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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 27, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 30, 2023

Harvesting history, trivia – and a whole stable of animal phrases – from a pastoral photo of 1891 Renton

By Jean Sherrard

When historian Ron Edge forwarded this week’s picturesque portrait of the farm of Renton founder Erasmus Smithers (1830-1905), I melted into a sentimental puddle.

Like many Americans long removed from pastoral life, I still use its idioms, from “Hold your horses” and “stubborn as a mule” to “till the cows come home.” Also, I began life near this spot. So to complement our 1891 “Then” photo, I’m all in on making hay while the sun shines.

The young Smithers was lured from Virginia to the Northwest by the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. Upon arriving in 1852, he secured 160 acres near the confluence of the Black and Cedar rivers. Following the death of neighbor Henry Tobin, Smithers expeditiously married Tobin’s widow Diana in 1857. Their combined holdings totaled 480 acres, displacing the Duwamish village that had straddled the rivers for millennia.

Reputedly guided by Duwamish chief Jimmy Moses, Smithers discovered a seam of coal on a nearby hillside. Soliciting investment from a wealthy Port Blakely lumberman, Capt. William Renton, he founded the Renton Coal Mine, soon providing right-of-way for the nascent Seattle-Walla Walla Railroad. The site became a thriving rail hub, its huge bunker serving mines throughout the eastern foothills. A grateful Smithers deeded Moses a single acre on the Black River (dried-up today).

With mining partners, Smithers platted the town of Renton in 1875. His original grid of streets and avenues remains largely intact south of the Cedar River.

This spring, I met fraternal twins Lydia Della Rossa Delmore and Linda Della Rossa outside vast McLendon’s Hardware, near the farm site, on which, in 1945, Renton Hospital opened. It was where the three of us were born.

Aptly nicknamed the “wagon wheel” for its hub-and-spoke formation, the hospital was designed by Seattle architect George W. Stoddard (1896-1967), also noted for Seattle’s Memorial Stadium (1947) and Aqua Theater on Green Lake (1950).

While layers of concrete and box stores offer few links to the past, the Della Rossa sisters, peering over a seemingly endless parking lot, had a story to tell.

At 4 a.m. New Year’s Day 1953, the two were born to Eddie and Angelina Della Rossa. Aiding the family’s fortune, the Toni hair-products company — whose popular “Which twin has the Toni?” ad campaign had swept the country — awarded them $500 for producing the year’s first set of twins born in the United States.

In one shake of a lamb’s tail, the Della Rossas were living like pigs in clover. On that, you can bet the farm.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 video of this column, mosey on over here.

For a video interview with twins Lydia and Linda Della Rossa click here.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 23, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 20, 2023

To glimpse Seattle’s jazzy coffeehouse past, just enter The Door

By Clay Eals

Seattle’s coffeehouse craze can ground itself pre-Starbucks in the late-1950s rise of anti-materialistic beatniks and their yen for jazz and steamy espresso. Whether its New York and San Francisco hubs were showcased in national publications or Hollywoodized by Jack Lemmon’s bongo-playing in “Bell Book and Candle,” the nervy subculture took rapid hold in the nation’s psyche.

It caught Seattle-born Ben Laigo as a 23-year-old Army recruit at Fort Ord near Monterey. From there, he and buddies surveyed San Francisco’s startling North Beach scene. “It was,” he recalls, “a different kind of weekend, instead of getting drunk in a cocktail lounge.”

Raised in an enterprising Filipino family (his dad was a longtime Ivar’s chef), the O’Dea High School graduate and Frederick & Nelson window-dresser decided to import the espresso experience to his hometown. So Laigo and investors rented a downtown nook in June 1959 on Seventh Avenue between Stewart Street and Olive Way. Its name was the definition of hip: The Door.

He first booked folk music but quickly switched to jazz. “I was one of these wannabes,” Laigo, now 86, reflects. “I wanted to sit down and play the piano.” He settled for occasionally sitting in on bongo.

Open till midnight or 1 a.m. (3 a.m. Fridays), the no-alcohol eatery surpassed the beatnik niche, its crowds lining up to the now-razed Music Hall movie theater on Olive. Reflecting this, The Seattle Times’ Lenny Anderson was amused early on that when the music-loving Laigo asked a group of beatniks “several times for a little more quiet” and then to leave, one replied, “Time magazine says we belong in these places.”

In February 1962, as the Seattle World’s Fair neared, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer branded The Door “the largest late-hour espresso club in the state.”

The Door perhaps hit its zenith by sponsoring mid-fair concerts June 19-21, 1962, headlined by the legendary Dave Brubeck Quartet at the city’s Green Lake Aqua Theater. But proceeds came up “a little short,” reported columnist Emmett Watson. Laigo soon sold The Door, which continued through the late 1960s.

Befitting his given first name of Buenaventura, Laigo later embraced a multiplicity of ventures. He hosted at the Space Needle restaurant, ran the Norton Building-based Harbor Club (370 members) and even invented a Seattle-centered, Monopoly-style board game called Main Entrée that sold thousands of sets.

His persona was sealed from the start. As he told the P-I in January 1960:

“If you want to do something, get it out of your system and go do it. If you fail at that, start over and do something else. But keep doing.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Ben Laigo for his invaluable 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 14 additional photos, a history of The Door by Ben Laigo (pdf file) and, in chronological order, 66 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.

BONUS: Scroll to the bottom for a special section on “Main Entree,” the board game invented by Ben Laigo!

WEB EXTRAS

Here is a special section focused on Main Entree,” the Seattle-based, Monopoly-styled board game that Ben Laigo invented in 1971. First is a video in which Laigo discusses the game with Donna Driver-Kummen, who received the game as a gift when it was released. Afterward, you will find scans and pdf files of all of the game’s elements. Click and click again to enlarge them. Enjoy!

