Minam Canyon, Oregon - perhaps. (To ENLARGE click TWICE and search for the road & the stream, bottom right.)
Considering only the similar sky and the convenience of being nearby, Horace Sykes might well have taken this canyon-scape on the same trip that deadended for him at Hat Point where he recorded the scene shown yesterday as Sykes #72. Not typical for him, Sykes captioned both. That one yesterday “Hat” and this one “Minam.” We, however, are going to willfully suspend judgment on his “Minam” identification. We feel an intuition.
For those unfamiliar with Minam, it is a small town spectacularly sited at the north border of a braiding of canyons that resemble the curly regularities in the beards of Abyssinian war lords and/or dandies. We are familiar with those from ancient bas-relief sculpture and now here south of Minam we imagine them as seen from space, as on Google Earth, which is our authority in hirsute and other hairdressing matters as in much else, including topography. These canyons drain the north side of the Wallowa Mountains, which are Oregon’s more than match in size and elevation for Idaho’s Devils, noted yesterday. (And from the summit of Idaho’s He Devil to that of the Wallowa’s Matterhorn is a mere 40 miles. Both are a few stories under 10,000 feet tall.)
Now we will once more ride that devil crow, this time from Minam to Hat Point, which is about 50 miles to the east and a little to the south too of Minam. By highways and forest roads it took Horace 75 miles or more to reach Hat Point from Minam, but what a trip it was and still is – we imagine! Along the way – if you are driving – you, Horace and anyone will have to cross through the Imnaha Canyon, which to greatly simplify it is one canyon west of Hells Canyon, and for many in its scenery a more sublime spectacle than Hell’s. (Of course, we have not made any poll in this, but check it out and decide for yourself.)
Returning now to my intuition. I was stirred or agitated that the Sykes subject printed here might be a look into the Imnaha Canyon, rather than one of the several Minams, but, again, I know very little and speculate much. Still going back and forth between them, the melody to “Let’s Put the Whole Thing Off” sustained me. “You like Imnahas and I like Minams . . .” I did study via Google “helicopter” the Minam canyons “flooding” north from the Wallowas and twice came close to rising with a rousing Eureka from my adjustable desk chair! But with both canyons an irregular feature upset my discovery and I did recant. Still I was faithful to Horace’s lead – his caption – until I wasn’t.
So I returned to the Imnaha with a mildly guilty hope and to my surprise soon found a Google blue square (that is, a donated “click me” path to photographs) of the same subject and taken from nearly the same prospect as Syke’s own. However, to place it on the back of that now feverish crow, the blue dot is located 25 miles southwest of Hat Point and 7.5 miles southeast of the south end of Lake Wallowa, and that seemed to me to be way out of place. (Still there are not many other blue dots in its neighborhood and with those directions you should be able to find it.) Add to its seeming askew that the errant blue dot also has its own errant title – alas. It is named “Hells Canyon Oregon, 1986.”
Certainly, Sykes canyon and the blue dot’s own are NOT Hell’s Canyon. Perhaps the Google Earth blue dot photo was donated by a tourist from California or the Netherlands: generous but confused although generally in the correct corner of Oregon State. And for a while at least that is where we will leave Horace Sykes’ “Minam Canyon” as well, somewhere in that fanciful topographical mare’s nest* that is the northeast corner of Oregon State.
* Seen in toto (altogether) from space the northwest corner of Oregon IS a mare’s nest – except for those several canyons the run north from the Wallowa Mountains to Minam. Those are an Abyssinian’s groomed beard.
Pleas Continue with AN IMPORTANT IMNAHADENDUM
Now I have returned to my desk about three hours later and found it! My “intuition” or hunch about it being a look into Imnaha Canyon and not one of the Minams was right. Below, I have grabbed Sykes view with Google Earths – for a pair. The foreground will need some adjusting (Horace was a little lower than Google) but the more distance side of the valley – its west side as it is – lines up well between Google and Sykes. It is also a good witness to the “gloss” of the landscape that we get with Google, which with all its polishing and burnishing is a wonderfully revelatory tool.
The trick to finding this was turning the map upside down – looking south – and giving Imnaha a chance while abandoning Horace’s caption. Here he has recorded both a stream and road at the floor of his canyon – good clues of course. I soon determined that the road is the Upper Imnaha Road and the river, of course, the Imnaha too. It joins the Snake about 20 miles downstream from the turns in the river we see on the right. That confluence is about three miles above another where the Salmon River joins the Snake.
To get to his prospect Horace drove the sometimes precipitous one-lane gravel road up the east wall of the Imnaha Canyon – up from the Imnaha Store and Tavern and Motel and Roadhouse. Google includes an undated blue-dot photo of the clapboard establishment and it is blazoned with a banner celebrating its centennial. Horace took his photo looking south from an elevation of about 4200 feet. The river is 2000 feet below him.
Horace was standing on the exhilirating Monument Ridge, it is called, that carries what Google names the “Hat Point Road” for several miles above yet another valley – one between the Imnaha and Hells canyons. (Hidden here behind Horace.) Where this unnamed (we don’t know it) valley reaches grade with Monument Ridge is where Horace turned east towards Hat Point for the Hat Point Road’s last run up to its nearly 7000 feet high namesake. The distance between the sweet spot where Horace took this look south into the Imnaha is – as our crow flies – about ten miles from Hat Point across the “Interstitial Canyon,” we are now calling it.
The Imnaha River Canyon twice from Monument Ridge - once by Google and again (and earlier) by Horace Sykes. Both look south and a little west.
Hells Canyon from Hat Point, but not from the lookout there. Horace is too close to that broken pine to have climbed to the top of the timber lookout. (Click to Enlarge)
“What is the deepest canyon in North America?” was one of the cherished questions from the geography quiz my brother Dave and I would plead for when traveling long distances with our parents. The answer is (and still is, I hope) Hells Canyon, the about sixty miles of it that cuts the border between Oregon and Idaho.
What mysteries we Spokane Lutherans imagined lurked in Hells Canyon. My dad promised to take us there too. Although only a day’s drive – a rugged one – from our home it was still “out of the way.” We understand that such a promise is really the most heartfelt expression of a hope that one can make. We all wondered at Hells Canyon and wanted to see it, dad included, but could never find the time to go just that way. Not so its principal competitor the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.
The Grand Canyon was but one National Park we visited on our summer trip of 1950. We headed first for Yellowstone, and then onward to Jackson Hole, Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon, Big Bend, those caves in New Mexico, Sequoia, King Canyon, Yosemite, and Crater Lake. Although Grand Canyon is surely grand it is – again – still not as deep as Hell. But it is more often precipitous and also strapped or banded in many variations of red, a better color for Hell and Hell’s own. And, again, it was “on the way.” While barging through eleven national parks heading to and returning from Texas we did it in a brand new torpedo-nosed Studebaker. I can still recall the prestigious smell of it.
Dad was a delegate to a church convention in Houston. He also had a sister in Arizona we visited. She fed us squab. Our parents assured us it was a delicacy but we suspected that it was an economy. Another of dad’s ten sisters lived in Wichita Falls, Texas, and we found her in a tideflat shack with a TV set stuck on wrestling. Her son repaired TVs in a small shop downtown. In that house a clear line ran from the front door to the back, and those were the only doors in the place. The rest was hanging sheets. I concluded that my dad had come from a family of struggling Wisconsin farmers whose biggest crop, their own children, had scattered to the winds.
There are only a few prospects above Hells Canyon from which you can see the Snake River. This is one of them. The river can be seen reflecting the bright but still confounded sky. If I have figured it right, the drop here between Horace Sykes camera and the river is over 5000 feet. If Sykes had turned his camera to the horizon on the right he would have included the summits of the Seven Devils, the most precipitous mountains in Idaho. The fall from the 9300 foot summit of He Devil to the Snake is nearly 8000 feet – a fall of biblical dimensions, perhaps, a continuous descent into Hell. Some of the landmarks on that Idaho-side horizon continue the demonic motif. There’s the She Devil (second in height to the He Devil), the Gobblin, the Ogre, Purgatory Lake, Mt Belial, the Twin Imps, and the Tower of Babel – a very spiritual ridge. All of these mountains are strangely gnawed near their summits and the rock itself, because of it, looks like anti-matter might look.
