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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 28, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 31, 2025

A new West Seattle film encourages us to leave it to the beavers

By Clay Eals

We’re deep into a construction craze, the landscape changing overnight. Of course, this is hardly news anymore. Except this particular furor is fueled by … beavers.

Yes, beavers, the sizeable waterborne rodents that many of us have encountered in copious cartoons, from Mr. Busy in “Lady and the Tramp” to the dam builders in “Curious George.” With exaggerated buck teeth and paddle tails as tools of their trade, these amiable avatars sport wide-eyed smiles and hardhats to convey a busy, zesty persona.

But few Seattleites have seen actual beavers. That’s because they surface primarily at night. So we aren’t aware of their existence here.

Pamela Adams is out to change that. The one-time California fine-arts student and insurance broker moved to Alki three years ago and joined a wide if unheralded world of beaver advocates, morphing into what she calls “The Freelance Beaver Detective.”

That’s also the title of Fauntleroy filmmaker Kay D. Ray’s new 56-minute documentary, which, besides Adams, features other beaver promoters and city officials, along with waterway chronicler and former Seattle Times photographer Tom Reese.

Adams’ passion to track beavers found a ready “lab” in one of Seattle’s 49 streams, West Seattle’s Longfellow Creek.

Stretching 4-1/2 miles, according to the documentary (nearly 3 miles in daylight), it runs south to north, from Roxhill Park and beneath Westwood Village mall to the creek’s buried endpoint, beneath Nucor Steel and the West Seattle Bridge, in Elliott Bay.

Despite myriad human barriers, Adams says the creek boasts five beaver families that diligently chew trees and build dams and lodges, creating ponds that foster other wildlife — a far cry from the fur trade of centuries past when beavers were hunted to near-extinction for their pelts.

“The beavers are actually water keepers,” Adams says in the film. “They’re doing what they can, what they’ve always done for thousands of years, and they are part of our ecosystem. In this place that we have urbanized, we’ve channelized, we’ve paved over, they’re doing the natural process.”

A key example: Just north of West Seattle Golf Course, the creek’s culminating culvert and a trash-catcher that Reese nicknamed “Monstro” (for the vicious whale in “Pinocchio”) have existed for at least 87 years. Today, Reese says beavers’ tenacious ponding has helped adult coho salmon to spawn there.

Adams’ advocacy does require compromise. She works with Seattle Public Utilities to keep ponds from flooding footbridges and other property. She also buys and installs wire fencing to protect homeowners’ trees.

But it’s hard not to be captivated by the film’s industrious critters. In scores of sequences, many recorded with night-vision cameras, the real beavers are more compelling than any cartoon.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Pamela Adams, Tom Reese and Kay D. Ray for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 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, you also will find a trailer for “The Freelance Beaver Detective” documentary and 3 additional photos.

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 21, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 24, 2025

‘Almost a Paradise’ for settlers was
a paradise lost for Coast Salish

By Jean Sherrard

In times of anti-immigrant fervor, a gentle reminder seems pertinent that most of us are descended from recent arrivers.

Col. Isaac N. Ebey, of Missouri, landed in the Pacific Northwest via San Francisco, seeking a home for his extended family. In the spring of 1850, he hired canoes to explore today’s Puget Sound — a reconnaissance that preceded Seattle’s Alki Landing Party by more than a year. Letters home describe a land of exceptional beauty, suitable for colonization.

Finally, Ebey chose to settle on Whidbey Island, taking full advantage of the Oregon (Territory) Donation Land Law, which granted married couples 320 acres each if they committed to working the land for four years.

Their square mile, Ebey wrote his brother Winfield,

was “almost a Paradise of Nature,” and he encouraged his extended family to follow him and his close friend Samuel Crockett to the island prairie. By 1854, they were joined by nearly 30 Ebeys and Crocketts, lured from across the United States.

While these pioneers quickly established profitable farms, the original Coast Salish inhabitants, living here for millennia, were displaced without compensation — a toxic model being repeated throughout the territory.

Isaac’s 61-year-old father, Jacob Ebey, took up

residence on his own 320-acre spread atop a bluff overlooking his son’s land. Soon, Jacob built an 18-by-40-foot, 1½ story home for eight family members and found success planting wheat, oats and potatoes while raising livestock, including a small herd of dairy cows.

Isaac’s fortunes also rose. Besides farming his land, he worked as a lawyer and customs official and served as a territorial legislator. Sadly, wife Rebecca Davis Ebey, who had joined him with their two sons in 1851, died in 1853 after a difficult childbirth. Ebey subsequently married young widow Emily Sconce.

In 1855, Territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens toured the region, insisting that tribes sign federal treaties to formalize the vast transfer of land from Indigenous to white hands.

Bitter disputes raged as Native populations already diminished by disease and displacement were corralled into reservations.

With tensions rising, the settlers built blockhouses — the mid-19^th century equivalent of “safe rooms” — to protect themselves.

Jacob Ebey erected a thick-timbered blockhouse a stone’s throw from his farmhouse, anticipating confrontation with local tribes. On Aug. 11, 1857, however, the family’s security measures were breached.

In retaliation for the killing of 28 tribal members by the U.S. warship Massachusetts, a raiding party, likely from the Kake nation of Tlingit from southeastern Alaska, killed and beheaded newcomer Isaac Ebey at his home, just above the beachfront landing that still bears his name.

WEB EXTRAS

More scenes from the bluff below Jacob Ebey’s cabin.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 14, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 17, 2025

Poignant past could guide the future of Japantown’s Panama Hotel

By Clay Eals

On the corner of Sixth and South Main, the brick building stands resolute. Its west face meets an angled sidewalk. At the corner, turning east, the sidewalk inclines further. Up close, the five-floor structure resembles a statuesque promontory.

