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Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 29, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 1, 2023

In light of history, Seattle’s neon signs scream, ‘Hey, look at me!’

By Clay Eals

For more than 13,500 nights, from November 1948 to January 1986 atop a building at Sixth & Wall, it glowed in hues of red, blue, green and yellow — a beacon of hope for journalism and the city itself. Once dubbed “the earth and eagle,” it was known more simply and affectionately as the P-I globe.

Latecomers may find the hyphenated letters unfamiliar. But for 128 years, from the 1881 merger of the Seattle Post and Daily Intelligencer until the newspaper’s final press run on March 17, 2009, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer competed for citywide attention. Reinforcing this was the glimmering globe’s rotating slogan, profound in its brevity: “It’s in the P-I.”

Allowing the 48-foot-tall worldly ornament to burn brightly was the 1898 British discovery of neon. The treated gas also had fueled Seattle’s first-ever neon sign, also for the P-I, which shone at its earlier site at Sixth & Pine from June 1927 through late 1948.

Today, neon is ubiquitous, as documented in a new, wildly colorful book, “Seattle Neon.” For three years, author/photographer Matt Hucke, a Chicagoan who arrived in the Queen Anne district in 2015, explored all corners of the city. The result: a 174-page volume with 460 annotated images, arranged by neighborhood and depicting the most noteworthy examples of the elemental art.

It’s also a snapshot of a fluid commercial landscape. “In an age where everything is being torn down and built again in a few years,” Hucke says, “it gives you a sense of place.” And illuminated neon, he says, can yield expressive insight. “It’s about screaming for attention in the middle of the night. It’s ‘Hey, look at me!’ ”

His array includes such icons as the chef and flapping fish of the now-closed Dahlia Lounge downtown and “everyone’s favorite,” the giant rotating sign at Denny & Battery for Elephant Super Car Wash. Hucke captured the pink pachyderm and its smaller, stationary sibling before closure of the business prompted the signs’ dismantling for preservation and restoration.

Unfortunately, his cover shot of the smaller elephant shows the scripted “Super” tubing burned out. Hucke finds that symbolic: “Not everything is perfect here.”

A similar fate is slowly befalling the P-I globe. Seattle landmarked it in 2012, and it still overlooks the waterfront from a five-floor office building at 101 Elliott Ave. W., where the paper moved in 1986 and operated until its 2009 print shutdown. But the battered sphere is largely unlit, and its slogan no longer rotates. A fix-up would be expensive.

In our New Year, where shines the beacon’s hope?

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Mari Rabung and Barbara Dorhofer of 101 Elliott Ave. W., staff of Mindful Therapy, Jeff Pattison of NW Work Lofts, Matt Hucke, Dora-Faye Hendricks, Casey McNerthney, Heather & Erik Pihl  and especially Feliks Banel for their help with this installment!

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

Below are 10 additional photos, the 2012 Seattle landmark designation for the P-I globe and 26 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column. PLUS: a surprise at the bottom.

Also check out these online articles for further background:

• “In a world where the P-I globe is restored and preserved,” by Feliks Banel, Nov. 4, 2022
• “The Sixth & Wall Building Then & Now,” by Casey McNerthney, Seattle P-I.com, Jan. 31, 2013

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 15, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 20, 2022

Like a visit from Father Christmas every Tuesday night

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” — John Keats

By Clay Eals and Jean Sherrard

To write a column with accompanying photos is one thing. To see all the elements juxtaposed for print is quite another.

For us, receiving David Miller’s proofs for our forthcoming “Now & Then” columns in The Seattle Times was like receiving a cherished Christmas gift every week of the year.

Each Tuesday, a proof arrived as early as 8 p.m., but more typically after midnight. His creations were so expertly crafted that both of us often stayed up to view the magic as soon as possible.

Our responses usually centered on fine-tuning text or captions, but we also sought to salute the visual splendor David had wrought. His work so consistently and effectively showcased our work that we embraced a delicious challenge: finding new phrases with which to thank him. A sampling:

• Jean: “Remember that feeling you’d get cracking open the Sunday paper and digging out the funny papers? … I’ve pretty much lost that sense of wonder and anticipation, except when I receive an original David Miller!” (For a column on the downtown waterfront.)
• Clay: “With apologies to John Lennon, ‘All You Need is David.’ You did an unbelievably perfect job with this layout. … From Me to You, I Feel Fine.” (For a column on the Beatles in Seattle.)
• Jean: “Dagnabbit, David! Now you’ve done it. I’m going to have to teach this morning without socks, because you’ve knocked them right off!” (For a column on Eagle Falls.)
• Clay: “This looks beautiful, especially given your vertical emphasis. It’s as if the spread were a retaining wall for the magazine itself.” (For a column on Queen Anne’s Wilcox Walls.)

From his end, David communicated with warmth, cleverness and humility. Samples:

• “I love this one. We’ll make the horizontals work. No trubble at all. … When La Push comes to La Shove, your [photos] are still way better than mine.” (For Jean’s Olympic Peninsula columns.)
• “As a Kansas native, I appreciated the ruby slippers.” (For a “no place like home” column on Clay’s grandparents’ former house.)
• “You’re probably giving me too much credit for creativity and subtlety. … It could be that I was subliminally directed by the shape and didn’t even know it!” (For a Virginia V column for which David initially had fashioned a V-shaped headline.)
• Finally, “Thanks for all the nice compliments. I’m not sure I deserve ANY of them,” and, “Some days, I go whole minutes between screwups.”

