(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 26, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 29, 2026

April Foolery Quiz: Think you know the towers of Seattle and Paris?

By Jean Sherrard

Springtime in Paris brings “poisson d’avril” — literally “April Fish.” On the first of the month, children across France tape paper fish to the backs of unsuspecting people in a ritual of gentle mischief dating back to the 16th century. While some link the tradition to the lean meals of Lent, it primarily celebrates the “catch” of a good-natured prank.

For several years, we at “Now & Then” have marked the arrival of cherry blossoms and the promise of warmer weather with our own brand of civic April Foolery. With the help of noted Parisian photographer Bérangère Lomont, a longtime collaborator of our column, we offer an exercise featuring two great structures: the Eiffel Tower and the Space Needle. Each is shorthand for its city. But which is which — and which is not?

Space Needle or Eiffel Tower?

Choose one answer per question:

• The Space Needle
• The Eiffel Tower
• Both
• Neither

1. Which tower was built for a world’s fair celebrating technological progress?

2. Which one was conceived as a dining destination as much as an observation platform?

3. Plans for this one were first sketched on a napkin (or serviette, in French).

4. Which was primarily financed with significant government funding?

5. Financed largely with private capital, this structure generated enough revenue in its first year to repay its principal investor.

6. This one debuted in varied shades of red.

7. It was attacked by prominent artists as a monstrous eyesore.

8. Its official height increased after antennas were added.

9. Originally, it was intended to stand for only 20 years.

10. Which one was famously climbed by a reigning British monarch during its inaugural year?

The Answers (No Peeking!)

1: Both. The Eiffel Tower (1889) marked the centennial of the French Revolution. The Space Needle (1962) celebrated the Space Age.

2: Space Needle. Its revolving restaurant was central to the Century 21 vision.

3: Space Needle. Edward E. Carlson sketched his early concept after visiting Stuttgart’s TV tower.

4: Neither. Both relied primarily on private financing.

5: Eiffel Tower. Gustave Eiffel’s personal underwriting reportedly paid off during the first year of operation.

6: Both. The Eiffel began “Venetian Red.” The Needle’s “Galaxy Gold” was more orange than gold.

7: Eiffel Tower. A “Committee of Three Hundred” artists protested it in 1887.

8: Both. Each gained height through later antenna additions.

9: Eiffel Tower. Its permit ran 20 years. Radio transmission saved it.

10: Neither. Queen Victoria never climbed the Eiffel (she died in 1901). Queen Elizabeth II visited Seattle in 1983, long after the Needle’s debut.

Scoring Your ‘Catch’

• Master angler, 7–10 correct: You know your statehood and your steel. You’ve navigated the currents of history without getting snagged.
• Expert troller, 4–6 correct: Deepwater understanding, though on technical details you may have swallowed a bit of bait.
• Nibbler, 1–3 correct: You’ve got a taste for history, but big truths slipped the line.
• The poisson d’avril, 0 correct: You are the catch of the day — hooked, lined, and sinkered by our historical lures. Wear your paper fish with pride. And if you’ve discovered that one of these towers has been quietly affixed to your back, consider yourself properly celebrated. After all, April belongs to the fish.

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 video of this quiz on location at the Seattle Center, click right here!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 19, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 22, 2026

Mixed feelings vex mainstay owner of beloved Wedgwood Broiler

By Clay Eals

What can you say about a guy who never left his childhood neighborhood?

In 1981 at age 19, he became a dishwasher at a restaurant 10 blocks from home. Over 15 years, he worked his way up. In 1996 he bought the business, helming it for three decades, to the present day.

“I don’t know too many people who have done that,” Wedgwood native Derek Cockbain says with understatement. “The day I started, it wasn’t my plan. It just sort of fell into place.”

Cockbain, 64, stands on the cusp of giving up arguably the district’s best-known diner, bar and community hub — the beloved Wedgwood Broiler.

This classic steakhouse anchors a two-acre, 1960s-era shopping center on 35th Avenue Northeast. In recent years, the three-block-long property faced a high-profile proposal for a six-floor retail-residential development. It fizzled, but while no new project has been announced, such a plan could return.

Will the Broiler survive? Will its building be razed? The questions haunt its modest, strip-mall exterior and warm, dark interior whose layout, décor and furnishings have stayed largely the same for 50-plus years.

A tiny eatery began onsite in 1965. With a remodel in 1969, it became Sir Wedgwood Broiler. “Sir” fell off the name in 1973, but the initials, “SW,” carved big in north entry doors, remain.

“We try to stay consistent,” Cockbain says. “People who came in 20 years ago to have a teriyaki steak will come in today and have it, so it should be exactly the same. That’s one of the things we pride ourselves on.”

Another constant, however, is uncertainty. He’s had to rent month-to-month since COVID. Will he give up the ghost? His feelings are deeply mixed.

On one hand, a lifelong ethic prods Cockbain to make things work. That grit surfaced during a soccer stint at Nathan Hale High School, where he topped the Metro League in scoring. After he recovered from a broken ankle, his coach Joel Waters told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1979, “Derek can score with either foot. In fact, he scores more with his off foot than his right foot.”

But with dreams of traveling with his wife, Alycien, and other properties to tend, Cockbain also feels “done,” ready to retire. “I don’t want to work until I can’t enjoy it.”

Still, tenacity and heart come to the fore.

“The neighborhood doesn’t want us to go,” he says. “The problem for me is that I grew up here. I know everybody. I’ve got the kids I went to school with, I see my old friends, their parents still come in, and I don’t want to close the doors.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Valarie Bunn of the Wedgwood in Seattle History blog well as Derek and Alycien Cockbain 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 3 additional photos, a flier and 2 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 12, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 15, 2025

Weyerhaeuser’s shrine to wood was built to move as waterfront changed

By Jean Sherrard

Meant as a grand showcase for the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company, the building in our “Then” photo provided an administrative headquarters in 1923 while offering a structural ode to timber itself. Weyerhaeuser’s timber-trade dominance at the time was legendary, rooted in the 1900 “neighborly deal” in which Frederick Weyerhaeuser purchased 900,000 acres of Washington timberland from railroader James J. Hill for $5.4 million.

After the purchase, Everett quickly became the manufacturing heart of Weyerhaeuser’s empire, with waterfront mills producing wood products shipped globally. To manage this reach, the company commissioned a headquarters that doubled as architectural persuasion. Designed by the firm Bebb and Gould, its stylized English Gothic structure was built not only to impress but also to move—literally. Architect Carl F. Gould anticipated future evolutions on the waterfront and engineered the building onto four giant crossbeams, making portability a feature, not a bug.

The structure was relocated at least three times. First, in 1938, it was barged along the Snohomish River to accommodate expanding mills. It moved again in March 1984, when the tug Whidbey towed the office from its base at

Preston Point to the new Everett Marina Village. Finally, in 2016, it traveled nearly a mile by land to its present home at Boxcar Park on the Everett waterfront.

Today, the Port of Everett owns the landmark, which was restored at the behest of NGMA Group CEO Kwok “Jack” Yang Ng to house The Muse Whiskey & Coffee, which serves as a coffee shop by day, speakeasy-inspired whiskey bar by night. During a recent visit, general manager Joseph Mottola and NGMA VP Rachel Escalle led a tour through the historic space. Mottola pointed out that the building was designed as a physical “demo”—each room features different trim work to showcase the versatility of Douglas fir, western red cedar and western hemlock.

At the building’s heart remains an original 160-ton

vault, its thick concrete walls now sheltering wine rather than payroll. The vault held a sharp surprise for restorers from Grant Construction: Designed to release tear gas if tampered with, one canister remained charged after a century. When disturbed during the 2023 renovation, it “popped”—a stinging reminder that some early security systems never lose their bite.

Mottola is particularly fond of the corner office associated with the Weyerhaeuser family. As the story goes, after his retirement in 1942, company President John P. Weyerhaeuser would occasionally return to “boot out” the current manager, reclaiming his former desk for a day or two. From there, he could look out over the docks, where log-laden ships still departed to fuel his family’s empire.

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 degree video created on the Everett waterfront at Boxcar Park, click here.

A few more photos:

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 5, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 8, 2026

Seattle chose its first woman as mayor 100 years ago

By Clay Eals

In 1981, as newspapers struggled to employ non-sexist terms and I was in Oregon covering education for the Corvallis daily, the woman heading the school board pulled me aside.

“Please don’t write that I’m the chairperson,” she said. ”It sounds like I’m the one who sets up the chairs!”

In that vignette’s spirit of gender equality, this week we celebrate a centennial. Monday, March 9,  marks the 100th anniversary of the 1926 election of the first woman as Seattle mayor — and the first woman to helm any major U.S. city.

She was Bertha Knight Landes, serving just one term, when mayoral terms were only two years, unlike today’s four.

With her husband, Henry Landes, whom she later labeled her “tower of strength,” she moved in 1896 from Massachusetts to Seattle, where he became science dean at the University of Washington. Gradually she attained leadership in local women’s clubs whose influence swelled with passage of statewide women’s suffrage in 1910. She won election to the City Council in 1922 and 1925, serving two years as its president.

As acting mayor in 1924 while Mayor Edwin Brown attended the Democratic National Convention, Landes fired the police chief, whom she said was lax about bootlegging and gambling.

Two years later, seeking the city’s top job, she invoked domestic wordplay — “municipal housecleaning” — while promoting a pushback on vice.

Landes, just over 5-feet tall, was reserved and plain-spoken, choosing to neither accentuate nor duck her gender. “If the men will not show enough interest in their city government to get the right kind of candidates in the field, the women must,” the 57-year-old said the night before defeating the incumbent by 48,700 to 42,802 votes.

Ironically, her novelty in 1926 became a liability in 1928. “Her sex is against her,” read a New York Times subhead in capital letters. An elusive, wealthy businessman, Frank Edwards, whom Landes labeled “a name, a photograph and a rumor,” ran against her with the slogan “the man you would be proud to call mayor.” Though endorsed by newspapers and labor, Landes lost re-election, 39,819 to 58,873.

Landes died in 1943. After her mayoral term, it took 91 years for Seattle to elect a second woman to the post. Jenny Durkan served from November 2017 through 2021.

In our “Now” photo, we place new Mayor Katie Wilson, the third woman voted into the office, next to a Landes reception chair gifted to the city in 2006. It stands behind glass in a vast, first-floor City Hall meeting room named for Landes. In its honorary promontory, this chair is unlikely to be set up or taken down again.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Thuch Mam and Sage Wilson 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 3 additional photos, a 1928 Annual Report and 11 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 26, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 1, 2026

Whimsical details from 1968 Seattle enliven classic Caplan poster

By Clay Eals

Eye-level, it’s push-pinned to my hallway wall. If I’m not in a hurry, one of its details arrests and rivets me, always inducing a grin. I imagine the same experience for countless others over the past nearly 60 years.

Our “Then” image is a 30-by-40-inch poster, a fanciful take on downtown Seattle and the West Seattle shore in 1968.

It looks like a cockeyed cross between a bird’s-eye map and “Where’s Waldo?”

As period caricature, it emphasizes some aspects and conflates others, but that’s part of its charm, invoking memories and inviting comparisons to today.

Commissioned by the revered but long-gone Frederick & Nelson department store (now, there’s a memory), the poster was the vision of Seattle artist Irwin Caplan (1919-2007).

Throughout his life, from his upbringing in Madison Park to Garfield High, the University of Washington and beyond, Caplan created images in plentiful styles and forms. But he made his fame after World War II as a premier magazine cartoonist.

His panels graced an astonishing array of mid-century periodicals: Look, Time, Liberty, True, Holiday, This Week, Argosy, Esquire, Ladies Home Journal, the New Yorker and, in syndication, from Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Later, he created commercial art and Seattle Times Sunday magazine covers, also teaching drawing and painting at the UW.

It was as if a pencil, pen or brush never left his hand. “If he was awake,” says Robert Caplan, oldest of three offspring, “he was doing art.”

Caplan’s dizzying Seattle poster became a career highlight. Priced at $1.95 (mailing tube 10 cents extra), it sold enough to go into second printing. “The longer you look,” the Frederick’s ads aptly strutted, “the more familiar names and landmarks you see!”

Therein, the Space Needle whirls, while downtown’s soon-to-open Seafirst Building (now Safeco Plaza) —then the city’s highest high-rise, nicknamed “the box the Space Needle came in” — sports a “Big Daddy” pennant.

Flying past the Smith Tower is a plump jet from which five mechanics dangle. A trailing banner, oblivious to imminent corporate calamity, proclaims, “Boeing Job No. 50327.”

Six superimposed ovals spotlight districts like Seattle Center, in which Caplan asks “Where’s Zollie?” — a salute to Zalman Volchok, who booked the Beatles’ first Seattle concert in 1964, at the Coliseum (now Climate Pledge Arena), and later general-managed the city’s then-new, now-departed basketball SuperSonics.

Another oval highlights the UW, framed by the motto “Lux Sit” (“Let there be light”) alongside a “Love” picket sign and a nod to the Helix underground paper.

Hydros, Chief Seattle, the ferry Kalakala, Pacific Science Center and future Rainier Tower architect Minoru Yamasaki — the references seem delightfully endless.

The scene is jam-packed, busy, vibrant. Also, some would say, prescient.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Joan Clarke, Steve Caplan, Robert Caplan and especially Raulin Sterne 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 25 additional photos and 22 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

We’ll begin this array of extras with several rarities submitted by readers in response to this post:

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 19, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 22, 2025

Border control: How muralist Billy King outlines the world

By Jean Sherrard

Billy King believes that borders define attention.

A longtime Seattle artist and muralist, King, 77, is best known for large-scale works in Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square — vibrant, colorful panels crowded

with vendors, hustlers, passersby and dreamers. He also paints, sketches and makes prints, finding recurring cosmic and human patterns in any medium.

On a recent weekday afternoon, hunting down King’s murals is an adventure in occasional trespass. Some adorn well-traveled paths. Others are tucked into apartment foyers or half-forgotten corridors. At least

one, King says, has simply disappeared. Whenever he explores downtown, he brings along food for “the first homeless guy we see.”

Sure enough, outside a downtown doorway, King hands a small bag

of snacks to a ragged man holding a cardboard sign. After a companionable howdy-do, King offers design advice he learned decades ago while working at Sean’s Produce in the Market.

“Have you got a magic marker?” he asks the man. “Draw a black border around the edge of your sign. That border means people have to look at it. If you leave the edges open, it’s optional.”

Born in Coos Bay, Ore., King grew up in Spokane before arriving in Seattle in 1966 to study art at the University of Washington. Like many artist peers, he never graduated — “a badge of honor,” he calls it — and worked a succession of jobs: railroad yard checker, dishwasher, bartender and Market vendor. Art, however, remained the through line.

Hustle and timing eventually landed King in a 1974

Smithsonian exhibition surveying Pacific Northwest art, a turn that “confounded and irritated” local critics because King was, in his words, “a nobody.”

Early on, he learned that declaring oneself an artist mattered as much as credentials, a lesson reinforced when, in 1977, King received his first major mural commission for the Fairmont Hotel Apartments on the First Avenue side of the Market.

Inspired by a classic, early 20th-century photo of Market farmers unloading wagons, he reinterpreted the scene. “When you make art, you have 10,000 elements,” he says. “The artist’s job is to winnow that down, first to 1,000, then maybe 100. Out of that, you paint the most important 30.”

Such distillation defines King’s best-known works. For his Market and Pioneer Square murals, he has painted primarily from memory. The result isn’t nostalgia. It’s taxonomy — a living catalog of urban roles still very much with us.

On a return visit to the Market, we encounter the same homeless man. His cardboard sign now includes a neatly drawn black border. King notices immediately and gives a thumbs-up. Attention, after all, begins at the edges.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video, click here.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 12, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 15, 2026

Early Japanese barbershop image reflects Seattle library’s care

By Clay Eals

By itself, our “Then” photo poses a multifaceted mystery. Not coincidentally, the story behind our “Now” photos — in which I’ve had a small hand — offers satisfying answers.

A nearly 115-year-old image reveals an immaculate barbershop, three workers, a customer and the view of a city streetscape through the front window. The scene abounds with signs and rich visuals. But who are these people? Where are they? Why?

This shot shows a storefront just off Yesler Way along a curved, diagonal side street near the brand-new Smith Tower. It’s little more than a stone’s throw from what was, and still is, known as Japantown (Nihonmachi), where immigrants began settling in the 1880s to work in fisheries, railroads and logging.

The barbershop owner, perhaps one of the depicted men, was Kashiro Kawakami. Born circa 1886 in Japan, he likely first came to the United States in 1902. A farmer, he returned to Japan in 1910, marrying and sailing back to Seattle with his wife. They had three children here while he worked as a barber at the photographed site in about 1911-14. Records go silent after 1916. Perhaps the family moved back to Japan.

These details and many others about this photo emerged, starting in summer 2023, during detective-style research by Seattle Public Library’s Special Collections staff on a massive collection donated by historian and “Now & Then” column founder Paul Dorpat following his 2019 retirement.

Before his donation and at the library’s request, I was honored in early 2018 to spend 17 afternoons in Dorpat’s basement in Wallingford, logging negatives, prints, slides, discs, tapes, films and other media that he amassed for four decades to document a constellation of Seattle-area scenes. The total, covering a century and a half, exceeded 309,000 items. Many, including a glass-plate negative of the Kawakami image, were unlabeled.

Dorpat, 87, who now lives in a Shoreline care center, contributed his collection to the library because of its mission to provide free public access. But he also knew its staff would first marshal extensive tools — city directories, index files, databases and other collections — to give the materials meaning.

The barbershop photo is a telling example, says Sean Lanksbury, the library’s Special Collections service manager, who assumes that painstaking scrutiny of such images eventually pays off.

In this case,  he says, the library contemplates a potentially wide-ranging impact down the road, “whether it be someone seeking images from that Seattle neighborhood, researchers on minority-operated businesses or, better yet, a relative of these particular Kawakamis.”

Work on the Dorpat collection continues. Public access — and posterity — await!

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Knute Berger, Sean Lanksbury and Gergana Abernathy 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column. (Notice anything different in this week’s 360 audio? If so, email your hunch to Clay Eals or Jean Sherrard.)

Below, you will find 2 additional photos and 3 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Plus, you now can browse part of the Paul Dorpat Collection at Seattle Public Library. Click here!

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 5, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 8, 2025

How Seattle’s 1892 Metropole Building went from gunfight to the good fight

By Jean Sherrard

On June 25, 1901, a feud between former friends turned deadly at the Metropole Building. Armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a brace of revolvers, disgraced former Seattle police chief William Meredith ambushed theater owner John Considine outside G.O. Guy’s drugstore at Second Avenue and Yesler Way.

Once close allies, the two men had become bitter enemies after Considine’s accusations of corruption led to Meredith’s dismissal. Meredith fired first. His shotgun blast missed Considine, tearing through the store’s front doorway and lodging in the ceiling. Considine fled into the shop with Meredith close behind. The two wrestled until Considine drew his own .38 and shot and killed the former lawman, according to contemporaneous reporting in The Seattle Times and later historical accounts. (For an authoritative retelling of this story, visit HistoryLink, where historian Phil Dougherty masterfully lays out the fascinating, if sordid, details)

The encounter lasted less than 90 seconds. Seattle was transfixed. Though Considine was later acquitted, for years passersby stopped to peer at shotgun pellet holes still visible in the drugstore’s ceiling. The violence passed. The city moved on. The building survived—then slowly slipped into a long, silent decline.

Today, nothing remains of the drugstore or the damage. But the Metropole originally known as the H.K. Owens Building, financed by Henry Yesler in 1892 as a brick phoenix rising from the ashes of the Great Fire—still remains, across the street from the Smith Tower. A century after the shooting, it became the site of another fight. Not over vengeance, but purpose.

Following a damaging 2007 fire and more than a decade of vacancy and false starts, the building was purchased in 2019 by the Satterberg Foundation, a

Seattle philanthropic organization that experienced a seismic shift in 2014 when its endowment grew from $4 million to more than $400 million following a major gift. Instead of treating the Metropole as a conventional real estate investment, the foundation chose to make the building itself a tool of its mission, which centers on social justice, equity and community-based work.

In 2018, it had architect Matt Aalfs and his firm, BuildingWork, transform the ruin into a hub for nonprofits with office, child care and community spaces while meeting the strictest possible environmental standards. The renovation achieved LEED Platinum certification, turning a 19th-century structure into a model of modern sustainability. The building is now fully electrified. Old-growth timbers milled in the 1890s have been salvaged and repurposed into stairs and furniture. Daylight reaches deep into the interior, and a structure once sealed and abandoned has been

reopened to the public.

If the shootout in 1901 reflected a young city struggling to establish order, the Metropole’s rebirth signals something quieter and harder: the work of sustaining a city over time. The shotgun pellet holes are gone. What remains is a foundation for the good fight.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360-degree video of this column, click here.

See below for a few more photos of the Metropole’s reconstructed interior:

To see answers to the three questions posed in the first paragraph of text, scroll down to “Web Extras.”

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 29, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 1, 2026

Pioneering ‘Quizdown’ showcased local students’ wisdom, futures

By Clay Eals

Quick quiz: When the Ice Age ended, was the terrain rocky and rough or flat and fertile? What type of engine burns oil, not gasoline? If you turn a quart of water into steam, would the steam be more or less than a quart?

For answers, many of us today would dive into Google. Not so, however, for children who starred in 366 episodes of Seattle’s first locally produced program, “Quizdown,” which featured 5,000 fourth- through sixth-graders from public and private schools across King County.

Broadcast on Saturdays, “Quizdown” began on KOMO radio on Jan. 8, 1949, converted to TV on KING on Nov. 1, 1952, and on Dec. 12, 1953, returned to KOMO, where it remained on TV for the rest of its 16-1/2-year run.

From schools, KOMO and the co-sponsoring Seattle Post-Intelligencer solicited students’ questions, which numbered in the tens of thousands and probed topics in science, history, math and civics.

Longtime “quizmaster” Millard Ireland then interviewed and popped questions to pre-teens during the half-hour shows. Installments featured six students from each of two schools (plus alternates), competing for their schools to win encyclopedias, record players and other prizes.

