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(Published in the Seattle Times online on Nov. 28, 2019
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Dec. 1, 2019)

Keeping their (National) Guard up in downtown Tacoma

By Clay Eals

Those who, like me, are charmed by the hillsides of downtown Tacoma may easily place the setting of our “Then” photo. But the activity bespeaks chaos, not charm.

The image looks west up 11^th Street across Pacific Avenue in the late afternoon of Friday, July 12, 1935. Non-union men, desperate for Depression-era work and returning from tideflat lumber mills across the 11^th Street Bridge, were confronted by angry hundreds who fueled the famed, summer-long Great Lumber Strike of 1935, a fractious, voluminously documented chapter in state labor history.

To preserve order, Gov. Clarence Martin called in part-time citizen soldiers of the Washington National Guard, who traveled 13 miles north from their Camp Murray headquarters, outfitted with rifles and bayonets and wearing World War I uniforms. Strikers jeered them as “tin hats.”

The photo captures guardsmen deploying tear gas. As thousands watched, a few from behind upper windows, some strikers hurled smoking canisters back at the guardsmen, who wore no masks and faced a stiff easterly wind that blew the acrid chemicals into their eyes. Despite the turmoil, the four-hour uproar produced only a few injuries. No shots were fired. No one died.

The 1935 scene evokes memories of my own – and, I suspect, many others – of a vastly different time and circumstance, when an ill-trained and ill-led Ohio National Guard used tear gas and opened fire during a 1970 anti-war protest at Kent State University, killing four students.

Such infamy, however, does not reside in the track record of this state’s guard, one of 54 such organizations in U.S. states and territories, say authors of a new book. The three – Andy Leneweaver, Rick Patterson and Bill Woodward — embody a combined 96 years of local guard service.

In their plain-titled Washington National Guard, the trio uses 200 photos to spin stories spanning a century and a half. They cover a wide swath of guard service, from protecting Chinese citizens during Seattle’s anti-Chinese riots in 1886 to providing police backup – without using tear gas – during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, again in Seattle. The photos also depict deeply appreciated disaster relief, such when the fabled 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption enfolded guard soldiers in air and road patrols, search-and-rescue and ash cleanup.

The book does not overlook the guard’s many international military missions, and the authors and their 8,000 peers around the state remain fighters. Their slogan – “always ready, always there” – fits.

“We’re trained to go to war and support the national emergencies,” Patterson says, “but we’re also Washingtonians who care real deeply about our communities. When there’s floods and fires and quakes and volcanoes, we’re ready to jump on board, and we really feel proud about that.”

WEB EXTRAS

To see Jean Sherrard’s 360-degree video of the NOW prospect and compare it with the THEN photo, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column!

For hundreds of Seattle, Tacoma and labor newspaper stories about the Great Lumber Strike of 1935, including the incident described above, visit this page of the University of Washington site: “Strikes! Labor History Encyclopedia for the Pacific Northwest.”

Also, below are a 1976 column about the incident, a promotional postcard for the Washington National Guard book and a link to a 27-minute video interview of the book’s authors.

 

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(Published in the Seattle Times online on Nov. 21, 2019
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Nov. 24, 2019)

What are the odds? Descendants of 2 Seattle immigrants find family members in the same 1929 photo

By Jean Sherrard

More than 30 years ago, my wife and I disastrously hosted our first Thanksgiving feast meant to introduce Vietnamese neighbors to an American immigrant ritual and roasted our first turkey. Benjamin Franklin’s favored bird, bane of chefs and home cooks alike, often emerges from the oven raw or overdone, but our perfectly basted 14-pounder seemed to achieve a happy medium. As I transferred it from pan to platter, however, a previously unnoticed bag of giblets exploded from the neck cavity. We assured our slightly unnerved friends that this was not part of the traditional fare.

In this week’s “Then” portrait of King Street Station coach yard workers and trains, taken 22 days before the Oct. 24, 1929, stock-market crash that launched the Great Depression, we encounter another particularly American story of arrival, immigration and citizenship. Ninety years later and by coincidence, two Seattle descendants of men portrayed here separately presented us with this rare image.

