museum of History & Industry. He and Carney lead Sunday tours, spouting gentle cannons of marine lore for visitors.

Today’s four operating Seattle fireboats are the Chief Seattle (launched in 1984), the Leschi (2007), Fire One (2006) and Fire Two (2014). During summer festivals, their pumps propel a sizeable spray. But the most inspired show emerges from the deck of the Duwamish where, for a few gripping moments at its disabled water cannons, anyone can imagine being a waterborne hero.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Molly Michel, Seattle Design Festival; David Cueropo, Seattle Fire Department; Xin Tong, Kristin Wong, Tom Liu, Devon Lawrence, Tom Smith and especially Bob Carney and Steve Walker for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are a video interview of Steve Walker, a historical timeline and fact sheet by Bob Carney, 38 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 6 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 27, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 30, 2023

An overdue return trip for railway workhorse and zoo touchstone

By Clay Eals

We at “Now & Then” usually take our “Now” photos at, or near, the same spot as the “Then” images, but this week, the spatial spread is greater. We’re talking 35 miles.

At least the locales are in King County, and you may abide the distant pairing because the fundamental function of our subject is to move people and things from one place to another.

Those who lived here as children between 1953 and 1980 (or as adults with kid-like awe) likely recall with warmth and admiration, if not worship, the colorful locomotive #1246 that greeted visitors inside the south entrance of Woodland Park Zoo. The Great Northern Railway gifted the steamer to the city on the cusp of dieselizing its locomotive fleet.

Built in 1907, it had what today would be called a “wow” factor. To fully appreciate the gleaming engine, more than 15 feet tall, you had to look way up. In person, it demanded honor and deference — more than could be conveyed by mere visual or verbal depiction.

Of course, #1246 possessed a mobile past that long predated its stationary role as a zoo touchstone. For decades, it toiled on rails from Portland to Vancouver, B.C., and over the Cascades to and from Wenatchee.

For a time during the locomotive’s zoo stint, a placard heralded #1246’s historic status as a consolidation-style engine, featuring two small pilot wheels followed by eight 55-inch-diameter drive wheels:

“They were slower and less spectacular than earlier, lighter types, but their initial (starting) tractive effort was superior, and they could start and pull longer trains. For more than 75 years, they were the workhorses of American railroads, and their performance in mountainous terrain played a significant part in the development of the west.”

The narrative fits “The Railroad Changed Everything” tagline of Snoqualmie’s Northwest Railway Museum, which brought #1246 back to King County in late April after nearly 30 years of negotiations with owners in desert-like southern Oregon. Though looking “like it was pulled up from the bottom of a lake,” says Richard Anderson, executive director, it is reassuringly intact, complete with “grime and grease” from when it last operated 70 years ago.

Restoration will take years, but Anderson says #1246 already stands as a “massive and powerful” asset among the organization’s 75 rail vehicles. “You can walk right up to it and touch it,” he says, and the steam legacy adds “a sense of life.”

Eventually it will bolster an anticipated 35,000 square-foot addition to the museum’s current 24,000 square feet — just in time to awe the senses of a new generation of children.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Kevin Weiderstrom, Bob Kelly, Richard Anderson and Dan Kerlee for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are 34 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 31 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 20, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 23, 2023

Gas Works: a belching hellscape turns post-industrial paradise

By Jean Sherrard

There was a time when gas lighting had no ulterior motives. The steady golden flame was an assurance of illumination on demand and a promise of innovations to come.

When the Seattle Gas Lighting Company lit up 5 city streets and 42 private homes on New Year’s Eve 1873, the sound of corks popping must have been accompanied by sighs of envy from denizens of darker Seattle.

For the fortunate few early adopters, the first gas, converted from Eastside coal, was delivered through hollowed-out cedar logs.

The nascent utility of settlers Arthur Denny and Dexter Horton grew rapidly to match increased demand, supplying more than 1,200 customers by 1892. By then, gas increasingly provided both light and heat for home appliances.

Eastern investors further expanded the utility, moving its production facilities to Brown’s Point on north Lake Union in 1906. Coal gasification was an immensely filthy process, requiring vast quantities of water that the then-undeveloped 20-acre lakeside tract could accommodate.

Over the next 50 years, belching out smoke, flames and fumes while contaminating soil, groundwater and sediment, the plant was an unwelcome neighbor, even after converting to marginally cleaner oil gasification in 1937. Many Wallingford houses were built to avoid the hellish view of tower effluvia. Complaints about the facility poured in throughout its half-century tenure.

Relief greeted the plant’s closure in 1956 when the Trans Mountain Gas Pipeline opened, bringing natural gas from Canada to Washington state. The utility, renamed Washington Natural Gas, left 20 noxious acres behind. Given the view location, however, calls soon mounted to convert it into a city park.