On the other (east) side of the Devils is Highway 95 running north-south along the Little Salmon River. I rode it in a post-war art-deco bus north out of Boise in 1964, a most enchanting ride. Over the rolling hills part of the trip the two-lane but paved highway with grass shoulders (not gravel!) dipped with the topography like a roller-coaster. There was hardly any deep grading through the hillocks. And I took this trip early enough to experience the splendid collection of hairpin curves on White Bird Pass. It was subsequently straightened in the 1970s. Just north of the pass is the in the high-plateau of Nez Perce farmland is the Idaho agri-town of Grangeville. I first visited Grangeville when I was 13, a guest of my brother Dave when he drove down from Spokane on a summer weekend. For me it was a revelation of teen lust. The youths of Grangeville spent their weekend evenings slowing cruising up and down Main Street, a libidinous promenade of souped machines, hidden beer, pop music and carefully chosen clothes.
If you look to the far left horizon of Horace Sykes view from the nearly 7000 foot high Hat Point you see clouds. Beyond them on a clear day you would see instead some of the farms around Grangeville. Dave and I were then on Grangeville’s Main Street only 43 miles northeast of Hat Point (and perhaps even Horace Sykes for the timing was within range) as the devil crow flies over the deepest canyon in North America. But at that time I gave it no mind attending as Dave was to other matters, and following after him.
Heading east on Highway 2 about 35 miles out of Everett you will come to a little canyon, and it is there you may indulge this look at Mt. Index, if the atmosphere allows it. You can prepare for your trip by visiting Google Earth and its highway picture #45522 beside Highway #2. You will also find nearby one of the site's blue squares - this one floating in the river - that indicates there is a picture for you to see. If you tap it, up will pop a snapshot titled "Mt. Index early Spring." From this prospect it is easily appreciated how this face of the mountain is popular with rock climbers. The Google view is from nearly the same prospect as Syke's view and shows the same big rock in the Skykomish River. The mechnical bar on the rock is a digital artifact and none of the rock's. We think we will leave it there for eternity for no flood will foil it. (If you like, CLICK TWICE to Enlarge.)
We found this exhibition just now. It is fitting for the story we ran last June 12th on the Totems of Belvedere Viewpoint. It is also a heart-warming example how one goof may have got fortunate with a good-humored partner.
This underwhelming Sykes leaves for the moment his passion for grand landscapes, while tending to one of his frequent motifs, the winding road. Typically, Horace Sykes did not leave a caption nor clues nor cross-references. This slide did not appear in order neatly next to another and another that are similar and so also revealing. So far at least it stands alone. And so does that horizon. Is there another directly beyond it or does the road wind downward into a deep valley? I'll imagine, at least, that he is reaching the summit of Colockum Pass, the rough pioneer wagon road that still crosses the Saddle Mountains between Ellensburg and Wenatchee. On the other side of the horizon we might see the Columbia River near Crescent Bar. Yes, that is unlikely. I have not yet completed looking through the boxes of Skypes slides from the 1940s and early 1950s and confess that the old teamster's pass would be a natural subject for Sykes and so I hold hope of finding him up there. And up there it certainly is at 5383 feet, which makes it easily one of the highest passes in the state - much higher than the 3022 feet at Snoqualmie and the 4056 at Stevens and closer to the 5477 feet of Sherman Pass in the Okanogan between Republic and Kettle Falls on the Columbia.
THEN: One of about a dozen photographs commissioned by the first owners of Fir Lodge, the Bernards. The Lodge is on the left, behind the lead team of white horses. The Bernards did not let us know with their own caption why about a dozen white-clad women are posing in the Seattle Transit vehicle on what now is part of Alki Ave. SW. (Photo Courtesy Log House Museum)NOW: For his “now” Jean wisely chose to climb a balcony on the building that otherwise would have blocked his view of the Homestead Restaurant. Jean will also be the “official photographer” next Sunday July 4th for the Southwest Historical Society’s “mass photo” of citizens showing their support for restoring the Homestead. For that photo Jean will be hollering instructions from a prospect on 61st Avenue – not the balcony.
Fir Lodge was built of Douglas fir logs in 1904 for a local soap maker, William J. Bernard, his wife Gladys and daughter Marie. They stayed three years on Alki Point before returning to the city across the bay in 1907, ironically the first year that trolleys started running regularly from the West Seattle “pioneer” shoreline to Pioneer Square. Of course, Fir Lodge was not the first “log cabin” built on Alki. That was the structure David Denny started building for John and Lydia Low and their four children in the fall of 1851.
Fir Lodge was built to be rustic, but sumptuously. Certainly a good percentage of Seattle citizens and their guests visited it as the Alki Homestead restaurant, which opened in 1950 and became steady for its long run in 1960 when Doris P. Nelson purchased and ran it and devised the “family style” chicken-based menu that seemed as righteously American as the flag, mothers and apple pie, which the Homestead also served. I knew the zestful Doris and the energy she gave to both her landmark restaurant and the establishment of a home for the Southwest Seattle Historical Society in what was the Bernards’ carriage house and is now the Log House Museum. After Doris died in 2004, the landmark kept busy until the roof caught fire in January 2009.
The Southwest Seattle Historical Society, which secured city landmark status for Fir Lodge in 1996, is staging a mass photo event in front of the now silent building on Sunday, July 4, to express continued support for its preservations and restoration. The photo will be used in a poster and distributed widely online. Restoration supporters are encouraged to be part of the photo, and those who do will hold signs that say, “This Place Matters,” a catch phrase of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The photo will be taken shortly after 1:30 p.m. following the historical society’s annual all-comers Independence Day membership picnic, to be held one-half block south in the courtyard of the Log House Museum. Politicos who have signed on to be in the photo include King County Executive Dow Constantine, Seattle City Council member Tom Rasmussen and former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, West Seattleites all.
WEB EXTRAS
Jean writes: While usually we try to position “Location Now” with “Location Then” as closely as possible, in the comparison above, a photo taken from the original photographer’s spot blocked the Homestead Restaurant completely from view. But for the exacting, here is a closer approximation of that view.
Repeating the original perspective
In addition, turning 180 degrees offers a familiar scene:
Give me your weary. your wet…
And strolling around the block, we see the Homestead down its front walk:
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean – several things to add.
FIRST I’d wished that you had reminded our readers that it is YOU who has been invited to take the GRAND GROUP HOMESTEAD RECORDING this coming INDEPENDENCE DAY. So now I have made a raucous note of it, and add that it is unique to see with what ease someone as monumental as yourself can easily gain the effective prospect for recording landmarks and masses. So readers please – if you will – come see Jean and get in front of his Nikon this coming JULY 4 (next Sunday and not this) at 1:30 in the afternoon. That is (how could this be not clear?) in front of the Homestead Restaurant at the Alki Point address of 2717 61st Ave. SW, and that is ONE-HALF BLOCK in from the STATUE of LIBERTY, which (back to Jean) you have shown us above in its new setting.
Also below are two more examples of “NOW & THEN” out of old issues of Pacific, and both predictably related to the subject above. One is about the Homestead, published first in 1994. It prepeats some of the material used above. The other is about another log structure on or near Alki Point, the Sea View Lodge. The first of these also features a few more 1905 photos of the Homestead, inside and out, when it was a nearly new log mansion for the Bernard Family.
Dont Miss:BUCOLIC GHOST BUSTERS
Following the logs is an extensive and gentle parody on ghost-busters, and in this case vampires ravaging the cows of Moclips. Jean visited Moclips this evening as the speaker for the annual banquet given by the Museum of the North Beach. That vibrant roadside attraction broke all our records in book sales for “Washington Then and Now.” We are thankful, indeed we give thanks by making fun with them.
JEAN’S BACK IN THE CANYON AGAIN
One thing more. In between the Moclips mysteries and the hallowed Homestead is one of Jean’s most wonderfully surreal recordings of the Yakima Canyon landscape. One ordinarily needs to visit a location many times to bring up such. And Jean often does drive through the canyon with his close friend Howard Lev on trips that are mostly about checking the growth of Howard’s peppers for his popular and spicy condiment Mama Lil’s Peppers. I use them in my rice regularly. (This, I believe, amounts to this blog’s first advertisement, although it was not paid for, except in pickles and without asking.)
One of a handful of photographs taken for the Bernard family of their new Alki Point log mansion in 1905. The group was handed to me for copy by Doris Nelson who took over the mansion in 1960 and continued to operate it as a restaurant until her death in 2004. The rest of the photos will be attached below the copy I wrote (with a few changes) for Pacific Northwest's April 10, 1994 issue. (CLICK to ENLARGE)
The Alki Homestead
Except for its listing in the Seattle Tour Map, the Homestead Restaurant doesn’t advertise. It doesn’t need to. The menu is traditional American, with basic entrees such as steak and pan-fried chicken, biscuits, vegetables, potatoes – usually mashed – and apple pie. What brings customers in is as much the place as the plate. The Homestead and its carriage house are two of the last three surviving log structures on Alki Point. (In the 15 or so years since this was first published two others have been found. Neither is on Alki Point but rather up the hill. When the addresses are available we will share them – here.)
