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Like our recent visit to London’s Big Ben, this look north into Paris’ Place de la Concord is one of the rare photos snapped by me for the historical half of this weekly feature. Both were recorded on a Leica I borrowed during the adventurous summer of 1955.  I was an exhilarated sixteen-year-old snapping my way through Europe, heading with about thirty other Northwest teenagers for a conference at the Cite Universitaire de Paris. (It was hot that summer, too.)

Most of the ten ‘older students’ posing this summer for their combined teacher-tour guide, Jean Sherrard, are also fifteen and sixteen.  But not Kael Sherrard, Jean’s smiling brother in the checkered blue shirt on the right.  Kael is the school’s principal.  Probably every one of these Hillside students carries her or his own camera (in their phones) and are regularly sending pictures home to their parents, siblings and friends.  In 1955 we were not equipped to be that smart.

Place de la Concord is as elegantly packed with landmarks as those surrounding London’s Parliament Square.  Posing at the north end of the Pont de la Concorde, the Hillside students are standing above the River Seine. Centered above them, the most distant classical structure with its tall columns, is the eglise de la Madeleine. It was conceived as a pantheon in honor of Napoleon’s armies.  The two long and nearly twin classics on the distant side of Place de la

Concord were completed in the 1770s. Through their two centuries-plus served many purposes including serving as a warehouse for the King’s extra furniture.  The Hotel de la Marine, on the right, with the temporary gray blanket, reminds me how soot-shrouded were the landmarks of Europe when we visited them in the 1950s.

The Luxor Obelisk that stands tall above the Hillside students, was not stolen from the Egyptians but rather given to the French in the nineteenth century.  Removed from its place at the entrance to the Luxor Temple on the Nile, it arrived in Paris on December 21, 1833.  Three years later the 75-ft column was set at the center of Place de la Concord, near where in the 1790s the execution ‘theatre’ of the French Revolution excited the hordes with its efficient guillotine.  Renamed the Place de la Revolution, its blades cut off the heads of hundreds of aristocrats, along with the people’s terrorist Maximilien Robespierre, the King Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette.  By 1795 the square had settled down and was renamed the Place de la Concorde.

WEB EXTRAS

Berangere sent us these spectacular repeats just this morning:

And a special series, thanks to BB, her repeats of a number of Paul’s 1955 photos.

Anything to add, mes compères?  More Paris from 1955 Jean.

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Through Seattle’s so far brief history (when compared to Jerusalem), one of the most flamboyant invasions of this well-defended city of about seventy-seven hills came in late July 1925 when 30,000 “members and families” of – and the name is long – “The United Religious, Military and Masonic Orders of the Temple and of St John of Jerusalem, Palestine, Rhodes and Malta of England and Wales and Its Provinces Overseas.“

These Masons were better known as the Knights Templar, named for the medieval crusading Christians who attempted to break the Moslem grip on Jerusalem and most of the eastern Mediterranean.   These twentieth-century marching Protestants –mostly – reached Seattle by land and sea (but not quite yet by sky) for the “conclave of the grand encampment of the United States of America for the 36^th Triennial of the Knights Templar.”

Surely the most enduring vestiges of these warriors –preachers, super-salesmen, educators, disciplined clerks, meat-packers, and other ambitious protestants – were their uniforms, which they took care to keep brushed.  Make a quick on-line visit with “Masonic Knights Templar” and you will be treated with a polished flood of fraternal regalia, most of it for sale.  The on-line show includes, but is not limited to, shoulder boards, sleeve and collar crosses, swords, pins of many sorts, stars centered with crosses, and chapeaux.

These chapeaux are the fancy plumed caps we see here heading east up Yesler Way from Second Avenue like a disciplined flock of low-flying ostriches. Here the marching is in order, and you will not find any mason out of line or step. They are moving up First Hill to their fort.  I imagine them singing the still popular, uniquely militant, hymn that goes, in part “Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.”

A cross is hanging over Yesler Way center-right, nearly lost in the shadows of First Hill.  It is but one of scores of crosses the Templars raised in Seattle during their July visit.  The largest sat atop the grand-sized welcome arch that covered the intersection of Second Avenue and Marion Street.  (See above)  The cross mounted on the roof of the then brand new Olympic Hotel competed with the cross on the welcome arch for dominance on the cityscape.

It is likely that the warriors in our featured photo are headed to their faux fort and headquarters constructed for their visit on City Hall Park, seen at the center of the photograph below. The fort’s drawbridge on Terrace Street was “manned” by Boy Scouts, some of them, most likely, future knights.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lodge members? 

Jean, do you remember when we lectured to a Masonic group at its home in Greenwood and had a good time?  With the new NOW-THEN book scheduled for release in late October we should start calling the lodges and clubs and schools and churches about putting on our show and selling books – books which we both will sign.  Of course the value of the book is thereby increased by our estimate – and we have noted this often when lecturing and signing – 20 Cents.   We could reconsider this.  Normally the value of one of our books inflates a dime when we sign it.  With two signatures it seems to me that the value is doubled.  What do you think – if you have read this far? 

(Howz about putting up an inquiry of interests (for illustrated lectures) and such on this BLOG?  Show our interested readers some of the pages.)