Enter noted landscape architect and University of Washington professor Richard Haag (1923-2018). His 1962 proposal for adaptive reuse was revolutionary — and initially controversial. Following cleanup of the polluted site, Haag advocated preserving the 5-story cracking towers while converting the plant’s boiler house to a picnic shelter and its exhauster-compressor building into a brightly painted children’s play barn.

A 45-foot high Great Mound (aka Kite Hill), made of construction fill, would cover polluted soil while providing breathtaking vistas from what had been a choking hellscape.

In October 1973, Gas Works Park began opening in stages, and was immediately acclaimed as one of Seattle’s favorite parks. Designated a Seattle landmark in 1999, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.

Today, park cleanup is ongoing. Reducing toxic lake sediment is next in a series of environmental remediations. But this rough diamond in the crown of Seattle parks is worth the effort — no gas lighting required.

WEB EXTRAS

For Paul Dorpat’s original 2015 column featuring an interview with landscape architect Richard Haag, click here!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 13, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 16, 2023

A century ago, a Seattle speech foreshadowed a president’s death

 By Clay Eals

Today we ruminate over presidents of advanced age. But a century ago, the U.S. president was Warren G. Harding, then just 57.

In 1923, his third presidential year, Harding mounted a grueling, two-month journey through the American West, with final stops planned in Washington, Oregon and California. Before sailing north to Alaska (then a territory), he addressed 25,000 on July 5 in Tacoma. Back south in Seattle on July 27, he spoke to 30,000, including many Boy Scouts, at Woodland Park and 30,000 at filled-to-capacity University of Washington (now Husky) Stadium.

Six days later … he died.

His Seattle speeches were the last for a president who — despite affability, enthusiasm and a statesman’s countenance — left professional and personal scandals in his wake. Today, historians rate him among America’s worst presidents.

A rural Ohio newspaperman who had risen to U.S. senator, Harding was a reluctant compromise candidate during the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago, emerging from a proverbially smoke-filled room.

Three years after his election, his 5 hours in Seattle played an unintentional role in his demise. He had traveled 5,246 miles via rail, car and steamship in just 22 days. After his Woodland Park appearance, plus a downtown parade and reception at Volunteer Park, his major speechifying ended at the UW.

There, wrote biographer Francis Russell, Harding’s cheeks looked green, and his jaws were “set in pain.” While speaking, the president “hesitated, slurred his words [and] called Alaska ‘Nebraska.’ ”

Midway, Harding “began to falter, dropped the manuscript and grasped the desk,” recounted Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce (and later president), who sat behind Harding, picked up the scattered sheafs and quickly organized and fed Harding the remaining pages. Harding, Hoover wrote, “managed to get through the speech.”

“PRESIDENT ILL!” screamed a Seattle Times banner the next day. Reportedly contracting ptomaine from poisonous crabmeat en route from Alaska, Harding was ordered to bed rest on his train. His tour abruptly ended.

“PRESIDENT IS DEAD” shouted the Seattle Post-Intelligencer front page on Aug. 3. His evening passing, in a San Francisco hotel, came from a heart attack. Five hours later, in Vermont, his vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, was sworn in as his successor.

“He had no business being president, but strange things happen,” says Mike Purdy, presidential historian, of West Seattle, who says Harding lacked the wisdom and vision for the role.

Harding himself offered confirmation: “The presidency is hell. There is no other word to describe it,” he once said. “I knew this job would be too much for me. I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Ron Edge, Greg Lange, Wendy Malloy, Gigi Allianic and Craig Newberry of Woodland Park Zoo, the PBS series “The American President” and especially Mike Purdy for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are 2 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 60 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 6, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 9, 2023

Renovations will bolster Green Lake’s ‘heart of the community’

By Jean Sherrard

While today’s billionaires are blowing up rockets in Earth’s lower atmosphere and dreaming of colonizing Mars, one of the richest men in the world at the dawn of the 20th century devoted himself to building an enduring legacy of brick and mortar.

Industrialist, bibliophile and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) emigrated from Scotland to the United States with his working-class parents in 1847. At 13, he worked in an Allegheny cotton mill, changing bobbins 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. From these unlikely beginnings, Carnegie’s industrial innovations and political machinations resulted in a vast steel empire.

A notorious strikebreaker noted for paying his workers abysmally low wages, the complicated robber baron also publicly supported progressive tax laws, including estate taxes. Famously he insisted, “The man who dies rich, dies in disgrace.”

Indeed, by the time of his death, Carnegie had donated 90% of his wealth, largely in funding construction of 2,509 libraries throughout the English-speaking world — 1,689 in the United States alone.

Moreover, committed to wide accessibility of literature and reading, Carnegie promoted unrestricted “open stack” policies, encouraging library patrons to browse freely among shelves of books.

