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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 23, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 26, 2023

The ‘happy airs’ of Orcas waft from Robert Moran’s Rosario Resort

By Clay Eals

Early on a Sunday 102 years ago, “strains of wonderful music” awoke newspaper writer Dolly Madison as she stayed at the Orcas Island mansion of retired Seattle mayor, shipbuilder and philanthropist Robert Moran.

“Hazy visions of heaven, with its choirs of sweet singers and golden harps, arose,” she wrote. “Near and nearer the sound traveled. The faint notes of a pipe organ became discernible. The music grew louder; then louder. Phrases were recognized. Suddenly an avalanche of sound pealed forth; low, deep notes; the warbling of birds; then the snatches of happy airs.”

Her senses didn’t deceive her. Routinely, Moran manipulated player rolls to create sunrise sounds on his 1,972-pipe German organ — an Aeolian (after the god of wind). The 1913 instrument still weaves magic in the five-floor, 117-year-old “Shangri-La” that Moran named Rosario, for the nearby strait.

Expanded and run as a resort under several owners since 1960, it’s again for sale. The Barto family of Anacortes seeks an entity to implement a 10-year, Seabrook/Suncadia-like redevelopment while retaining Moran’s vision and integrity.

Moran (1857-1943) forged an impressive if improbable existence. Born in New York slums, he arrived at Yesler’s wharf in Seattle at age 17 with only a dime. Seven years hence, the entrepreneurial machinist founded Moran Brothers drydock, which over two decades built steamers, barges and the USS Nebraska, a battleship active from 1904 to 1923.

Along the way, Moran won two one-year terms as Seattle mayor, straddling the city’s devastating Great Fire in 1889. Though lauded for swift recovery measures, Moran later deflected such praise:

“The fire simply cleared the ground and made it possible to build what is today one of the most beautiful cities in the United States,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1909. “It did more than that, however. As the electrical engineer would say, it put the ‘peak’ load on its citizens, morally and physically.”

Moran was facing his own challenge of destiny. Told by doctors at age 47 that he had six months to live, he left his Seattle empire and in 1906 decamped to peaceful Orcas, “the gem of the San Juans.” There, he bought thousands of acres and carefully built his waterfront Rosario estate in the new landscape amid family and frequent guests, living to age 86.

Guiding him were the hand-hewn Arts & Crafts movement, his long-held shipbuilding sensibilities and a deep respect for nature, which inspired his donation of what became next-door Moran State Park, including the breathtaking 2,400-foot Mount Constitution.

Who will carry on Moran’s life-enhancing showpiece? Perhaps they only will need to experience its music.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Patty Johnson, Scott Cameron, Meg Eals and especially Christopher Peacock 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 are 5 additional photos and, in chronological order, 63 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.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 9, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 12, 2023

Seattle’s midcentury rhythm-and-blues crowd flocked to Birdland

By Clay Eals

Barney Hilliard stands beside the imposing, six-floor Summit at Madison Park, a self-described boutique retail-residential complex. Signs for Safeway and Starbucks hover above while cars whiz by on the adjacent arterial, freshly paved for the pending installation of a new RapidRide G bus line.

Any visible residue of history at 22nd and East Madison seems to have vanished.

But to Hilliard, 85, a lifelong tenor-saxophonist from Renton, it still feels like home. His school buildings — Horace Mann Elementary, Edmond Meany Junior High and Garfield High — are mere blocks away, as are YMCA and YWCA branches and churches. Likewise is true for the sites of long-gone restaurants, a pharmacy and a shop that sold rhythm-and-blues records that were banned from radio airplay.

And on this very corner stood the hub. “This was the place to be,” Hilliard says. The place was Birdland, also known as Club Birdland.

Named after legendary saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker and New York’s Birdland club, the Central District incarnation drew national acts from Cal Tjader to Big Jay McNeely for 10 years. The hot spot, razed in 1965, is a focus of Peter Blecha’s new Northwest music-history book “Stomp and Shout.”