This view of the Homestead was photographed in 1905 when it was the new home of W. J. Bernard, a Seattle soap manufacturer. Its builders soon gave it up, however; missionary work interested Mrs. Bernard more than the duties of managing the social calendar of a capitalist’s mansion.
In 1907 Seattle’s New Auto Club bought the log mansion and its adjoining carriage house. Getting from Seattle to West Seattle by motorcar was then still an adventure and most members made it a two-day excursion. The clubhouse gave them a night’s lodging and a large kitchen for preparing club meals.
Driving to West Seattle soon became both easy and passé’ and the motorists abandoned their log clubhouse to common uses – a boarding house, family home and since 1950, a restaurant. Doris Nelson, its present owner, has been with the Homestead since 1960
One of Seattle’s most vital and effective heritage organizations, the Southwest Seattle Historical Society, is working to acquire the Homestead’s sizable log carriage house for a museum. Considering that Alki Point is (at least one of) the birthplace(s) of Seattle and that the settler’s first structures were rough-hewed, using this log survivor for a museum is a most well-chosen and promising act of preservation.
(Doris Nelson died of pneumonia on Nov. 18, 2004. Following her death it was hoped, as noted above, that the West Seattle Historical Society might manage to acquire the Homestead and use in, in part, for an expansion from its Log Cabin Museum, which was originally the carriage house for the Bernard family. Instead, property developers Patrick Henly and Thomas Lin purchased the Homestead and also kept it going as a restaurant of the same style and menu that Doris had developed. Then the fire of Jan. 16, 2009 made its interruption.)
Bernard family home porch, 1905.DiningFireplace & Piano. Sheet music for "I'm On the Water Wagon" & "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (Click to Enlarge)Library and fireplace
Finally – we think – how to get to West Seattle before the trolley arrived in 1907. Ferry City of Seattle takes on passengers at the West Seattle dock on Harbor Avenue. Actually, the ferry continued to run long after the streetcar arrived.
When new in 1904,Sea View Hall at 4004 Chilberg Ave. S.W. was a relatively isolated family cabin. Now the hall seems hunkered in its crowded beachside community. The address has also changed: In the streamlining 1950s, the 4000 block of Chilberg Ave. was renamed an extension of 59th Avenue – and thereby another link to history amputated. Andrew Chilberg and his extended family were leaders of Seattle’s Scandinavian community in the 19th Century. As the president of the Scandinavian National Bank, his vice president was Amund Amunds, a maternal uncle to Ivar Haglund’s mother Daisy. It was from Amunds that Chilberg got his part of Alki Point for development.
Sea View Hall
If there is truth in this naming, then the prospect of Puget Sound from Sea View Hall was most likely unobstructed when the hall was built early in the 1900s. Now that view is somewhat obscured by beachside homes and the hall’s own front-yard landscape.
Sea View Hall is one of the three log-cabin survivor in the Alki Point neighborhood. (The others are the Log Cabin Museum and the Homestead Restaurant. Recently – in 2010 – John Kelly, West Seattle explorer, revealed to me that he or his had found another, although one somewhat obscures by its size and landscaping. Perhaps, I learn again the address from John, which was a thrill – a modest one – finding on Google Earth.) Like the better known still now long-gone Stockade Hotel, his hall was constructed in good part of wood salvaged from the beach, its logs set vertically like a fort. And “Sea View Hall” was eventually spelled out in “logoglyph” style; letters shaped with big sticks and hung from the roof, or here the upper veranda. In this early view, the sign has not yet been shaped or placed.
John and Ella Maurer are probably among the at least 23 persons posing here. In 1954, the hall’s 50th anniversary, John was identified as its builder by his daughter-in-law. After returning from the Alaska Gold Rush, he had taken up construction and painting, and built this nostalgic summer cabin for his family’s recreational retreat from Seattle. The rustic theme was continued inside with, for instance, a staircase handrail constructed form a peeled log with banister supports fashioned from the same log’s twisted branches.
The Maurers moved on in the 1910s. In the 1930s, probably, a room made of beach rocks was added to the Hall’s north (left) side. According to neighborhood lore it was used as a playground for the children living there, and the next name I can associate with the hall after the Maurers seems perfect: Rochfort Percy, listed at 4004 Chilberg Ave. in 1939. He soon moved on and Alma Kastner followed, converting Sea View Hall into a World War II boarding house. She kept the sign. Kastner stayed for about 20 years before passing on this fanciful construction to Allvin and Margaret Ross. This is still Ross Hall. (It was when this was first published in Jan 23, 2000. Perhaps five years hence efforts were made to sell it – and most likely to purchase it too. What became of that I do not, for this moment know, but will probably be informed by the Log Cabin Museum on the present fate of Sea View Hall. By then, perhaps, I will also find some of the “now” photos I have taken of it.)
Cruising through my collection, I found several shots that Mister Sykes might have liked. In many of his photos, he sought out the dramatic – dark, threatening skies with a peaceful foreground and the resulting tension between the two. Of course, much of this is being in the right place at the right time, which for Horace at retirement age, was not a problem.
Here, in the Sykes style, is a right place/right time photo taken of the great bowl across from Umtanum creek.
If you do not care for demure introductions to sensational stories then just jump past what follows to the sanguine meat of the feature itself. It begins directly below the photograph of the Moclips Weather Service ca. 1909
Today – and in the interests of posterity we will make a recorded note of it – this day, Saturday June 25, 2010, this Blog’s own Jean Sherrard heads out to the Pacific Coast to meet, dine and share more Moclips stories with members of the Museum of the North Beach and their heritage leader Kelly Calhoun. Jean is also making this visit to describe the joys and trials of making our book “Washington Now and Then.” And he is driving that scenic highway to thank Kelly and the citizens of and near Moclips for the records they set in distributing the book. Moclips, of course, was one the subjects that we featured in our book.
The primary Moclips image used in our book "Washington Then and Now." It shows the damage to the north end of the Moclips Beach Hotel following the storm of 1911. (Click to Enlarge)
We add what follows as evidence of our continued fascination with Moclips history. Recent and disturbing news from Kelly had Jean and I putting our heads together – feeling concerned. His letter about ghost busters visiting the museum and their, it seems, success in finding a few spirits to bust, helped us to recall some Moclips news reports, oddly out of an old London newspaper, that surfaced while we were – now long ago – assembling our book. While there was no place to make note of them in “Washington Then and Now” we do now. Although we could not recover the clips themselves, we remembered, between us, their particulars and, with the support of Grays Harbor historian Gene Woodwick, have confidently assembled the story below, which is actually three short stories concerning Moclips fated nights, first that of its biggest storm – its “One Hundred Year Storm” of Feb. 12 1911.
The message attached to this pre-storm promotional postcard is unclear and so, given the events that followed, troubling.
How soon we have forgotten. Even long ago, in the respected depression-time 1941 publication “Washington, A Guide to Washington State,” no mention was made either of the 1911 storm or the weird events we will soon reconstruct below. Instead, Moclips is described briefly as “a busy little settlement, supported largely by its shingle mill. The Moclips High School serves the oceanside region north of Grays Harbor, and its gymnasium is used for community gatherings. On the northern outskirts is the Moclips Fire Observatory (open), atop a 175-foot fir tree.” We think it unlikely that such an observatory would have survived the events of 1911.
The Moclips weather service, circa 1909.
MOCLIPS EXSANGUINATIONS 1911
In Moclips, and now nearly a century ago, between the great Pacific Coast poundings of 1911 and 1913, storms whose damage is recorded in spectacular photos at the time, “Moclips Mysteries” occurred which remain uncanny to this day.
The most alarming of these took place on a small dairy farm. The family name is barely remembered for they changed it and moved away soon after the events described below. But in 1911 they were known as the Van Hooverens. (This is confirmed by Grays Harbor historian Gene Woodwick who rarely makes things up. Readers who have combed her most recent book Ocean Shores will, we wager, not have found a single mistake in it. We have attached her addendum, near the bottom.)
The Van Hooverens brief stay near Moclips may have as much to do with their eldest daughter Arabella’s best chances as with milk and cheese. She was an enthused student of the Moclips Finishing School that rented several rooms on the top or third floor of the north wing of the Moclips Beach Hotel. After only six weeks of study she gave her first “Famous Adagios” recital, which was appreciated for its steadfast sincerity and the length of the program. The destructive storm put an end to the school, and immediate hopes for the Van Hooveran’s daughter of moving on to the Portland Music Conservatory. We know, of course, that it also put an end to much else in Moclips.