“That it was on TV made it an example for countless kids that education is important, it can be fun, and it can lead to rewards,” reflects former longtime KING-TV anchor Jean Enersen, who helped represent Magnolia’s Our Lady of Fatima Parish School at age 11 in 1956.

The show’s name stemmed from “spelldown,” an event in which all contestants start standing, then sit as they’re eliminated. In “Quizdown,” though, students sat at school desks, facing cameras. Signs hung from their necks indicating their names and grade levels.

The show’s peppy personality derived from Ireland, an early newscaster who later became a U.S. Civil Defense official. His encouraging, rapid-fire exchanges with kids hinted at their later lives. On Feb. 1, 1958, for example, he ferreted out the interests of John Hay Elementary sixth-grader Norm Ahlquist.

“I like to work with radio and television,” Ahlquist said. “When they don’t work, I like to find out what’s wrong with them. … One time there was just a raster [grid pattern] but no picture. There was only one video tube in there, so we checked it, and it turned out to be completely dead.”

“You know,” Ireland deadpanned, “you might be teaching our technicians something about how to fix their own sets.”

Today, Ahlquist, 79, of Capitol Hill, boasts a long career in computers and civil engineering.

For another student from the same show, former Colman Elementary sixth-grader Cris Krisologo, (pronounced kris-OH-luh-go), 80, of Columbia City, “Quizdown” was consequential:

“It was like, ‘I can do that. I could probably answer those questions.’ Doing a show with younger kids really makes a difference. You start to get their juices going and thinking, ‘What do I want to really be?’ ”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Norm Ahlquist, Cris Krisologo, Darwin Mitchell, Cal Ernst, Jean Enersen and especially Lindsy Ireland and Joe Wren 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find answers to the quiz questions posed in the first paragraph above, a video of the Feb. 1, 1958, episode of “Quizdown”; a video interview with a participant in that show, Cris Krisologo; 2 additional photos and 42 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

=====

Answers to quiz questions in the first paragraph above:

1. Rocky and rough.
2. Diesel.
3. More. (One quart equals 1,600 quarts of steam.)

UPDATE: We just received the following email from Eugenia Woo of Historic Seattle:

Historic Seattle decided to reschedule our HeartBomb at Gas Works Park because of the Seahawks parade on Wednesday, February 11.

The HeartBomb is now scheduled for Tuesday, February 17. Meet at NOON; photo around 12:10/12:15 pm.

On Jan. 21, 2026, the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board voted 5-0 (with two recusals) to table Seattle Parks’ proposal for Gas Works Park, with conditions for Parks to address.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 21, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 25, 2025

Past, present, future:
Balancing safety and art at Gas Works Park

By Jean Sherrard

(Reader’s Note: This column is being published a day early to coincide with today’s pivotal Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board meeting regarding the fate of the Gas Works towers.)

In February 1971, 13-year-old Peter Steinbrueck accompanied his father, architect Victor Steinbrueck,

to an abandoned industrial site on the north shore of Lake Union.

The coal-gas plant had been shuttered since 1956. Its towers, pipes, and vats were widely regarded as toxic leftovers — candidates for removal rather than reverence.

But camera in hand, Peter saw something else.

“I was just a kid exploring,” he told me recently. “But even then, you could feel the power of it.”

While his dad sketched the two dominant towers from the ground, Peter photographed him at work, capturing a moment when the site’s fate hung between erasure and reinvention.

Even then, its uncertain future had drawn the attention of landscape architect Richard Haag. He had come to Seattle to help establish the University of Washington’s landscape architecture program at

Victor Steinbrueck’s encouragement. Haag proposed transforming the abandoned gas plant into a public park — a radical idea at the time.

Haag never sugarcoated the site’s condition. “It was awful,” he recalled in a 2015 interview. “I just thought, ‘God, what a horrible place … What an ecological disaster.’”

But where others saw only blight, Haag saw possibility — and a design problem to solve.

With no forests or rock outcroppings to anchor a conventional park design, Haag camped on the site, sleeping beneath the towers, waiting for the place to declare itself.

It did, unmistakably.

Facing fierce public opposition — particularly from the

family of late City Council member Myrtle Edwards, who viewed the plant as an ugly stain on the lakefront — Haag defended the towers in public hearings by turning them into characters.

The largest became “Myrtle Edwards.” The one behind it, standing in her wake, became her husband.

“Wait a minute,” Haag realized. “Here’s a whole family.”

By anthropomorphizing what critics dismissed as junk, Haag reframed industrial debris as presence — what he later called “obdurate objects,” refusing to disappear. When Gas Works Park opened in 1975, the towers remained.

A half-century later, the skyline has risen around Gas Works Park, but the vision of open engagement has narrowed.

In 2015, Haag and historian Thaisa Way publicly argued to “Free the Towers” — remove the fencing around them and allow visitors to walk among the structures as sculptural ruins.

That hope has collapsed with tragedy. Since 2012, at least three people have died after falling from the park’s structures, most recently a 15-year-old boy in July. Eleven others have been injured in the past decade, some suffering broken bones or brain damage.

In the aftermath of those accidents, grieving parents called for the site to be declared a public hazard. The city, facing anguish and liability, confronts a painful question: Has preservation of the structures become untenable?

For now, Seattle Parks & Recreation has reinforced the fencing that encircles the central tower complex.

Noted Seattle public artist John Fleming finds the fencing dispiriting — visually dominant, hostile in tone and, as the tragedies have made clear, no guarantee of safety. It leaves the city trapped in a seemingly impossible binary: leave the hazard as it is, or remove it entirely.

“Do we cut down our trees because someone might climb one and fall?” Fleming asked during a recent visit. “You can’t eliminate all risk from the public realm. We have to live with facts on the ground,” he continues. “But that doesn’t mean tearing everything down.”

Fleming — whose public art includes “Western Tapestry” along Western Avenue below Pike Place Market and “Grass Blades,” an installation at Seattle Center composed of 110 tall, brightly colored vertical metal pieces — has an idea for a third way: a protective wrapper encircling the tower complex.

In his concept, a smooth, serpentine wall of colorful panels weaves around the rusting Gas Works bones. It would be impossible to climb and could rest lightly atop the capped, toxic soil, avoiding deep foundations.

The proposal is practical and philosophical.

The towers would no longer beckon as a playground. But instead of a fence that shouts “keep out,” Fleming describes his proposed art wall as a tribute — both to the historic structures and to the imaginative impulse that first saved them.

WEB EXTRAS

Update: John Fleming’s “Third Way” Perspective

Following the publication of this column, artist John Fleming shared with us a letter he has drafted for the Seattle Times. Writing in response to a previous reader’s letter regarding safety at the park, Fleming argues that the current “middle path” offered by the city is actually a plan for erasure.

John describes the Parks Department’s December 2025 eighty-five page “Pedestrian Appurtenance Removal Report” as a failure of imagination, noting that if their plan is followed—removing every item rendered in red in their drawings—the historic character of the site will be lost.

Countering the “Red Zone”

In a follow-up exchange today, Fleming provided an illustration to counter the Parks Department’s proposal to strip the structures of their “danger.” By taking the city’s own drawings and adding an 11-foot high gray band at the base, he illustrates a simpler, more surgical alternative.

Fleming notes that since the city’s own reports state that 99% of people cannot scale an 11-foot barrier without assistance (like a ladder or rope), a targeted barrier in the 11-to-15-foot zone could effectively keep climbers out while saving the historic “red” elements above that line.

As John notes in his response to the Times:

“I am writing in response to Tim O’Connor’s letter claiming that Seattle Parks Department has presented a well thought out middle path… The report includes detailed drawings with items rendered in red for removal. If you take away everything marked in red, all that is left are nine or ten tall smooth cylinders, hardly what we think of as our historic Gas Works.

We’ve been stating that we don’t want to cut down our trees to prevent young people from falling out of them. SPD’s so called middle path is like cutting all the branches off so we’re left with telephone poles.”

His vision reminds us that treating these industrial relics with the same respect afforded to high art might finally shift public behavior from hazard-climbing to appreciation.

For our narrated 360-degree video of this column, head over here.

Also, Peter Steinbrueck shares his astonishing never-before-seen photos of Gas Works, snapped in February 1971 when he was just 13 years old.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 15, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 18, 2026

Past is present: Immersion in the Depression’s day-to-day ordeal

By Clay Eals

When people picture the Great Depression in Seattle, one scene usually comes to mind. It’s depicted in in our “Then” shot looking north along the waterfront to downtown.

Even in bright sunlight, it’s a dark landscape. While smoky piers bespeak activity, the foreground paints a dispiriting amalgam of scattered, makeshift dwellings. This “town that forgot the straight line,” as dubbed by American Architect magazine in 1933, appears devoid of people. But contrary evidence abounds, including light-colored clothes flapping in the wind.

Overseen by the Seattle Tower (1929, center) and Smith Tower (1914, right), this formerly vacant acreage had been the site of World War I concrete machinery pits before it became known as Hooverville, a jab at Herbert Hoover, the new president when the stock market crashed in 1929, triggering the Depression.

The landscape portrait was taken early in Hooverville’s nine-year existence. What many don’t realize — and what may resonate in today’s homelessness debate — is that the city declared the Hooverville huts hazardous and twice used kerosene to burn them down before letting the 600 inhabitants, nearly all men, rebuild with a promise to keep order. The pact lasted until 1940, when the site was cleared for use by U.S armed forces as the country again mobilized for war.

Those are among countless details in the narrative carved by former Seattle Times editorial board member Bruce Ramsey in his book “Seattle in the Great Depression” (2025, WSU Press). Therein, the retired, longtime regional business reporter, a child of Depression parents, offers two noteworthy approaches to the topic.

First, Ramsey mines material straight from the city’s three daily newspapers and other period publications, including a master’s thesis by a University of Washington student who lived in Hooverville. Second, unusual for history books, Ramsey casts his tale entirely in the present tense.

The result is that, in 344 pages and with 120 photos, readers can experience how Seattle lived through the nationwide economic and social crisis day by grueling day. As Ramsey puts it, “Newspaper stories are first impressions, fresh takes. Because I wasn’t there, I want to listen to the people who were.”

Today, the Hooverville site is near the Port of Seattle’s Terminal 46, eerily empty since the 2017 collapse of cargo giant Hanjin Shipping Co. The governing Northwest Seaport Alliance is seeking a replacement.

Meanwhile, Greg Nickels, tagged with his own Nickelsville jab for homeless villages arising late in his 2001-2009 Seattle mayoral term, argues in a recent Facebook post that the land should “come back in the heart of the city” as a vibrant urban center like Granville Island in Vancouver, B.C.

Whatever its future, the area’s haunting past persists in perspectives of the present.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ensign Santiago Vazquez and Petty Officers Daylan Garlic and William Kirk of the U.S. Coast Guard for photo access to their building and especially Bruce and Anne Ramsey 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find a 1982 “Now & Then” column on Hooverville, 8 additional photos and 2 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 11, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 8, 2025

Built in 1925, restored Devonshire Apartments preserve affordable housing

By Jean Sherrard

FOR A CENTURY, the red brick Devonshire Apartments have anchored the northern edge of Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. The Tudor flourishes of the handsome, U-shaped touchstone have greeted generations of clerks, shop workers and downtown strivers.

Yet this resilient 1925 structure has more than once come close to death, threatened by economic collapse, eyed by developers and nearly surrendered to decay.

A rare alignment of community will and financing has granted the Devonshire a new lease on life, securing the property’s 62 units as affordable housing for the next century.

Designed by locally prominent architect Henry

Bittman, the building rose during Belltown’s regrade-fueled boom as Wall Street Court — a name that reflected prestige until the 1929 stock market crash. Two weeks later, newspaper ads quietly reintroduced the property under a less toxic banner: the Devonshire.

For nearly a century, its design remained intact, including a basement garage tucked beneath its courtyard — a rare amenity in the early auto age. Discreet brick openings in the exterior masonry reveal vintage pie-safe vents, narrow enough to cool a pastry but too tight for anyone to pinch one. What’s more, the original terrazzo floors and mirror accents in the central stairwell were carefully preserved during the gut renovation.

By 1979, developer Martin Selig, who later built the 76-story Columbia Center, proposed replacing the three-story walk-up with a 48-story tower. Tenants protested and prevailed, saving the bricks but not stopping time. In 2021, a plumbing failure signaled the structure’s pending demise.

Community Roots Housing, the Devonshire’s nonprofit owner since 1993, chose to preserve and modernize. Backed by $33 million from the city Office of Housing, Heritage Bank and federal tax credits, the organization completed a top-to-bottom restoration. “Every time we peeled back a layer, it was like playing back an idea from 100 years ago,” says Jordan Sullivan, real estate director.

Crews poured new concrete shear walls inside the masonry to meet seismic codes. They solved puzzles ranging from odd rooftop structures composed of stacked old-growth timbers to ancient ducts, nicknaming the new walls after cheeses — cheddar, never Swiss. (“No holes allowed,” Sullivan quips.)

One facade detail puzzled the team: repeating terra-cotta shields bearing a large “S.” Did it stand for Seattle? Newly unearthed 1925 documents offer a clue:the letter likely honors F.M. Stanley, the original owner who abandoned the “Wall Street” branding after the crash.

For new tenant Kat Metrovich, the “S” means survival.

A former PCC cheesemonger priced out of Queen Anne, Metrovich says landing affordable digs feels life changing. “It’s challenging to locate housing in this town if you’re not right in the money,” she says. “This feels like home.”

According to Community Roots CEO Colleen Echohawk, that sentiment is the renovation’s true measure. “The goal is simple,” she says. “To keep people housed and happy for another 100 years.”

WEB EXTRAS

 For a narrated street-side 360 degree video view of the Devonshire Apartments, click here.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 1, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 4, 2026

Meadowbrook Pool turns 50

‘A sense of belonging’ where there’s ‘nothing but water’

By Clay Eals

If you zip along busy 35th Avenue Northeast, Meadowbrook Pool is hard to miss, just as when it opened 50 years ago.

The building bears a distinctively broad and slanted roof. Up a wooded sweep of steps and inside the entry, its bustling lobby acts as a prelude to action in the pool itself. Swimmers dot the pool’s water beneath a wood-beamed vault ceiling that creates the aura of a mountain lodge.

Smiles are everywhere — exactly the point when the natatorium was dreamed up with six other city pools  and voter-approved as part of the Forward Thrust campaign in 1968.

“In a place like Seattle, there was really nowhere to learn to swim except the lakes,” recalls 94-year-old Green Lake resident David Towne, city Parks superintendent when Meadowbrook opened. “I think the idea was to teach everybody to swim and live in this part of the world where we have nothing but water.”

Designed by Seattle architects Calvin/Gorasht, the 44-by-75-foot pool was dedicated Oct. 28, 1975. It presides at the southeast corner of Meadowbrook Playfield, a site with deep roots. Formerly part of Meadowbrook Golf Course, established in the early 1930s, the complex abuts the 1963 Nathan Hale High School, mirroring school/pool placements elsewhere in Seattle.

Though fueled by Forward Thrust money — bond measures that created the Kingdome, neighborhood improvements, arterial highways and other projects — Meadowbrook Pool’s construction was no easy endeavor.

Hindered by swampy land near Thornton Creek and bids more expensive than forecast, plus economic fallout from the notorious Boeing Bust in the early 1970s, the project took several years longer than anticipated to complete.

Today, however, the pool — with a newer community center built next door in the late 1990s — is a point of pride, what Towne calls a “mark of achievement” for a district tucked between Lake City Way and northern Lake Washington. Of course, he allows that not everyone is a swimmer, but the pool and community-center combo provides a sum greater than its parts, a place “to socialize, be involved. It adds a sense of belonging.”

Embodying that spirit is Jenson Yuen, who grew up in the neighborhood and began swimming at Meadowbrook at age 4.

He started volunteering at the pool in 2010, has been employed there for 11 years and is now senior lifeguard and assistant coordinator.

“Connecting with various generations” inspires him, he says. “In our recreation swim, we have grandmothers bringing their grandkids. We have parents who take the day off, who take their newborn babies here, and they swim. It’s truly a way for everyone to come together, and it’s a really great place to just have fun.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Valarie Bunn, Jeanette Voiland, Dave Belanger, Stacy Moe, Jenson Yuen and especially David Towne 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find a video interview of Jenson Yuen,  the pool’s dedication program, 14 additional photos and 8 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Click each headline or photo to see the complete Postscript!

City Light surplused ‘Evolution of Lighting’ panels as scrap metal
— by Clay Eals

Newly restored, Marvin Oliver’s poles soon will return to Steinbrueck Park — by Jean Sherrard

Click each headline or photo to see the complete Postscript!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 11, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 14, 2025

For Space Needle’s longtime Santa, Christmas is all about presence

By Jean Sherrard

Some things must be seen to be believed. The transformation of mild-mannered Russell Long into Santa Claus is one.

Emerging from a basement changing room beneath the Space Needle, snowy-bearded Santa Russ encounters wreaths of smiles and spontaneous delight.

“Santa, you’re back!” exclaim Needle staffers with childlike glee. In the gift shop, visitors clamor for ussies with Saint Nick as others point and wave.

While we ride the elevator to the observation deck for our photo shoot, I ask what draws people, young and old alike. He twinkles, then takes my breath away.

“Unconditional love,” he says gently but firmly.

Long’s metamorphosis began nearly 30 years ago when, facing early retirement from Microsoft, he felt adrift. A pastor at his church made an offhand suggestion: with his rotund figure, full beard, and kindly demeanor, why not play Santa for the season?

He joined Arthur & Associates, the Seattle company that has supplied Santas for many decades. In 1943, its founder, Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer Art French, watched crowds visiting the Frederick & Nelson Santa through his office window and thought, “We should be taking pictures of that.” The following year, French opened a photo studio in the department store and began snapping shots of tots on Santa’s lap. He made over $10,000 in a single month, several times his annual P-I salary. His idea spread nationwide, becoming a holiday tradition that endures eight decades later.

Long dove in. Dyeing his blonde hair and beard white was, he recalls, torturous. “The bleach was so strong, I had to breathe through a hose for half an hour.” A local tailor hand-sewed his first velveteen red suit.

By 1998, Santa Russ was greeting families at Bellevue Square. Later generations followed him from mall to Needle, bringing children and grandchildren to perch on his lap.

The work isn’t without strain. “My cheeks hurt those first few days,” he says. “You don’t realize how much smiling it takes. And you have to train your mustache to curl up — it makes the smile bigger.”

Each appearance begins with a quiet ritual of transformation. “White gloves first, then gold spectacles, then the robe,” he says. “By the time I’ve finished dressing, Santa has arrived.”

The enduring moments aren’t about presents. “One boy, around nine, told me what he wanted most was for his dad to quit smoking,” Long says. “I turned to the father and said, ‘Did you hear that? He wants you to stick around.’ That’s when you realize Santa can touch a whole family.”

He also recalls parents arriving from Seattle Children’s Hospital, bringing fragile children for what might be final photos. “You never forget those visits,” he says softly.

So what’s Santa’s secret? He sparkles. “We all need to give our gifts,” he says. “Everyone has something: time, kindness, love. It does us good when we give it.”

For Santa Russ, the gift is presence itself. “I know how to listen,” he says. “Being heard and accepted — that’s the true spirit of Christmas.”

WEB EXTRAS

First, a bit of shameless self-promotion. Join me for the 18th annual Rogue’s Christmas, this Sunday at Seattle’s Town Hall!

Now back to our regular programming! To watch a narrated 360 degree video of the Santa Russ column recorded atop the Space Needle, click right here.

Also, check out a few extras from Santa Russ himself beginning with 18 sequential annual photos of Isabel Brownlow.

Afterward, you’ll find a half-dozen Seattle Post-Intelligencer news clips detailing the origin of Santa photos here at Frederick & Nelson by P-I photographer Art French in the mid-1940s.

Plus, there’s video of a Dec. 20, 2017, “Eric’s Heroes” story from KOMO-TV, courtesy archivist Joe Wren, covering the Frederick & Nelson Santa-photo story.

In addition, here’s a column from four years ago about Seattle’s 1968-1976 giant Westlake Santa.

And from my column partner Clay Eals, scroll down further to see several more Santa-related extras!

Santa-related extras from Clay

By Clay Eals

First is a charming take-off on a classic holiday poem, “T’was the Plight Before Christmas,” by West Seattleite Sue Barry. It makes for a delightful, read-aloud piece, perhaps best-timed for Christmas Eve. You might call it a union tale, but the message goes much further. To download it, just click the Santa-hat image here:

Next is a repeat from five years ago from this blog — but actually from 40 years ago when it first was published!

I offer this “Black Santa” story of mine that appeared Christmas Day 1985 on the front page of the West Seattle Herald, for which I served as editor. The fine photos were by Herald photographer Brad Garrison. This is posted with the permission of Robinson Newspapers.

I have tried searching online for Tracy Bennett, the subject of this story, who would be 62 today. Alas, I have turned up nothing.

Still, this story about Tracy and his view on the Santa milieu remains timely, powerful and inspiring — at least, that’s my hope.

At the time I wrote it, the story resonated quite personally, From 1985 to 1993, I volunteered more than 100 times to play Santa for children and adults at parties and in schools, community halls and private homes throughout Puget Sound as part of the American Heart Association’s “Santa with a Heart” fundraising program. As any Santa will tell you, it was a uniquely heartwarming and unforgettable experience. (See clippings at bottom.)

Please click any of the images once or twice to enlarge them for easy reading. And if you want to read the transcribed Black Santa text instead of reading directly from the images, scroll down.

Merry merry, and ho, ho, ho!

West Seattle Herald, Dec. 25, 1985

‘Just for you’

Black Santa relishes children’s happiness

Santa Claus, known as Tracy Bennett in the “off”-season, walks into a class of busy fifth- and sixth-graders at Hughes Elementary School in West Seattle.

“Hi, boys and girls,” says Santa.

“Oh, hi Santa Claus!” the students respond, almost in unison.

“Howya doin’?”

“Fine.”

“That’s good. I thought I’d drop in and visit you for a minute.”

“Yeah,” say a couple of students. “You changed colors.”

“Yeah,” answers Santa, “I sure did, didn’t I?”

By CLAY EALS

When most of those who are opening packages under the Christmas tree this morning think about “the man with all the toys,” their vision probably doesn’t look like Tracy Bennett.