One of 7 extant Carnegie library buildings in Seattle, the Green Lake Branch was built on land purchased chiefly by neighborhood contributions. Carnegie’s foundation fronted $35,000 (around $1.2 million in today’s dollars) for construction of the two-story edifice.

Designed by Seattle architects Woodruff Somerville and Joseph Cote in French Renaissance Revival style while hewing to Carnegie’s prescriptions, the elegant structure has more than held its own, nominated to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and designated a Seattle landmark in 2001.

Dawn Rutherford, the Seattle Public Library’s interim northwest regional manager, and Elisa Murray, digital communications specialist, provide reflections at the branch, the first of three unreinforced masonry Carnegie library structures to be shuttered for seismic retrofitting, ADA accessibility upgrades, conversion to an electric heat pump system and significant interior renovations.

Will Carnegie’s investment in libraries continue to yield dividends in today’s digital era? “The more we’re online,” Rutherford says, “the more we need a physical place that we can come together.” For young and old, she says, seeking to understand and adapt to changing technologies, libraries remain “the beating heart of the community.”

Besides, Murray adds, “People still love their books, and at the library, books are our baseline.”

Not having died with the most toys, Carnegie, a man of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions, left behind gifts that will enrich and enlighten terrestrial communities for generations to come.

WEB EXTRAS

More interior photos of seismic and facility improvements:

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 29, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 2, 2023

Look closely for the ferries’ floating billboards for Century 21

By Clay Eals

Countless times have we seen this placid, pleasing “Then” scene — two Washington State Ferries passing each other while criss-crossing Puget Sound.

But look more closely.

It’s 1962, and each ferry bears a 40-foot-long banner advertising the Seattle World’s Fair. Three-foot-tall letters proclaim the exposition’s futuristic moniker, Century 21. After “21” is the fair’s official logo, an arrowed circle resembling the biological male symbol and the astrological symbol for Mars. Its arrow points upper right, to space-age progress. Inside the orb is a skeletal cartoon globe. Throughout our region that year, the logo was seemingly everywhere.

But look even more closely.

Before “Century” is the same logo, only in reverse. The arrow points upper left. To the “Northwest,” perhaps? Or representing the double-ended, ambidextrous ferries themselves?

The speculation comes from Paula Becker and Alan Stein, who wrote the definitive 2011 coffee-table book “The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and Its Legacy.” The two otherwise puzzle about the inverted logo, which in their research they never saw reversed in any other context.

The banners, which transformed all 21 state ferries into floating billboards starting in June 1961, were prepared by the state and authorized by Gov. Albert Rosellini. The ads not only bolstered fair attendance but also helped boost 1962 ferry traffic to record levels: 3.2 million vehicles and 9.8 million people.

Our main “Then” photo itself is also distinctive. Most extant photos of the bannered ferries are in black-and-white, and they usually show only one such vessel, not two.

The photographer was then-25-year-old William “Bill” Benshoof, who captured a south-facing view of the Kehloken (foreground) and Rhododendron ferries on the Mukilteo-Clinton run while courting 21-year-old Wylene “Willie” Feske, the woman he would marry Nov. 30 that year.

Fresh from a Navy stint, he was working on the Minuteman missile project for Boeing, while she was beginning a phone-company career. Each living with family near White Center in 1962, the two visited Bill’s aunt on Whidbey Island, hence the ferry trip, and took in the big-city fair.

“It put Seattle on the map,” Bill says. “It was our Disneyland.” Willie recalls “how excited people were. They all had to come to Seattle to see the Space Needle and the center.” Bill liked “the funny-looking elevator” called the Bubbleator inside the Coliseum (today’s Climate Pledge Arena). Willie delighted in a Pacific Northwest Bell exhibit “where you could talk on the phone and see each other.” With a laugh, she recalls telling a friend at the time, “That’s never gonna happen.”

Could bannered ferries happen again? Perhaps (wink!) with our next world’s fair?

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Dina Skeels, Jade D’Addario of the Seattle Public Library Seattle Room, Ian Sterling and Christy Grnaquist of Washington State Ferries, Emily & Bruce Howard, Paula Becker, Alan Stein and especially Bill & Willie Benshoof for their invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video this week.

Below are 8 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 31 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(As ever, click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on June 22, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 25, 2023

The flouring Fisher family legacy–from scones to silver screen

By Jean Sherrard

A Now & Then pop quiz: What do the once-mighty Fisher Communications Company, the Puyallup Fair and recently crowned King Charles III have in common? A hint: It’s dense, fragrant and dolloped with butter, clotted cream and fresh jam.

Kudos to all who came up with (drum roll) … the scone.

James Erickson, author of the lavishly illustrated “Washington’s Fisher Scones: An Iconic Northwest Treat since 1911,” records the pastry’s Scottish origins. He guesses that the medieval town of Scone (also noted for the Stone of Scone, atop which all British monarchs have been crowned for 800 years) may have baked an eponymous prototype in the early 1500s.