Bypassed by busier traffic in the Japantown (Nihonmachi) sector of the Chinatown-International District west of Interstate 5, the edifice may appear obscure.

Its legacy, however, is not.

This is the 115-year-old Panama Hotel, the title setting for Jamie Ford’s best-selling 2009 historical novel of heartrending cross-cultural romance, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.”

Designed by Sabro Ozasa, Seattle’s first Japanese architect, the Panama was built during construction of the famous canal thousands of miles south. From the outset, it was a single-room-occupancy (“workingman’s”) residence for immigrants. Its basement included what is described today as the last intact, albeit unused, Japanese-style communal bathhouse in North America.

The hotel’s poignant fame, center stage in the novel, derives from a preserved cache of 8,500 items, from suitcases, baskets and trunks to books and myriad household items, all left behind by 37 Japanese families whom the U.S. government forced into incarceration during World War II. Their materials — “saved for a happier time that never came,” wrote Ford — make the place both a museum and a shrine.

At the vortex of this city-landmarked “treasure” (the term used by the National Trust for Historic Preservation) is its passionate owner, Jan Johnson.

She grew up in Olympia and West Seattle, studying art in Italy before becoming so inspired by the Panama’s saga and surviving original features in 1985 that she purchased it soon afterward.

The seller was Takashi Hori, who was raised near Chehalis and in Seattle and secured a University of Washington business degree. He had bought the hotel in 1938 before being removed in March 1942 like the others whose belongings linger there.

Over the decades, Johnson’s motivation hasn’t varied: “It’s the history and the education and the knowledge and to save the building.”

Daily, she juggles renting rooms, supervising a tea-and-coffeehouse, handling maintenance, even trying to launch a Panama Hotel nonprofit, while touring streams of guests. During one hour in June, visitors included an Australian tourist and a curator for L.A.’s revered J. Paul Getty Museum.

It’s daunting work for someone well into retirement age. The situation cries out for sensitive benefactors, says Historic Seattle’s Eugenia Woo, a longtime Johnson champion. “The hotel has an authenticity you can’t re-create,” she says. “It needs people who appreciate history and can run it like a business.”

Which begs the question: Will the Panama’s future be bitter? Or sweet?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Nancy Ishii, Reina Endo and especially Jan Johnson for invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 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.

Here is an extensive 2022 Seattle Times article on the hotel, and a similar 2002 North American Post article.

Below, you also will find 3 additional videos, 1 additional photo, 4 landmark documents and 18 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 7, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 10, 2025

For 40 years, Pike Place Market newsstand let us read all about it

By Jean Sherrard

We know of at least one canary that thrived in a coal mine against the odds. “From the start,” says Lee Lauckhart, now 84, “everyone tried to convince me print media was doomed.”

For 40 years, however, he ignored the naysayers, owning and operating “Read All About It,” his beloved newsstand in the Pike Place Market, beginning in 1979.

“Every day, we’d see dozens of regulars who became good friends,” he recalls warmly, singling out longtime

co-workers for special praise. “We were just like family.”

Born in Seattle, Lauckhart graduated from the University of Washington in 1968, signing on with Thurston County as a “registered sanitarian” before joining the “back to the land” movement: “I spent four years as a Snohomish dirt farmer.”

Stints selling newspapers in New York’s Gramercy Park then driving taxis in Seattle “were pretty nip and tuck,” he says. Then one of his cab fares offered him a job making “horseshoe nail” jewelry in the Pike Place Market. It felt like coming home.

Just divorced, he found housing for himself and his young daughter in the Market’s newly renovated Leland Hotel, “the one with the ‘Meet the Producers’ sign on it,” Lauckhart recalls.

In 1979, after four years as a “crafty,” he had a lightbulb moment. Friend and longtime newspaper hawker Sebi Nahmias had a coveted license to sell local dailies from his stand at First and Pike.

Lauckhart, then in his late 30s, made Nahmias an offer:

that together they open a general-interest newsstand in the Market offering publications from around the world. Soon joined by partner Steve Dunnington, they comprised an irrepressible entrepreneurial trio.

“Read All About It” opened Oct. 25, 1979, on a 10-by-30-foot pitch in the Market’s southeast corner.

The newsstand was an unqualified success — and its location didn’t disappoint. “First and Pike,” Lauckhart says, “was the busiest intersection in the Pacific Northwest.”

A slew of innovations followed. The partners arranged for daily New York Times deliveries (before dawn each

morning via Flying Tiger Airlines) while negotiating contracts with newspaper and magazine publishers across the globe.

After four decades, however, the final curtain. Thousands of newspapers had been shuttered, writing the final epitaph for purveyors of print media.

Lauckhart, by then the sole owner, stubbornly held on as a matter of principle. For 10 years, he paid employees out of the newsstand’s dwindling profits while surviving solely on Social Security.

On Dec. 31, 2019, the “Read All About It” canary, one of the last of its kind, finally sang its swan song.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360 degree video, captured on location in Pike Place Market, click here.

Billy King, noted NW muralist — once voted Mayor of the Market– is a longtime pal of Lee Lauckhart’s. He created the print of “Read All About It” featured above.

When we prepared this column, Billy was hard at work restoring a mural painted years ago for Maximilien, a French restaurant in the Market. Check out a few pix of Billy at work:

Finally, Lee Lauckhart’s favorite photo of the newsstand in situ, taken for a now-defunct rag called Endless Vacation.