That’s because Bennett is Black, while nearly all of the Santas in the world — at least in the United States — seem to be as white as the North Pole’s year-round snow.

Bennett isn’t bothered, however. He keeps an upbeat, optimistic attitude about the seasonal craft he’s practiced for the past 12 years. He says he’s encountered subtle prejudice from adults and skepticism from kids, but he boasts of being able to win over most of the doubters.

Exposure is what Bennett says he needs most. And so do the other Black Santas in America, he says.

Bennett got some of the exposure he desired last week when he walked the halls of both Hughes and Van Asselt elementary schools, the latter of which is attended by some students who live in southern West Seattle and the city side of White Center.

He roamed the halls at Hughes and, with the assistance of teacher Willa Williams, peeked into classrooms and dropped off sacks of candy canes, occasionally stopping for a few minutes to talk to kids on his lap. Bearing a staccato, smile-inducing “ho, ho, ho,” he almost resembled a politician, repeatedly extending his hand for a shake and greeting children with a steady stream of “Howyadoin’? … Howyadoin’, guy? … Hiya guys. Workin’ hard?”

The racially mixed classes responded in a generally positive way. Although one sixth-grader was heard to say, “I thought Santa Claus was white, because I saw a white Santa Claus at The Bon,” for the most part any negative comments centered on whether he was “real,” not on his skin color.

“He’s nice, but his hair’s made out of cotton. Weird,” said fourth-grader Jessica Canfield. “And he has clothes under his other clothes.”

“He’s fine, and I like him,” said fellow fourth-grader Johnny Cassanova. “He said that he would visit me, and he would try to get everything that I want for Christmas and to get good grades.”

Was he the “real” Santa? “Yeah,” said Johnny, “to me he is.”

“It went real good,” Bennett said afterward. “They were very polite. They weren’t skeptical. Mostly loving, you can tell.”

Bennett, who at 22 is unemployed and intends to go to school so that he can get a job either as a police officer or working with handicapped kids, began his Santa “career” at the young age of 10. “I started as a little dwarf and moved my way up,” the Rainier Valley resident said with a laugh.

Over the years, Bennett said, he’s been Santa at private gatherings and community centers in Seattle’s south end, and he’s pieced together a costume he thinks is unimposing. The key part, he said, is his beard, which is a rather flat affair.

“The big Santa Claus beards and hairs are so flocky, so thick, that it scares some children,” Bennett said. “His color of his suit and his beard is so bright already, along with the brightness of his face.

“A Black Santa Claus with a white beard seems to bring out an older look, and the color of my skin makes it look like a normal Black man wearing a suit.”

Consequently, he said, kids warm up to him rather quickly. “Apparently I work out pretty good,” he said.

Children, both white and minority, raise the racial question fairly often, Bennett said. They usually just say, “Santa Claus is white,” expecting a response, he said.

“But I really don’t say nothing. I just look at ’em and smile, or I say ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ and they usually don’t ask anymore,” he said. “I’m used to it, so it’s no problem.”

Bennett does look forward to a day when more Black Santas are around to break the racial ice at Christmastime.

“I’m not the only one, but I never see ’em in stores,” he said. If just one major downtown store would feature a Black Santa, “that would mean the 12 years that I’ve been working on it has started to come through,” he said. “It would be a breakthrough. I want it to happen.”

He also would like to see children exposed to Santas of a variety of races. “If we bring the children Black Santa Clauses, Korean Santa Clauses, Japanese Santa Clauses, the kids will like it after a while,” he said.

For that to happen, however, some prejudices will have to be broken down gradually. “You can feel it’s there,” he said. “You try to believe it’s not there, but you can see it in people’s eyes.”

Like any Santa Claus, Bennett finds it a “thrill” to portray Saint Nick to children. “When kids are happy, I’m happy. When they’re sad, I feel for ’em. I’d like to give ’em more than I can.”

He insists, however, that it’s important not to insist that he’s the “real” Santa when kids challenge him. He tells children, “You don’t have to believe in me. But I’m doing this just for you.”

“Why ruin a kid’s mind and say, ‘I’m real, believe me’?” he said. “He (Santa) is a beautiful man, OK? No one can take that away from him. But we have to tell what’s real from not. We have to tell our kids we play Santa Claus because we love children.”

Bennett also said it’s important not to push the religious aspects of Christmas as Santa. “When we talk about religion, we have to let kids do what they want, do not force them.”

Williams, the teacher, took the same approach in deciding to invite Bennett, a friend of hers, to visit Hughes. While Christmas “is a fun time and should be a time for joy,” she said she’s well aware of the Seattle School District’s policy that’s intended to separate religion from school activity.

Bringing Santa to the classroom — and a Black Santa at that — was an attempt to get students to “understand each other’s differences,” she said.

“When I told them Santa Claus might visit, one student told me, ‘I don’t believe in Santa Claus.’ Another said, ‘Santa Claus is my mom and dad,’ and another said, ‘Santa Claus is Jesus’,” Williams said. “It was just the idea of general thought and letting them express themselves and learning to accept each and every person and their differences as long as there isn’t any harm.”

For Bennett, the delight of being Santa is that “guy is just a giving person, you know?

“He gives away things to make people happy. If a child’s sick in bed, he sees Santa Claus, he’s going to try to smile as much as he can because he’s happy. When they say, ‘Santa Claus, you didn’t give me so-and-so,’ I say, ‘Well, maybe next year, OK?’

“I don’t tell them I’m going to get this (particular item) for them and get their hopes up. I tell them that maybe somebody will get it for them very soon.

“One guy said he wanted to go to college, and I said, ‘Maybe next Christmas or a few Christmases from now, you’ll be going to college and be saying you got your wish.’ ”

Bennett clearly is hooked on his annual role: “As long as I live and as long as I stay healthy, I’ll always be Santa Claus.”

P.S. Clay as Santa

As promised above, here are tidbits from my eight-year volunteer Santa Claus “career” for the American Heart Association: two clippings in which I demonstrate for other Santas the best way to don the uniform, plus a sketch I created to provide step-by-step guidance. Click once or twice on the images to enlarge them. —Clay

A bonus:

Just for fun and to keep with the theme, I also am including a Santa article I wrote that appeared on Christmas Eve 1980 in The Oregonian near the end of my eight-year stint as a reporter and photographer for that newspaper. Again, click once or twice on the image to enlarge it for easy readability. Enjoy! —Clay

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 4, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 7, 2025

Rollin’ on the river: 1975 Red Barn move launched flight museum

By Clay Eals

To soar, sometimes you’ve first gotta float.

The 22.5-acre Museum of Flight near Boeing Field south of Seattle is no secret. The world’s largest independent, nonprofit aerospace museum — home to 175 aircraft and spacecraft, thousands of artifacts, millions of photos and dozens of exhibits — is bedrock here. But few know of the spectacle that set its course.

Fifty years ago, on a foggy Tuesday, Dec. 16, 1975, a battered, two-story, 1909 building eased off Port of Seattle property along the Duwamish River in West Seattle. Once a boat shop and Boeing’s original airplane factory, the edifice had been long abandoned. That day, its 150-by-65-foot frame, weighing 325 tons, began a two-mile barge journey upriver, arriving at the Duwamish’s east bank. The next day, it rolled across East Marginal Way to its eventual home base.

Bright red, with distinctive white lettering, the building was Seattle’s beloved Red Barn.

On the eve of the nation’s bicentennial, the move became what the first executive director, Howard Lovering, calls the museum’s “fulcrum” — the pivotal moment turning civic nostalgia into collective action.

The move, following the shortest route from points A to B, was a nail-biter. “The industrial canal was a wonderful way to do it,” says Lovering, 88, “but it wasn’t easy. The structure was in such bad shape that it was going to fall apart if you tried to move it. It had to be secured.”

The bigger challenge was an electricians’ strike. “We had to cross East Marginal Way, and the high-tension wires there carried an awful lot of power,” Lovering says. “Facilities people said we needed a three- to four-foot rise, and there was no crew to do it. They said, ‘If you cross the street, this wood structure with its wrought-iron fire exits, you’d have the world’s largest toaster.’

“It scared the heck out of all of us. I ended up in the union hall saying, ‘Is there some way we can get those raised?’ They cared enough about this building to say, ‘No, we can’t do that, but we know a non-union firm that might.’ And those wires were raised just adequately for us to pass under. When we got across, everybody breathed a sigh of relief, and we headed for the taverns.”

And the museum’s new home began to soar.

A 1976 open house drew 20,000. The restored Red Barn opened in 1983. Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush headlined the 1987 opening of the next-door Great Gallery. Today, the much-expanded museum lures a half-million visitors and serves 140,000 students each year.

Lovering still marvels: “I’m not sure all of that would have happened without the move.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ted Huetter, Alison Bailey, Peder Nelson, Cody Othoudt, Jeff McCord and especially Howard Lovering 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find a video of the 1975 Red Barn move, a present-day video interview of Howard Lovering, 7 additional photos and 9 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

See this 2020 article on Howard Lovering at MarketingNW and listen to Lovering being interviewed earlier this fall by Feliks Banel on Cascade of History.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 27, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 30, 2025

Seattle’s Chinese Baptist Church has fostered community for more than 100 years

By Jean Sherrard

It was Friday, June 13, 1952. Fifteen 4- and 5-year-olds gathered for a graduation ceremony at Seattle’s Chinese Baptist Church nursery school, dressed in pint-sized mortarboards and black gowns. The school’s supervisor, Mrs. Harry Ruehlen, handed diplomas to each graduate.

Among them was Betty Lau, who still remembers the

musty basement classroom, the smell of chalk dust and the comfort of belonging.

Seven decades later, Lau stands before the same brick façade, joined by several former classmates. They reminisce about games, songs and afternoon naps, recalling how the church provided a place of warmth and community in post-war Seattle.

Founded in 1892, the Chinese Baptist Church served generations of families who made their homes and livelihoods in the surrounding neighborhood. Originally an outreach mission of Seattle First Baptist Church, it combined prayer services with English lessons for Chinese immigrants.

With no permanent home, early congregants first gathered in private homes and leased halls in old Chinatown. In 1902, they built a modest structure at Maynard Avenue South and South Washington Street. Two decades later, in 1922, the growing congregation purchased property at 10th Avenue South and South King Street.

By the early 1950s, Chinese Baptist served as a

spiritual center and anchor for young children whose parents worked long hours nearby. Its nursery school offered early education, socialization and — perhaps most important — a sense of place and welcome.

Lau recalls her teachers’ patient voices, one in English and one in Chinese, and the joy of receiving her diploma, which she kept for years. “I was very shy in public, but nursery school felt normal, like being in a bigger family,” she says with a smile. “I didn’t know the word ‘community’ yet, but that’s what it was.”

In the decades since, the church building has changed hands, and the neighborhood around it has evolved. Yet for Lau and her classmates, returning to that spot rekindles vivid memories of friendship, faith and beginnings.

Retired after 41 years as a secondary-school teacher, Lau sees clear lines between that early experience and her lifelong devotion to education and youth activities.

“Understanding where we come from,” she says, “gives students confidence and connection. Those who feel seen and supported thrive and carry that forward.”

The basement classroom may be long gone, but its lessons endure. Each reminiscence shared among Lau and her classmates summons cherished childhood scenes of caps and gowns — and parental pride — from a June day more than 70 years ago, when the future felt as bright as a diploma freshly handed to a 5-year-old.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video of this column, click through here.

Just to make trouble, I’m appending the initial draft of the column I submitted to The Times. In a Now & Then first, our editors summarily rejected it. It took a complete rewrite to ease it into print. 

Here’s the original version that was, said the Times, not ready for prime time:

Chinatown longtimers shun ‘international’ label: ‘We are Americans’

It was Friday, June 13, 1952. Fifteen 4 and 5-year-olds gathered for a graduation ceremony at Seattle’s Chinese Baptist Church nursery school, dressed in tiny mortarboards and black gowns. The school’s supervisor, Mrs. Harry Ruehlen, handed diplomas to each graduate.

Among them was Betty Lau, who still remembers the musty basement classroom, the smell of chalk dust and the thrill of belonging.

Seven decades later, Lau stands at that same brick façade, surrounded by former classmates and recalling with a smile how the church offered sanctuary in a city that had long drawn invisible lines denoting where Chinese families could and couldn’t live. Those borders, she says, still define a struggle for identity in Seattle’s Chinatown.

It was a pattern etched long before her time.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made Chinese immigrants the first group in U.S. history barred by race and nationality. In Seattle, exclusion persisted through property covenants, housing codes and loan denials that confined Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Black residents to a few downtown blocks.

Redlining maps from the 1930s shaded Chinatown bright pink — “hazardous”— a warning to banks not to invest.

This was coupled by what was labeled progress.

In 1928, the street called the Second Avenue Extension sliced through the second Chinatown, forcing re-location to King Street. The Interstate 5 corridor carved away another section in the 1960s. Construction of the Kingdome in the 1970s further impacted the neighborhood.

Each project promised renewal. Each time, Chinatown’s footprint shrank.

In 1951, a year before Lau’s nursery-school graduation, Mayor William Devin renamed Chinatown by proclamation, calling it the International Center. For the Chinese community, it felt like erasure.

Restaurateur Ruby Chow, who became the first Asian American elected to the King County Council — and become Lau’s mentor — bristled. The city of Seattle, she believed, had created a “reservation.”

“International,” son Brien Chow argues, implies Asian Americans are perpetual outsiders when they are Americans.

The linguistic sleight-of-hand eventually became civic policy, morphing into “International District,” then, as mandated by a 1999 city ordinance, “Chinatown International District” – the collective name of Chinatown, Japantown and Little Saigon.

Retired after 41 years as a secondary-school teacher, Lau says identity is essential to belonging.

“Understanding place and heritage,” she says, “gives students pride and connection. Those who are secure in their self-identity thrive and strengthen community.”

As former classmates gather with her at the church’s entrance, Lau eyes the neighborhood that raised them. Whatever any signs may read, for her it always will remain Chinatown.

So what do you think, gentle readers, on this rainy Thanksgiving? Interested to hear your opinions…

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 20, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 23, 2025

‘No way’ to keep couple from UW stadium’s new roof in 1950

By Clay Eals

At age 19, many of us dream of rising above it all. In 1950, Nancy Knox did just that — literally — by climbing onto the brand-new southern roof of University of Washington Stadium.

This was no sanctioned visit. Nor was it entirely safe. Newspapers had reported two weeks earlier that a steelworker had fallen from the cantilevered construction site to his death.

But for Nancy, a Roosevelt High graduate and incoming freshman who aimed for a job in teaching or librarianship, it was merely a sneaky transgression with her new boyfriend and future husband Charley Lennstrom.

“There was no way I should have been up on the roof,” the 94-year-old Normandy Park resident says, “but there was no way to stop us. When stuff is under construction, sometimes they don’t have all the barriers in place. So it wasn’t hard to get up. There were stairs that took you to the upper level of the ceiling, right? And then we were on the back side, outside of it, and went on up.”

Proof lies in 11 black-and-white snapshots taken by the pair with Charley’s camera during a late-summer caper just 12 days before the expanded stadium opened Sept. 23, 1950, for UW Husky football.

The images show the pair in various rooftop spots, along with impressive vistas. Long before drones and Google Earth, the soaring, 210-foot-tall roof — atop a distinctive zigzag grandstand and twin spiral walkways — provided glimpses never before seen from that vantage because until then, the 30-year-old stadium had resembled a flattened bowl.

Long known as Husky Stadium, the gridiron shrine in 1987 gained a twin north grandstand that famously collapsed during construction when support cables were prematurely removed. Repairs were completed in time for fall ball.

From Nancy’s and Charley’s trespass in 1950 grew a shared lifetime, which began at her family’s U District rooming house. The quieter Charley was a UW engineering student who later worked for Boeing. Outgoing Nancy, after they had four children, finished her degree in 1974 and worked at the Highline Community College library.

Over the years, they followed the Huskies, even attending the Rose Bowl in 1964. Charley died in 2007. Today, Nancy fondly recalls their rooftop rendezvous.

“It was an afternoon adventure, and there’s always the call to look at the view,” she says. “You could see all around to the north part of Lake Washington, around to the east and quite a bit to the south, the Montlake Bridge, all this stuff from above. You know how kids are. They like to explore. And it was our university.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Kathleen Lennstrom Bogue, Diane Lennstrom and especially Nancy Knox Lennstrom, as well as UW information officers Victor Balta, Dan Erickson, Kurt Svoboda Chip Lydum and Jeff Bechthold 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, you will find 5 additional photos and 10 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Also, click here to download the 2010 Seattle nomination report for Husky Stadium.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 13, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 16, 2025

Expresso insight 50 years ago still inspires Cafe Allegro

By Jean Sherrard

Blink and you might miss it. Nestled in a University District alley just off The Ave, Café Allegro is an unassuming temple to coffee — and community.

For the past 50 years, its caffeinated regulars, many from the UW campus one block east, have gathered to study, create, reflect and converse in a locale that seeded ideas and conventions that forever transformed how the world sees and drinks coffee.

The café’s first owner, Dave Olsen, had no grand ambitions when he first opened its doors. After serving as an Army air-defense officer in Seattle, followed by two years as a carpenter, he rode his bicycle to San Francisco in search of direction.

North Beach’s legendary Caffè Trieste, often cited as

the first espresso coffeehouse on the West Coast, offered a roadmap.

“I was completely smitten,” he says, “by the taste and aroma of coffee, the whole vibe of a café.”

Olsen returned to Seattle in pursuit of a dream. In December 1974, he signed the lease for an improbable location — the alley garage of a former U-District mortuary — and, with $17,000 in cash and buckets of sweat equity, he opened Café Allegro in May 1975. He had assembled all the essentials: an Italian espresso machine, fresh-roasted beans, recipes and techniques.

Then the first customer strolled in.

“He walks up to the counter and orders a cappuccino,” Olsen says. “I did the best I could, slid it across the counter, and took his money.”

They made eye contact, and Olsen had a lightbulb moment.

“I suddenly realized it’s all about connecting with people and taking care of them,” he says. “That has served me ever since.”

After 11 years at Allegro, Olsen accepted a job under a

rising young executive at Starbucks named Howard Schultz.

“We really hit it off,” Olsen says. “Howard was the creative force with business acumen and ambition. I was sleeves-rolled-up behind the counter, roasting coffee and training people.”

Schultz bought Starbucks’ original six Seattle storefronts and within a decade expanded to more than 1,000 shops. Olsen served as the chain’s first green-coffee buyer, scouring the world in search of beans.

In 1990, Olsen sold Café Allegro to then-managers Nathaniel Jackson and Chris Peterson, who continue the traditions Olsen established. Peterson juggles his day job as a lawyer with managing

the café and takes pride in roasting Allegro’s signature coffees.

“Our focus has always been the coffee and the community,” Peterson says. “We encourage people to hang out all day — to socialize and connect. And we’ve always been that way.”

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360-degree video featuring the Allegro and environs, click here.

Also, check out a video of Clay Eals’ Steve Goodman biography event held in the cafe’s upstairs room on Oct. 3, 2008. Clay’s book, Steve Goodman: Facing the Music, is now in its updated 6th printing!

Finally, a selection of photos from photographer Bill Kuhns, who’s documented Allegro life and times for decades.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 30, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 2, 2025

 In new ‘secret’ book, dancing maidens sweeten Tacoma’s stature

By Clay Eals

Modeled on Grecian nymphs, two French-cast statues of dancing maidens have welcomed visitors at downtown Tacoma’s showcase Wright Park for an astounding 133 years.

Their pale patina glows against the rich green of the 27-acre park’s abundant woods. Yet the maidens also hide, says Chris Staudinger, within the persistent persona of a city of 228,000 that’s shadowed by its Space Needled northern neighbor.

Tacoma, dubbed the City of Destiny when it was named the Northern Pacific Railroad’s western terminus in 1873, is “close to my heart,” says the 40-year-old ex-journalist. In the past nine years, Staudinger’s guided-tour business, Pretty Gritty Tours, has grown to 26 employees who mount a busy slate of excursions around the state, especially in Tacoma.

“It is such an incredibly important and historically rich city that gets passed over by a modern lens all the time,” he says. “There’s so many firsts or huge achievements that took place here. But the City of Destiny is still better known as the ‘Tacoma aroma.’ And I aim to fix that.”

In his 190-page book, “Secret Tacoma: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure” (2025, Reedy Press), Staudinger transforms the odiferous paper-mill/smelter reputation into a fragrant, fun collection of 94 unique, quirky spots that anyone would want to visit or revisit.

Notably, they include Tacoma’s oldest existing building, the 1873 Old St. Peter’s Church, which still operates in the city’s Old Town, and, not far away, the 1907 Engine House No. 9, now a pub.

Back at Wright Park, the maiden statues, like many of Staudinger’s entries, bear a colorful backstory. They arrived with Clinton P. Ferry (1830-1909), a booster known as the “Duke of Tacoma.” Ferry acquired them and other pieces, intending them for a new marital home, during a late-1880s European trip with his second wife.

One day on that trip, as recounted in Murray Morgan’s Tacoma-centered tome “Puget’s Sound,” Ferry returned early to their Parisian suite and caught his wife and her French tutor in flagrante delicto. Heartbroken, Ferry ended the marriage and gave his collected art to the city of Tacoma.

Over the years, the sculptures acquired nicknames — “Annie” (for her Annie Wright Seminary, now Schools, and for the wife of park donor Charles Wright) and “Fannie” (for nearby Fannie C. Paddock Memorial Hospital, now Tacoma General Hospital) — as well as a few bruises. Fannie’s right hand once reached her chin but now crosses her midsection. And today her right foot is missing.

Each mini-chapter in “Secret Tacoma” ends with a “Pro Tip.” The one for the maidens is “Be good to your loved ones.”

Short and, yes, sweet.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Boo Billstein and Chris Staudinger 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, you will find a video interview, 2 documents, 4 additional photos and 5 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 23, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 26, 2025

‘Secret Sauce’ saves island’s special gathering place, the Nordland General Store

By Jean Sherrard

Just east of Port Townsend, Marrowstone Island — so dubbed by Capt. George Vancouver on May 8, 1792, the same day he affixed “Mount Rainier” to a conical volcano southeast — harbors a bucolic sanctuary.