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              TO BE CONTINUED …

 

 

 

 

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Through its thirty-seven years, this is surely the furthest from First and Yesler that our weekly feature, ordinarily about regional heritage, has ventured. Reaching 443-feet above the River Thames is the Elizabeth Tower.  On both our “now and then” occasions this neo-Gothic landmark has been exceptionally dressed for make-overs.  Two of the four faces for its tenants, the Great Clock and Big Ben, perhaps the world’s most famous chiming and yet cracked bell, can be seen through the restoration scaffolding of 1955. That was one year before the creation of London’s Clean Air Act.

I remember well pointing my borrowed Leica to record this London landmark sixty-three years ago.  I was touring Europe with sixteen rolls of Kodachrome slide film, donated by a Spokane drugstore merchant, and about thirty-five other Northwest teens, “donated” by their parents.  We were all delegates headed for a ten-day YMCA-YWCA conference in Paris.  We were selected by discerning adults who were especially encouraged by other adults: those who could afford to send us, our parents.  The conference responsibilities were preluded by a five-week tour of Europe that began here in London.

Jean Sherrard sent me his Westminster/London repeat a mere two days after he served for family and friends one or two of his exceptionally tender rotisserie chickens at teh Sherrard family home near the north shore of Green Lake.  Dodging some overhanging foliage Jean recorded his splendid portrait of Great Britain’s Big Ben from nearly the same spot where I also photographed that chiming clock sixty-three years earlier.

If memory serves, in 1955 it took us twenty-one days aboard the Orsova, flagship for the Orient Lines, to reach London from Vancouver B.C. via the Panama Canal.  I remember well the two on-deck swimming pools. Also, any passenger could enjoy both teatime tables slathered with pastries and the sometimes splashing tables of the captain’s cocktail hours.  The freedom and frivolity of this drinking was entirely new to us Northwest innocents, who were more likely to find our guarding chaperones in attendance than the Orsova’s smiling Captain.

The Paris Conference itself was often neglected by an inexpensive attraction: walking the streets of Paris.  Jean will be carrying with him one or more of my Paris pictures from 1955 for possible repetition.  (Assuredly these other “thens” will not be of conference subjects.) However, Jean’s Paris “now” will, no doubt, include the same entourage of the Hillside Students he has posed in this London “now.”

BELOW: A Few of the Stock LONDON subjects I took in 1955.

I am thinking of their luggage. I remember what a limited wardrobe we carried with and on us in 1955. By the time we reached Paris, many of us were committed to the Lederhosen, or leather shorts we had purchased in Germany. In Paris Jean’s Hillside students may use a Parisian runway for a showing of their Northwest wardrobe.

WEB EXTRAS

A few things to add, I’m thinking. Some more shots from Paul’s 1955 trip (above), and I’ll include a few photos taken on our school trip.

We discovered upon our arrival in London that Rodin’s magnificent ‘Burghers of Calais’ sculpture, usually in Victoria Tower Park next to Westminster, had been temporarily moved for a special Rodin exhibition. Hillside students attempted a repeat on the empty plinth:

And now a selection from the rest of our trip…

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It may be fitting that a bluff on Gatewood Hill in West Seattle, close to Seattle’s highest point, gave birth to a mountainous retail giant that helped put our city on the map – the co-op we all know as REI. The firm took shape on the west face of that bluff inside a modest, wood-frame home erected at the beginning of the Depression, perhaps teaching us that good things (or successful businesses) can sprout from small packages.

The dwelling, at 4326 S.W. Southern St., just west of California Avenue, was the only “improvement” on its otherwise forested block when built by just-married transit worker Lloyd Anderson and teacher Mary Anderson in 1932.

That decade, as thousands fell into relief or took government jobs and others unionized and leaned left, the thrifty Lloyd, a “pocket socialist,” avid climber and leader of the 30-year organization called the Mountaineers, took a seemingly inconsequential step. Aided by Mary’s knowledge of German and frustrated by middleman-inflated stateside prices of up to $20, he ordered an ice axe directly from Austria. By mail from the other hemisphere, the storied tool cost a mere $3.50.

“The news spread like wildfire through the rebel ranks,” according to Harvey Manning’s detailed 1988 history REI: 50 Years of Climbing Together. Purchases of crampons, pitons, carabiners and hiking foods snowballed. The Anderson cottage took on the persona of a warehouse, leading the couple to found the mail-order Recreational Equipment Cooperative in 1938, the same year as our “then” view.

While REI later anchored storefronts downtown and on Capitol Hill, many in Seattle’s climbing community passed through the Andersons’ unassuming doors, including Jim Whittaker, who grew up nearby and in 1955 signed on as REI’s first full-time employee and ascended to CEO. As the first American to summit Mount Everest, in 1963, he became – and remains – REI’s most famous face.

After Lloyd died in 2000 at age 98, Mary sold their home to a developer who intended to raze it but pulled out after 9/11. Neighbors purchased the parcel in 2002, colorfully restoring the residence’s front end, floorboards and basement while adding reverse shed dormers and a cupola, eventually adorning the property with three more houses and a shared garden. (Mary, who died last year at age 107, spent her sunset years in a Green Lake retirement home.)

The compound that is now dubbed Anderson Gardens will host the Southwest Seattle Historical Society’s annual fundraising “If These Walls Could Talk” tour this afternoon – at noon (for VIPs) and 2 p.m. The insights to be shared by Jim Whittaker’s son, Bobby, promise a peak experience.

FOR TOUR DETAILS AND TICKETS: visit loghousemuseum.org.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Certainly Jean more features mostly from the West Seattle neighborhood, and Ron Edge and I welcome you home after your three weeks in Europe with students of Hillside.

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