It began when Casey McNerthney, visiting a postcard and photo exhibition in Portland in April, spotted a panoramic print in a dealer’s booth. Its inscription tallied with his great-grandfather Matt McAlerney’s time at the coach yard. Leaning in to examine the photo more closely, Casey delighted in finding Matt’s face in the crowd. “No way,” he thought. “What are the odds of that?” Casey purchased it on the spot.

Having immigrated to Seattle from County Down in Northern Ireland in 1911, Matt McAlerney soon found work with the Great Northern Railroad. In October 1916, he met Lily Kempson, a young fugitive who had fled Dublin after playing a significant role in the failed Easter Uprising. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple married and had seven children. Matt continued his rail work through two world wars, retiring in the mid-1950s.

Our second serendipitous contributor, 96-year old Emil Martin (originally Martincevic), at an October book event in West Seattle, presented us with the identical photo and pointed out his father, Petar Martincevic. Petar arrived in Seattle in 1910 from Yugoslavia and began work as an air-brake mechanic in the coach yards. He died in 1964 at age 86.

As a boy, Emil came to know his father’s co-workers well. He says they were of “many nationalities including Irish, Yugoslavian, Scandinavian, Italian, Belgian” along with “an unusually large number of White Russians” who fled across Siberia following the 1917 Russian Revolution.

In the proud faces of these immigrant men (and a handful of women), many who left behind strife, political oppression and poverty, this Thanksgiving we salute their hope for better lives in a new world.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360-degree video of the “Now” photo shoot with Jean’s narration, click here!

Also, head over to Casey’s fascinating biography of his great-grandmother Lily Kempson (and a bit about Matt, as well).

Casey thoughtfully sent along photo ID’s of each and every participant:

Clay Eals visited Emil Martin, the serendipitous provider of the second copy of our “Then” photo, and snapped this portrait:

To read Emil Martin’s short memoir of his own work at the King Street Station coach yards, click on the embedded page just below. For a much more detailed and fascinating handwritten account of Emil’s life and times, check out this remarkable document he provided. Thanks, Emil!

Emil adds on Nov. 25, 2019: “I would like to make one correction in my reminiscence article. I said the 5 and 10-cent stores were Kress and Rhodes. Rhodes had a department store at the SW corner of 2^nd Ave and Pike St. It should have been Kress and Woolworth. Kress was on the SE corner of 3^rd and Pike. Woolworth was on the SW corner of 3^rd and Pike and was the one with the soda counter, piano music and live birds.”

 

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(Published in the Seattle Times online on Nov. 14, 2019
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Nov. 17, 2019)

A ferry tale with a happy ending for Alki

By Clay Eals

To the dogged and detailed volunteer researcher Phil Hoffman, the idyllic calm of our sunset scene, which looks west from Alki Beach, may be deceptive. Waves ready to roil in the foreground could be a more potent symbol. This, he says, is because while history usually records what happened, “Sometimes what didn’t happen is more important.”

Our “Then” depicts a ferry dock extending into Puget Sound from Alki Avenue north of 64^th Avenue Southwest in West Seattle. From there, entrepreneur Harry Crosby’s Direct Line Ferries opened 65-car service to tiny Manchester, east of Port Orchard in south Kitsap County, on April 20, 1925. Thirteen months later, Crosby sold it to Puget Sound Navigation Company, parent of the famed Black Ball Line, whose network represented the last vestiges of the Sound’s fabled “Mosquito Fleet” before it gave way in 1951 to our state ferry system.

Alki to Manchester was the shortest distance between Seattle and the Kitsap mainland, so the new terminal in 1925 exploited the soaring popularity of automobiles by launching countless excursions (85 cents one way for cars) to the tantalizing Olympic Peninsula.

Ads featured exotic illustrations and cartoon maps that likened the waterborne route to a suspension bridge. One even invoked an irresistible pun. “There’s a fairy-land across the blue waters of Puget Sound,” it proclaimed in the May 23, 1930, Seattle Times. “A vacation land unrivaled anywhere in the world. Unspoiled – primitive yet livable and very accessible.”

It was no accident that the Alki-Manchester route, inaugurated in the Roaring Twenties, died amid the Great Depression, on Jan. 13, 1936. The cause was not just a national economic collapse. The line also fell victim to ongoing disputes with marine unions, as well as initiation by the consolidation-minded Black Ball of a new ferry between downtown Seattle and Manchester the previous July.

