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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 16, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 19, 2026

Historian locates Ivar and Trump’s grandfather in Pioneer Square

By Clay Eals

A Seattle historian holds forth:

The original name for Seattle’s revered Pioneer Square was Pioneer Place. And Skid Road, the vaunted sobriquet for Yesler Way, is an entire misnomer.

“As far as I can tell, not one log was ever skidded down any street in Seattle,” he says. “It blows people’s minds when I tell them that. I don’t know if Seattle’s ready to hear that.”

The historian, Michael Ostrogorsky, relishes debunking published and oft-repeated legends. He leads tours of his favorite district, Pioneer Square, for which he just self-published a guidebook.

The 208-page volume bursts with 140 photos and maps. Its conversational text reveals startling details. Case in point: our main “Then” from 1956, which looks west along South Washington Street as it intersects with Occidental Avenue South.

Bold capitals indicate an Ivar Haglund café two blocks east of the waterfront and five blocks south of Pier 54, where the restaurateur-promoter opened an aquarium in 1938 and in 1946 expanded it to his enduring and renowned Acres of Clams restaurant. His lesser-known inland Ivar’s, depicted here (dubbed Chowder Corner), began in late 1955, lasting just four years under his helm. Today it’s Baba Yaga, a rock club.

Equally surprising, one-half block east (on the right in the photo) is the Lucky Tavern. At that storefront in 1891, an eatery called the Poodle Dog was purchased, renamed and operated for two years as The Dairy by none other than Fred Trump, paternal grandfather of our current president.

Ostrogorsky asserts that a 2000 biography, “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire” by Gwenda Blair, “simplistically paints Fred Trump’s The Dairy restaurant as a den of iniquity and Fred Trump as a pimp and criminal.” But he adds that “there is simply no historical evidence of any criming that occurred in association with Fred Trump” at The Dairy or at another restaurant he owned in 1897 at Second Avenue and Cherry Street.

The Dairy/Lucky Tavern building became a parking lot in 1969. When Fred Trump ran The Dairy, he lived in a hotel above the storefront that became Ivar’s Chowder Corner. That building’s upper three floors fell victim to the Seattle earthquake of 1949.

Such particulars animate Ostrogorsky.

“We live in a fact-free world, where people get to choose the reality that they want to experience,” he says. “As a historian, I’m here to say the facts matter. Even if people choose not to believe it, there are still facts out there, things that happen. It’s the job of us historians to present those facts, however many heads may explode in the process.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Michael Ostrogorsky for his invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below, you will find 1 additional photo and 11 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 July 2, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 5, 2026

Exhibit reveals sweeping swath of roles, purposes for U.S. flag

By Clay Eals

What events today bring out more than 50,000 people in our city? Certainly Seafair parades and hydro races. Pro football and soccer, too.

On Independence Day 1920, a Central Labor Council-sponsored Pageant of Democracy at Woodland Park hit that mark.

From downtown, celebrants paraded to today’s north Seattle zoo site, where patriotic reenactments featured actors from 19 cultures, from Indigenous to Greek, with nighttime fireworks at nearby Green Lake.

The afternoon spectacle was intentionally over the top, given the recent flu epidemic and end of World War I, plus tensions lingering from the 1919 Seattle General Strike. One element was ubiquitous — the U.S. flag.

“From downtown buildings, myriad American flags fluttered in the breeze while the crowds that lined the streets and parks wore knots and ribbons of the national colors,” reported the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

This weekend, as the country reaches 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, the Museum of History & Industry opens an ambitious, layered, flag-focused exhibit, “For Which It Stands,” aptly referencing the Pledge of Allegiance.

“There’s pride, and there’s protest, and there’s reverence, and there’s belonging, and honoring sacrifice, and carrying forward America’s ideals, all these different ways that people have used the flag,” says Mikala Woodward, the museum’s curator of exhibits and engagement. “We want to give people that range to think about and put themselves into it.”

Examples in the exhibit abound:

• A flag from “The Boys in the Boat” U.S. men’s crew that triumphed at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
• A photo of a mother holding the burial flag of her son, a Japanese American Nisei soldier who died in Europe during World War II while relatives were incarcerated in America. “It’s about expressing loyalty and sacrifice to the nation,” Woodward says, “even when it’s mistreating you and your family.”
• A flag borrowed from the volunteer Oso Fire Department uncovered in the town’s catastrophic 2014 mudslide. “It became this symbol of hope and the community coming together to keep looking and finding people and heal and carry on.”
• A flag flown upside down in the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) zone in 2020, with spray-painted words “love” and “rage.”