Formerly the Gala Theatre moviehouse in the silent 1920s and into the early sound era (it screened “Frankenstein” in 1932), the two-floor building later hosted Democratic and Republican rallies and other gatherings. In 1942, soon after the U.S. entry to World War II, it also was a “civil control station” to register Japanese residents for forcible evacuation from Seattle.

It became the Savoy Ballroom, then Eastside Hall, when the city council, seeking to better serve Seattle’s Black community in 1946, relaxed its “unwritten but rigid policy” forbidding cabarets east of Eighth Avenue.

By the time the $1,000 Birdland neon sign went up in 1955, Barney Hilliard and friends had formed what became the influential Dave Lewis Combo, playing teen dances “from West Seattle to Ballard and all the high schools in-between.” Because the integrated Birdland stayed open until 3:30 a.m., the versatile “covers” band could finish a gig elsewhere and return to the club to enjoy late shows. In late 1956, the Lewis troupe landed a prime perch: opening act for the house.

Hilliard left the combo in 1959. For decades, with a law degree he assumed noteworthy, Seattle-based business, nonprofit and governmental roles. But he kept soaring with his sax, retiring only 10 years ago. He traces everything back to Birdland. With a hearty smile and laugh, his emotion for the era is right in tune:

“It was labor of love, but it was mainly love. We just loved what we were doing.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Barney Hilliard, D’Vonne Lewis, Dave Lewis Jr., Molly Woolbright, Kait Heacock and Peter Blecha for their invaluable help with this installment!

Events for “Stomp and Shout” are scheduled April 19, 2023, at Town Hall Seattle, with music by the D’Vonne Lewis Combo, and May 23, 2023, at McMenamins Elks Temple in Tacoma, with music by Girl Trouble. For more info, click here.

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 an essay, a video interview and, in chronological order, 40 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.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 23, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 26, 2023

Documentary launches up-Hill quest to honor the ‘Empire Builder’

By Clay Eals

When I routinely rode with my dad to his downtown office in the late 1950s, he drove north along Fourth Avenue. Looming as we approached the nexus of Olive and Stewart, Seattle’s version of Times Square, was an enormous, elevated sign featuring a scaffolded Great Northern mountain goat atop a showy slogan: “EMPIRE BUILDER.” Through the windshield, I and countless others were absorbing a layered message.

“Empire Builder” referenced the passenger train from St. Paul that had crucially connected our city to the rest of the country in 1893, post-Great Fire. The catchphrase also echoed the sobriquet for the railway’s indefatigable founder, who helped turn Seattle into a metropolis — yet whose name is little seen or celebrated today.

Seasoned West Seattle documentarian Stephen Sadis seeks to change that, in a manner as audacious as his subject. His new “The Empire Builder: James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway,” is a four-hour tour de force, the result of on-and-off research for 20-plus years, summoning 5,000-plus images, maps and film clips and dozens of interviews to tell its larger-than-life story.

Hill (1838-1916) was a town speculator, agriculturalist, shipping magnate, banker, collector, philanthropist, longtime husband and the father of 10, but his legacy rides with the “Iron Horse” and its inescapable impact, which inspired Sadis’ fascination.

“If I told you,” he says, “that tomorrow when you wake up you could travel from Seattle to New York in 10 minutes, that’s the kind of change that occurred in the mid-19th century, from a six-month wagon trek across the country to a four-day train ride. That transformation is the key.”

Through Hill’s saga, Sadis and producing partner Kyle Kegley weave the personal (Hill’s right-eye blindness from a bow-and-arrow accident as a child) with the enterprising (Hill’s insistence on fashioning efficient and enduring rail lines) while repeatedly giving voice to the trains’ displacement of Native Americans.

The tale hits a peak with Hill’s opening-day speech for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition at the University of Washington. For an industrialist, the bent is surprising, as bold and prescient as its source — and certainly relevant today:

“Will you realize what this country will become when stripped of its forests — the washing away of the soil, the inevitable changes in climate when the forests have gone? …

“You have but to raise your eyes and be in the presence of some of the grandest works of God. Soil, climate, resources, all favor you. You will never again know isolation. The spaces once separating you from the rest of the country have been conquered. Remain as you have been, the architects of your own fortunes.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Stephen Sadis and Kyle Kegley 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 an additional photo, a video interview and, in chronological order, 12 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.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 9, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 12, 2023

The legacy of Seattle’s streetcar mindset isn’t black-and-white

By Clay Eals

In the beloved “Calvin & Hobbes” comic strip, Calvin asks his dad on Oct. 29, 1989, “How come old photographs are always black and white?” His dad’s classic response: “The world was black and white then.”