We also are grateful that David voted with his feet on our behalf, choosing to break bread with a jolly group at Ivar’s Salmon House to celebrate column founder Paul Dorpat’s 81st birthday in 2019.

Suffice to say, we will continue to honor — and miss — David Miller more than just “now and then.”

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 8, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 11, 2022

To grandmother’s house we swerve — around Lake Keechelus

By Jean Sherrard

“Lewis!!!”

This scream from my grandmother-to-be was followed, a split second later, by a swerve from my grandfather-to-be to avoid a head-on collision. He skidded off the gravel road and barreled toward a 100-foot cliff.

Let us freeze that instant of white-knuckled, bug-eyed terror and pause to consider life’s random fragility. From near-miss bullets and plane flights not taken, to Spanish flus and rattlesnake bites, every family history is replete with “what ifs” upon which threads of destiny dangle.

My maternal ancestors’ fate hinged for several seconds on the reaction time of my 21-year-old gramps, who drove a Model-T Ford in the late fall of 1927 on a treacherous switchback of the Sunset Highway, high above Lake Keechelus’s eastern shore.

Heading home to Seattle for the holidays from Whitworth College in Spokane, Lewis Randal and his fiancé —  Dorothy Dailey, then a senior — were taking a much-traveled road with a long and checkered past.

For likely thousands of years, Snoqualmie Pass (elevation 3,010 feet) offered a trail from east to west. In the 1860s, it was expanded to accommodate pack trains and cattle drives and later used by cross-state travelers and nascent automobiles. Early in the 20th century, however, traffic over the pass slowed to a crawl.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had designated Lake Keechelus, a primary source of the Yakima River, as the ideal reservoir to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres of parched valley farmland. They erected a temporary wooden coffer dam in 1907 at the lake’s mouth, raising the water by 10 feet — just enough to make the existing road unusable.

The recently formed Washington State Highway Department, led by Joseph Snow (who engineered Seattle’s first major regrade) found itself between a rock and a wet place. Travelers on the east/west road, now partially flooded, were hostages to a private ferry operator who offered lake crossings at usurious prices.

Meanwhile, on the west side of the lake, astute managers of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad had planned ahead, carving railbeds well above the dammed waters. By 1909, their trains ran on a busy schedule, taunting bottlenecked traffic on the opposite shore with every steam whistle.

With convict labor, the state’s re-routing of the wagon road, part of the proposed Sunset Highway, was not complete until 1915. It remained unpaved until 1934, years after my grandparents flirted with terror.

A merciful thaw of the freeze-frame reveals that the Model-T was halted by a stump at the cliff’s edge, allowing them to proceed toward their (and my) destiny.

WEB EXTRAS

Just follow the link to watch our 360 degree video version of this column.

For your enjoyment, Jean added a few photos taken on the same late October trip of the eastern side of the Cascades in the Yakima Canyon near Ellensburg.

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 1, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 4, 2022

Treasure and mystery set sail in yard-sale images from 1933

By Clay Eals

When unexpected photographic treasures arise, sometimes they bear more than a modicum of mystery.

John Gerhard, a retired Boeing intellectual-property manager who lives in West Seattle, went on one of his usual prowls last summer, combing yard sales for finds. On a table at a house bordering Admiral Way, spilling out of an envelope was a set of 12 thin items, tiny and shiny.

They were medium-format photo negatives from long ago. Squinting while holding each one skyward, he discovered a negative with an airborne perspective of downtown and boat-packed Elliott Bay, backed by the West Seattle peninsula.

Gerhard grinned.

The seller, Caty Burt, had purchased the negs at a Georgetown sale years earlier but knew nothing about them. Gerhard asked her if he could donate them to University of Washington Special Collections, where he has volunteered for six years and which has a ships collection. Sure, she said.

The images centered on the 1797 warship USS Constitution, better known as Old Ironsides because, while it sank a British vessel during the War of 1812, its thick, oak hull survived a barrage of cannonballs. Restored, it toured 76 ports for three years starting in 1931. Its Seattle visit from May 31 to June 14, 1933, drew an astounding 201,422 visitors. Today, it’s on permanent exhibition at the Boston Naval Shipyard.

Of the 12 negatives, only one had the helicopter view, having been taken from the West Coast’s then-tallest building, the Smith Tower. Seen looking east down Yesler Way, the 2,200-ton, 175-foot, three-masted USS Constitution stands out among fishing boats, tugs, small craft and even a ferry.

Gerhard had no prior knowledge of the famous frigate. But he got up to speed after spotting, in another of the negatives, the ship’s name on its stern.

Six of the images depict Old Ironsides hosting tours while anchored at Pier 41 (now 91) at Magnolia’s Smith Cove, where cruise ships dock today.

One even reveals, in the distance, the remains of West Seattle’s Luna Park Natatorium, destroyed by fire in 1931.

But riddles remain: Who took the photos?

The negatives are unmarked. They include four images of a model sailboat. One of them shows a man examining a camera, seemingly about to photograph the model. Did he take the other 11 photos? He’s standing in front of a Spanish-style, stucco home near a bluff. Where was this house?

Gerhard speculates the guy was an engineer, interested in the mechanics of vessels. Perhaps, like Gerhard, he worked at Boeing?

“There’s a story here,” says Gerhard, a determined sleuth.

Can any of you come aboard with more details?

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Lisa Oberg and John Gerhard for their help with this installment!

No 360-degree video for this week’s installment.

Below are 5 additional photos, 9 collector’s envelope covers, an online scrapbook, further links and 8 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Here are links to other websites relating to the USS Constitution:

• NavSource Online
• Naval Museum of the US Navy
• Puget Sound Navy Museum