With a population of just under 1,000 that swells with vacationers each summer, the island’s unincorporated town of Nordland was founded by Norwegian immigrant Peter Nordby (1862-1919) who bought and platted its 187 acres in 1892.

Four years later, in 1896, Congress approved construction of Fort Flagler, a U.S. Army coastal artillery post at the island’s north end.

For more than a century, the Nordland General Store, built circa 1922, has stood at the island’s heart, selling groceries and supplies to locals and visitors alike.

Early records also illustrate a flip side to the business — its centrality to the community as a gathering place. The annual Strawberry Festival, first held a century ago, continues to draw celebrants peninsula-wide.

In recent decades, a lively Tractor Days parade has drawn farmers and lawn jockeys, rumbling their heavy machinery past the store every Memorial Day weekend. Other festivities include a pumpkin-weight guessing contest held before Halloween, a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in which Santa arrives by boat, and a Polar Bear Dip at noon on New Year’s Day.

In the early hours of Nov. 5, 2020, the store was sustained major damage from an electrical fire. The building was declared a total loss. “A little piece of

Marrowstone Island died when the Nordland Store was destroyed by fire,” reported the Peninsula Daily News.

Then-owners Tom and Sue Rose, nearing retirement, made the painful decision to put the business on hold. Townsfolk were unnerved, faced with the prospect of losing the island’s soul.

Longtime Marrowstoner Barcy Fisher and a more recent arrival, Patti Buckland, friends for more than 30

years, collaborated on an audacious business plan. To save this touchstone, why not convert the store to community ownership?

Cue huzzahs and applause. Inspired investors stepped up with nearly $400,000. 592 neighbors and friends chipped in $250 each for lifetime memberships to the co-op. What’s more, dozens of volunteers stepped up to help rebuild. Within 10 months, on May 25, 2024, the Nordland General Store staged its grand reopening. Rain notwithstanding, Buckland says, the event was attended by hundreds of exuberant neighbors.

“At the end of the day,” she says, “what we’re all about is serving our community. It’s not just about groceries. It’s about connection. That’s our secret sauce.”

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 9, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 12, 2025

Explosive legacy underlies Rainier Valley’s serene hilltop park

By Clay Eals

In this age of political pyrotechnics, what could be more welcome than a compact, peaceful park with a trail that winds through tall trees and native plants?

Inside this blufftop preserve we find no evidence, other than its namesake, that it once hosted an anything-but-tranquil fireworks factory that produced flares and explosions seen, heard and renowned the world over.

We are in the Columbia City neighborhood at Hitt’s Hill Park, named for Thomas Gabriel (T.G.) Hitt (1874-1958). An immigrant chemist from London by way of Victoria, B.C., he parlayed a childhood fascination for things that go boom into an international business based atop Rainier Valley’s highest slope.

In 1905, two years before Columbia City joined Seattle, Hitt Fireworks Co. took shape in what became 26 tarpapered shacks, each hand-numbered in red on galvanized grey signs, and spaced several yards from each other to prevent manufacturing accidents from obliterating the whole lot.

A frequent overseas traveler to negotiate deals, Hitt employed up to 200 people on his hill.

Products ranged from panoramic set pieces for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and other prominent fetes around the country to extra-loud “Flashcrackas” and other novelties that fit in the palm of a hand.

His craftsmanship also bolstered Oscar-winning Hollywood films, in the war scenes of “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930) and the burning-of-Atlanta sequence of “Gone with the Wind” (1939).

Not all was safe and sane, however.

Fiery onsite calamities occasionally made banner news, especially when on May 8, 1922, exploding powder killed 17-year-old employee Nora Bailey. One day later, the suicide of a same-aged female friend was attributed to her demise. Angry locals demanded the plant be banned from the city, but the city resisted, providing that Hitt obey fire-marshal regulations.

The heyday of Hitt, also a perfumer and inkmaker, started fading after his accidental arsenic poisoning in the 1930s, says great-grandson Ray Akers, but family continued the enterprise past his death into the 1970s. The company’s arc paralleled society’s love-hate relationship with fireworks, eventually resulting in Seattle banning their manufacture (and, later, their private use) and business moving abroad.

By century’s end, invasive ivy, blackberries and rats flourished onsite. Locals including Akers fought back plans for dozens of houses to be built on the 3.2-acre parcel. Open-space advocates successfully lobbied the city to make it a park and volunteered muscle and money to transform it into a natural refuge.

Today, the only major noise in the sanctuary comes from periodic jet overflights. The uninitiated would never suspect it once had been home to big bangs and fabricated flash.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Katie McClure and John Bennett 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, you will find 6 additional photos and 30 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 2, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 5, 2025

Ready for 50 years of riveting riddles? Game on in Woodinville!

By Jean Sherrard

Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” may recall a scene featuring youthful protagonist Bilbo Baggins exchanging riddles with the gruesome, elder Gollum who threatens to eat him if he fails to answer.

The historical questions we pose here may be playful and seemingly of local import only. But I would argue the stakes are high. Every place matters, every story counts, especially when history itself is on the line.

In its century and a half, Woodinville — just east of the north end of I-405 — contains more than a whiff of rural wizardry. Bounded by gentle rivers and lakes, and now a town known for dozens of picturesque wineries, its earliest brain-teasers are well worth exploring.

“Why was it named Woodinville?” asks a smiling Cherry Jarvis, co-founder of the Woodinville Heritage Society, celebrating its 50^th anniversary.

“So much timber maybe?” co-founder Phyllis Keller answers with a chuckle.

For those who don’t know the forest from the trees, the giveaway: Ira and Susan Woodin fled “urban” Seattle in 1871 and rowed up Sammamish Slough in search of new beginnings.

OK, that was easy. But the next sticklers may require attending an event. For details, read on.

Those following the Woodins found work in the village’s surrounding forest and farmland. They included lumber magnate Frederick Stimson, who built a baronial mansion in 1911 and opened a prize-winning dairy. He named it Hollywood Farm. Why? Were holly bushes abundant? Did Charlie Chaplin pay a visit?

A Woodinville blacksmith, born Johann Koch in Germany’s Baden-Baden, set up shop near the town cemetery. Why did he change his name to John Cook?

Tools of Cook/Koch’s trade (anvil, forge, hammer and tongs) pose even more mysteries. Why does his anvil anchor his grave?

Popular Norm’s Resort on bucolic Cottage Lake became nationally famous. Was owner Norm Fragner an early PR genius?

When one of our state’s largest wineries, Chateau Ste. Michelle, sought land to fulfill world-class aspirations, why did Woodinville stand out?

Such queries are enough to create enduring ties that bind.

“When we founded the heritage society in 1975,” recalls co-founder Jarvis, “Woodinville was small enough that we all knew each other.” Today, the town population approaches 14,000. “Together, we can honor the past,” says Kevin Stadler, the society’s president, “while inspiring connections for generations to come.”

Want to catch the inspiration?

Join “Now & Then” co-columnist Clay Eals and me at 10:50 a.m. (doors open at 10:15 a.m.) Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025, at Brightwater Environmental Community Center, where Woodinville Heritage Society will host a gathering of passionate, crackerjack history buffs who will supply “pocketses” of answers to all these riddles, and much more.

WEB EXTRA

So we return after a delightful program featuring the Woodinville Heritage Society historians to answer a few of the questions posed in the column.

A video of the hour-long program should be forthcoming with further solutions – we’ll post it as soon as it becomes available.

• Why did Frederick Stimson, lumberman, name his estate Hollywood? Most likely, says direct descendant MaryAnn Feczko, because of family connection to Southern California, specifically Los Angeles. Two Stimson brothers ended up living there and Frederick visited them often. So Charlie Chaplin never visited the farm, although President William Howard Taft put in an appearance!
• Woodinville blacksmith Johann Koch changed his name to John Cook to avoid anti-German sentiment during World War I. In future decades, he reverted to Johann Koch, which appears on his unique anvil tombstone. He requested that the anvil be inscribed “The Woodinville Blacksmith” but as he was not the only smithy in town, the inscription was altered, depriving him of a solo act.
• Norm Fragner of Norm’s Resort was, by all accounts, a genius of PR. His unique logo spread across the country on signs and post cards — bringing to mind the somewhat earlier Wall Drug marketing campaign in the 1930s promoting Wall, S.D., as a destination. Reportedly, signs for Norm’s Resort could be found from Alaska to the Mexican border.
• Finally, the reasons Chateau Ste Michelle chose Woodinville were various, if somewhat obvious. The already bucolic setting of the the Stimson estate combined with proximity to a major urban center provided the ideal environment to replicate a traditional French winery. Over the decades, dozens of winemakers have followed suit.

When the video presentation is completed, we’ll post it here with some fanfare. Congrats again to the Heritage Society on its 50th anniversary!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 26, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 28, 2025

For 36 wayward metal-art panels, let there be (city) light!

By Clay Eals

An exquisite set of 36 long-unseen city art treasures has come to light, at least most of it. A few panels are still missing. Was the set misplaced, lost, stolen? As with previous mysteries, we at “Now & Then” ask you, dear readers, to be detectives.

Ninety years ago, their owner, Seattle City Light, named the set “The Evolution of Lighting.” The silver-sheened panels trace an inspiring story, from ancient (“Primitive man’s first source of light, a forest fire caused by lightning”) to modern-day (“Edison’s First Incandescent Lamp, Perfected 1879”).

The wafer-thin panels are made of Britannia metal, a pewter alloy. Each 3-by-2-foot panel exemplifies a French relief art crafted by hammering the metal’s reverse side, a technique called repoussé (reh-poo-SAY), meaning “pushed back.”

The first 34 panels were designed by Albert E. Booth and hammered out by John W. Elliott, both Seattleites, in 1935 for the just-opened City Light building at 1015 Third Ave., encircling the lobby from above. Elliott — whose elaborate art adorns three-dozen prominent Northwest edifices — added two panels to update the exhibition for the expanded and remodeled City Light building in 1958. The aggregation was rearranged into a 27-by-8-foot wall, nine panels wide by four panels high.

The mystery? When City Light moved to the Seattle Municipal Tower at Sixth & Cherry in 1996, the panels were to follow.

“That never happened,” says Tom Parks, a 1979-2015 City Light employee who heads the Retired City Light Employees Association. “I think it was a task that fell through the cracks.” He says it’s possible they were filched, that someone thought, “They’re pretty cool, they’re old, and we can get some money for them.”

The evidence? In May, West Seattle antique dealer Mike Shaughnessy purchased four of the panels, each in a wooden frame, from a fellow “picker.” In August, after seeing a 1960 City Light booklet depicting all 36 panels, he doubled down, discovered 28 more and snapped them up. He is four shy of the whole set.

He envisions selling the set back to the city for the $12,000 he’s invested. But first he contemplates a downtown gallery display, including mockups of the missing panels, hoping to scare up the real ones.

Parks applauds the quest. “They were unique,” he says. “It was a key feature in the old lobby. It was the first thing that people noticed when they came in.”

How did the panels get into private hands? Where are the outliers? Shaughnessy’s trail has run dry. Our own inquiries and dives into local archives turn up nothing.

Clues, dear readers?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Gary Zarker, Tom Parks, Mike Wong, Jeanie Fisher of Seattle Municipal Archives, Laura Spess of University of Washington Special Collections and especially Mike Shaughnessy and Bradi Jones 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.

Here is other local coverage of this “history mystery”:

• West Seattle Blog, Sept. 27, 2025
• SPACE 101.5 FM, Sept. 28, 2025

Below, you will find Seattle City Light’s two booklets that display “The Evolution of Light” panels. The 1935 booklet shows 34 panels, and the 1960 booklet shows 36. Also there is the Jan. 30, 1996, program for the ceremony noting closure of the City Light building at 1015 Third Ave.

You also will find 3 additional photos and  8  historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 18, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 21, 2025

Kirkland historian brings web close-ups to Seattle’s silent-film era

By Clay Eals

When was the last time you saw a movie in a theater? Today, many stream movies from anywhere but theaters. No surprise, given society’s embrace of the convenience and selectivity of the internet.

So maybe it fits that a comprehensive new history of our region’s early movie exhibition is virtual, not physical.  The fledgling but voluminous website “Northwest Picture Show” supplies chronologies and anecdotes aiming to lure movie-maven Alices into a rewarding rabbit hole.

It’s the creation of Eric Flom, by day a benefits writer but at all other times a deep documenter of local theater lore. The 57-year-old Kirkland resident has devoured vintage trade magazines, newspapers and theater programs for the past 25 years.

With 236,000 words posted on his illustrated site (and 128,000 more coming this fall), Flom admits, “Brevity is not my strong suit.”

A fan of the pre-sound era, Flom isn’t averse to the limiting yet tangible medium of books to tell its stories. His 300-page tome “Silent Film Stars on the Stages of Seattle” (2009, McFarland) appraised our city’s turn-of-the-20th-century stage performances by scores of future celluloid luminaries, from Theda Bara to Buster Keaton.

But today the internet is Flom’s vehicle. Arguably his most significant narrative examines the Clemmer Theatre, which opened April 10, 1912, at 1414 Second Ave. downtown.

Capitalizing on widespread film fervor, James Q. Clemmer, the theater’s dream-big owner, became the first to construct an enduring palace in Seattle expressly designed for movies, not stage shows. The $100,000 project featured interior Roman columns and murals, 1,200 seats and a $10,000 pipe organ.

The alternate claim to fame, or infamy, for Clemmer is that he outflanked other local operators to mount lavish screenings of “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s cinematically innovative but racist 1915 epic about the Civil War and its aftermath.

Clemmer, who thrived in the Seattle theater business until his 1942 death at age 61, was a lifelong pitchman. In 1915 for Moving Picture World, a Seattle financier illuminated Clemmer’s aggressive approach:

“He came rushing into my office, pulled off his coat, unrolled a set of plans and started to talk. I excused myself, rushed into the next room and locked the safe. I was afraid he would grab my money, push me into the safe and run. Before he was through talking, I began to tremble in my boots for fear that I could not remember the combination to the safe in time to grab some of the stock of the Clemmer [Theatre] before it was all gone.”

Just one of myriad in-person, scene-stealing stories that Flom brings alive online.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Tom Blackwell and David Jeffers of the Puget Sound Theatre Organ Society, Lisa Oberg of University of Washington Special Collections, Bob Carney, Gavin MacDougall and especially Eric Flom 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, you also will find a link to “The Birth of a Nation” plus 1 additional photo and 19  historical clips (including two Paul Dorpat “Now & Then” columns) from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Free all-day history conference Saturday, Oct. 11, downtown

If you’re enjoying “Now & Then” every week, you may want to immerse yourself in local history for a full day — and for free, no less.

The Pacific Northwest Historian Guild ‘s 32nd regional history conference will take place all day on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025,  at the Seattle Public Library downtown.

With the theme “Challenging History,” the conference features a keynote address by local historian Lorraine McConaghy, as well as sessions covering a wide range of topics, from research challenges and waterscapes to labor politics and historic preservation.

The conference also includes a special lunch presentation by yours trulies Clay Eals and Jean Sherrard, and it will conclude with a wrap-up session.

In addition to the presentations, attendees can visit a book table with works by conference presenters and displays from sponsors.

Financial support comes from the Washington State Historical Society, 4Culture, Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, and HistoryLink.org.

Registration is required but is free. You can register and find the full schedule here. Day-of check-in begins at 8:15 a.m., and the program starts at 9 a.m. The wrap-up runs from 4:45 to 6 p.m.

In addition, a night-before reception and annual meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10, 2025, at the Mountaineers Seattle Program Center. Admission is $15 for Guild members, $25 for others.

Hope to see you there!

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times on-line on Sept. 11, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 14, 2025

Seattle’s waterfront past can illuminate its future, new book says

By Jean Sherrard

“No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe…”

— John Milton, “Paradise Lost“

Had English poet John Milton toured the shadowy underbelly of Seattle’s waterfront — as seen in our 1934 “Then” photo — he might have found his own words apt. Rotting pilings, crumbling fill and the stench of decaying waste lay mostly hidden from public view.

In “Where the City Meets the Sound: The Story of Seattle’s Waterfront” (HistoryLink, 2025), author Jennifer Ott, HistoryLink’s executive director, traces this shifting edge between land and water.

HistoryLink’s 30th book charts the transformation from a Lushootseed crossing-over place, where a tidal lagoon met the Duwamish River’s mouth, to the parks, overlooks, boat tours and civic gathering spaces we know today. In the

1850s, the lagoon’s disappearance, Ott notes, “made it harder for Native people to claim space. Effectively, they were made invisible — a tension that still goes on today.”

While celebrating the waterfront’s feats of engineering, Ott also recovers overlooked stories of marginalized people and events. “Seattle’s urban history,” she says, “is about how the city was built and the choices that were made involving massive transformations of the landscape.”

She cites the many communities — from Native peoples, immigrants, dockworkers, fishers and more —without whom the waterfront would not exist and thrive.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, patchwork seawalls, pilings and landfills replaced tide flats with

solid industrial ground. South of Pioneer Square, more than 3,000 acres of tidal wetlands were filled, dramatically reshaping the Duwamish delta. Along the central waterfront, the plank-paved Railroad Avenue, built on pilings over Elliott Bay, became Seattle’s maritime front door, but also, in Mayor John Dore’s 1934 words, “a death trap” and “a menace to the life of all that use it.”

The waterfront’s Depression-era seawall, built from 1934 to 1936, secured the shoreline from Washington Street to Bay Street. Above it, Railroad Avenue was rebuilt as Alaskan Way. Two decades later, the 1953

Alaskan Way Viaduct loomed over the stretch — a postwar icon that Ott calls a “psychological and visual barrier” separating the city from its bay. “The waterfront became fly-over country,” she quips.

Today, with the viaduct gone and the seawall rebuilt

for seismic safety, the waterfront once again is being reimagined. Ott shows that Elliott Bay’s edge is more than a physical boundary. It’s a mirror reflecting Seattle’s shifting priorities.

Documenting its past, she suggests, can illuminate a path forward, bringing long-buried layers into the light. What’s more, “in understanding these layers,” she says, “we are given a deeper connection to this special place.”

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 degree video on location at the waterfront, click right here.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 4, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 7, 2025

110-year-old Rhodes Mansion reflects Seattle retail royalty

By Jean Sherrard

When Seattle department-store magnate Albert Rhodes died unexpectedly on a business trip in 1921, a

life’s work may have been interrupted, but his grieving widow, Harriet, took the helm, dauntlessly proving herself in an otherwise male domain.

Up to that point, their lives might accurately have been described as charmed.

The first of four Wisconsin-born Rhodes brothers to arrive in Puget Sound, Albert settled in Tacoma in 1889 and worked as a traveling salesman. He found a

partner in love as well as in work and civic life when he married Harriet Williams from Dallas, Ore.

As the brothers’ Tacoma stores boomed, Albert opened his own Seattle branch, the Rhodes Company, in the Arcade Building at Second and Union in 1907. Its original 20-foot storefront rapidly expanded, cementing itself as a wildly successful retail force.

For their residence, Albert and Harriet enlisted noted Seattle architect Augustus Warren Gould to design a Mediterranean Revival showcase sporting spectacular

Lake Union views from north Capitol Hill. In 1915, the couple moved in permanently. The Rhodes mansion — popularly dubbed “the castle on the hill” — immediately became celebrated as an architectural jewel.

Still standing on busy 10th Avenue East, the gleaming white terra cotta edifice hosted lively social and civic gatherings, while husband and wife were no less committed to their hundreds of employees.

Lauded for paying the highest department-store wages in the United States, Albert also served as wartime president of the Seattle Chamber of

Commerce, promoting the city’s interests nationwide. He took pride in an unwavering commitment to civic duties. “Every man,” he insisted, “owes public service, without pay or reward, to his community.”

During a 1921 trip to New York City, he was stricken with the “Spanish flu,” which culminated in a fatal heart attack. “No death of recent years,” editorialized The Seattle Times, “has stirred the city so deeply as of this widely known merchant prince.”

Flags across town were lowered to half-mast to mark his passing. Dressed in black for years to come, Harriet

assumed the role of company president, and under her guidance the Rhodes department store expanded exponentially, filling an entire block with 10 floors of merchandising.

Significantly, the booming business remained

committed to the general welfare and equitable treatment of employees. With no children of her own, Harriet reportedly knew most of her staff by name. In return, they affectionately called her “Aunt Hattie.”

In 1944, she died after a trip to New York, staying at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where Albert had breathed his last. Her closest friends suggested that “knowing she was ill, [Harriet] made the journey out of sentiment.”

WEB EXTRAS

To watch our narrated 360 degree video, head over here.

For more spectacular interiors, see below:

Last but not least, Cupid!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 28, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 31, 2025

A new West Seattle film encourages us to leave it to the beavers

By Clay Eals

We’re deep into a construction craze, the landscape changing overnight. Of course, this is hardly news anymore. Except this particular furor is fueled by … beavers.

Yes, beavers, the sizeable waterborne rodents that many of us have encountered in copious cartoons, from Mr. Busy in “Lady and the Tramp” to the dam builders in “Curious George.” With exaggerated buck teeth and paddle tails as tools of their trade, these amiable avatars sport wide-eyed smiles and hardhats to convey a busy, zesty persona.

But few Seattleites have seen actual beavers. That’s because they surface primarily at night. So we aren’t aware of their existence here.

Pamela Adams is out to change that. The one-time California fine-arts student and insurance broker moved to Alki three years ago and joined a wide if unheralded world of beaver advocates, morphing into what she calls “The Freelance Beaver Detective.”

That’s also the title of Fauntleroy filmmaker Kay D. Ray’s new 56-minute documentary, which, besides Adams, features other beaver promoters and city officials, along with waterway chronicler and former Seattle Times photographer Tom Reese.

Adams’ passion to track beavers found a ready “lab” in one of Seattle’s 49 streams, West Seattle’s Longfellow Creek.

Stretching 4-1/2 miles, according to the documentary (nearly 3 miles in daylight), it runs south to north, from Roxhill Park and beneath Westwood Village mall to the creek’s buried endpoint, beneath Nucor Steel and the West Seattle Bridge, in Elliott Bay.

Despite myriad human barriers, Adams says the creek boasts five beaver families that diligently chew trees and build dams and lodges, creating ponds that foster other wildlife — a far cry from the fur trade of centuries past when beavers were hunted to near-extinction for their pelts.