The jest underscores how hand-tinted images — like this week’s “Then” photo, circa 1924 — can let the color-habituated among us better envision city life a century ago.

Looking north and slightly east, we hover above East Jefferson Street in an impressive “bird’s eye view” of the Seattle Electric Company’s centrally located, all-wood streetcar barn and yard between 13th and 14th avenues on First Hill.

Erected on former pro-baseball grounds and replacing a barn at Sixth & Olive downtown, the storage and maintenance complex was to have been opened for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, but its launch came shortly afterward. At its north side, a tower stored water for potential fires while the city completed its fire-hydrant network.

With electrified streetcars continually rolling in and out, the unfenced facility became a busy community landmark, referenced for decades as a locator in classified ads for nearby apartment and room rentals and cafes. It hosted various meetings and even served as a draft-registration site in 1940.

The last Seattle streetcar ran in 1941, but the Jefferson hub operated for 44 years past the city’s rail-to-rubber conversion to trolley coaches. In 1984, the city sold the property to Seattle University, which 10 years later converted it to a soccer stadium, dubbed Championship Field in 1998.

Despite today’s focus on light-rail expansion and getting people out of cars, Seattle’s matrix of now-vanished streetcars produced a higher per-capita use of public transit, notes Mike Bergman, retired Sound Transit and King County Metro planner and author of “Seattle’s Streetcar Era: An Illustrated History, 1884-1941.”

“I think there was more appreciation of the system then,” he says. “The highest levels of ridership occurred during the first and second World Wars, when population densities were far less. Part of it was lower car ownership. Fewer people could afford a car. Fewer still could afford two cars.”

Gradually and relentlessly, he says, automobile and petroleum interests converted the public mindset to individualized travel. “They certainly made it easy to fill up your tank, and it was really cheap,” he says. “It also became a status symbol.”

Bergman optimistically projects another mass-transit heyday, fueled by increased urbanization: “I just don’t think all of those people will be able to get around solely in cars.”

Here we can return to the comic Calvin. In the 1989 strip’s closing panel, he tells his tiger friend Hobbes, “The world is a complicated place.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to collector Danny Eskenazi , Zachary Tartabull of the Craft Apartments and historians Dave Eskenazi, Bob Carney and Mike Bergman 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 4 additional photos and, in chronological order, 21 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.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 26, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 29, 2023

Busy physician Jacob Benshoof relied on four-hoofed transit

By Clay Eals

Not yet 2 was tiny Rene Alarie. The evening of Aug. 13, 1907, she played in her South Park backyard as her mother focused on her 4-month-old sister. The tot opened a gate and toddled into the road, where returning to Seattle was a Route 5 streetcar.

The conductor and motorman, not yet aboard, ran to catch the car, but its fender knocked Rene down, and she was seriously injured. Fortunately, she regained consciousness while resting at a neighbor’s home, where she recognized her mom.

“Dr. J.A. Benshoof, the attending physician, believes she has a good chance to recover,” reported The Seattle Times.

With automobiles a blossoming curiosity, the phrase “attending physician” painted a rustic picture 115 years ago. The doctor, Jacob Andrew Benshoof (1882-1979), who began work in South Park two years earlier, reached a wide swath of patients — including uphill in forested White Center, where he was the district’s first doctor — via horse.

“I would start out for some cabin in the woods in the morning, and by the time I got there a neighbor might have sent for me to come on another two or three miles farther to their home,” Benshoof told The Times in 1955 on his 50th anniversary of practice. “I’d go out to some tent or cabin in the timber to care for a woman in childbirth or a man who had been hit by a timber or caught in a saw or shot. Things happened in the timber country in those days.”