Apparently Arabella taking a break from her studies.
The Van Hooverens were a first generation Dutch family. They are also believed to have produced the first Edam cheeses in the Pacific Northwest, although aside from one small fragment of ephemera this evidence is anecdotal, which is to say that it is a story also told by the admired historian Woodwick. No actual cheese or cheeses survive, just part of a cheese wrapper that reads in fragment “Eat’em Eda,” which surely would be completed as “Eat’em Edam Cheeses.” Their mysterious story follows.
Before the storms, Moclips was a busy destination for the new motoring classes.
On the fateful Sunday of Moclips’ biggest storm day, February 12, 1911, two of their finest milk cows disappeared from their stalls. The next morning, Jan (probably for Jandon or Jandor) Van Hooveren, finding the barn door open and the cows, Marjolin and Mijn, missing, raised a cry. Jan, his wife (Annika or Anneke), two daughters, and three sons scoured the farm and surrounding fields for these valuable animals. The melk boer (milk farmer) began to lose hope that neither hide nor hair would be found of either, but then before sundown on Monday the 13th the cows were stumbled upon by a young couple who had hurried to the coast from Wenatchee. Having heard of the storm’s fury, particularly visited upon Moclips, they rushed to the site aboard the Great Northern Railroad and were already exploring wreckage and the brusied landscape when along the beachfront they came upon the two cows, side by side, and partially buried in the sand. Further examination determined that both animals had died, not from any visible trauma, but most unusually from loss of blood. While neither showed obvious injuries, each carried two small wounds on the neck, located proximate to major arteries. It was surmised that the complete exsanguinations of the cows was accomplished through these wounds alone.
A Dead Cows Simulation Only
Jean and I both remembered that the clipping on this extraordinary event was headlined either “Two Cows Give Blood Up” or “Two Cows Give Up Blood.” Jean came upon it first while researching for the book “Washington Then and Now” but that is long ago and our memories of all this may be twisted in some points. At that time we, again, made note of it to Northwest historian Gene Woodwick who had also heard of the “exsanguinations sensations”, as she put it and expressed it with an ease that was way beyond either of us. But then the regional historian still knew little more about what was done with the cows or why the Van Hooverens were also swept so thoroughly from the community. (Persons doubting the above or wanting more information may contact Gene – if they can find her.) We remember that the story was not clipped from any regional paper but rather appeared in a London daily. Most likely that first story went over the wire and got little more than that one London chance for being published. That was but the first mysterious event.
Moclip's Main Street with apparently some early damage. Note the Moclips Hotel is still intact at the rear, and to this side of it a local stands with her cow, perhaps a Van Hooveren. (Please Click to Enlarge)
A second and uncannily related event also involves a death by loss of blood – this time human blood, and again nearby Moclips. After Bjorn Sandberg was violently struck on his skull and knocked from his wagon by a tree limb during the 1913 storm, his son ran home to alert his mother Inge. When they returned less than an hour later they were startled to find the father-husband bleached as white as the foam pushed ashore by the storm. The discovery sent mother and child into shock. They clutched each other throughout the night and into the following day and could not be pried apart even by other loving hands. Without the ability to express their wishes or give instructions, the body was left lying in the road where the father had first been knocked from his wagon. As with the bovines Marjolin and Mijn, Van Hooverens’ drained livestock, Bjorn was also left bloodless.
The 1913 storm that finished the destruction of this secular temple of both ocean shore excitement and reflection.
The third and again resonant event involved Martha Connelly, a young Sunday school teacher visiting from Aberdeen two years later in 1915. While visiting her married sister Dorothy (whose last name may have been Perkins) in Moclips, Miss Connelly agreed to mount a Christmas pageant with the primary school children. Late one evening, after a long and exhausting rehearsal, Martha was alone at the schoolhouse, putting up streamers and “festoons for the faithful” of all sorts. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a figure passing by the window and assumed it was her brother-in-law Vernon, come to escort her home. In an account written up in a family “vanity history” (i.e. genealogy), Martha described putting out the lamps and stepping outside onto the schoolhouse porch. As she fumbled for her keys, footsteps approached. She glanced about, expecting to see Vernon, but in an instant, a dark figure (“all claws and teeth,” she claimed) leapt atop her forcing her to the ground. Powerful fingers held down one of her arms. Expecting the worst, the devout Martha closed her eyes and prayed while making the sign of the cross with her free hand. To her surprise, after feeling a sudden piercing but not unpleasant pain in her neck, as if two sharp knitting needles had been skillfully slipped into the side of her neck, the “thing” fled.
Vernon Perkins had indeed been sent by Martha’s sister to bring her home for a late supper. Save for her saving from prayer and cross-marking, Martha, too, may have ended her life sucked dry of blood. Vernon saw the thing but barely, for it was already in flight when he arrived and disappeared quickly from his lantern light. It was “rat like” in appearance, though it would have been the largest rat ever seen in the northwest coast being, Vern guessed, some six feet long. It was dressed elegantly too – “dressed to kill.” Martha bore those two little scars for the rest of her life. She felt most fortunate at having survived the attack and proud as well. Following the attack she did not continue with the Christmas pageant, but later learned to enjoy telling the story of her night with what she insisted was a vampire.
Martha Connelly by coincidence with a cow.
Although, it seems, long forgotten – or perhaps repressed – by the community there survives another belief, which may be related. During the great storm of Feb 12, 1911 that destroyed most of his great Moclips Beach Hotel, Dr. Edward Lycan fell into a panic, or rather a trance and through the duration of the storm he seemed to be without pain or anguish. Those who cared for him those few hours when he was incongruously serene but witless were puzzled then by his repeated and kind advice: “They want our blood, you know. It’s the blood they want.” When told of this later the Aberdeen doctor had neither memory of his temporary madness nor any explanation for the message he insisted on repeating. Several Moclips citizens, however, put their own interpretation on the doctor’s brief lapse. They had heard – and independently – the gale-force winds of that winter storm howling “cud, cud, chew on cud!” or alternatively, “stud, put them out to stud!” One of them, a bartender heard a different refrain. He insisted that it was “We want blood sausage?” that was being shouted and the bartender felt pretty certain it was a group of Spanish sailors, stranded by the gale and pining for their native chorizo. Yet another heard the storm cry aloud “blood blood, we want blood” so plaintively and with such compassion that she only wished that she might that night have given to the winds some of her own blood.
Although Jean and I agreed to put our “heads together” to recreate the above – and without the original sources – we are still confident of the Connelly, Sandberg and Dr. Lycan stories, however, we cannot speak with such certainty for the grotesquely-sized exsanguinations of the Hooverens’ poor Marjolin and Mijn. For those milk cows historian Woodwick’s addendum, which now follows is most helpful.
"The life of farm animals along the Grays Harbor Coast." Gene Woodwick
Van Hooveren’s Cow (from Gene Woodwick)
As you know I am adequately equipped to relate this historical information regarding the Van Hooveren’s cow shown in the attached image. You can see by the photo the farm was located on a meander channel near the Moclips River. The family was famed – although briefly – for its dairy cattle and their products which they supplied to the Moclips Hotel.
As is well known, farmers of that era fertilized their fields with the abundance of spawning salmon from the rivers. Van Hooveran’s were no exception. The purity of the Quinault blueback salmon oil not only produced a rich milk from which the family made excellent cheese, but it also produced pigs with a moist fat content that made the hams and pork sought after. The Hotel featured the Van Houvern’s bacon on the dining room breakfast menu.
The Moclips Madness cheese was easily broken down into salmon balls that accompanied the fine bakery products from the Moclips Bakery. Although some thought the pure milk a little too fishy for their taste, others touted the health benefit of the milk so rich in vitamin D. Further south of Moclips where Dr. Chase operated the Iron Springs Health Spa, his clientele was enamored by the Van Houvern’s milk products and would have no other. After all, old iron bed springs, well hidden upstream from the health facility, provided a wealth of minerals enabling guests to go home full of vim and vigor.
I do hope this historical information is of great value to you and Jean. Especially the fine photograph that illustrates so well the life of farm animals along the Grays Harbor coast.
Happy for Moclips,
Gene
Gene Woodwick, upper-right, recently with friends at Ivar's Salmon House on Seattle's Lake Union. Another colored postcard of the ideal Moclips - the Moclips before the storms and other sensational events.