“The beavers are actually water keepers,” Adams says in the film. “They’re doing what they can, what they’ve always done for thousands of years, and they are part of our ecosystem. In this place that we have urbanized, we’ve channelized, we’ve paved over, they’re doing the natural process.”

A key example: Just north of West Seattle Golf Course, the creek’s culminating culvert and a trash-catcher that Reese nicknamed “Monstro” (for the vicious whale in “Pinocchio”) have existed for at least 87 years. Today, Reese says beavers’ tenacious ponding has helped adult coho salmon to spawn there.

Adams’ advocacy does require compromise. She works with Seattle Public Utilities to keep ponds from flooding footbridges and other property. She also buys and installs wire fencing to protect homeowners’ trees.

But it’s hard not to be captivated by the film’s industrious critters. In scores of sequences, many recorded with night-vision cameras, the real beavers are more compelling than any cartoon.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Pamela Adams, Tom Reese and Kay D. Ray 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, you also will find a trailer for “The Freelance Beaver Detective” documentary and 3 additional photos.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 21, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 24, 2025

‘Almost a Paradise’ for settlers was
a paradise lost for Coast Salish

By Jean Sherrard

In times of anti-immigrant fervor, a gentle reminder seems pertinent that most of us are descended from recent arrivers.

Col. Isaac N. Ebey, of Missouri, landed in the Pacific Northwest via San Francisco, seeking a home for his extended family. In the spring of 1850, he hired canoes to explore today’s Puget Sound — a reconnaissance that preceded Seattle’s Alki Landing Party by more than a year. Letters home describe a land of exceptional beauty, suitable for colonization.

Finally, Ebey chose to settle on Whidbey Island, taking full advantage of the Oregon (Territory) Donation Land Law, which granted married couples 320 acres each if they committed to working the land for four years.

Their square mile, Ebey wrote his brother Winfield,

was “almost a Paradise of Nature,” and he encouraged his extended family to follow him and his close friend Samuel Crockett to the island prairie. By 1854, they were joined by nearly 30 Ebeys and Crocketts, lured from across the United States.

While these pioneers quickly established profitable farms, the original Coast Salish inhabitants, living here for millennia, were displaced without compensation — a toxic model being repeated throughout the territory.

Isaac’s 61-year-old father, Jacob Ebey, took up

residence on his own 320-acre spread atop a bluff overlooking his son’s land. Soon, Jacob built an 18-by-40-foot, 1½ story home for eight family members and found success planting wheat, oats and potatoes while raising livestock, including a small herd of dairy cows.

Isaac’s fortunes also rose. Besides farming his land, he worked as a lawyer and customs official and served as a territorial legislator. Sadly, wife Rebecca Davis Ebey, who had joined him with their two sons in 1851, died in 1853 after a difficult childbirth. Ebey subsequently married young widow Emily Sconce.

In 1855, Territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens toured the region, insisting that tribes sign federal treaties to formalize the vast transfer of land from Indigenous to white hands.

Bitter disputes raged as Native populations already diminished by disease and displacement were corralled into reservations.

With tensions rising, the settlers built blockhouses — the mid-19^th century equivalent of “safe rooms” — to protect themselves.

Jacob Ebey erected a thick-timbered blockhouse a stone’s throw from his farmhouse, anticipating confrontation with local tribes. On Aug. 11, 1857, however, the family’s security measures were breached.

In retaliation for the killing of 28 tribal members by the U.S. warship Massachusetts, a raiding party, likely from the Kake nation of Tlingit from southeastern Alaska, killed and beheaded newcomer Isaac Ebey at his home, just above the beachfront landing that still bears his name.

WEB EXTRAS

More scenes from the bluff below Jacob Ebey’s cabin.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 14, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 17, 2025

Poignant past could guide the future of Japantown’s Panama Hotel

By Clay Eals

On the corner of Sixth and South Main, the brick building stands resolute. Its west face meets an angled sidewalk. At the corner, turning east, the sidewalk inclines further. Up close, the five-floor structure resembles a statuesque promontory.

Bypassed by busier traffic in the Japantown (Nihonmachi) sector of the Chinatown-International District west of Interstate 5, the edifice may appear obscure.

Its legacy, however, is not.

This is the 115-year-old Panama Hotel, the title setting for Jamie Ford’s best-selling 2009 historical novel of heartrending cross-cultural romance, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.”

Designed by Sabro Ozasa, Seattle’s first Japanese architect, the Panama was built during construction of the famous canal thousands of miles south. From the outset, it was a single-room-occupancy (“workingman’s”) residence for immigrants. Its basement included what is described today as the last intact, albeit unused, Japanese-style communal bathhouse in North America.

The hotel’s poignant fame, center stage in the novel, derives from a preserved cache of 8,500 items, from suitcases, baskets and trunks to books and myriad household items, all left behind by 37 Japanese families whom the U.S. government forced into incarceration during World War II. Their materials — “saved for a happier time that never came,” wrote Ford — make the place both a museum and a shrine.

At the vortex of this city-landmarked “treasure” (the term used by the National Trust for Historic Preservation) is its passionate owner, Jan Johnson.

She grew up in Olympia and West Seattle, studying art in Italy before becoming so inspired by the Panama’s saga and surviving original features in 1985 that she purchased it soon afterward.

The seller was Takashi Hori, who was raised near Chehalis and in Seattle and secured a University of Washington business degree. He had bought the hotel in 1938 before being removed in March 1942 like the others whose belongings linger there.

Over the decades, Johnson’s motivation hasn’t varied: “It’s the history and the education and the knowledge and to save the building.”

Daily, she juggles renting rooms, supervising a tea-and-coffeehouse, handling maintenance, even trying to launch a Panama Hotel nonprofit, while touring streams of guests. During one hour in June, visitors included an Australian tourist and a curator for L.A.’s revered J. Paul Getty Museum.

It’s daunting work for someone well into retirement age. The situation cries out for sensitive benefactors, says Historic Seattle’s Eugenia Woo, a longtime Johnson champion. “The hotel has an authenticity you can’t re-create,” she says. “It needs people who appreciate history and can run it like a business.”

Which begs the question: Will the Panama’s future be bitter? Or sweet?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Nancy Ishii, Reina Endo and especially Jan Johnson for 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.

Here is an extensive 2022 Seattle Times article on the hotel, and a similar 2002 North American Post article.

Below, you also will find 3 additional videos, 1 additional photo, 4 landmark documents and 18 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 7, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 10, 2025

For 40 years, Pike Place Market newsstand let us read all about it

By Jean Sherrard

We know of at least one canary that thrived in a coal mine against the odds. “From the start,” says Lee Lauckhart, now 84, “everyone tried to convince me print media was doomed.”

For 40 years, however, he ignored the naysayers, owning and operating “Read All About It,” his beloved newsstand in the Pike Place Market, beginning in 1979.

“Every day, we’d see dozens of regulars who became good friends,” he recalls warmly, singling out longtime

co-workers for special praise. “We were just like family.”

Born in Seattle, Lauckhart graduated from the University of Washington in 1968, signing on with Thurston County as a “registered sanitarian” before joining the “back to the land” movement: “I spent four years as a Snohomish dirt farmer.”

Stints selling newspapers in New York’s Gramercy Park then driving taxis in Seattle “were pretty nip and tuck,” he says. Then one of his cab fares offered him a job making “horseshoe nail” jewelry in the Pike Place Market. It felt like coming home.

Just divorced, he found housing for himself and his young daughter in the Market’s newly renovated Leland Hotel, “the one with the ‘Meet the Producers’ sign on it,” Lauckhart recalls.

In 1979, after four years as a “crafty,” he had a lightbulb moment. Friend and longtime newspaper hawker Sebi Nahmias had a coveted license to sell local dailies from his stand at First and Pike.

Lauckhart, then in his late 30s, made Nahmias an offer:

that together they open a general-interest newsstand in the Market offering publications from around the world. Soon joined by partner Steve Dunnington, they comprised an irrepressible entrepreneurial trio.

“Read All About It” opened Oct. 25, 1979, on a 10-by-30-foot pitch in the Market’s southeast corner.

The newsstand was an unqualified success — and its location didn’t disappoint. “First and Pike,” Lauckhart says, “was the busiest intersection in the Pacific Northwest.”

A slew of innovations followed. The partners arranged for daily New York Times deliveries (before dawn each

morning via Flying Tiger Airlines) while negotiating contracts with newspaper and magazine publishers across the globe.

After four decades, however, the final curtain. Thousands of newspapers had been shuttered, writing the final epitaph for purveyors of print media.

Lauckhart, by then the sole owner, stubbornly held on as a matter of principle. For 10 years, he paid employees out of the newsstand’s dwindling profits while surviving solely on Social Security.

On Dec. 31, 2019, the “Read All About It” canary, one of the last of its kind, finally sang its swan song.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video, captured on location in Pike Place Market, click here.

Billy King, noted NW muralist — once voted Mayor of the Market– is a longtime pal of Lee Lauckhart’s. He created the print of “Read All About It” featured above.

When we prepared this column, Billy was hard at work restoring a mural painted years ago for Maximilien, a French restaurant in the Market. Check out a few pix of Billy at work:

Finally, Lee Lauckhart’s favorite photo of the newsstand in situ, taken for a now-defunct rag called Endless Vacation.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on July 31, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 3, 2025

What’s the big deal? A longtime Seattleite finally catches Hydro Fever

By Jean Sherrard

After two hours this spring at Stan Sayres Pits on Lake Washington, I finally flipped for the hydros. The impossibly sleek, brightly colored, vintage unlimited hydroplanes streaking across blue-gray waters on a cloudy morning sent my aging heart all a-flutter.

When I grew up in Seattle, the hydros’ throaty roar left me underwhelmed. I never leashed a plywood model

of Miss Bardahl to my Stingray and raced through puddles trying for a roostertail. Crossing the Lacey V. Murrow floating bridge during the Seafair races was the closest I got to the action.

David D. Williams, executive director of the Hydroplane and Raceboat Museum in Kent, hooked and landed me during the museum’s spring testing event.

“Our mission is to honor, celebrate and preserve the legacy of hydroplane racing,” Williams  says, and it’s only after seeing them “on the water bouncing around at 160 mph that you will truly understand how they captured the imagination of an entire city.”

With a lifelong passion for the sport and a breadth of knowledge of history, technology and the culture of speed, Williams is head torch carrier for a golden age of hydroplanes. “My childhood,” he says, “was a tent raised on two tent poles. There was Christmas and there was Seafair.”

After World War II, hydroplane racing scaled up exponentially, inspiring and transporting legions of fans. By 1955, Seattle’s population reached 457,000. That year, 500,000 people from across the state crowded the shores of Lake Washington to watch the races live.

In his seminal 2007 book, “Hydroplane Racing in Seattle,” Williams details what might be described as an inevitable arranged marriage. “We were the boating capital and the aviation capital of the country — and the best of both of those worlds coalesced into hydroplanes.”

Before Seafair and its “hydro fever,” there were only two games in town: Husky football and Pacific Coast League Seattle Rainiers baseball. Today’s deep civic pride in the city’s major sports franchises, Williams says, “was born and bred … when Seattle sports fans first found their collective voice cheering for the hometown’s Slo-Mo-Shuns.”

Today’s turbine-driven hydroplanes, while safer, quieter and faster, somehow sidestep the intimate if raucous sensory nostalgia — and admittedly lethal

danger — of an earlier age, documented by the Hydroplane Museum and its dedicated volunteers.

“These [older] boats were the heart and soul of our community for the better part of 40 years,” Williams says. “In noise and spectacle and goosebumps, they win hands down.”

Seeing and hearing the vintage boats do their thing in person goosed my own bumps. Who knew a rooster tail could make this boomer crow with joy?

WEB EXTRAS

To check out our narrated 360 degree video shot in the Stan Sayres Pits, speed on over here.

More photos from the pits — plus some other extras!

And a few from the Hydro Museum:

Several contributions from Seattle historian Peter Blecha:

Several contributions from Dina Skeels, Seattle Times designer:

(Above) A friend of Dina Skeels pilots the same hydro in a canal at Ocean Shores in 2021 before the boat was restored.

Plus a neighborhood, handmade hydro contest that spans 60 years.

And a final blast from the past: a Bob Hale Gold Cup preview that ran Aug. 10, 1958, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on July 24, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 27, 2025

Nearly 70 years later, Seafair queen
looks beyond ‘bubblehead’ image

By Clay Eals

Seattleites could be forgiven in 1956 when they opened their newspapers and thought the new queen for the seventh year of the city’s Seafair celebration might be Grace Kelly.

While her resemblance to the previous year’s Oscar-winning best actress was uncanny, the regal honoree was 18-year-old Laurelhurst resident Dixie Jo Thompson.

Today, when daughter Kim Brillhart says others likely compared her to the movie star, the nearly 88-year-old — who uses her married name, Porter — scoffs at references to her appearance. “Maybe I look more like Grace Kelly than their dog did,” Porter says. “Really, are you kidding me? Well, I was blonde and white-skinned.”

The animated resident of the Mirabella Seattle retirement community wields a tongue both thoughtful and tart, countering what she says could be seem as the “bubblehead” image for a festival queen. Her observations frequently turn to a cogent conclusion: “Seafair was something that happened to me rather than something that I chose to do.”

Her fate, she says, was dictated by her parents, who determined that the Utah native and only child attend the University of Washington and join the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which, she says, “assigned” her to compete for Miss University District. Winning that title eventually led to her being named the city’s “Queen of the Seas.”

It was a time (and perhaps still is) when society’s view of women focused on looks. To a degree, Thompson confounded that. Her 3.4 freshman grade-point average triggered this Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline: “Beauty, Brains All In One Royal Package.” But the paper also thrice reported her body measurements, even in a headline. Said another P-I head: “She Dimples Her Way To City’s Heart.”

Even then, she saw herself as “part of a fake kingdom, like being in the theater,” and she played the part to full expectations. Her oft-reported quote was, “It’s like a fairy tale.” In this volunteer role, she donned a crown and gown to smile and preside at countless events. She also endured repeated waist clutches from countless older men whom she dutifully kissed on the cheek.

Gradually, she left the role behind. A YWCA leader starting at the UW in the 1950s, she married Tom Porter, raised three children and became a financial adviser.

Last month, as requested by a Seafair fan at Mirabella, she delighted a crowd of 139 with her life story and details of Seafair’s evolution as part of a “Resident Revelations” series. She told of her “personal fear beyond belief” of the unrestrained Seafair Pirates. “Sorry, pirates,” she said, “you can trash me sometime.”

She also said she tired of visits from celebrities like Bing Crosby and Phil Harris, who “pawed me like I was some kind of cat” during required photo ops that she thinks influenced later Seafair changes.

Indeed, titles and programs evolved at Seafair over the years. What started as Queen of the Seas (1950-71) became Miss Seafair (1972-2024) and was replaced this year by a Community Hero. From 1950 to 1999, a King and Prime Minister were selected, but in 2000 the King became King Neptune, the Prime Minister was dropped and Queen Alcyone was added.

She cheered this year’s Queen Alcyone selection of former Seattle police chief Carmen Best. And with a grin, she cracked that since her younger years, “I have lost 5 inches of height and 22 pounds of weight, so yeah, this is what you’ve got to deal with now.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Judy Waring, Kim Brillhart, and especially Dixie Jo Thompson Porter for invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video this time, but below you will find video of Porter’s Mirabella talk, along with a transcript. You also will find 6 additional photos and, in chronological order, 68 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Click the above image to see Dixie Jo Thompson Porter’s one-hour talk on June 10, 2025, at Mirabella. The sound is a little murky, so click here to open a transcript of her remarks and use it to follow along.

(Click and click again to enlarge news clippings)

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on July 17, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 20, 2025

In 1898, their grandfather and a school chum answered the cry of ‘GOLD!’

By Jean Sherrard

On July 17, 1897, after the steam ship Portland docked in Seattle bearing treasure from the Yukon, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s front-page-topping headline incanted, “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!”

A day later, the New York Times ran its own front-page article, “Wealth of the Klondike.”

With the rest of the country, two Cornell Law School students, Mark Odell and Ellis Aldrich, read these accounts of vast easily acquired wealth and tossed their hats in the ring.

By March 1898, the ambitious chums had secured funding from a syndicate of investors, likely including Syracuse’s Lyman C. Smith, after whom Seattle’s Smith Tower was named. They dropped out of school and boarded a train for the Northwest.

In their just-released book, “From Cheechakos to Sourdoughs: Two Ivy Leaguers’ Quest for Yukon Gold,” Odell’s maternal grandsons Steve and John Lundin tell a compelling tale drawn from journal entries, letters and 12 rolls of photographs found in a shoebox.

Hot on their grandfather’s trail to the Yukon, the Lundins offer an indelible portrait of the young “stampeders” and their transformation from greenhorns (“cheechakos”) to veteran prospectors (“sourdoughs”).

Within a week of arriving in boomtown Seattle, the industrious Odell and Aldrich purchased more than a ton of supplies from local outfitters and booked passage on the S.S. Alki to Skagway. Throughout, Odell’s observant voice enlivens the narrative.

Steaming up the Inside Passage, he marvels at the “wonders of the sea” whose “delicate changing azure tints” seemed to conceal “mermaids [who] had just slipped off into the dark green waters.”

Arriving in lawless Skagway on April 3, the pair prepared for the first of their countless ordeals — many days of hauling their mass of supplies over

legendary Chilkoot Pass. “From a distance … it looks much like a string of ants creeping up a small mound,” Odell wrote. “Such scenes I never saw nor imagined.”

Over grueling months, the partners continued their northbound journey, often narrowly skirting disaster. Building a cabin near Wolverine Creek, a Yukon River tributary, they mined and prospected throughout a brutal winter, digging 30-foot deep

“placer” shafts through permafrost in forbidding temperatures. “Holy Smut!” Odell noted on Nov. 11. “It was 51 degrees below last night!!!!!”

Approaching mental and physical exhaustion, the two ended their quest for treasure, making a laborious

return from the Yukon February-March 1899, a full year after setting out.

After 126 years, the Lundins write, one mystery remains. Contemporary newspaper accounts suggested that Odell and Aldrich arrived in Seattle laden with gold. But both sourdoughs firmly denied it to the end of their lives.

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 degree video of this week’s column, click right here.

For a fascinating 90-minute PNW Historians Guild lecture by the Lundins, head in this direction!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on July 3, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 6, 2025

For 40 years, Wallingford’s critter column
has sensed the Animal Storm all around us

By Clay Eals

In a sense, it’s all about the senses.

In 1975, sculptor Ron Petty, then 36, moved to the hillside neighborhood north of Lake Union and took note of “the tremendous amount of wildlife here.” Ten years later, thanks to $30,000 contributed by Wallingford residents and businesses, he shaped life-size versions of more than 60 critters from 32 species clambering around and peeking out from a monumental column of bronze and aluminum.

To great fanfare, he installed the 16-foot tower on July 27, 1985, across from the old Food Giant at the southeast corner of Wallingford Avenue and 45th Street. He named it Animal Storm.

“It was just kind of like a storm cloud raining animals,” he reflects today, summoning another palpable fact of local life, what some call Seattle sunshine. In fact, on the pillar Petty even represented our legendary showers as narrow, rectangular bars slipping angularly between the creatures.

Rain or shine, the sculpture draws people who want to see, photograph and touch it close-up, especially kids. And at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 12, 2025, during the 2025 “Wild in Wallingford” parade, Petty’s first and best-loved major creation will get a 40th-anniversary salute. Amid drill teams and floats, inhabitants are encouraged to attend in animal garb.

That would please Petty, who relishes seeing newcomers and returnees examining the pole and finding its squirrels, birds, geese, slugs, bats, cats, fish (one is concave with eggs inside), raccoons, ducks and even a dog wearing a tiny peace-sign collar pendant. He delights in recalling a class of blind grade-schoolers who caressed and identified the critters.

Capping the pedestal is a pounce-ready feline modeled after the artist’s “Mama Cat” at the time. “When I was doing the drawings for the piece, the cat kept walking across the drawing table,” he says. “One of the final times I kicked the cat off, I told her if she stayed off the table, I’d put her on top of the sculpture. And I did.”

Circled by a base of engravings and a broad, curved bench and backed by courtyards of the landmarked Wallingford Center retail and service hub (formerly Interlake School, built in 1904-1908), Animal Storm quickly became the community’s most prominent visual and tactile showpiece.

Petty, also known for his similar but more somber 1988 memorial sculpture at Ballard’s Fishermen’s Terminal, remains grateful for the early faith that Wallingford placed in him to create an enduring tribute to the smaller breathing beings nearby us all.

It’s a profusion, he says. “We just don’t realize that until we actually look close to see what is here.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ron and Marjan Petty and especially Sarah Martin of Historic Wallingford for invaluable help with this installment!

The Historic Wallingford page on Animal Storm has lots of background information, photos, news clips and videos, including the filmed 1985 dedication ceremony, thanks to Sarah Martin.

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, you also will find 1 additional video, 9 additional photos and 4 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on June 26, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 29, 2025

Lake Sammamish town’s fiery 1925 demise echoes today

By Jean Sherrard

History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. Accordingly, burning 100 years ago were conflagrations whose embers rekindle today with the threat of literal and figurative five-alarm fires.

On Thursday, June 25, 1925, the thermometer atop Seattle’s18-story Hoge Building recorded the then-warmest temperature in Northwest history. As the mercury climbed to 98 degrees, the city’s two major dailies sported banner weather headlines.

Although “numerous small fires” had broken out across Western Washington, the Seattle Times assured its readers that “they were reported under control.” Further, “fire wardens [will] exercise every precaution as long as the dry weather remains.”

The next day, however, hopes evaporated when the Lake Sammamish mill town of Monohon, four miles north of Issaquah, went up in smoke. The fire began just after noon, reported the Post-Intelligencer’s R.B. Bermann, when “a cigarette tossed aside in the [sawmill’s] washroom started a conflagration which raged unchecked until the whole settlement was virtually destroyed.”

Along with dozens of homes, Monohon’s railroad depot, hotel, general store and the J.E. Bratnober sawmill were “blotted from the earth,” Bermann said, “as though some gigantic monster had stepped on [them], crushing everything to the ground.”