The exhibit includes places for reflection and interaction. It asks visitors to finish the sentence: “I pledge allegiance to …” The hope is to spur universal introspection.

“It makes you feel different if you’re carrying a flag,” Woodward says. “You think about how you’re representing something, you’re expressing something, you’re connecting yourself to a place or a group or a statement and what it really means to you.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Mikala Woodward , Wendy Malloy, Allie Delyanis, Gigi Allianic and Ariel Rathbun 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 2 additional videos and 6 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.

Click this sentence to access 21 other MOHAI photos depicting elements of the 1920 Pageant of Democracy.

Also, here is a detailed description of the precise location of the 1920 Pageant of Democracy, as outlined by Ken Kroeger, Woodland Park Zoo project manager:

The exact location where the 1920 “Pageant of Democracy” was performed is a historic area of the park that has completely transformed over the last century.

The stage was built on what was then known as the Great Lawn, which served as the majestic, wide-open focal point of the original 1908 Olmsted Brothers design for Woodland Park. According to historic records of the event and park layout, the specific spot sat directly north of the park’s early tennis courts and wading pool, giving a massive crowd of spectators plenty of room to sit on the grass before the stage.

If you were to stand in that exact spot today, you would find yourself right in the heart of the modern Woodland Park Zoo exhibits.

Where it sits on the modern map

Over the decades, the Great Lawn was steadily enclosed as the zoo expanded its habitats and the city bisected the park to build Aurora Avenue (Highway 99) in 1932. The specific footprint where the pageant’s temporary stage, the costumed labor union performers, and the horses stood is now split across two primary areas of the zoo:

The African Savanna Exhibit: The southern expanse of the historic Great Lawn—where the crowd sat and looked northward toward the stage—is the exact landscape footprint occupied by the giraffes, zebras, and gazelles today.

The North Meadow: The northernmost remnant of that original lawn is still a wide-open grassy space. It is the area used today for summer evening concerts, community events, and picnics.

The tennis courts mentioned in the 1920 event accounts (where the revelers danced later that evening into the night) were located near the southern boundary of the lawn, roughly where the South Entrance and the Rose Garden (established just two years later in 1922) sit along N. 50th Street.

Because the entire central swath of the park was a unified open meadow in 1920, the performers had the expansive, sweeping backdrop needed to assemble all 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and an entire cavalry of historical figures before thousands of gathered Seattleites.

To visualize where the photographer stood to capture this historic moment at the Woodland Park Zoo, you have to look at how the stage and audience were oriented on the old Great Lawn.

Because the temporary wooden stage was constructed with its back to the north (near the modern-day North Meadow area), the performers on stage were looking directly south across the expansive grass. The massive crowd of spectators sat on the sloping lawn south of the stage, facing north.

The camera’s position

The photographer capturing Joan of Arc on her horse with the stage directly behind her was positioned just south of the stage, facing slightly north/northwest.

On a modern map of the zoo, this precise vantage point places the camera at the northern edge of the African Savanna exhibit, right on the boundary line where it transitions toward the central paths and the North Meadow. The camera was aimed northward, capturing the performers elevated on the stage with the natural tree line of the park’s western ridge framing the background.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 25, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 28, 2026

Throughout history, Seattle voices rise in protest

By Jean Sherrard and Clay Eals

America began in protest. A tea party, a declaration of grievances, a war — and then, improbably, a nation.

Seattle arrived late to the country but early to the argument. For a century and a half, the city has lifted its voices in protest for better — and occasionally worse.

Few American cities have matched Seattle’s range and reach. From the waterfront strikes of 1919 to the WTO protests of 1999, what begins here has a way of reverberating far beyond the city limits.

Ahead of America’s 250th anniversary observance, this week we glimpse several “Then” protests, selected for what they reveal and what still resonates. For our “Now,” we chose recent No Kings marches and rallies, reminding us that the impulse lives today.

We also provide a timeline and invite you to leave a comment to share Seattle protest memories that matter to you.