This, we are confident, is a scene along the Yakima River Canyon between Ellensburg and Yakima. , Readers may remember: for Jean this canyon is one the state's charmed places. As recently as yesterday he wet visiting the canyon to explore an orchard there on a hillside. Perhaps he will share a picture or two with use of his visit. (Please, Click to Enlarge)
Hi Paul, while I didn’t get a chance to shoot this spot yesterday, here’s a few from previous trips:
Another Sykes-captioned slide. He calls it "Walla Walla County Farms." This landscape may be compared to that in #66. And the sky too. Here we also get a Sykes motif. He includes the road, and such a fine road, all rutted from a rain now long passed by. Sykes liked his subjects to take us both hither and yon. And that bush standing across the way will be an instance of his frequent fitting of compositions with some singular or upstanding planting or wild thing near at hand.
Another Sykes visit to the Palouse, or near to it. Here Horace is moved to write a caption. It reads. "Field - Pea Harvest in Washington State. 1000 acres fields, common." Click to Enlarge - Please
There is something “purple” about the phrase “purple mountain’s majesty” and purple hegemony from sea to shining sea runs through the poem “America” by Katharine Lee Bates, a Wellesley College English teacher who found the poem’s landscape on a summer train trip to Colorado Springs in 1895. The first lines came to her at the top of Pikes Peak. She was not looking west then into the endless ridges of the Rockies but east from whence she and Manifest Destiny had come. She looked to the fruited plains that were taking shape like a checkerboard with farms keeping to section lines set down by federal surveyors years earlier. The poem’s clean-and-gleam urban visions came from recollections of the teacher’s visit to the “white city” of the Columbia Exposition in Chicago two years earlier. “Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears! / America! America!” (Obese on hogs and steers.) A century ago, this year, after many composing contenders her poem met the by now accepted music for it, and it is still preferred by many to the official national anthem about bombs exploding and rockets flaring. Samuel A. Ward, a choirmaster-organist did the composing, and with sheet music soon published – and 78 rpm recordings available too – America the Beautiful became a patriotic hit, concluding with lines that had forgotten the then still fresh slaughter of the “Americans” who had lived here for a few thousand years before it was possible to take a train to Pikes Peak and more easily shoot at them, the buffalo and later the Burma Shave signs. “America! America! God shed his grace on three / And crown they good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea!” I loved singing about “purple mountains majesty” as a child, and always thought that it was much the better song – over the “Oh Say Can You See” anthem. We also played lots of Cowboys and Indians, admired the Lone Ranger’s Tonto and the special skill required to ride bare-back, and knew nothing about the Native American genocide at the hands of both uniformed regulars and settlers.
Typically with Horace Sykes he leaves no hint where we will find these purple mountains.
One summer in the 1940s Horace Sykes paused for this parade in the town of Okanogan. It is, we know, customary for military groups – active, reserves, veterans – to take their parts in community parades. Here a local in overalls joins a parade with his dog (we assume it is his) and a sign tied to the dog, which is a pleasing pun on “post,” as in army post or veterans of foreign wars post, and any post for his dog to pee on. It is a rugged example of country irreverence. The next dog parading is going north on Seattle’s 4th Avenue and just passed over the center slot of the Madison Street Cable Railway. The building beyond the happy parade witnesses is the old Carnegie Library – it’s southwest corner. May we take a cue from the New Yorker Magazine’s cartoon editors. (Continued below the two photographs. Remember to Click to Enlarge.)
Post request in Okanogan, the 1940s.Dog and clipped crow - I assume - heading north on 4th Avenue, probably during one of the late 1930s Potlatch Parades. (This needs a caption. See below.)
That publication posts cartoons without captions and offers prizes for what it considers the best ones sent in by readers. Not big prizes – but still prizes. Consider this, then, a challenge: a contest. What an honor to win. Prizes will be announced – if we get any captions.
THEN: A municipal photographer recorded this view across Eastlake Avenue of the charming Lake Union Water Power Auxiliary Plant on the left, and on the right the first section of the Lake Union Steam Plant in 1917.NOW: The Lake Union Steam Plant stopped its generating in the mid-1980s. After escaping a proposal in the early 1990s to convert the decommissioned power plant to condos, the still-grand factory was purchased in 1993 by ZymoGenetics. Bruce Carter, the biotechnology company's president, described his new acquisition as "the mother of all fixer-uppers."
The progressive citizen spirit of the 1890s created Seattle City Light in 1902-03 and the construction of the first publicly owned hydroelectric installation in the country. Soon, however, the rock-filled timber-crib dam on the Cedar River was inadequate to serve all the locals wanting their own electricity — which was also cheaper than the competing private company’s.
The two elegant factories, small and big, recorded here in the spring of 1917 were built in response to these surging public-power needs. First was the Mission style Lake Union Water Power Auxiliary Plant on the left. It generated power from water that fell with a head of about 300 feet from overflow at the Volunteer Park reservoir. Locals enjoyed the coincidence that here, too, as with the timber-crib dam, electricity was being generated by the Cedar River, for Seattle’s supply of fresh community water came by pipeline from that source as well.
Snug to the side of the charming “power factory” the much larger and better-known City Light Lake Union Steam Plant was constructed in 1914, enlarged in 1918 and again in 1921. Perhaps somewhat in the public spirit of this pleasantly sprawling City Light alignment, Daniel Riggs Huntington, their creator, was hired as city architect in 1912 and served the city until 1921.
Through its years Now & Then has featured a good sample of Huntington’s creations, including the Fremont branch of the Seattle Public Library (in the Mission style), the Gothic Firland Sanatorium, new concrete piers for the University (Eastlake) Bridge in the late 1920s, and the D.A.R. Rainier Chapter House on Capitol Hill. All of them survive and are well-preserved.
Anything to add, Paul?
Only a few photos Jean – a nearly random sample.
Under a cover of snow the first City Light dam on the Cedar River resembles, perhaps, a Buddhist retreat. City Light pushing public power with its display upon the sides and roof the Lake Union plant.Before the freeway (and here long before it) the Lake Union plant could be tracked from a block or two up the hill to the east. The Lake Union Dry Dock Co is just beyond and far across the lake the Aurora Bridge (1932) appears in a haze.The southwest corner of the plant roasted but not razed by fire. The plant in 1997 - a good portrait in which to compare the size of the stacks with those in the fire picture next above.Not, of course, to be confused with the stacks above the Concrete plant at Concrete, Washington.
Jean, I’m revived after six hours of sleep with pleasant dreams. Now I have more for the Eastlake location.
Not far north of the steam plant site, snuggled between the old Oceanography docks and the chain of houseboats, Terry Pettus park was added to the playing Lake Union sometime, I think, in the 1980s. At least I first stumbled upon it that then and took this snapshot on a summer afternoon. It sits at the foot of Newton Street. The immediate neighborhood also has an intimacy for me for I lived a block away on Newton in 1967-68, and also for a few weeks nearby in a houseboat. It is gratifying that the Seattle Park Department (if it is responsible) named this vacated street end park for Pettus, the depression-era radical journalist who later in his long life became the eloquent advocate of the houseboat community - the Floating Homes Association.
When I received the Horace Sykes slides from the Gowey family in the mid-1980s I did not know its complexity, which these two slides will illustrate. The top is one of those rare instances when Horace stamped his slide “Horace Sykes Seattle, Wash.” This time he also identified the subject, although for that we needed little help. He named it “From Magnolia Bluff, Seattle.” The second slide was also labeled, and similarily. It reads “From Magnolia Blvd. Nov. 17, 1958 – 1:p.m.” It is not, however, signed. The mounting for this second slide is also more sturdy. We subsequently discovered that it is not by Sykes, but rather by Robert Bradley, a professional photographer with a competing interest in rare stones. Horace and Robert were probably friends, and may have met through the local camera club, or church, or insurance (Sykes profession), or through Lawton Gowey. When I learned that Horace had died in 1954, I needed to find another photographer for all those sturdy sides that were dated after the year of Sykes’ passing. The slides themselves included many scenes taken from the Lamplighter Apartments on Capitol Hill, and with a little investigating I found a photographer living there – Robert Bradley. Subsequently, I also found a slide among them with his name included in the caption. The Bradley collection is not as large as the Sykes and his sensitivities are more urban and not so picturesque as Sykes. But here they are standing in nearly the same place and looking in the same direction.
(Click to Enlarge) Horace Sykes has both stamped his name to the cardboard slide holding this scene, and identified it as "From Magnnolia Bluff, Seattle."Some few years after Horace recorded his view from Magnolia Blvd - he lived in the neighborhood - Robert Bradley took his look through madrona branches to the brilliant Olympics. It may be a very fresh snow. The photograph was taken on Nov. 17, 1958 and at 1 p.m. - or very near it. Bradley was disciplined about such details and recorded them directly on his slides.