The intense heat had shriveled vegetables on their vines and blackened trees within hundreds of yards. Young chickens in their coops were “baked to a crisp.”

Firefighting efforts were stymied when the road running through town was engulfed in flames. Inadequate hoses and pumps having failed, “attempts to check [the fire] with dynamite … blew blazing timbers all over town, starting dozens of new fires.”

Historian Phil Dougherty, whose HistoryLink essay offers a thorough and colorful account of the disaster and its aftermath, wrote, “The mill rebuilt and survived

in various incarnations until 1980, but Monohon itself was gone.” Though no deaths or injuries were reported, “everything that had made this little town of 300 souls almost the Valhalla of Lake Sammamish — gone.”

A century later, these events continue to send up smoke signals.

The National Forest Service, whose hotshot crews of firefighters have battled wilderness infernos for the past hundred years, has been decimated by workforce cuts from the Trump administration.

As recently detailed in The Seattle Times, significant personnel losses are reported by individual forests across Washington state.

Forest Service officials privately predict disaster for the upcoming fire season, one Washington manager saying that without experienced employees, “the West will burn.”

This is one rhyme we can only hope against hope not to repeat.

WEB EXTRAS

Noting a compass correction: As several readers have commented, Monohon is not 4 miles west of Issaquah, but due north. I was misled by the P-I article printed the day after the fire, which sent me in the wrong direction!

Click on through for our narrated 360 degree video.

A fascinating and somewhat alarming side note: only two weeks later, on July 10, 1925, the Scopes “monkey trial” was about to commence, in which the pugnacious perennial populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuted a science teacher who broke a Tennessee law forbidding mention of evolution in the classroom. On the Scopes trial centennial, a bell tolls for scientific inquiry and education, ringing out another rhyming echo.

UPDATE: Congrats to Sunset Hill Community Hall, which will receive Historic Seattle’s 2025 Community Advocacy Award at the organization’s annual Preservation Celebration on Sept. 25, 2025, at the Labour Temple downtown. For more info, click here.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on June 19, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 22, 2025

For nearly a century, Sunset Hill clubhouse has built community

By Clay Eals

We all revere the concept of community, but how do we put it into practice? It boils down to joining forces for the common good — for desired improvements and mutual enjoyment. And as with many things, it can be as much about perception as reality.

In 1929, University of Washington master’s student Irene Somerville Durham documented Seattle’s then-108 community clubs, mostly in middle-class and working-class residential neighborhoods. She related the legend of two north-end gents repeatedly stumbling into puddles in the dark and failing to persuade the city to illuminate the area.

One “conceived the bold idea of getting out some letterheads with a community-club name, calling himself the president and his neighbor the secretary. On behalf of this mythical organization, the two demanded a street light in front of their houses. Within a week … the light was in the desired spot.” The letterhead originator “thought the secret too good to keep, and the community-club movement had its beginning.”

Within Ballard, annexed to Seattle in 1907, the western sub-neighborhood of Sunset Hill (from the Locks to the city’s then-northern border of 85th Street) spawned a club in 1922. Two years hence, it bought land at the southwest corner of 66th Street and 30th Avenue. By 1929, the club’s stately home — with two large meeting floors, the upper one with a stage — opened for meetings and parties alike.

It remains a happy survivor, along with similar neighborhood clubhouses in Mount Baker (1914), Lakewood-Seward Park (1920), Haller Lake (1922) and Rainier Beach (1923). A few other such structures also endure citywide but in other uses.

With a succession of four names (Community Hall is the latest), the Sunset Hill club stated from the start that it welcomed all residents of the district, historically a Nordic American enclave that gradually has diversified. From securing street, water and transit improvements to presenting speeches, dances and performances, its leaders apprised members: “You are part of an organization that is getting results, and you would find great pleasure in doing your part.”

This rich mixture of the political and social over a near-century of service allowed the gleaming yellow hall to attain designation as a city landmark in March. The hall’s response was — what else? — to hold a party the following month, drawing a capacity crowd.

John Munroe, the club’s energetic president, acknowledges herculean efforts to keep intact both the building and its legacy.

“We’ve done tons of work on it over the years,” he says. “We will survive anything … We have all kinds of fun all the time because this is a community.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Robert Loe, John Munroe and especially Holly Taylor and Peggy Sturdivant 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, you also will find 2 additional videos, 2 documents and 5 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on June 12, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 15, 2025

Tallest US Masonry Dome stands as our state’s homage to democracy

By Jean Sherrard

A visit to Olympia, which I highly recommend, is a tonic for what ails us. From the lofty architecture of the Legislative Building (aka the Capitol Building) to the generous, Olmsted Brothers-designed landscape, the sense of uplift is palpable.

As in our nation’s capital, the edifices of government were designed to reflect neo-classical themes of the Enlightenment, plus a shout-out to ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy.

In an era when, increasingly, questions arise about the legitimacy and efficacy of our democratic republic, these soaring expressions of harmony, proportion and humanism offer enduring comfort.

First, a few pertinent facts:

Our state Capitol building, at 287 feet, is the tallest masonry dome in the United States and among the tallest in the world. The dome itself weighs 30.8 million pounds. The building’s exterior is made of warm-colored Wilkeson sandstone from Pierce County. Built to last, the structure has survived three major earthquakes, most recently the Nisqually Earthquake in 2001, followed by three years of seismic upgrades and structural rehabilitation.

In their authoritative overview, “Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the U.S.A.,” architectural historians Henry-Russell Hitchcock and William Seale suggest that in Olympia, “the American renaissance in state capitol building reached its climax.”

The long road to achieving this ideal began when Olympia founder Edmund Sylvester donated a 12-acre

bluff as a site for the territorial Capitol. In 1856, the Legislature moved into a two-story wood-frame building on the site, which served first the territory and then the state until 1903.

Early plans for the capitol campus had been shelved following the 1893 financial Panic. The governor

authorized purchase of the Thurston County Courthouse, in whose cramped quarters the Legislature met beginning in 1905.

In 1911, a new State Capitol Commission held a nationwide design competition, enlisting Seattle architect Charles Bebb to serve as lead judge. Out of 30 mostly local submissions, two architects from New York City seized the prize.

For Walter Wilder and Harry White, junior architects in their mid-30s, designing the group of capitol buildings was their first and only major commission. Unexpectedly, their work stretched over the next 18 years.

When announcing the award, the commission also wired the Olmsted Brothers — the renowned Brookline, Mass., landscape firm already known for its many Washington state contributions — asking if they could “prepare plans for Capitol Building grounds.”

The Olmsted designs were adopted and installed by 1930. Their addition of verdant gardens, trees and wide boulevards completed our state’s graceful, human-scaled homage to nascent democracy in a city quite fittingly named Olympia.

WEB EXTRAS

Here’s a “now” of the Thurston County Courthouse, purchased for use by the legislature.

For our narrated 360 degree video of this column, click on through here, pardner!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on June 5, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 8, 2025

Road trip! AAA’s early 20th century arrows showed us the way

By Clay Eals

Talk about signs of the times …

Most of us know that automobiles rumbled into general use roughly 120 years ago. However, we don’t think much about the roads on which they rolled. Initially, many were unmarked, and without GPS or phone apps, how did drivers know which path to choose? Printed maps helped. But what if you were mapless and came to a fork in the road? While governmental road signs guide us today, it was not always thus.

Enter the nation’s upstart auto clubs, some of which affiliated with the national American Automobile Association (AAA or Triple-A), founded in Chicago in 1902. Soon afterward in our state came the launch of what became the Auto Club of Western Washington, organizational ancestor of today’s AAA Washington.

Over the years, the club advocated for quality byways and safety education and became known for emergency road service, maps and travel advice. But through the mid-1940s, it also built countless directional signs and installed them at key intersections.

The club installed its first signs in 1906, planning 500 pointers within 30 miles of Seattle. Twelve years later, the club reported that “at least” 1,500 signs had been placed on 3,200 miles of roads and streets in western Washington. “This, however, is just a start.”

The white-painted signs were instantly visible and recognizable — a bouquet of arrows pointing every which-way, identifying places near and far, with numbers indicating mileage. An accompanying diamond-shaped sign identified the club, an ingenious brand for a captive driving audience.

In both urban and rural settings, the signs became ubiquitous. Guidance and safety were an obvious part of their motivation and appeal. But an equal factor, the club said in 1920, was aesthetics: “We want to rid our splendid scenic highways of the signs on trees and stumps and rocks along the right-of-way, which distract so seriously from their beauty.”

Pointing out everything from telephone booths and scout camps to speed limits and speed traps (!), the signs drew “innumerable compliments” for “assisting the stranger.” The club spent $300,000 on sign installations from 1916 to 1945, when signage became the legal responsibility of cities, counties and the state.

The club maintained sign shops and took pride in photographing the signs when installing them. Many surviving prints, however, bear no dates or documentation of their locations.

Even so, it’s fun to view them today. Eyeing their posted place names and doing the mileage math, we can speculate about the intersections where they once stood sentinel to show us the way.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Bob Carney, Cindi Barker and especially Sam Murphy, Mellani McAleenan and Kelsey Bumsted of AAA Washington 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, you also will find 5 additional photos, 2 AAA Journeys magazine stories from 2004 by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on May 29, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 1, 2025

Enduring from 1861, columns bring ‘LIFE’ to UW’s Sylvan Theater

By Jean Sherrard

This idyllic grove with four tall columns contains elements that might seem contradictory: youthful expectation and ambition framed by academic tradition and a whiff of mortality — in short, the stuff that educators’ dreams are made on.

The quartet is among Seattle’s oldest extant architectural artifacts. Originally old-growth cedar trees, toppled near Hood Canal and floated to Henry Yesler’s waterfront sawmill, the 24-foot-tall columns

adorned the portico of the 1861 Territorial University building downtown.

Carved by early postmaster O.J. Carr and cabinet makers A.P. De Lin and O.C. Shorey, the sturdy, fluted columns, topped with scroll-shaped “volutes” in accordance with Ionic style, offered potent symbols of classical education. (Shorey and De Lin later applied their carpentry skills to casket-making in pioneer Seattle, founding the funeral home that became Bonney-Watson.)

Some called it hubris when a town with fewer than 200 mostly male inhabitants built a two-story white academy on an overlooking bluff. But it also indicated exuberant faith in the region’s future. For Arthur Denny, donor of much of the academic institution’s land, and Daniel Bagley, an influential Methodist preacher, a university was the tail that was to wag the dog of civic life.

As Seattle boomed and 1889 statehood loomed, the homegrown University of Washington abandoned the then-crowded business district for largely undeveloped holdings then-north of the city in 1895. The original building, though a sentimental favorite, was left to molder before being torn down in 1910.

Its four columns were salvaged and added to the expanding campus in 1911.

Edmond S. Meany, head of the History Department, supplied each column with a name: Loyalty, Industry, Faith and Efficiency, adding up to “LIFE.”

After a decade of being stranded outside Savery Hall on the Quad, the university held a contest to determine their final placement.

The winner: 19-year-old Marshall Gill, architecture student and son of the late Mayor Hiram Gill, who had died a year earlier during the influenza pandemic. His design for an outdoor “Sylvan theatre setting” southeast of Drumheller Fountain was acclaimed as “an appropriate and fitting tribute to the … impressive solemnity” of the columns.

Young Gill, however, witnessed only the first fruits of his labor. Within weeks of the grove’s creation, he died of a brain embolism following a tonsillectomy at age 20.

Two years later, School of Architecture alumni installed a stone bench and commemorative plaque at one end of the grassy stage.

In this tranquil spot, treasured by generations of UW students, Marshall Gill created a lasting monument — his only surviving design — to youth, artistry and history.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360-degree video, captured on location, click right here.

Also, in a separate video, our MFA actors introduce themselves, reflecting on their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Click on the photo below to see it.

In late-breaking news, here’s a pertinent photo and email just sent in by reader Roseanne Kimlinger:

I had kind of a “Wow!” moment of recognition reading Now and Then in today’s Pacific NW magazine. The Gill memorial bench in your photo looks an awful lot like the one these three UW students are sitting on in the photo I’ve attached! They are my aunt and two of her friends, the year was 1928.

I may have to head over to campus to check it out. Amazing that bench is still there.

Thank you for an unexpected Sunday morning delight!

Thank you, Roseanne!

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on May 15, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 18, 2025

Social Security, recipients say, ‘makes America truly great’

By Jean Sherrard

When aptly named Frank Messenger arrived in Seattle in late 1936, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to direct the city’s first Social Security field office, on his shoulders may have rested the weight of history.

A veteran of World War I, then called the Great War, Messenger had served abroad as a trade negotiator for the Department of Commerce before heading the Treasury Department’s procurement offices in 21 states.

But in helming the nascent effort to weave a safety net for those devastated by the Great Depression, Messenger hit his stride. By early 1937, the rapidly expanding Seattle bureau had moved from cramped Room 213 in the downtown Alaska Building to take over the entire 14th floor.

From that perch, Messenger delivered the New Deal’s signature message of hope and promise. In a 1942 Seattle Times interview, he endorsed his office’s mission.

“If you like people,” he said, “this is an interesting spot.”

Nothing gave him greater job satisfaction, he said, than “telling a young widow [with small children] that she wouldn’t lose her home” or seeing “a trembling old hand sign a brand-new Social Security card” or witnessing “the smile of delight on a youngster’s face” when giving a first card to the child.

“This,” Messenger exulted, “is America!”

Eighty-three years later, the message is under siege. Though insisting Social Security benefits will be protected for nearly 69 million retirees, the current administration has upended the agency, promoting falsehoods about fraud while slashing its workforce by many thousands.

Online, we recently asked local recipients to sum up what Social Security means to them. Their responses:

Patricia Falsetto, retired therapist: “It’s not a giant Ponzi Scheme, but a guaranteed income after retirement, a fund which I personally have been paying into since I was 16 years old.”

John Rahn, retired professor: “An irreplaceable lifeline for retired people with little savings.”

Marcia Sanders, retired teacher: “Instead of exploding it, let’s look at ways to fix it. How about raising the Social Security wage limit above $176,000? Seems like a no-brainer. ”

Karen Kent, retired geriatric mental-health therapist: “I saw many elders whose only income was Social Security. [Without] that income, they would end up homeless or committing suicide to avoid homelessness.”

Linda Bevis, retired teacher: “With Social Security under threat, it makes it much more difficult to predict or plan what my future will look like.”

John Owen, retired City Light engineer: “Social Security is a manifestation of some of the most important values that we share as citizens. It is a fundamental example of what makes America truly great.”

WEB EXTRAS

To see our narrated 360 degree video captured on location, click here!

Click here for a video of the Mister Roger’s theme song, sung by participants.

Full statements from contributors:

Marcia Sanders:

I retired from teaching a little more than a year ago.  I rely on a pension and Social Security to have a decent, dignified retirement.  I paid into both of those funds over the years.  Unlike the members of Howard Lutnick’s family, who wouldn’t complain if a Social Security check were late, I would complain, just as I would complain if a paycheck were late.  I earned that money and I depend on it to pay my bills.  I don’t have a billion dollar reserve that would cause my income from a Social Security check to be insignificant.
I know that as things stand currently, Social Security  will eventually run out of money. I understand why people younger than me feel they won’t get any, and that every year people have to wait longer and longer before they are eligible for it.  However, instead of exploding the system, let’s look at ways to fix it.  How about continuing to take Social Security out of  wages, beyond $176,000?  That seems like a no-brainer.

Linda Bevis:

I just retired from teaching last month. In the Fall, when I sent my letter of retirement in to my college, I was factoring in Social Security payments to my monthly retirement income. Now, I don’t know if those payments will come through for me or anyone. It makes it much more difficult to predict or plan what my future will look like.

Francis Janes:

I believe that social security is foundational to our promise to seniors that they live their retirement years with dignity and security. Social security affords seniors peace of mind and a means to pay basic living expenses.
Social security payments affords me the flexibility of living in a way that allows me to explore new hobbies, volunteer with community groups, mentor young people, visit new lands and experience new cultures.

Ginny Weisse:

What does social security mean to me.
Just that Security!
One works and pays into the program and counts on the benefit to be there for you when you retire.
Social security provides essential help/support for the elderly, disabled and Social security may be the only income for some.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on May 8, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on May 11, 2025

Site for 1979 Rainier ad, conceived by students, is rural no more

By Clay Eals

It’s what I call an all-too-common Northwest reality: One of our region’s best-remembered idyllic landscapes is now a vast housing development.

This rural Pierce County site, one hour’s drive southeast of Seattle, where 230th Avenue East becomes Buckley Tapps Highway, once was a narrow, two-lane curve flanked only by backwoods, meadows and aging wooden fence posts.

Long-timers know it as the setting for a 30-second commercial first aired in 1979, in which a solitary motorcycle sweeps by, heading in pre-sunset magic light toward a glowing Mount Rainier. Besides crickets, the ad’s only sound is the bike’s overdubbed, seemingly changing gears: “Raaaaiiiii-neeeerrrr-Beeeeerrrrrr.”

It could be the most talked-about local TV spot ever. Its saga — and that of other hilarious Rainier commercials, including super-sized “wild” beer bottles “hunted” by actor Mickey Rooney — is told in an irresistible two-hour documentary, “Rainier: A Beer Odyssey.” It debuted at the 2024 Seattle International Film Festival and has had several later runs.

Where did the motorcycle idea come from? Not Rainier or its ad agency. Many insisted to the documentary’s director, Isaac Olsen, that they knew someone who dreamed it up. But they offered no proof, so the doc skirted the question.

After I saw the film last May, I informed Olsen that I happened to write a 1979 story for the Oregonian newspaper about two Eugene high-school students who sent in the idea in 1976 and were paid $500.

That evidence helped Olsen locate the true originators: Brian Nyjordet, a Poulsbo carpenter, and Jack Inglis, a Portland coffee-wine bar proprietor. Olsen plans to feature them in a sequel focusing on the motorcycle spot.

Nyjordet (who conceived the idea after seeing the sketch-parody movie “The Groove Tube”) and Inglis (who captured it in a storyboard and handled communication) remain thrilled that Rainier embraced their basic concept and executed it at a perfect location.

Of course, the mountain’s still there. So are the two lanes, wider and still divided by a double-yellow line, but surrounded by (no typo) 350 one- and two-floor suburban homes built over the past 10 years, with high perimeter fences, gravel berms, tree saplings, trimmed grass and shrubs, tiny pink marker flags, speed-limit and street signs, fire hydrants, a stormwater facility and a streetlamp.

Typically whizzing along the gradual turn is a sporadic stream of sizable cars, trucks and the occasional motorcycle. Many flout the posted 35-mph limit, slowing only to turn onto side streets.

Posted blue and orange placards promote “Up to 6 Bedroom Homes,” “Up to 5 Car Garages” and, naturally, “Mountain Views.”

But during breaks in traffic, you can still hear an intermittent cricket.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Dave Lamar, Brian & Joele Nyjordet, Jack Inglis, Bobbi Lee Betschart (of the Elk Run development) and especially Isaac Olsen 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.

Here is a June 11, 2025 story on Brian Nyjordet and the famed motorcycle commercial, by Mike De Felice of the Kitsap Daily Sun. And click here and here to download pdf files of Mike’s story and photos as they appeared in the Port Orchard Independent and North Kitsap Sun.

Below, you also will find 4 more videos, 3 additional photos and 5 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Above) The Rainier Beer motorcycle commercial filmed in 1978 is re-created April 5, 2025, at the same spot, with motorcyclist Dave Lamar of Tacoma doing the honors. The rural Pierce County site, one hour’s drive southeast of Seattle, is where 230th Avenue East becomes Buckley Tapps Highway. Here are three versions. (Clay Eals)

(Above) The classic Rainier Beer motorcycle commercial filmed in 1978 is re-created April 5, 2025, at the same spot, with three different nameless motorcyclists doing the honors. The rural Pierce County site, one hour’s drive southeast of Seattle, is where 230th Avenue East becomes Buckley Tapps Highway. Here are three versions. (Clay Eals)

(Above) Here is the original 1979 Rainier Beer motorcycle commercial, embedded in a trailer for the documentary “Rainier: A Beer Odyssey.” The trailer includes sound effects from a previous “frog” commercial.

(Above) Brian Nyjordet, of Poulsbo, reflects on how he came up with the idea for the classic Rainier Beer motorcycle commercial that was filmed in 1978 and first aired in 1979. He is standing on April 5, 2025, at the site the commercial was filmed. (Clay Eals)

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on May 1, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 4, 2025

Before its fiery demise, the Alida sidewheeler briefly served 1870 elites

By Jean Sherrard

Some might call it a one-hit wonder, but for a few months in 1870, the Alida, the sidewheeler steamer in our main “Then” photo, reigned on Puget Sound. Uncrowded Seattle, fewer than 20 years old, had barely topped 1,100 in population. Ambitious, rough-hewn residents focused on laying foundations for the future.

In one of the earliest extant photos of the waterfront, snapped from the west end of Henry Yesler’s wharf, a log boom from Yesler’s mill seems dense enough almost to be walkable.

Just above the Alida’s sidewheel can be made out the dirt intersection of Marion Street and Front Street (now First Avenue). Center left, the steeple of Rev. Daniel Bagley’s five-year-old Methodist Protestant Church (popularly called “the Brown Church”) points heavenward.

Bagley was a prime mover behind the construction of the Territorial University (today’s University of Washington) whose dome-shaped cupola graces the center horizon.

Keen eyes also will make out, at upper right, the original bell-towered Central School, Seattle’s first public schoolhouse nearing completion.

The Alida, commissioned by the entrepreneurial Starr brothers, eager to obtain a federal subsidy to deliver mail between Olympia and Victoria, was constructed in two locations. Its 115-foot hull was laid in Olympia in 1869, while its upper decks, luxuriously appointed with a dozen comfortable staterooms, were installed the following June at Hammond’s Boatyard near the foot of Columbia Street.

Capt. E.A. Starr, jockeying for influence, invited Seattle’s “it” crowd for an inaugural voyage on June 29, 1870, and it seems likely that the prominent citizens are those seen assembled on the upper deck for a round-trip trial run to Port Townsend. By all accounts, the four-hour, eight-minute trip delighted the passengers.