Born and raised in Iowa and trained in St. Louis, the busy Benshoof served as surgeon for the long-gone Meadows Race Track south of Georgetown and as Seattle medical examiner. He also joined the early staff of Providence Hospital and established offices downtown.

And he acquired a car. (He placed a 1910 Times ad to sell his “buggy horse and saddle, sound and gentle; new buggy and harness.”) But while building a family and becoming known as a prolific deliverer of babies, he never lost his early reputation for four-hoofed service, carrying a medical kit and rifle while riding or driving an ex-racehorse named Mabel Payne.

Two days after Rene Alarie’s streetcar accident, the Times reported that another South Park girl, Helen Taylor, 7, visited a neighbor’s home to get milk.

The neighbor’s chained bulldog startled the girl and bit her as she fell into a hole. A key part of the report:

“Dr. J.A. Benshoof dressed the wounds, and the little girl was removed to her home, where she is now resting easily.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Dina Skeels of the Benshoof family and to Wendy Malloy of the Museum of History & Industry and streetcar historian Mike Bergman 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 4 additional photos and, in chronological order, 24 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.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 12, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 15, 2023

For his family,  a Burien father reveals ‘Sturdy Gertie’
and ‘how big the world is’

By Clay Eals

In this tranquil tableau that his wife captured with a camera, a father and the couple’s daughters gaze upon the newly completed Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1951.

For the girls, it was a surprise visit, like others their dad initiated on Sundays. However, little could they comprehend the notorious catastrophe that had unfolded there before any of them was born.

Relative newcomers accustomed to today’s pair of Narrows bridges may be forgiven for not knowing the riveting context of the solitary span that opened there on Oct. 14, 1950. It replaced a narrower Narrows Bridge that had opened on July 1, 1940, but had met a calamitous fate.

After four months and 265,000 car crossings, the earlier bridge twisted for two hours (like a ribbon, corkscrew or hammock, onlookers said) in 42-mph winds, broke apart and plunged 190 feet into Puget Sound just before noon on Nov. 7, 1940. The only lost life was that of a dog mistakenly abandoned in a sedan mid-span.

The bridge’s failure pulled out the rhetorical stops. A reporter later termed it “the Pearl Harbor of American civil engineering,” but its enduring and endearing epithet was “Galloping Gertie.”

Newspapers, accordingly, termed the stronger, wider Narrows Bridge “Sturdy Gertie,” and it has stood for 72-plus years. (To accommodate more traffic, a fraternal twin to the south opened July 15, 2007.)

Eye-popping film of Gertie’s 1940 undulation and collapse became familiar to those in the 1950s who watched its repeated airings on the weekly ABC-TV series “You Asked for It.”

The electrifying footage also figured in an episode of the movie serial “Atom Man vs. Superman,” in which evil Lex Luthor destroys the bridge as a warning signal to Metropolis but not before the Man of Steel briefly grasps and stabilizes the span so that a woman on it can be rescued.

In 1951, the real-life girls in our “Then” photo possessed their own Sunday-drive context, imparted by their dad, railroad dispatcher William Fogelstedt of Burien.

“He would choose places that we had never seen before,” says daughter Helen Hackett of Bothell, who has no memory of the Narrows trip beyond its photos. “He would keep it a secret until we got there. It was always a buildup: ‘Now, just a few more miles down the road, and we’ll be there.’

“He would show us all the wonders of the world here in Washington. It always was followed up by an ice-cream cone on the way home. It was his way of expressing life and how big the world is.”

A simple snapshot. A lesson for a lifetime.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Washington Department of Transportation staffers Robert Webster, Stan Zal, April Leigh and Stefanie Randolph, as well as Lauren Koslowsky Bakken, 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 (1) links to a contemporary video interview, a Feliks Banel story (with vintage audio) and three historical accounts of the 1940 bridge collapse, (2) an additional photo, (3) a 1994 Paul Dorpat “Now & Then” column on Tacoma’s “other bridge,” (4) a link to a 2007 Seattle Times article by Mike Lindblom on 1950 Narrows Bridge steelworker Earl White, plus, (5) in chronological order, 22 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.

 

Vintage audio from 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse

 

 

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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. 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.