 * * * * *

A partial list of Seattle protests

• 1886: Anti-Chinese expulsion riots roil the waterfront.
• 1909: Japanese laborers protest discriminatory wage policies.
• 1916: Industrial Workers of the World protest turns into Everett Massacre.
• 1919: The General Strike shuts down the city for six days.
• 1934: Longshoremen’s strike paralyzes the Port of Seattle.
• 1942: Japanese Americans resist incarceration orders.
• 1961: Congress of Racial Equality sit-ins target Seattle lunch counters and hiring practices.
• 1966: Boycott against Seattle Public Schools for racial segregation in classrooms.
• 1967-70: Vietnam War protests surge through the UW campus and downtown.
• 1970: Thousands of UW students take over I-5 after Kent State shooting.
• 1969-71: Rallies promote, and voters approve, saving Pike Place Market.
• 1972: Freeway fighters block the would-be R.H. Thomson Expressway.
• 1999: A World Trade Organization ministerial conference collapses amid “the Battle of Seattle.”
• 2011: Occupy Seattle encamps in Westlake Park and later Seattle Central Community College for several months.
• 2017: Womxn’s March on Seattle draws 100,000 to 140,000 in one of the largest political marches in the city’s history.
• 2020: George Floyd protests fill streets; Capitol Hill becomes CHOP.

* * * * *

Seattle stops work for six days that shook the nation

For six days in 1919, Feb. 6-11, Seattle simply stopped.

Some 65,000 people — laundry workers, hotel maids, streetcar operators, building laborers — walked out in solidarity, in the first general strike ever called in a major American city.

No streetcars ran. No restaurants opened. Workers struck, and the city held its breath.

It had begun with frozen wartime wages in the shipyards. But a call from the Central Labor Council transformed a labor dispute into something larger: a demonstration of what organized workers could do. They ran the Seattle General Strike like a city within a city. Twelve labor kitchens fed thousands of people a day. Workers’ patrols kept order without incident.

Mayor Ole Hanson termed it a Bolshevik Revolution. Federal troops arrived from Fort Lewis.

The strike ended Feb. 11, the workers having lost their demands. But the loss was complicated.

Two days before the walkout, activist and journalist Anna Louise Strong had cheered on workers, writing in the Union Record that the strike would lead “NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!“ She was right. The phrase reverberated far beyond Seattle, helping ignite the first Red Scare and reshaping the national debate about labor, capital and the limits of solidarity.

Seattle’s workers didn’t win. But they changed what was thinkable.

 * * * * *

Sitting in for Black representation
and to persuade ‘the power group’

Sometimes protests in Seattle wielded influence from smaller groups with close-to-home targets.

In July 1963, 22 young people — nine adults and 13 juveniles — staged a sit-in at City Hall. They complained that of 12 citizens appointed by Mayor Gordon Clinton to Seattle’s fledgling Human Rights Commission, only two were Black. They sought five, wanting to “keep pressure on the power group.”

After four days, police arrested the demonstrators for creating a disturbance, loitering and resisting arrest. Cameras rolled as the youths, lying on their backs, were picked up and carried away.

Charges were dropped a month later. But the front-page ruckus elevated and helped galvanize the eventual work of the new commission, which drafted a Seattle open-housing ordinance to outlaw discrimination in real estate sales and rentals, known as racial redlining.

Enacting it took time. By a resounding margin of 112,448 to 53,453, with opponents decrying “forced housing,” the ordinance fell to voter defeat by referendum in March 1964. Four years later, the City Council finally enacted it without voter challenge.

Before the council vote, outspoken real-estate agent and human rights commissioner Elliott Couden captured the issue: “The right to discriminate in the rental and sale of housing because of the color of a man’s skin is not a precious American heritage.”

 * * * * *

Clever signs of today’s Seattle: ‘No Kings but Salmon’

Of course, Seattle protests have never required solemnity. The city has long understood that showing up — with wit, neighbors, even a vuvuzela horn — is itself the argument. To protest is to love an imperfect union enough to disagree with it.

The city’s answer to a national call reappeared March 28 with characteristic elan. In the “No Kings” crowd of 75,000, a sign read “No Kings but Salmon,” a reminder that our city has sorted its allegiances.

At Seattle Center, a mock court made the point. An ersatz President Donald Trump, with orange wig and enormous red tie, bellowed while jesters capered and a placard presented the verdict: “The Emperor Has No Brains.”

No surprise: Smaller “No Kings” rallies have multiplied throughout Seattle’s neighborhoods. Their clever homemade signs (a shared coping mechanism?) bespeak laughter through tears.