Reported the July 4 Daily Intelligencer, “During the passage down, the beautiful weather, the delightful scenery, the rapid and easy progress made, and, last though not least, the excellent instrumental and vocal music which was furnished by the ladies, all contributed to the enjoyment of the occasion.”

Within weeks, however, the Alida, intended to supplant older, slower steamers, proved too unstable for the daunting passage across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Starrs soon replaced it with the 168-foot North Pacific, a heavier, more powerful vessel that bested all comers.

The Alida was consigned to calmer waters, steaming among Olympia, Seattle and other Puget Sound ports until 1890 when the sidewheeler met a fiery end. Moored at Gig Harbor, the elegant flash in the pan burned to the waterline, set alight by embers from a raging brush fire.

WEB EXTRAS

As promised, here’s the oldest known photo of the waterfront, taken in 1869, one year before our “then”.

Most definitely click to enlarge for full effect. Maybe click again!

Also, for our usual narrated 360-degree video, captured on the waterfront from the Marion Street overpass, click here!

Every column featuring maritime topics enlists the finest historians who help ensure we use only the choicest ingredients! Michael Mjelde (former editor of ‘The Sea Chest’) and Stephen Edwin Lundgren are always fit for purpose.

Lundgren adds a few notes to the mix, starting with a fascinating reflection on the 1869 photo just above:

About the Robinson photograph of Seward sailing away to Alaska in July 1869. It’s the sidewheeler Wilson C. Hunt, identifiable by the unique steeple housing for the vertical piston engine.

Accounts of Seward’s trip say he arrived in Sitka on the steamer Active. Prior to that he arrived from SF in Victoria July 20.

“The next morning he left for a tour of Puget Sound on the steamer Wilson G. Hunt, accompanied by a party of more than a dozen men and women that included Thomas Somerville (d. 1915), a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Somerville later wrote a vivid narrative of the trip titled ‘The Mediterranean of the Pacific’ that appeared in the September 1870 edition of Harper’s magazine.”

… First stop Port Townsend, then Port Ludlow. Port Gamble, Port Madison, then Port Seattle (just kidding) for an evening visit, thence same evening past Tacoma to Steilacoom overnight, next day to Olympia. Returned “reaching Seattle about 9 p.m., where it was greeted with a 13-gun salute. After a brief stop at Yesler’s Wharf, the Hunt continued north, passing Whidbey Island the next day.”  where he transferred to the Active. (https://www.historylink.org/File/9969)

So this Seattle photo – July 22, 1869 – shows the sidewheeler “Hunt” heading north to Nanaimo enroute to Alaska via a larger ship, the Active. (Wilson G. Hunt was larger than the Alida? 185.5×25.8×6.75  461 g.t. versus Alida’s 115 feet)

The Active was also a sidewheeler, 173 feet length, in commercial service 1849-1852 as the Gold Hunter (original name), then 1852-62 as the Coast Survey shp USSCS Active, including Puget Sound service in 1856 during the Indian war. One of few Union ships on West Coast during Civil Way (1861 US Navy service). Returned to commercial service, 7 years later in the summer of 1869 to Alaska with a government survey scientific team to observe a solar eclipse, with Seward aboard.  Damaged, beached and wrecked near Humboldt,  California  June 6, 1870.

The Isabel seems to have been mostly in Canadian service until it got damaged and repaired, at which time Ed Starr bought it probably on the cheap for the Straits of Juan de Fuca leg, which as those who read the sad tale of the Clallam know are very dangerous waters.

Michael Mjelde chimes in:

I got out my copy of Roland Carey’s The Steamboat Landing on Elliott Bay, published by the author in 1962, this evening and note how he specified the Alida being originally  ‘partially’ built in Olympia as the Tacoma in 1869, and being completed at the Hammond yard in 1870.

The Alida eventually went beyond Port Townsend to Victoria as indicated by brief article in the Victoria Colonist in which they mention that they “sponsoned” her out  in a Victoria shipyard  because she tended to roll. I don’t know how long she was a ‘mail’ boat but she did serve in that capacity.

For your information, I have a copy of the index of certificates (NARA-Seattle) issued to vessels licensed to carry passengers  by the Steamboat Inspection Service.which, at that time was in Port Townsend.   Alidais listed twice in that volume.  Unfortunately, the page showing how many passengers she was licensed to carry is missing but the reference to Alida starts in 1875.

You may recall she was quite narrow at 18 feet plus paddle boxes; by comparison, Virginia V was eight feet wider;  whereas there was only a difference of six feet in their registered length.

Note that she didn’t ‘officially’ become Alida until she was issued that first register by US Customs.  Although her initial construction was in Olympia in 1869,  the incomplete hull was towed to Seattle (according to Carey, she received her engines in Seattle) and officially became Alida in Seattle.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on April 24, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 27, 2025

Deadly, damaging 1965 quake reminds us: Should we run?

By Clay Eals

The boy was maybe 8. He resembled TV’s Beaver Cleaver, but his smirk was more Eddie Haskell.

Interviewed briefly on a downtown Seattle sidewalk by KOMO-TV reporter Howard Shuman on April 29, 1965, about that morning’s 6.5-magnitude earthquake, the boy said he had been “in my house,” which “started to rumble.”

What did he do? “Ran outside. What else?”

Lasting 45 seconds at 8:29 a.m., the quake, centered in Northeast Tacoma, shook residents and structures over an area of 190,000 square miles. Three died from falling debris and four others from heart attacks.

The temblor marked the memories of many Northwesterners still living today. With its 60th anniversary upon us, the boy’s cheeky response merits reflection.

Running outside may be a natural gut reaction. But it goes against longstanding advice, which is to stay inside, move away from objects that could fall and crouch under a table or near a wall.

The boy’s sentiment, of course, wasn’t unique. Shuman’s other unnamed interviewees provided chilling echoes.

A Queen Anne High School girl, queried downtown, described a scene of panic before classes were to begin: “At first we saw someone running down the hall. There was a lot of noise, and the building started moving and the floor shaking up and down, and everybody started running out.”

A middle-aged man who had been in an elevator in the Great Northern Building at Fourth and Union said, “The elevator wouldn’t work, I pushed all the buttons, and it was shaking, and I didn’t know what to do. Finally the door opened, I looked down, and it was still shaking, and I walked right out of the building.”

At Harbor Island’s Fisher Flour Mill, a wooden tank fell seven stories, brick walls broke away from the sixth floor and two died. A jittery young worker said, “I didn’t have any control over my legs, so I dove underneath a post until I quit, and I ran out, and I ran about a 5-second 100-yard dash in street shoes.”

Admonitions to the contrary abound for an in-the-moment response. So do longer-term tips, such as those provided by Seattle disaster-preparedness coach Alice Kuder. Her firm, Just in Case, outlines a comprehensive “Flee Bag” of key items needed when a quake knocks out basic services.

All of which is immediately relevant, as geologists repeatedly tell us the Big One is imminent. Not if but when, and it could happen tomorrow. Our region’s most recent major earthquakes warned us in 1949, 1965 and 2001. Logic points to getting educated and taking precautions.

Indeed, “What else?”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Alice Kuder and especially Joe Wren, longtime KOMO-TV archivist, 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, you also will find two videos, 5 additional photos and 15 historical pages from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on April 17, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 20, 2025

Should Seattle’s Klondike museum close? Just ask its visitors

By Jean Sherrard

On a blustery, mid-March weekend, at a beloved federal facility targeted for closure by the current administration, it was time to strike it rich with opinions.

At Seattle’s Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, inside Pioneer Square’s restored Cadillac Hotel, I launched a poll.

My first prospect was a tall, bearded, mountain of a man. Formerly a Lake Tahoe-area ranger, he was touring the Northwest. He shook his head, declining to identify himself. But as he watched a Gold Rush video, he seethed.

“Nothing I say would be printable,” he said. “If I told you what I really felt, it would ruin my vacation.”

No less passionate, others eagerly went on the record.

Theresa Lacey and Tom Calder of Redmond had just heard of the potential shuttering and made a beeline downtown.

“It feels just like burning books,” Lacey said.

“If we don’t know about the past,” Calder added, “we don’t know where we’ve been or where we’re going.”

Jason Hein, with daughter Vivian, said the museum provides a parallel lesson for today. In a dig at AI and

its investors, he said of the Gold Rush, “For the vast majority seeking the mirage of promised wealth, it was a complete bust.”

The lessons also are generational, Vivian noted: “Kids can come here and see how their ancestors lived and see how the city they live in was built.”

Connie Wall and Dawn Walker, longtime Olympia pals and “national park geeks,” said between them they’ve visited 30-plus national parks. They took the possible closure personally.

“It threatens who we are as people,” Wall said.

“As Americans,” Walker chimed in.

Ex-rangers David Monroe and Jenny Dyste, who ferried across the Sound to visit, saluted the museum’s organizational context.

“The national parks,” Monroe said, “are the greatest thing America has done. It’s a gift to the people of the United States.”

Wiping away tears, Dyste added, “It’s our shared history.”

Lifelong Northwesterners John and Sandi O’Donnell were making their first visit.

“I’m celebrating my 63rd birthday by buying a National Parks Senior Pass today,” John said.

Sandi lamented the “heartbreaking” prospect of closure. “This place is a national monument.”

Could I find supporters of closure? Try as I might, it just didn’t pan out.

Theresa Werlech of Mercer Island has worked as a tour guide for 35 of her 88 years. Escorting dozens of student choir members from Arizona, she summoned a hopeful analogy.

“This place is an absolute jewel,” she said. “I’d be devastated if it closed. Let’s hope that the Klondike continues to go in search of gold.”

WEB EXTRAS

A handful of photos show off the museum’s lovingly designed interior, upstairs and down.

For our narrated 360 video of this column, please head over here!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on April 10, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 13, 2025

Neighborhood views from the air school us in new perspective

By Clay Eals

Throughout our lives, we often yearn to be close-up. But sometimes the farther away we get, the more we learn and appreciate. I’m speaking of distance — not only in physical space, but also in time.

Consider today’s pair of photos looking northwest at the West Seattle hub of Admiral Way and California Avenue. Taken from high up, they grant us perspective we rarely glean on the ground. They reveal how neighborhood icons can endure and how radically the rest of it can change.

Recently I received the main “Then” above — an oversized, mounted print — from a Fall City friend. Cars and other elements date it between 1930 and 1932. The photographer is unknown, but the image’s purpose is clearly to showcase its centered subject, Lafayette Elementary School.

Built one-half block south of Admiral Way in 1893 before West Seattle became a city of its own (1902) and annexed to Seattle (1907), the schoolhouse was first called West Seattle Central, drawing students of all grades peninsula-wide. With a bell tower and spires, it took on the nickname of “The Castle.”

Growth prompted an eight-room addition in 1908, and after West Seattle High School opened nearby in 1917, it focused on lower grades. In 1918, it was renamed for French Gen. Lafayette, who aided the Continental Army in the early 1780s during the U.S. Revolutionary War.

An April 1949 earthquake, fortunately during spring vacation, reduced much of the edifice to rubble, so in 1950 a much flatter Lafayette opened on the same site, featuring nine rows of innovative brown “saw-toothed” rooftop skylights.

The school presides at the center of our “Now.” But both airborne views display much more that survives:

At upper right is the narrow 1919 Portola Theatre, predecessor of the expanded 1942 Admiral Theatre, today a beloved landmark moviehouse. At lower right is the 1929 former Sixth Church of Christ, Scientist, also a landmark and home of the newly opened Washington State Black Legacy Institute. And at bottom center is the northwest tip of 1911 Hiawatha Playfield, an Olmsted-designed landmark, with two lone tennis players on its courts in each photo.

What’s changed in nearly 100 years? Oh, my. Lot sizes are far smaller. Houses and commercial buildings are more plentiful, many of them much taller.

The comparisons are seemingly endless, which is why drone shots and Google Earth are popular successors to the airplane- or even balloon-based photos of yesteryear, says Ron Edge, an expert on local aerial photography.

“The interest has always been there,” he says. “People have just loved to see what their towns looked like from the air.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ron Edge for his invaluable help with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard’s aerial video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, visit here.

Below, you will find 9 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

You also will find 107 photos from the Laidlaw aerial negatives in the Webster & Stevens Collections at the Museum of History & Industry, along with an index, courtesy of Ron Edge‘s scanning.

And here is a brief history of aerial photography!

Help create a fun and timely Now & Then column featuring the local history of Social Security!

The Alaska Building was home to the first Social Security Administration offices in Seattle in 1937. Its enthusiastic regional director was the aptly named Frank Messenger.

Join us Sunday, April 13, at 2pm at the northeast corner of Second and Cherry in front of the Alaska Building to demonstrate your support for a strong and healthy social security system.

Bring your SSA cards  (or facsimiles) to hoist in the air for the group photo. All are welcome!

Also, another opportunity to make your voice heard. Send us your succinct thoughts about Social security for possible use in the upcoming column. All comments will be posted here on the blog as well. Please email seattlenowandthen@gmail.com with the subject line “Social Security.”

Published in The Seattle Times online on April 6, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 3, 2025

Cruise along Chuckanut Drive – ‘an incomparable panorama’ since 1916

By Jean Sherrard

For my Grandpa Jean, a truck driver originally from Stillwater, Oklahoma, the journey was the destination.

In the 1930s, he crisscrossed Washington state in his trucks and was eager to share his scenic discoveries with a growing young family.

Hugging the steep sides of Chuckanut Mountain south

of Bellingham, Chuckanut Drive offered breathtaking vistas across Samish Bay and must have attracted the ex-Okie flatlander like a bee to honey.

Parking along the two-lane road and scrambling down to a small Pigeon Point cove for picnics became a family tradition. Sandy beaches, busy crab pots and massive Burlington Northern trains (and the pennies they flattened) colored childhood memories.

Chuckanut Drive has always taken the “drive” part of its name seriously. It can be traversed by car,

motorcycle or a particularly intrepid bicycle, but its narrow curves chiseled into precipitous sandstone cliffs leave scant margins for error (or photographers!). Likewise, its creation story boasts twists and turns worthy of dime-store novellas.

Primitive and undependable, the earliest north-south passages along the west side of Chuckanut Mountain were subject to falling rocks and high tides.

After the Great Northern Railway bought the right-of-way along the shoreline in 1893, road improvements were stalled to prevent landslides that might impede rail traffic.

In 1910, a nascent state highway department took control, hiring inexperienced convict crews to carve out stone ledges watched over by guards with shotguns. After 5.5 grueling miles, money ran out, and labor ground to a halt. With a further injection of state funding, contractors finally completed the task.

Hailed upon its spring 1916 opening, the road boasted a slew of firsts. A glowing Seattle Times account proclaimed it “the first link of the Pacific Highway from Vancouver B.C. to San Francisco to parallel salt water.” The route also handily connected Skagit Valley farms to Whatcom County ports, “proving its utilitarian value” while providing “an incomparable panorama of Western Washington.”

What’s more, Bellingham’s Charles Larrabee, encouraged by Gov. Ernest Lister, donated 20 acres of forested land along the road’s northern stretch, which became Washington’s first state park. Proclaimed the Times, “It will undoubtedly be appreciated by tourists desiring an ideal picnic spot.”

In 1919, Chuckanut Drive began to be paved and widened, attracting even more sightseers. By the mid-1920s, tourist-filled buses with observation windows shared the highway with Prohibition-skirting smugglers of liquor and drugs from Canada.

The Larrabee family gifted the state another 1,500 nearby acres in 1937. Today’s 2,683-acre Larrabee State Park is one of the state’s largest and most popular — and just one of the many hallmarks of spectacular Chuckanut Drive.

WEB EXTRAS

To view our narrated 360 degree video of this column, click right here.

And for ultimate enjoyment, check out this hand-tinted photo from the same prospect (but a different photog) supplied by the legendary Ron Edge.

Below, a few more photos of Larrabee State Park beach and environs.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 27, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 30, 2025

A 36-second thrill ride immerses us in a 1973 route to Seattle

By Clay Eals

Homemade time capsules can be uniquely evocative. This I know from the creativity of a long-ago best friend.

Seattle native Mark Tyrrell, a buddy starting when we both were 5 and growing up on Mercer Island, had an offbeat and entertaining affection for our regional milieu, revealing it in unexpected ways.

In the early 1950s, the vortex of the baby boom and long before seemingly everything was digital, our fathers purchased home-movie cameras, captured soundless 8mm vignettes of family events and regularly screened them for us.

At age 22, as shown in this video and in “then” screen grabs (below), Mark took this pastime to the next level.

With his dad’s two-lens Ampro Eight 350 camera — and its “Accurator” viewfinder, with adjustments for light and frames per second — he fashioned a fast-motion film in 1973 that documented the west end of U.S. Highway 10 before completion of its successor, Interstate 90.

In an impossibly swift 36 seconds for a real-time 9-minute journey, his rollicking, windshield’s-eye footage covered 7.2 miles, from Mercer Island’s forested Gallagher Hill Road to the James Street exit of Interstate 5. It’s a westbound thrill ride both startling and smile-inducing, especially for those of us who recall the route.

Therein, coming alive on grainy, color celluloid are many sights that evaporated decades ago, including:

• The thoroughfare at ground level, instead of elevated, sunken in a trench or covered by a concrete “lid.”
• The prominent TraveLodge motel in the Mercer Island business district. (During childhood, I’m embarrassed to say that I took its sign too literally and mistakenly called it the “Trave Lodge.”)
• The Lacey V. Murrow floating bridge, just two lanes each way. Built in 1940 across Lake Washington with a 40 mph speed limit, it featured a midway water pocket for large-boat openings but also a dangerous “bulge” for cars and trucks to navigate.
• The bridge’s equally perilous reversible lanes, with red “X” and green arrow markers that switched during rush hours. Unsafe as well: abrupt pre-tunnel entry and exit turns.
• A pullout lane near Rainier Avenue for crossing against full-tilt traffic (!) to a ramped shortcut to Beacon Hill. (My brother, Doug, recalls a similarly dangerous cross-traffic turn opportunity to reach the upper Shorewood apartments on Mercer Island.)
• A come-to-a-halt stoplight at Dearborn, near Goodwill, on the way to Interstate 5.
• The isolation of downtown’s then-tallest tower, the 1969 Seafirst Building (now Safeco Plaza), “the box the Space Needle came in.”

Sadly, Mark died way too early, at age 46, of myelodysplasia after a dozen years of multiple sclerosis. But his breathtaking mini-travelogue and other filmed and written pieces survive for us to ponder and enjoy.

Today, what Seattle sites do our smartphones and dash-cams record that soon will vanish?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Howard Lev for his invaluable chauffeuring assistance with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard’s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect through an automotive sunroof 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, you also will find 6 “Then” and “Now” comparisons from the route, a high-school paper on Interstate 90, and a children’s book illustration of the infamous floating-bridge “bulge.”

You can see many other vintage Washington state highway videos at this YouTube channel.

Also below, look for another fast-motion video by Mark Tyrrell from 1972 (of him changing the readerboard at Look’s Pharmacy on Mercer Island) and a booklet of Mark’s writings, prepared by Clay for a gathering of friends following Mark’s death in 1997.

COMPARISON 1

COMPARISON 2

COMPARISON 3

COMPARISON 4

COMPARISON 5

COMPARISON 6

AN APPRECIATION OF MARK TYRRELL:

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 20, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 23, 2025

113-year-old Roosevelt District jewel houses tiny shops ‘of hope’

By Jean Sherrard

What do storybook characters Ferdinand the Bull, the Little Engine That Could and the subject of today’s column have in common? All are plucky, dignified survivors in a seemingly indifferent universe.

“It’s like a reverse ‘Up’ house,” says Ryan Donaldson, adding to the trope and referencing an unassuming two-story structure anchoring the corner of 65th and 16th in the Roosevelt district.

His grandmother, Lucille Moreau Mrozcek, lived and

worked here beginning in 1980. Built in 1912, the combined house and shop, once Jewel Grocery, today stands isolated in what resembles a war zone, strewn with graffiti-covered broken concrete foundations.

“For years, my grandmother refused to sell,” Donaldson says. “This place was her home, full of family history, and she wanted to preserve it.”

“Mom’s my idol,” adds daughter Barbara Donaldson. “She never let up.”

In the early 1960s, Lucille and then-husband Conrad Mrozcek opened an artists’ supply shop on “The Ave,” serving university art students and professionals. Within several years, they opened a complementary business, Seattle Auction Palace, dealing largely in art and antiques.

Following their divorce in 1968, Lucille continued working full time while raising seven children. Buying the corner house and shop near Roosevelt High School made juggling life as a working single mother tenable. For nearly 40 years, she helmed Silhouette Antiques downstairs while nurturing children and grandchildren above.

“She had a signature saying,” Barbara recalls. “ ‘You do what you’ve got to do.’ Simple as that.”

Even as investors snapped up nearby properties, Lucille was adamant, refusing to move out. “She was definitely a thorn in their side,” Ryan says.

After her death in 2020, hoping to preserve the

existing structures, her family sought a sympathetic buyer. “We put up a for-sale sign,” Barbara says, “and in walked a young couple who lived just up the street.”

The two, Jenny Gerstorff and Josh Frickberg, were thrilled at the idea of opening a business in a location with neighborhood history. After many months of DIY renovation, repair and re-use, their shared vision bore fruit.

Ravenna Rocks, featuring crystals, gemstones and a host of geologic marvels, is housed in the Silhouette Antiques space, while just upstairs, Ravenna Refills offers organic shampoos, soaps and lotions in reusable containers.

For Lucille’s offspring, the preserved place provides the perfect coda. “We get to come and visit whenever we want,” Barbara says. “It’s like adding another branch to the family.”

“With so much bad news these days,” Gerstorff says, “we’re really happy to be good news for the community.”

Ravenna Refills partner Robin Dreisbach agrees: “We’re like a little shop of hope.”

WEB EXTRAS

Ravenna Refills will be having its official grand opening celebration on Saturday, March 29th, 3-6pm. We’ll be on hand to document the event!

Click right here to watch our narrated 360 degree video of this column.

Scroll down for more photos telling this fascinating story.