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 13, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 16, 2023

A paved path around Lake Union honors a Duwamish chief and his beloved homeland

By Jean Sherrard

In May 1906, while his second wife, Tleebuleetsa lay dying in their Portage Bay cabin, John Cheshiahud honored her final wish. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, it was “that in her last days … she be surrounded by her kinsfolk … and the friends of her youth.”

Lake Union John, as Cheshiahud was known to his white neighbors, sent messengers throughout the Duwamish diaspora, and during three days of celebration and solemn farewell, family and friends came from the Port Madison, Puyallup and Muckleshoot reservations to pay last respects.

A Duwamish chief, Cheshiahud is noted for remaining in Seattle long after the influx of white immigrants. Born circa 1820, he came of age before the settlers’ arrival. In a 90-year life, he witnessed unimaginable change.

His close friendship with a prominent newcomer fueled his drive to remain on ancestral land near his birth village. A sympathetic David Denny (1832-1903) sold him five forested acres on Portage Bay for a dollar.

While hunting, fishing, trapping and occasionally serving as tour guide, Cheshiahud straddled two worlds, one on the verge of certain annihilation.

Given earlier encounters with white homesteaders, Cheshiahud may have anticipated coming troubles, having narrowly escaped execution by a lynch mob. Denny’s daughter, Abbie Denny-Lindsley, provided the harrowing details in a newspaper account decades later:

She wrote that in 1854, her father, with David “Doc” Maynard and Henry Yesler, discovered the remains of a murder victim in a shallow grave near Lake Union. Advanced decay prevented identification. “When the murder became known,” she wrote, “three young Indians were arrested and imprisoned … although no more guilty than the rest of their tribe.”

An angry mob gathered and hung two of the men. As they strung up the third, Sheriff Carson Boren arrived and ordered them to stop, but they refused. In response, “he cut the rope,” noted Denny-Lindsley (Boren’s niece), “just in time to save [Cheshiahud]’s life.”

Found innocent of any charges, Cheshiahud “never ceased to be grateful” to his rescuer, who happened to be the same person who initially detained him without cause. Leaders of the lynch mob also were tried, Denny-Lindsley wrote, but it “never amounted to anything.”

In summer 1906, distraught after Tleebuleetsa’s passing, Cheshiahud sold the last piece of his Lake Union land for a significant profit, making him one of the wealthiest Native Americans in Puget Sound. He joined his daughter Jennie Davis in Port Madison, where he remained until his death in 1910.

In his honor, Seattle Parks in 2008 opened Cheshiahud Loop, a paved path circumnavigating his beloved Lake Union.

WEB EXTRAS

For our 360 video version of this column, head over here.

To boot, a couple of additional photos provide context and location. Thanks to Caleb and Rob Wilkinson for their inestimable help exploring Portage Bay by boat.

Abbie Denny-Lindsley’s 1906 account of the near lynching of Cheshiahud:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 9, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 6, 2023

After 53 years, cozy movie house maintains its ‘Grand Illusion’

By Clay Eals

In a military war, the weapons are guns and bombs, the results often instant, destructive and unthinkable. But in an economic battle, the weapons are dollars, the results frequently incremental, insidious and no less calamitous to the societal soul.

Enter the tiny Grand Illusion Cinema in the U District. Or should we say exit?

Sharing the name of the famous 1937 anti-war film directed by Jean Renoir, the cozy 68-seat arthouse soon could face the wrecking ball. It’s nestled on the second floor of a funky 103-year-old conglomeration of low-rise retail buildings along hillside 50^th Street at its intersection with University Way,

The West Coast commercial real-estate firm Kidder Matthews is asking $2.8 million for the 4,120-square-foot site, zoned for a maximum six floors and destined for apartments. The Grand Illusion holds a two-year lease but could be bought out anytime. To survive, it could be forced to move, to whereabouts unknown.

Its footprint a former dental office, the theater took root in May 1970 as the vision of perennial University of Washington literature student Randy Finley, who wanted to show films based on great books. He called it The Movie House, he says, “because there was a little house there.”

Quickly it became the home of foreign and offbeat fare, classic and obscure, including festivals featuring Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and West Seattle-bred Frances Farmer. When attendance lagged, Finley repeatedly brought in the dependable “King of Hearts” (1966) and “A Thousand Clowns” (1965) to fill the till.

Each December starting in 1971, several years before “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) became a TV staple due to lapsed copyright, Finley screened the Christmas Eve-based classic. He publicly labeled it “the nicest film The Movie House could ever offer.” Routinely, audiences cheered when the film’s ecstatic George Bailey ran through Bedford Falls and shouted “Merry Christmas, movie house!” The annual tradition has lasted 52 years.

The brash Finley (“I know the value of being heard; I made a lot of noise”) eventually built an indie theater empire of 20 Northwest screens. He ceded The Movie House in January 1979 to milder-mannered Paul Doyle, who renamed it the Grand Illusion — not just for the Renoir film, he says, but also cannily for “the medium of movies itself and, some would say, the nature of life.”

After Doyle left in 1997, Northwest Film Forum became the owner, and the theater went non-profit. Today, the development clock is ticking. “We’re biding our time,” says Brian Alter, manager for the past 13 years. “Everybody doesn’t want to see it go away.”

Is that hope the grandest illusion of all?

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Eugenia Woo, Kji Kelly, Taelore Rhoden, Evan Bue, Jessica Albano, Tracey Gurd, Jennifer Ott, Andrew Weymouth, Amy Hagopian, Betty Udesen, Jake Renn, Amanda Cowan and especially Brian Alter, Paul Doyle, Maitland Finley, Patricia Clark-Finley and Randy Finley for their invaluable 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 12 additional photos and, in chronological order, 41 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.