A West Seattle sampling:

• “We’ve Seen Better Cabinets at IKEA ‘As-Is’ ”
• “Small Hands, Small Dictator”
• “Faux-King Traitor”
• “U Know It’s Bad if the Introverts Showed Up”
• A favorite: “Sometimes You Have to Flush Twice”

Imaginative ire also has arisen in mime. Two enormous puppets jousted at this year’s Northwest Folklife Festival, an orange-haired monarch taking gentle bops in the head from the boxing gloves of — who else? — the Statue of Liberty.

WEB EXTRAS

No 360-degree video this time, but click here to see a 30-second video of roving puppeteers at 2026 Northwest Folklife Festival depicting Lady Liberty bopping a crowned Donald Trump.

And check out a few more videos from the March 28, 2026, No Kings March:

• Protesters descend into from Capitol Hill into downtown Seattle.
• A marching band of drums and horns inspires protesters to step lively.
• Seattle Raging Grannies sing a song of protest.

And one from June 14, 2025, in West Seattle:

Below, you will find 1 booklet, 1 additional photo and 28 historical clips related to open housing 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.

Don’t miss the final news clip from 1896, good for a laugh!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 11, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 14, 2026

Seattle celebrated dirigible’s first flight over North Pole in 1926

By Clay Eals

The ice-laden North Pole bespeaks mystery. How much more unfathomable must it have seemed a century ago, when no human eye had seen it from above?

While ground explorers reportedly reached the pole in 1909, a collective desire to see it from the air intensified in the Roaring Twenties, when hazardous, barrier-breaking aviation captured imaginations and created instant heroes. Examples included the first flight to circle the world, a five-month group effort based in Seattle in 1924, and Charles Lindbergh’s famous solo journey across the Atlantic in 1927.

In-between, on May 12, 1926, came an aerial accomplishment celebrated here but little known today — the first undisputed human flight over the North Pole. Notably, the vehicle was not a conventional airplane but instead a dirigible, a form of passenger and military air transit much more common and familiar at the time than now.

In 71 hours, the hydrogen-filled Norge airship and its 16-man crew crossed the pole while traveling 3,400 miles.

The expedition began from the high-Arctic Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and ended with the dirigible’s deflation at the town of Teller, Alaska, then a U.S. territory.

The principals represented a trio of countries:

• Norwegian Capt. Roald Amundsen (1872-1928), flight organizer renowned for having led the first ground trek to the South Pole in 1911. The dirigible’s name saluted his homeland.
• U.S.-based Lincoln Ellsworth (1880-1951), a wealthy explorer and engineer who financed the flight.
• Italian Col. Umberto Nobile (1885-1978), a prominent aviator and the airship’s commander and designer. The Norge’s construction was backed by his country’s notorious dictator Benito Mussolini.

The only joint public appearance of the three in the United States post-flight came weeks later in Seattle. On June 27, 1926, traveling aboard the steamer Victoria and escorted in Elliott Bay by yachts and military planes, they arrived at then-Pier 2, site of today’s state ferry terminal.

Mayor Bertha Landes and 5,000 others welcomed the three, who paraded to the Olympic Hotel. They spoke the next day at a Seattle Chamber of Commerce banquet broadcast live on KFOA radio. The mustachioed Amundsen, widely viewed as the flight’s spokesman, told the crowd of 700 that the crew’s lighter-than-air odyssey had legitimized future cross-polar commercial aviation.

Other polar journeys followed, producing success and tragedy, including, ironically, given their intermittent friction, Amundsen’s death two years later in an airplane search for Nobile, who was on a second Arctic expedition when his dirigible, the Italia, crashed.

Still, the Norge’s 1926 extraordinary achievement endured. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it “one of the world’s greatest adventures.”

At the Seattle banquet, Amundsen seemed to sense its finality. “I’ve fulfilled my every ambition,” he said. “My work is ended. What more could I ask?”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Knute Berger, Bob Mayer, Bob Carney, the Museum of Flight‘s Peder Nelson and Cody Othoudt and especially Dan Kerlee 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 3 additional internet links, 2 additional videos, 2 additional photos, 1 additional essay and 38 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.

The news clips include a reflective 13-part series under the joint byline of Amundsen and Ellsworth, written for the New York Times and exclusively published locally in the Seattle Times.