And here’s an interesting coincidence, discovered by Josh Frickberg’s dad. The Pingreys – Albert and Kittie – (pictured below) who also once owned the structure and ran a grocery there, are Josh’s 7th cousins, 3 generations removed.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 13, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 16, 2025

Librarian hears 20 years later how ‘her kids’ felt they belonged

By Clay Eals

In some pursuits, you have to trust that you’re having an effect that lasts. Teaching is like that. Journalism, too. So is being a children’s librarian. The kids you engage may never again pass your way.

Not so, however, for Laura Meyer. An educator/entertainer of kids for Seattle Public Library for 35 years, mostly in Lake City, Meyer was known for puppet shows and employing X-ray vision (actually a keen memory) to tell stories while facing a book forward for all to see. She retired at age 58 in 2005. Two years later, she and her husband moved south to Vancouver.

She made periodic trips to Seattle to see relatives. But years passed, and the youths she captivated became adults. Do they remember her?

Enter Casey McNerthney. An ex-newsie who is the spokesperson for the King County prosecutor, he recently pondered his mid-1980s affection for Meyer.

As a tot, he asked Meyer for the in-demand book “A Chair for My Mother.” When it came available, she telephoned him at home.

“I thought it was so cool that she called specifically for me,” he says. “She said she would save it for me. It was like having Taylor Swift play the song you requested.”

A father himself, McNerthney absorbed Meyer’s lesson: “She was the first person I remember meeting, outside of my family, who conveyed to children that they mattered.”

Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if she could reconnect with “her kids,” whose ages would now be roughly 20 to 65?

He organized a Lake City reunion, spreading word via social media. On the day-of, two-dozen people streamed through the branch door. Scores more sent well-wishes from across the country, even Ireland.

The branch had been renovated twice since she last worked there, but Meyer, it seemed, was no different. Same broad, crinkly-eyed grin. Same bold, expressive voice. Same flower in her hair.

It was Story Time again. Only this time, the grown-ups told as many as did Meyer.

“She was the kindest, most caring person you’d ever want to meet,” said John Desgrosellier. “I still remember a couple of books she shared with us when we were younger — ‘The Boxcar Children’ and ‘The Iron Giant’.”

“She always made me feel like I belonged here,” said Kristine dos Remedios Edens, who brought her daughter Avery to meet Meyer and to convey thanks. “It’s important to tell people like that,” she added. “Usually, you don’t get to tell them the impact that they’ve made.”

Meyer’s response: Tears, smiles and, of course, more stories! Mission accomplished, Casey.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Laura Meyer, Casey McNerthney and “Mrs. Meyer’s kids” for their invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video this time, but below you will find:

• A half-hour video of the Laura Meyer reunion on Feb. 1, 2025.
• A downloadable pdf of transcripts of 1998 and 2025 interviews of Meyer.
• A selection of 8 additional photos.
• And 7 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on March 6, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 9, 2025

At this 1938 Seattle cathedral’s blue domes, ‘heaven and earth meet’

By Jean Sherrard

For a first-time visitor, Sunday services at St. Spiridon evoke elaborate ritual.

After the ringing of eight bells mounted on the church’s side porch and tower, worshipers of all ages assemble in the square nave, most standing throughout the hour-long liturgy.

Priests perform a complex choreography before the altar, featuring arrivals and departures through multiple doorways, curtains that open and close, and mesmerizing recitations accompanied by a choir. Throughout, the delicate musk of frankincense wafts through the cathedral.

“We believe in the literal power of the sacred,” says John Cox, the church’s official zvonar, or bellringer. Cox relinquished Episcopal roots to join the Russian orthodox congregation in 1998. “For us, faith is not just a metaphor.”

This includes the physical church itself, which presides half-hidden amid high-rises on a slope just west of Interstate 5 in South Lake Union. For orthodox believers, Cox says, it is “a place where heaven and earth meet.”

St. Spiridon was founded in 1895 by Russian, Ukrainian, Greek and Serbian immigrants working in Seattle’s lumber and fishing industries. The congregation initially erected a wooden New England-style meeting house at the foot of Capitol Hill.

Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, great

numbers fled the new Soviet Union, and St. Spiridon’s congregation swelled to accommodate the new arrivals. The Bolshevik government, however, while shuttering churches across Russia, also sent out “church” representatives who attempted to seize ecclesiastical properties worldwide.

In 1924, ignoring the protests of church members, Seattle courts ordered that the building be ceded to the Soviet emissaries. In the dead of night, irate parishioners broke into their sanctuary and stripped it bare, removing icons, altars and religious art.

For 12 years, St. Spiridon met in rooms donated by the sympathetic Episcopalian archdiocese nearby. By 1936, members had raised enough capital to purchase another plot of land and erect a traditional Russian parish church.

They hired Russian-born architect Ivan Palmaw (1896-1979), also noted for designing Capitol Hill’s St. Nicholas Cathedral and the art deco Renton Fire Hall (now the Renton History Museum). Palmaw had fled post-revolution Russia, eventually landing in Seattle to attend the University of Washington School of Architecture.

“Orthodox churches are not built this way just because it looks cool,” Cox says. “Every aspect holds meaning.”

St. Spiridon’s nine domes — all robin’s egg blue —

represent the nine orders of angels and archangels. Their onion-like design is significant. “They are shaped,” he says, “like the tongues of fire that appeared over the apostles’ heads on Pentecost.”

On a blustery Sunday, he adds a wryly practical, if secular note: “They also shed snow really easily.”

WEB EXTRAS

A cool photo collage from St. Spiridon’s basement foyer illustrating significant moments in construction.

And to view our 360 degree video of the column, please wander over here.

For a short video of the Sunday service complete with choir and bells, click on the YouTube below:

And here’s a video treasure bell ringer John Cox just alerted me to:

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 27, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 2, 2025

Unassuming for generations, a Seattle site zigzags to the heavens

By Clay Eals

Each day is a steppingstone to something next. Take, for example, a corner just north of Denny Way at Dexter Avenue and Thomas Street. Circled by Seattle Center, today’s Amazonia and downtown, the parcel was rather unassuming for generations.

Two floors high with a brick façade, the structure was built in 1933. Over the decades, it housed a trade market, auto-repair and tire-retread shop,  bus headquarters, plate-glass company, wallpaper store, rentable warehouse and storefronts ranging from computer to legal services.

A notable notch in its lineage arrived in the 1990s. Sleepy-looking on the outside, the building exploded on the inside with the chords of grunge and other contemporary sounds. Among Seattle’s 80-odd music studios, it became one of the city’s four largest as it morphed into a haven called Stepping Stone Recording.

“The whole idea,” says founder Mike Foss, “was helping artists move their game up and get into the scene a little bit better by giving them better recordings, better productions.”

Key to that was advanced equipment and a supportive, hands-off approach. “It was about ‘Come and enjoy the studio, and if you want to talk to me, talk to me,’ but anytime you get involved and insert yourself in their creative process, it can usually be a negative. You want to let them walk in and own the place. I think that’s why we did so well, because I understood that.”

Proof lies in the studio’s track record of luring prominent bands, including the Posies, Rockinghams, Presidents of the United States of America and Quiet Riot, and individuals Paul Rodgers (Bad Company), Chris Cornell (Soundgarden), Jeff Ament (Pearl Jam) and Ann and Nancy Wilson (Heart).

Working 12- to 18-hour days, Foss paid $3,000 monthly rent for 7,000 square feet, spending 10 years in the building, sometimes climbing to its roof. “I could see for a long ways,” he says. “We’d look at the Space Needle, watch the fireworks, see the water out there. It was amazing.”

In the building’s place today is Skyglass, a 31-floor complex finished in 2023. Its first six stories resemble the old brick façade, but the upper 25 shoot a reflective zigzag to the heavens. Its 388 luxury apartments rent for an astounding $3,700-$6,800 per month. Goldman Sachs recently bought it for $175 million from its Chinese developer.

Foss eye-rolls at the transformation. “It’s a bizarre feeling,” he says. “This used to be a quiet street. It felt like a little place. It had a really cool vibe to it.”

Change seems inexorable. What, we may wonder, will be the next steppingstone?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Mike Foss and especially Tom Heuser 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, you also will find a video interview of Foss, 10 additional photos and 16 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Here are 10 additional photos kindly provided by Mike Foss:

Here, in reverse chronology, are 16 news clips about previous businesses in the building:

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb.20, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 23, 2025

Seattle Ski Park of 1934 (at Snoqualmie Pass) was ‘close to heaven’

By Jean Sherrard

Every Saturday morning during bleak winter months in the late 1960s, when weather cooperated, my parents would drop me off at the parking lot of Bellevue Junior High School to catch a yellow school bus bound for Snoqualmie Pass and a day of skiing.

In the mountains, I joined hundreds of other students, learning to negotiate rope tows, chair lifts and snowy slopes until some measure of prowess and confidence bloomed. Though not a natural athlete, I discovered I was a passable skier.

By late afternoon, aching and weary, all of us student skiers boarded the buses home. We could hardly wait for the next Saturday.

I only recently discovered the early origins of the exuberant civic spirit that championed school and community participation on the ski slopes.

“In 1934, the Seattle Parks Department opened the first municipally owned ski facility in the country,” says   ski historian John Lundin, author of “Early Skiing on Snoqualmie Pass.”

“Efforts were led by Seattle Mayor John F. Dore, a skier who envisioned the project as one that could lift his city’s spirits during the midst of the Great Depression.”

Ten acres of forest were cleared of trees by laborers provided by the U.S. Civilian Conservation Corps, who also added a “warming hut” for chilled skiers.

To prepare Seattleites for this unfamiliar recreation, Parks offered lessons to neophytes in the old Westlake Ice Rink. “The indoor school,” reported The Seattle Times, “is an innovation in ski training.”

The Seattle Ski Park opened Jan. 21, 1934. Though it was a drizzly Sunday, newly minted skiers, however, were scarcely discouraged. More than 1,000 turned up

to celebrate opening day, which featured the North End Community Band and Dore himself, who awarded a prize for the day’s best skier.

“This park is yours,” the mayor proclaimed. “We hope to expand it … and give you a ski instructor so that your children may learn to ski.”

Hardy enthusiasm saved the day. Because the park’s snowy incline had no rope tows or lifts (the first wouldn’t be installed until 1938), every skier made the long climb up Municipal Hill on foot, rewarded with thrilling if brief downhill glides.

City Council skeptics questioned creating a city-run park 60 miles from Seattle limits. Most councilors pronounced “ski” with a long “I.” Commented a wag, “ ‘Sky’ Park is rather descriptive when you consider how close Snoqualmie Pass is to heaven.”

Parks relinquished the ski park in 1940, but not before instilling an enduring love of snow sports in Seattle devotees.

WEB EXTRAS

For a 360 degree narrated video of this column, please join us on the snowy slopes!

Click here for historian John Lundin’s delightful HistoryLink essay. Much more of John’s work can be found at his personal website.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 13, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 16, 2025

Walks throughout Seattle can expand the mind and charm the soul

By Clay Eals

Mass transit always makes massive news. Well, what if the masses transported themselves more often by foot?

That’s a question implicitly raised by David B. Williams’ newly expanded second edition of “Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City” (University of Washington Press).

Filled with colorful maps and photos, tips, trivia and bygone context, the 304-page pocket guide, revised since its original printing in 2017, reaches all corners of the city. The sequel allowed Williams “to rethink my interaction with the landscape” while providing updates and additional walks in three neighborhoods that he identifies as humming with historical diversity:

• The Central District, with deep roots in the Black, Jewish, Asian and Catholic communities.
• South Lake Union, with an archival mix of nationalities and industries.
• And Georgetown, with working-class ambience based on the Rainier brewery that once dominated the district, paired with what Williams calls a “dark” vibe stemming from an infamous legacy of drinking, gambling and prostitution.

Viewing any neighborhood from a pedestrian’s eyes, of course, can reveal striking alterations. “Even if you’ve gone someplace over and over again, you always find something new,” says the author, best known for “Too High and Too Steep” (2015), about Seattle’s transformative regrades. “The city is always changing, whether it’s different weather, different people, different plant life or different animals you might encounter.”

Or different building uses. For instance, Georgetown, a city from 1904 until its 1910 annexation to Seattle, erected a stately, second city hall in 1909. Its classic clock tower presides in both our “Then” and “Now” photos. (The steeple was pruned by a storm and kept that way  to avoid low-flying aircraft.) Today the landmark serves as a Neighborcare Health dental clinic for low-income and uninsured people.

Throughout Seattle, Williams has charted routes meant to expand the mind and charm the soul, not to mention bolster the body. They range from 1.3 to 7 miles, flat where possible, and mostly on pavement, enabling explorations via wheelchair.

Along each path, Williams repeatedly finds validation for his long-held love of walking.

“It puts you at that slow level that allows you to pay attention to what’s around you,” he says. “It also allows you to stop and actually look at things. We never stop in our cars, or when we’re biking. It lets you interact with people and with the place that’s around you. You never know who you’re going to meet. For me, it’s really the best way to get to know a city or a neighborhood.”

We all probably can agree to toe that line.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to David Williams and Molly Woolbright 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, you also will find a video interview of Williams, 6 additional photos and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 6, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 9, 2025

This 12,500-year-old fossil found on Valentine’s Day 1961 got heart’s pounding

By Jean Sherrard

Without doubt, today’s “Then” photo is of the oldest — and largest — pelvis ever featured in this column.

Its original owner is a giant ground sloth that lived during the early Holocene era, soon after the retreat of the 3,000-foot-thick Cordilleran ice sheet. Its Puget Lobe, extending from Canada to just south of Olympia, left behind glacier-carved inland seas, lakes and rivers that still define this region’s topography.

As the ice melted, abundant life returned to the ’hood. Lowland bogs and swamps, including ample flora, supplied megafauna from mastodons to giant sloths with full larders.

Skip forward 12,500 years to Valentine’s Day 1961. Preparing to pour a concrete foundation for a Sea-Tac Airport expansion project, construction workers encountered an obstacle. Lean and compact, pile driver Gordon “Gordy” Simmons lowered himself into a 14-foot-deep hole to investigate.

“We were about 500 feet from the end of the runway,”

he recounted in a 2021 interview, “making these landing towers to guide planes in.”

At the bottom of the pit, Simmons saw what appeared to be a giant skunk cabbage, covered with rounded veins. But it crumbled away to the touch, exposing a huge hip bone. “I thought, ‘Gee, that must be an old cow or something.’ ” But it was buried too deep to be a cow.

He shouted up to a co-worker. “I got a dinosaur down here. Better call the university!”

And the paleontologists came running.

Construction was suspended while University of Washington scientists from the Burke Museum sifted through mounds of wet, unstable soil. What they unearthed was astounding.

“The Sea-Tac sloth provided the first evidence of these animals in the state,” notes David B. Williams, co-author of “Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State.” Just as thrilling, “it illustrated that interesting stories of natural history are everywhere, even in the heart of cities.”

The determined team recovered nearly 60% of the fossil’s remains, transferring them to the Burke Museum for further evaluation, inspiring years of rewarding research.

For Simmons, who continued working in construction until his retirement in the mid-1990s, the story of his find became a well-burnished family chestnut. Not until 2014, however, did he re-unite with his prehistoric pal, by then a featured exhibit.

In February 2022, daughter Dianna Johnson contacted the Burke with a request. Would it consider naming the giant sloth after her ailing father, then in his final weeks? Museum staff enthusiastically agreed.

Today, 11-foot tall “Gordy” welcomes visitors to the Burke Museum’s third-floor paleontology exhibit, its nickname invoking a serendipitous discovery and its intrepid discoverer.

WEB EXTRAS

First off, thanks are in order. Devlin Donnelly of the Port of Seattle greased the skids – as well as transporting the entire Simmons clan in a Port van making multiple trips to the photo site.

For a superb Port of Seattle video featuring Gordon and the sloth story, follow this link.

Here are a few more of Devlin’s photos:

Also deserving thanks and kudos, Patrick Webb, journalist for the Chinook Observer, who was first contacted by Dianna Johnson. Patrick wrote a moving account of Gordon’s fossil discovery, published shortly before his death in March, 2022.

And for a magisterial history of the Port of Seattle – which includes Gordy’s story – check out ‘Rising Tides and Tailwinds: The Story of the Port of Seattle‘ by Casey McNerthney, Kit Oldham and Peter Blecha.

More miscellany to share:

Finally, for our narrated 360 degree video, captured on on location, click right here.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 30, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 2, 2025

Compassion bolsters winter fishing for 90-year-old Tengu Club

By Clay Eals

Up, down, up, down.

Over and over.

Perseverance, patience, peace.

This approach has buoyed a little-known organization that has plied the waters of Elliott Bay off West Seattle most every winter for nine decades.

The all-volunteer Tengu Club, an aggregation of Seattle-area Japanese Americans and others, has forged a hearty culture and tradition of yearly fishing derbies.

Early on, Tengu became the club’s name based on reddish-faced supernatural beings in Japanese folklore with long noses that grow as they tell lie after lie — much as those who fish are prone to do.

Tengu Club’s durability, however, is no exaggeration. It stems partly from a fishing method members developed long ago called “mooching” — constantly moving a herring-baited line up and down, imitating the flutter of a wounded fish to entice bigger ones to bite.

The club’s venerated historian, Mas Tahara, 89, of northeast Seattle, also sees significance beyond its fishing. The underlying point, he says, is kizuna, a Japanese word that means enduring bonds.

“Tengu is people,” he says. “”It’s very, very important for anyone. It makes people alive.”

Summoning that spirit was a challenge when the club began in the mid-1930s. Though well-publicized spring and summer fishing derbies proliferated throughout Puget Sound, Japanese people weren’t invited to participate.

Ostensibly this was due to the success of mooching, as noted in the Sept. 16, 1940, edition of Time magazine. Describing the Sound’s 25 established salmon derbies, the article stated, “Japanese are barred (because they are too skillful).” But Tahara and other Tengu Club members assert that discrimination also was a factor.

To provide an alternative, Tahara says, Tengu Club set its derbies in the winter, a relatively unpalatable time for local fishing. The weather is bracing, and the fish typically available then are juvenile blackmouth salmon, smaller than their fair-weather adult counterparts.

Tengu Club’s contests ceased after Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Post-war, in December 1946, Tengu derbies resumed, lasting days and even weeks, and continue today.

Derby data starting in 1946, kept by Doug Hanada, longtime president, show 100-190 annual members through the mid-1990s, dropping to 20-35 in more recent years. Still, they’re a hardy crew.

Tahara emphasizes a pair of longtime Tengu Club philosophies: maintaining dignity and momentum in the face of unavoidable hardships, and extending goodwill by opening derbies to non-Japanese.

“We always try to see things with compassion,” Tahara says, “and we are always interdependent.”

The resulting camaraderie in the cold and wet, he says, is precious.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Mas Tahara, Doug Tanada, Nancy Ishii and Linda Ishii 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, you also will find a video interview of Mas Tahara and Doug Hanada, a dissertation (at the end), 85 additional photos and 18 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Following are 40 historical thumbnail photos, courtesy Doug Hanada, of Tengu Club events (click once or twice to enlarge):

Following are 17 thumbnail photos, courtesy Doug Hanada, of the Jan. 8-9, 2022, Tengu Club Cracker Derby (click once or twice to enlarge):

Following are 20 thumbnail photos, courtesy Doug Hanada, of the March 25, 2022, Tengu Club Banquet (click once or twice to enlarge):

Following are 3 thumbnail photos, courtesy Doug Hanada, of the April 29, 2022, Tengu Club Fish Fry at the home of member Dan Hicks (click once or twice to enlarge):

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 23, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 26, 2025

Lakeside Denny manor falls victim to religious landmark loophole

By Jean Sherrard

Turns out the mission was impossible.

Readers may recall our caper last March, attempting to visit Loch Kelden to capture one last photo before its approaching demolition. The three-story Spanish Mission Revival mansion overlooking Lake Washington had been completed in 1907 by Rolland Denny, the youngest member of the pioneer Denny Party.

We requested a final tour from the Unification Church, which had used the 1.7-acre property as a domicile and retreat since 1974. With its $6 million sale to developers still “pending,” the church turned us down.

So we took to the water. Accompanied by Rolland’s

great-grandniece Maria Denny, we boarded a cabin cruiser and, floating offshore, took “now” photos of the mansion gleaming over her shoulder.

Demolition was delayed, but sadly only by months.

Days before Christmas, we received news that the end was nigh. Mere minutes remained before the main structure of the house would be leveled. I grabbed a camera and made a bee line to Loch Kelden.

Unattended, I toured the denuded mansion, snapping photos. Soon I was joined by Aaron Blanchard, director of operations of EarthWise Architectural Salvage.

“We removed beautiful fir paneling, pocket doors,

leaded glass and stained-glass windows,” he said, along with 8-10,000 board feet of old-growth wood. EarthWise also saved the mansion’s front door, rumored to contain wood from the original 1851 Denny cabin.

“Incredibly cool,” Blanchard said, “was the horse-hair terra-cotta cornice above the door in the shape of a clamshell.” (The clamshell could be a sly reference to infant Rolland Denny’s survival, credited to Duwamish-provided clam nectar.)

After our spring caper, readers expressed shock and dismay over the pending demolition. Many asked how such a historic structure could be torn down without public input. What about city landmark status?

University of Washington architecture professor Jeffrey Karl Ochsner notes that the state Supreme Court affirmed in 1990 a claim by Seattle’s First Covenant Church that landmark designation infringed on religious freedom.

“The First Covenant ruling created a loophole in landmarks law,” Ochsner says. “Now what happens is a consecrated church building owner reaches a deal with a developer while the church is still consecrated. Then they get a demolition permit. This bypasses the landmarks process. Next the church deconsecrates and sells to the developer. The demolition permit transfers along with the property.”

For Maria Denny, the razing feels “like the loss of a family member, and it’s sad to think that a little piece of history is gone.”

Some may quarrel with “little” — in this specific case, and as an example for our city’s future.

WEB EXTRAS

Click through for our narrated 360 video featuring the demolition.

For those interested in a public discussion of the issues raised by this demolition, please join us on Feb. 4th at the Good Shepherd Center.

Also, a few last views of the mansion’s interior and exterior, minutes before destruction.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 16, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 19, 2025

Bavarian art-glass window resurfaces, but where will it shine?

By Clay Eals

Long missing, a Northwest art-glass masterwork has re-emerged. But will the enormous window ever again gleam in public?