This place is not as dry as it first seems. A river runs through it. Still it is another unidentified Sykes landscape of the West, a sand box for civil defense buckets or a backdrop for cutout characters in a class project animation.
Yesterday evening, walking around Green Lake, I came upon the following domestic scene.
Green Lake ducks
The pair seemed quite content to perch there, and entirely unafraid. I’ve never seen a duck in a tree before and thought it odd enough to post. Now back to Mr. Sykes.
As an adjuster for a Seattle insurance firm Horace Sykes specialty was fires. He wrote about them, lectured around the state about them, and sometimes "chased" them for his profession. Sykes names these ruins the "Columbia Cold Storage Company" and he dates it "April 5, 1944." Again, he does not tell us where it is. Wherever, the effects of a structure filled with ice and still destroyed by fire are odd. The Ice Box was soon a thing of the past then. I remember the regular delivery of ice for our ice box and I also remember the delivery of our first electric refrigerator, which we continued to call the "ice box" for years after. Both deliveries were in 1944 - or near it. (Click to Enlarge)
Horace Sykes visited Grand Coulee Dam a few times, both during and following its construction. Here we have both. The top view looks from the west (or southwest side of the pool) to the back of the dam when the top of its spillway was still not complete including the long and thrilling bridge that would cross it. In the sunset view below Sykes looks to the northwest from the east (or northeast) side. There the dam is complete. Its principal structure was ready ahead of schedule in the spring of 1941, conveniently or strategically ready to supply power for the munitions factories during the Second World War. Irrigation, one of the principal reasons Grand Coulee was built, was not a factor until well after the war when the big pumps, pipes, and canals were installed for irrigating large parts of the Columbia Basin. (Click to Enlarge)
May Sykes have driven that Chevrolet Fleetline Deluxe to the top of Mt. Constituion on Orcas Island? Yes, he might have. But is it General Motors' answer to Ford's revolutionary 1949 swept-fender model? I'm not sure? (As always - Click to Enlarge)Another prospect from the road up Mt. Constitution, but not by Sykes. A real photo postcard artist named Jacobson recorded this and the two views that follow.Near the beginning of the road up the mountain, the grand entrance into Moran State Park. This also by Jacobson.The sandstone Observation Tower on top of 2,409-foot Mount Constitution was constructed in 1935 by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) working from plans of architect Elsworth Storey. Jacobson has signed this one too.
A 1949 Ford meets a 1947 DeSoto (I believe) on a wheat highway in the Inland Empire. The '49 Ford created an automotive revolution with its swept back fenders. It was my first car, although surely not in 1949 - ten years later.
THEN: The view of Seattle from West Seattle’s Admiral Way ca. 1934-35. (Courtesy Lawton Gowey)NOW: A few central business district structures and waterfront piers survive, although with few exceptions, like the Smith Tower, they are hard to find or hidden. (Photo by Jean Sherrard)
I will fudge some with this depression-time view of Seattle from West Seattle’s Belvedere Viewpoint, and date it circa 1934-35. It includes at least one small structure (too small to point out) that was completed in 1933, and it shows Pier 48 near the foot of Main Street before it was widened and lengthened in 1935-36. That’s my meager evidence.
Embracing the 1934 date may help explain why Elliott Bay is stirred here by but two spiffy white naval vessels, far left, and what I propose is the then nearly-new stern-wheeler Skagit Chief heading north, just above the scene’s center. Perhaps this is a moment in the International Longshoremen’s Association coast-wide eighty-three day long Waterfront Strike that summer. The strike inspired The Times to make this satiric account of its effects in the issue for July 8, 1934.
“Seattle exports of wheat, flour, salmon and lumber, produced by industries which give employment to many thousands in the Northwest, reached the same level in June they were when Capt. George Vancouver and his little band of explorers arrived on Puget Sound and began selecting names for mountains, bays and rivers. They were nil . . . Twenty-five deep-sea vessels with a total net tonnage of 90,007 arrived in Seattle in June compared with 150 deep-sea vessels with a total net tonnage of 503,537 the same month last year.”
Above the bay, a key to comparing about 75-years of changes in the central business district is to find the Smith Tower. It appears in both views roughly a third of the way in from the right border. The northwest corner of Harbor Island protrudes into the bay directly beneath the tower.
In the foreground of the “then” but subtracted from the “now,” are the 1,150 foot long Colman Creosoting Wharf and the Nettleton Lumber Company just beyond it, both built above pilings and both long-time fixtures in this southwest corner of Elliott Bay.
WEB EXTRAS
For several detailed comparison views of Seattle’s skyline, taken from West Seattle’s Duwamish Head between 1907 to 2007, please visit our Washington Then and Now site.
Anything to add, Paul? Yes indeed, Jean.
First a picture of your tail at Duwamish Head. You have been there often enough steadying yourself and your camera on the railing at Hamilton Park Viewpoint. This look at you and your hometown is from our visit there this Spring when we attended the memorial service for Clay Eals’ mother near by on California Avenue. I’ll hope that you remember that it was then that you also took the now photo you inserted just above of the city from the Admiral Way viewpoint at Belvedere Place. I’ll conclude these additions with a now-then first published in Pacific on October 3, 2004. It shows the city skyline from Belvedere Viewpoint circa 1958, and still a few years before the great uplifting of the generic modern skyline – Seattle’s version – beginning, we will say, in 1967 with the construction of the big box, AKA the SeaFirst Tower. We will also show the penultimate totem in 2004 and another vibrant Kodachrome look at it from the 1960.
Jean "capturing" Seattle from Hamilton Park on West Seattle's Duwamish Head, May 24, 2010. Seattle through Belvedere Viewpoint ca. 1958. A 2004 repeat of the view directly above - followed by the now-then that first appeared in Pacific Northwest on Oct. 3, 2004.
The text below anticipates a new totem – only. Subsequently, the Bella Coola Pole shown above was moved to the Log Cabin Museum, home of the West Seattle Historical Society, and replaced with a less colorful pole but one which is perhaps more “correct” than the loving replica of the Bella Coola Pole done by two skilled Boeing Engineers. The new pole was carved by Michael Halady, a fifth-generation descendent of Chief Sealth (Seattle). It is 25 feet high and made from a western red cedar that was approximately 500 years old when it was dropped by tree poachers on the Olympic Peninsula. It is better to call the new pole a “Story Pole” rather than a “Totem Pole” for reasons you might wish to research on your own.
Here’s a request. If someone is in the neighborhood of Belvedere Viewpoint and carrying a digital camera will then snap it in the direction of the new Story Pole and send the results to us, we will thank them and place it directly below these words with proper credit and thanks.
BELLA COOLA POLE AT BELVEDERE VIEWPOINT – NOW & THEN
Like the “Seattle Totem” at Pioneer Square the West Seattle totem that overlooks Elliott Bay from the top of Admiral Way is a copy of the pole that was first placed there. The two poles, however, were both carved and “shipped” with different motives.
The older and taller pole (by twice) at Pioneer Square was cut in two and “lifted” in 1899 from Tongass Island by a “goodwill committee” of local dignitaries while they were on a kind of giddy celebratory cruise of southeast Alaska during the gold rush. Two years later in 1901 on the coast of British Columbia the smaller 25-foot high pole, shown here in the ca. 1958 view at the Belvedere Viewpoint, was built by Bella Coola Indians to be sold, not stolen. Consequently, according to James M. Rupp in his book “Art in Seattle’s Public Places”, the West Seattle pole with its stacked figures — from the top a beaver, frog, whale and bear – does not tell an ancestral story.
To continue the comparison between the two poles, in 1939 when “Daddy” Standley, West Seattle resident and owner of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, gave the original Bella Coola pole to the city, the replacement pole at Pioneer Square was being prepared for installation. The original was both rotting and torched by an arsonist in 1938. By the mid 1960s the Bella Coola pole at Belvedere View Point was only rotting, but it was replaced by a near duplicate in 1966, which was carved for free by Michael Morgan and Robert Fleishman, two Boeing engineers.
Now this cedar pole is being eaten at its center by carpenter ants. (Remember this was first written and published in 2004.) The Seattle Park Department holds funds for its replacement, although it has yet to be determined who will carve it or whether the new pole will be a copy of its two predecessors or of a different design. The pole it will replace – the one showing here in the “now” view – will most likely get a second and more protected life at West Seattle’s Log House Museum.
The slide for this vibrant Kodachrome of the Bella Coola Pole replica is dated Nov. 13, 1960. it was photographed by Robert Bradley. Those colors were neither crushed from berries nor pebbles.
Jean again. Here’s a shot looking back the other way at Duwamish Head on a recent gusty evening.