The West Seattle Commercial Club scurried to promulgate a scheme to convert to a state highway the arterial that circumnavigated Duwamish Head to the closed ferry dock, to no avail. The dock operated as a boathouse for several years and briefly hosted an eatery, Sea Foods First Mate Grill, in 1941. But by 1946, all that remained was its pilings.

Which is fine with Hoffman, who lives 500 feet from the dock site. Though flooded with partyers in the summer, present-day Alki is sleepy, even bucolic most of the year.

“It would be a very different place if that ferry had continued through today,” Hoffman says. “It would be a parking lot. The car would have consumed the land, the natural resources of the beach and the desirable residential aspects of the area.”

Today’s waves of Alki might be murmuring a sigh of relief.

WEB EXTRAS

To see Jean Sherrard’s (waterborne) 360-degree video of the NOW prospect and compare it with the THEN photo, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column!

Also we provide news clippings (scroll down) and present four photos courtesy of Phil Hoffman, who provides this addendum to go with the next three photos:

“Elta and Ernest Weiss operated the First Mate Seafood Grill on the Alki-Manchester ferry dock beginning in 1941. They married in 1940. Elta frequently purchased seafood, at Alki dockside, from local fishers. It is unknown when the restaurant closed, but it is suspected to have closed before 1943.

“Ernest was originally from Michigan and was a machinist. He retired from the machinist position he held at Ederer Engineering Company. Ernest had a reputation as an avid hunter and fisherman.

“Elta was the daughter of a Baptist minister and originally hailed from Gas City, Kansas. She was a member of her high-school championship basketball team. In the years following the Seafood Grill venture, she was a cook for the Seattle School District at Magnolia’s Briarcliff Elementary School. Following her retirement from the School District she took employment, in a similar capacity, with Seattle’s Ballard Hospital.

“The couple was childless and lived in Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood. Ernest died in 1981, at age 76, followed by Elta, a year later, at age 73.

“After the above column was published, I was contacted by David Rubbelke with information about Elta and Ernest Weiss. David Rubbelke is the Weisses’ nephew. I deeply appreciate David providing the information and photos that appear here.”

 

Phil also provides this photo of Harry Crosby:

Below, in chronological order, are 56 clippings from The Seattle Times online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and West Seattle Herald that, among others, were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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(Published in the Seattle Times online on Nov. 7, 2019
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Nov. 10, 2019)

Terry Pettus faces second Red Scare at Seattle’s speakers’ corner

By Paul Dorpat

Here — perhaps on a soapbox — stands Terry Pettus.

For a time, after moving to Seattle from Indiana in 1927, Pettus lived in the home of artist Kenneth Callahan. (A Callahan drawing hangs above my desk.)

Pettus was a reporter at newspapers around the state and was Washington’s first member of The Newspaper Guild. He was a member of the Washington Commonwealth Federation, a more “leftist” faction of the Democratic Party energized to end poverty. He joined the Communist Party, but after World War II, such idealism increasingly succumbed to the paranoid preaching of McCarthyism during the nation’s second Red Scare (the first followed World War I).

In our “Then” photo, Pettus and other party members promote a “six-hour day and 30-hour week” (a nice job, if you can get it). Another sign protests the “frame-up [of] Communist Party Leaders.”

This is one of a half-dozen photos snapped of this organized protest held in what for decades served as Seattle’s own speakers’ corner, at Occidental Avenue and Washington Street. I was given these small prints about 40 years ago. One has been dated, perhaps by me, “1952.” The year might be correct. But who took the photos, and who gave the gift?

This photo, and the rest of its cadre, might soon await identification in its new home at Seattle Public Library. The photos will be joined by a few hundred thousand other images I accumulated through a half-century of collecting and studying. (My original Callahan also will find a new home among the ephemera.)

Seattle Mayor Charles Royer declared March 7, 1982, Terry Pettus Day, and in 1985, a year after Pettus died, a small park was named for him on the east side of Lake Union. (There, in the late 1980s, I sometimes wrote outlines for this series of Sunday features.)

WEB EXTRAS

Below, in chronological order, are 13 clippings from The Seattle Times online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that, among others, relate to this column. Enjoy!