In his new book, Erickson documents the entrepreneurial, non-royal Fishers, who, seeking opportunities in a booming port city, relocated in 1911 from Montana to Seattle.

Just-completed 350-acre Harbor Island at the mouth of the Duwamish River, constructed of fill from dredging and recent Seattle regrades, with ready access to shipping and room to grow, proved the ideal location for their flour mill.

Largest in the western United States, the Fisher plant was “equipped to grind about 10,000 bushels of wheat … [and] create 2,000 barrels of flour a day.” But in the fiercely competitive flour business, Erickson writes, effective ads were key. Reaching into its Scotch ancestry, the family decided “to make scones and give them away or sell them for a nickel.”

In 1915, the “sweet treats” were debuted to acclaim at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, followed that year with the first annual appearance of a Fisher Scone booth at the Puyallup State Fair.

A decade later, another promotional brainchild beckoned. Fans of the then-new medium of radio, the Fishers purchased a broadcast frequency — available following the arrest of its previous owner, notorious Seattle bootlegger Roy Olmsted. The station, KOMO, went on the air Dec. 31, 1926, promoting Fisher Blend Flour.

In years to come, the family built a local media empire comprising dozens of radio and TV stations. Phelps Fisher, today a vigorous 90-year-old, worked his way up from the flour mill to chair the board of Fisher Communications.

For Fisher, it’s always been about family. “We worked together, supported each other and managed to get along,” he says. The result: “a wonderful, honest, productive business for the better part of the 20^th century.”

The flour mill was sold to Pendleton Flour Mills in 2001 and recently was transformed to a film studio. Meanwhile, Fisher Communications was acquired by Sinclair Broadcast Group in 2016. The Fisher Scone, notes Jim Erickson, “has outlived the very brand it served to promote.”

WEB EXTRAS

No 360 this week. However, we offer this illuminating interview with the delightful Phelps Fisher.

Plus a few more photos from the former Fisher Flour/now Harbor Island Studios site:

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 15, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 18, 2023

Soothing steamboat runs ended in upriver Snoqualmie in 1917

By Clay Eals

All 13 of those posing in this week’s idyllic “Now” scene came to the riverbank across from downtown Fall City by car. So did Jean Sherrard and I. Indirectly, the needs and wants of us and our collective forebears are why this section of the Snoqualmie River hasn’t seen a paddle-driven steamboat in well over a century.

In the late 19^th century, steamboats, also called sternwheelers, were part of Puget Sound’s celebrated Mosquito Fleet and a prime mode of transport for hops, timber and people in rural waterways. But their navigation fell victim to unmistakable signs of growth and progress — the complicating cables and booms of cross-channel ferries and bridges, the parallel routes of new railroad lines and the coming popularity (and rumble) of automobiles and trucks. Steamboat runs upriver as far as past Duvall, ended by 1917.

Thus, any rivercraft sailing past Fall City today consists only of recreational rowboats, rafts and kayaks.

But oh, for the days of steamboats, yearn childhood pals Steve Barker and Jack Russell. Now straddling age 78, they devoted their four most recent years to assembling a new, large-format book, “Steamboats on the Snoqualmie.” Its 148 pages overflow with 130 historical photos, six intricate maps and myriad details of elegant vessels from a seemingly gentler time, with names like the Traveler, the Ranger and the May Queen.

The softcover volume focuses on what we might call three “S-es”: the Snoqualmie River and to a lesser extent its downstream siblings, the Skykomish and Snohomish — a system emanating from the Cascades and snaking to saltwater in a northwesterly direction from above Snoqualmie Falls to Everett.

Russell, of unincorporated Skyway (between Seattle and Renton), and Barker, of Duvall, met in the fifth grade in 1955-56 at Hawthorne Elementary School in the Rainier Valley. Their families bore sternwheeler connections that buoyed their 67-year friendship.

Barker, a retired banker, was the primary writer and Russell the researcher. Russell also parlayed his steamer passion into an adult vocation he still practices today. He runs a Fishermen’s Terminal-based charter service on the 1993-vintage Christine W, the only commercial sternwheeler on the Sound. It embodies an appeal the book can only attempt to capture.

“It’s the smell of the steam and the cylinder oil. It’s not a diesel chugging away,” Russell says. “It only goes 5 to 6 mph, so it’s a gentler motion. And steam whistles can be very pretty, very melodious. It just sounds different and feels different than a propeller vessel.

“And when the paddlewheel turns, you can hear the wheel hitting the water. It’s a soothing sound.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Ruth Pickering, Lisa Oberg and especially Steve Barker and Jack Russell for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard’s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column. It includes the sounds of a sternwheeler whistle and paddleboat.

Below are a video of Jack Russell and his Christine W sternwheeler, a newsletter cover, 3 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 10 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.