(As always, Click to Enlarge) This too is rare for Horace Sykes - an identifiable landmark. I first visited Maryhill Museum with my parents in the late 1940s on a trip from Spokane to Portland. This view looks south across the Columbia River to Oregon also in the forties. The Green car, bottom right, may be rushing to the Maryhill Ferry. I remember taking a ferry or two across the Columbia and I think that one of those buoyant crossings was here. Perhaps the Green Hornet is hurrying down river to Portland for a publicity event at the "Coney Island of the West," the Jantzen Beach Amusement Park on Hayden Island, in the river just north of Portland on old Highway 99, or to have a serving of its once famous Deep Dish Cherry Pie, or to solve a crime or to apply for a job with Bonneville Power. The other side of the museum looking east to Mt. Hood. I photographed this during the hot summer of 2005 as Jean and I were preparing our book "Washington Then and Now" before flying off to Paris for a visit with Berangere.
Before there was color photography, or when it was still limited and difficult and not commonplace - in the early 20th-century - a subject like this but in black and white might have been purposely left just off focus to lend a dreamscape to the landscape - to blend the parts of it with a pictorialist's shimmer - like the vision that may come with or after crying. Here Sykes has framed another grand subject - the mountain - with an intimate close-up. It is, as noted, all a little soft on focus. The colors are mostly warm but still subdued. The light - at sunset most likely - we know is perfect without knowing why. The mountain I thought was Adams but now I doubt it. Behind one of the branches is a ridge almost as distant as the mountain, and the size of that ridge makes this mountain smaller than Adams, I think.
Once under the sway of my father's subscription to "Arizona Highways" I was most likely to assume that scenes like this one came out of Arizona. Now I think that it is more likely Utah, but, again, I don't know. For such an arid landscape this river is not so small and so we hope a helpful clue for finding Syke's prospect.
At this moment Jean Sherrard is up at Hillside School on the slopes of Cougar Mountain preparing and directing his older students there for a performance two weeks hence of one of the Bard's plays that involves a confusion of twins. It is an old trick borrowed from the classics, I think. In this Hillside production Jean has REAL TWINS playing the part - twins whom he has been directing since the 5th grade - twins who will soon be off to college. I have watched them perform in many Hillside plays and can tell you that they are very good at it. You really should come. What has this to do with Mt. St. Helens? (Read below for Jean's correction of me in this. I have got the wrong play, but still the right twins.) During all of his play-production-marches, Jean has time to do little else. But we will here tease him at least with the thought that he might put up directly below this Horace Sykes #53 of Mt. St. Helens his own view of it - the view he took for our book "Washington Then and Now" - the view that repeats Ellis' black and white photograph of this same scene from close to the same time (within a few unmarked years) that Sykes took his. Jean's repeat was an adventure, which he may repeat for this place by just inserting his text from the book, along with its "then-now" photographs.
Paul, I’ve added in the photo from the book and the accompanying text.
You are mistaken in your description of the play we are currently rehearsing at Hillside. While I have cast the twins in lead roles, they do not play twins but mother and daughter in the Kauffman/Hart classic ‘You Can’t Take It With You’. It was in their first play when they were sixth graders that they portrayed siblings, Viola and Sebastian in ‘Twelfth Night’ – which you, as always, faithfully recorded on video.
Text from our book: Hiking down towards Spirit Lake in late October 2005, I found the sheer scale of destruction on May 18, 1980 incomprehensible. The shell of a recently revived Mount St. Helens puffed out steam across the water. In the eerie stillness, since there were no visual cues to lend any sense of distance or size, I might have been looking at a model of the real thing. This distorted perspective was resolved when I pulled out Boyd Ellis’s postcard. (Printed below) In his photo of an austere morning with the mountain reflected in all its glory, the serrated edges of tree-lined ridges provided a yardstick to measure by. And then it all made sense.A "real photo postcard" of Mt. St. Helens by Boyd Ellis.
Horace Sykes wrestles with our grandest cliche, "The Mountain That Was God," Mt. Tahoma, Mt. Tacoma, Mt. Rainier. This is at Sunset, and Sykes sort of beats this commonplace by framing it all in a nearby landscape. The odds are only one in 365 that Horace took this photograph on June 6. (Stop. They are much better than that, because for many months in the year one cannot reach Sunrise - it is closed.) The significance of the date - June 6 - follows with the next blog insertion.
D-DAY: THE LANDINGS ON THE BEACHES OF NORMANDY, JUNE 6, 1944. This however is flying low over Paris sometime later. The street is named at the bottom. In the distance is the Arch of Triumph and beyond it the Louvre. On the upper right horizon is the cupola for the Pantheon, which is but three blocks from the home of our very own Berangere Lomont on the Rue Genevieve, the Patron Saint of Paris, whose (or one of whose) birthdays we also celebrate on THIS DAY IN HISTORY - JUNE 6. The picture here is uncanny, or at least strange. (Click TWICE to Enlarge) Except for a few military vehicles and scattered pedestrians there is little moving below. The scene is one of several low altitude fly-byes and all of them have the same silence or poverty of commotion. Paris was liberated over a few days in late August. As soon at the Germans left (those that did not simply stay for the surrender on August 25th) the streets of Paris were very busy with parades, general celebration and also some shaming of Parisians who had cooperated with the Germans. Fifty Five years before D-Day, 35-or-so Seattle City blocks were razed by its Great Fire of June 6, 1889. This view looks north on First Avenue in the block between Yesler Way and Cherry Street. The ruins on the left are on the west side of First (or Front Street as it was then still named).
HERE FOLLOWS the 2-page limited edition of the Next Day’s Post-Intelligencer for June 7, 1889. So that you might more easily read them these are big files and will take a bit longer to download. Once they appear please – as with all else – CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE and read the next days reports. Thanks one again to RON EDGE for providing these.
NOW WE INSERT a BLOGADDENDUM – another EDGE CLIPPING. In a caption to the Post-Intelligencer’s own description of its efforts to get out their two-page paper, Ron Edge points out its heroic qualities.
I was thinking that the heroic effort by the PI staff to print this little one page hand trimmed paper could itself be the significant event for the 7th of June. What an effort was made to get this little edition on the street the very next morning produced on borrowed foot presses and no sleep.Flip side to the Front Street Great Fire shot printed just above. Soon after the fire, photographers were selling scenes like this one on the streets and from their studios - those studios that survived. Here the fire's notable survivors are listed.Four years after D-Day Genevieve McCoy (named for the patron saint of Paris) was born on June 6, 1948. Genevieve "Genny" answered my request for a caption to this setting. "I was born on D-Day but in 1948. You are 71, 9.5 years older than I. This is me preparing for my Junior Prom at Holy Names in 1965. It was my first self-selected formal dress. I was a month or so shy of 18. Wasn't I cute 45 years ago? (We agree.) My mother must have taken the picture, just before I left for the prom." If we imagine that the 85 faces shown here include no second and third renderings of the same person then the odds would be a little more than one in four that one of them would have been born on the sixth of June. These odds are much better than those we might calculate for how likely it is that any of these 85 (so to speak) are named Genevieve, although one or more of them may be named for someone or something else's patron saint. BELIEVE IT OR NOT. It was on June 6 that Gene Woodwick gave me a copy of her latest book, "Ocean Shores." Inside the front cover is this note. "June 6, birth date of Ed Woodwick, father of Larry Woodwick, husband of Gene Woodwick, and father for their five children."
THEN: Thanks to Seattle Public Library librarian John LaMont for finding Werner Lenggenhager's 1961 record of the stern-wheeler Skagit Belle waiting between now-long-gone Piers 50 and 51. At the water end of Yesler Way, this slip was the pioneer-era site of Yesler's Wharf.NOW: To help understand the setting south of Colman Dock, Jean's "now" shot is much wider than Werner's "then."
Many Pacific readers will remember the Polynesian Restaurant built at the water end of Pier 51 in 1961, in time for the following year’s infusion of tourists for the city’s Century 21 World’s Fair. Some minority of you will also remember the Skagit Belle, a stern-wheeler parked beside the same pier for yet another food attraction in time for the fair.
This view of the two is by Werner Lenggenhager, the helpful Boeing retiree who, beginning in the 1940s, wandered the city and the state with his camera. This photo is stamped Oct. 28, 1961. The Polynesian is up but not completed, and the stern-wheeler is waiting south of the pier before it was moved to the north slip, fitted for a restaurant and painted like a vaudevillian in pink and blue.
Through its 20 years at Pier 51, the Polynesian was Seattle’s grandest example of Tiki décor, an exotic mix of island styles, perhaps best associated here with the chain Trader Vic’s (not Joe’s). The Polynesian was lost to public domain in 1981 and the expansion of the ferry terminal, Colman Dock.
The Skagit Belle was also short-lived. Built in Everett in 1941, it was the last commercial stern-wheel steamboat on Puget Sound. Soon requisitioned for war service, it wasn’t returned to the Skagit River Navigation Co. until 1947. Three years later it joined the Skagit Chief and the steel-hulled W.T. Preston in a race of stern-wheelers for Seafair. The Preston won. After grounding on a sandbar, the Belle was repaired in Bellingham for her fateful trip to the fair.
The ship sprang a leak in 1965, its pumps failed, and it sank to the bottom, though still tied to the pier. There it languished through eight years of tides and litigation until hauled away in pieces in 1973.
WEB EXTRAS
Jean adds a few photos taken nearby that same afternoon in early April.
Colman Dock, wideA dockside parkDock with OlympicsFerry ticket gate
Anything to add, Paul? Yes Jean I did have, and added them too. But I also neglected to publish them. The result – all were erased. I’m off to bed now and will do it all again in the morning. “It” is several slides of both the Skagit Belle and the Polynesian during the 1960s. Tomorrow then and nighty bears* to all for now.
* “Nighty Bears” is a welcomed substitute for the commonplace “Good Night.” It was taught to many of us by Bill Burden in the late 1970s and we have – as extended family – continued to use it.
Polynesian under construction looking east from the end of Pier 51. Note that the Tiki carvings and staining has been applied to the beams before construction. (Photo by Frank Shaw - like the rest of the colored scenes used here.)Like the above scene this was also recorded on May 6, 1961.May 29, 1961. The ends of both Pier 50 with the last remnants of its pier shed, and Pier 51 with the Polynesian, as seen from the Pergola at the foot of Washington Street. The Harbor Partorl boat can be glimpsed through the railing. June 26, 1921. Century 21 is open and the Bounty visits pier 51 and the completed Polynesian. How appropriate.Feb. 24, 1962. In place now on the north side of Pier 51, the Skagit Belle is still waiting for its make-over.The sternwheelers paddles, Feb. 24, 1962 Feb. 24, 1962. Another view of its unpolished rear with Colman Dock beyond. Frank Shaw, it seems, took no slides of the Skagit Belle during Century 21, or following it when the vessel gave its last work as a restaurant. This is one of several recordings of the sternwheeler after it sprung a leak. It dates from June 19, 1965.May 19, 1965 With Ye Olde Curiosity Shop to the rear.June 19, 1965 With Pier 51 parking to the rear.June 16, 1965 With the Exchange Building (1931) and the Norton Building (1959, Seattle's first highrise glass curtain) beyond, left and right respectively. June 30, 1969: time passes, the litigation continues and the Skagit Belle decays, witness to the struggle of making it on the waterfront.Pages 38 & 39 out of The Seattle Greeter for Sept. 1962 includes the Polynesian's claim "for an evening quite unlike any other . . ." and a partial list of local bars. Note also that after reading 39 pages of the local attractions that are considered exciting by their owners and the editor at the lower right corner we are instructed that before visiting any of these Seattle attractions one must "See America First." Such is the grandiose excitement of a night on the town. (This is another Edge Clipping with thanks to Ron . . . Edge.)
None of the ABOVE should be confused with any of the BELOW.
The Skagit Chief at the south end of the old Port of Seattle headquarters at Pier 66. The Skagit Queen nosed into Rosario Beach ca. 1910.The Skagit County Courthouse in Mt. Vernon ca. 1910. Below is Jean's ca. 2007 repeat of the courthouse long after the humiliation of losing it curvaceous top floor.
Back and forth we may attend here to the flowers overgrowing the roadside regrade and the fence post supporting two barbed wire lines against a sky that may be about to let go. Close-ups like these are rare for Horace Sykes. Putting a flowering plant in the foreground of his subjects is not. But almost always behind these intimate "decorations" is a sweeping landscape in a picturesque composition. Of all the subjects Sykes recorded this will be among the few for which we may have no hope of ever knowing its place. Although forever unknown I feel that is also forever profound. It has something to do with the post and the two wires. How they climb. Perhaps one has to be afloat to feel this. I do not mean elevated by any substance but rather by temperament. A woman or a man of feeling will see something profound here. Perhaps. The light is even.
Our beloved Paris correspondent, Bérangère Lomont, sends us the following report from the 5th arrondissement, which we offer in both English and French for our international viewers:
It is not Halloween, nor an operetta.
It was last Saturday at the place Maubert market in the fifth arrondissement, a strange medieval vision really, “la Commanderie du clos de Montmartre” came especially to enthrone the baker Monsieur Moisan, a creator of organic breads and Patricia, owner of the café “village Ronsard” located on place Maubert.
Ce n’est pas Halloween, ni une opérette,
C’était juste samedi dernier Place Maubert à Paris dans le 5ème, nous pouvions assister à une scène étrange venue du Moyen-Ange , “la commanderie du clos Montmartre” venait exceptionnellement pour introniser le boulanger Monsieur Moisan qui est éditeur, créateur de pains biologiques et Patricia la propriétaire du café ” village Ronsard” situé Place Maubert.
Le clos has many missions – one is to perpetuate a tradition of fraternity and wine, they organize meetings in this spirit all over the world…
In Montmartre they make the wine according to the rules of art and every year there is a great celebration during the harvest.
“La commanderie du clos ” a plusieurs missions : l’une de perpétuer une tradition fraternelle et vinicole , et organise dans cet esprit des rencontres dans le monde entier…
A Montmartre leur vin est produit dans les règles de l’art, et chaque année les vendanges sont une grande fête.
Here are a few photos {Quelques photos}:
First Enthronement {Premiere Intronisation}: Monsieur Moisan
Monsieur Moisan raises his hand while reading the commandments (10, perhaps?); the man in blue is a very famous owner of a cabaret in Montmartre and very well known to be generous, so once a month he invites retired neighbors to have lunch in his cabaret. {Monsieurs Moisan lève la main pendant la lecture des commandements de la confrérie (10 ?) , le monsieur vêtu de bleu est " Michou " le célèbre propriétaire d'un cabaret à Montmartre, et il est bien connu pour sa générosité , ainsi il invite à déjeuner chaque mois les personnes retraitées de son quartier au cabaret.}Second step in the ritual: to drink some precious nectar. {Deuxième étape du rituel, il faut boire le divin nectar de Montmartre}Third step: the enthronement and the medal. {Troisième étape, l'intronisation avec le cep de vigne et la remise de médaille}
Second Enthronement {Seconde Intronisation}: Patricia
Patricia (next to Michou the man in blue) listens to the Commander. Her parents once owned a little restaurant called "le petit Gavroche " in the Marais - it was my favourite restaurant for years. Besides being inexpensive, everyone felt at home there. {Patricia est à coté de Michou l'homme en bleu et écoute le Commandeur , ses parents possédaient un petit restaurant qui se nommait "le petit Gavroche", c'était l'un de mes restaurants préférés, le moins cher, et c'était comme à la maison.}
Another "Palouse perhaps" from Horace Sykes. Another harvester with truck and highway too. And a grove pressing or hiding a farmhouse, perhaps. And if this is close then those may be Blue Mountains foothills on the horizon.
(Click to Enlarge) Far below in another "daily sykes" Mr. Steve Silver of cheesecake and desert photography skills identified a Sykes scene as possibly from Zabriskie Point, about which some of us know only the film from the late 1960s that explored the adventure in which many of us among that sum were involved away from the theatre. If memory serves, it ended sadly if not tragically. But might this also be footage from Z-Point (the locals sometimes shorten it in their mud rooms) or something like it? RON EDGE of edge clippings answers with this link to a trailer for the Antonioni film Zabriskie Point. Ron remembers seeing it in 1970 at the Ridgemont Theatre. If you take a moment to follow the link http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=189731 you will - if all works out well - find that an image of Z-Point very much like this one appears at the head of the trailer. The rest of the production is sensationally silly. Trite. The film was a little better. As I remember we anticipated something better. Something as good as Blow Up, and earlier London-based film by Antonioni. Just paste http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=189731 in to the browser if it does not click open.
Unlike the Sykes view of Grand Canyon (on the Colorado) shown earlier, here he looks into the canyon and not unto the clouds. It seems like a diorama or stage set with the seemingly arranged delicacy of the foreground - but watch your step. Another of Grand Canyon, but for Horace Sykes a rare look at the tourists too. Perhaps the qualities of the composition overwhelmed his disposition to avoid human subjects.