Internet links:

• HistoryLink essay by Robert Mayer: “Roald Amundsen and crew of the airship Norge visit Seattle after their historic North Pole flight on June 27, 1926″
• Facebook group: “Zeppelin & Airship Collectors: Stamps, Mail & Ephemera”
• Book: “Umberto Nobile and the Arctic Search for the Airship Italia”
• Article from 1999: “Roald Amundsen’s bust turning heads in Gjoa Haven”

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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 28, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on May 31, 2026

World’s Fair welcomed the majesty of ill-fated Bounty in 1962

By Clay Eals

A futuristic Century 21 theme famously fueled the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962. But a fleeting, off-site attraction paid homage to Century 18.

Greeted by rocket salvos, fireboat spray and the cheers of thousands, a majestic blue-and-gold sailing ship emblematic of Great Britain in 1789 plied Elliott Bay beneath a gleaming sun. The floating storybook nestled at then-Pier 51 (site of today’s state ferry terminal), alongside the just-opened Polynesia restaurant.

It was the HMS Bounty. Not the original, but a largely true-to-life replica built in 1960 for use in a cinematic remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” the saga of a high-profile shipboard revolt.

The 118-foot clone, made 33 feet longer than its namesake to accommodate bulky cameras, docked June 22 at the Polynesia, where 10-year-old Bob Bunch and his parents from the Three Tree Point peninsula of Burien climbed aboard.

“The lashings, the masts and what seemed like miles of rope going up and down, all of it was terribly impressive,” Bunch says. “I was always reading stories of pirates and the Navy. I remember thinking it would be a total adventure to go for a sail on that thing in the ocean. The images never left me.”

The next five-and-a-half days, the replica welcomed visitors at the Port of Seattle’s Shilshole Bay Marina, interrupted only by a June 27 excursion through the Ballard locks to Lake Washington. On its opening weekend, the vessel took on a staggering 38,871 people.

Though linked to the fair, the ship’s Seattle stop was literally a Hollywood promotional vehicle. The 1935 Oscar best-picture winner “Mutiny on the Bounty,” starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, had been a TV perennial since 1956.

But its three-hour MGM remake with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard, a notoriously bloated production partly filmed in Tahiti, wouldn’t open until six months after the vessel’s Seattle visit.

The newer movie cost $20 million ($215 million today), of which $750,000 ($8 million) financed the replica. However, the clone’s sojourn to Seattle and around North America didn’t right the cinematic ship. The remake’s winter holiday run tanked, losing $6 million ($65 million).

The replica, for decades an East Coast mainstay, expired in 2012, swallowed by Hurricane Sandy, just as the original Bounty perished in a South Seas fire some 220 years earlier. Nevertheless, the allure endures.

“The power and romance of these ships is timeless,” says Noah Waldman, owner and captain of the Seattle waterfront-based tour vessel Bay Lady. “They always activate our imaginations. You can feel what it was like to be a sailor in the age of sail.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Devlin Donnelly for his invaluable help with this installment! Be sure to visit his Port of Seattle blog post for more details about the replica visit in 1962. And don’t miss this 8-minute video backgrounder shared by Devlin: “HMS Bounty Sails Again.”

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

Below, you will find 8 additional photos and 61 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.

And scroll to the bottom for a special addition from the former mayor of Des Moines and the president of the Des Moines Historical Society, Richard Kennedy!

THEN: The Chase sisters Jenny, 3, and Katy, 2, then of Bellevue pose on the deck of the Bounty replica June 23-27 at Shilshole Bay Marina. (Tom Chase)

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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 14, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on May 17, 2026

For 95 years, one family has played the tune at Ted Brown Music

By Clay Eals

Joining my school’s new concert band made me a fortunate fifth-grader in 1961. Which instrument would I learn? My mom loved the upbeat big-band sound of Glenn Miller, so the choice was easy: a brassy slide trombone. At the Sherman Clay music store in downtown Seattle, a student horn was a big purchase at $175, but my commitment endured for decades.

Thirty miles south in Tacoma, Ted Brown (1901-1971) made his own musical commitment during the Depression. His decision has enveloped his family for an astounding 95 years — and counting.

A clarinetist, Brown had worked for Sherman Clay in Tacoma, Spokane and Portland for eight years when, at age 30 in 1931, the West Coast retailer asked him to close its troubled downtown Tacoma branch. Instead, he lured investors and, for $50,000, bought it and began a brand.

“He was a natural salesperson — a connector in a business that works so much on relationships,” says Brown’s granddaughter Whitney Grisaffi, who runs South Tacoma-based Ted Brown Music, with 150 employees at stores in six Washington cities.

The company’s latter-day logo, designed by Grisaffi’s dad, Warren Brown (1934-2004), tells the founder’s story in miniature: a French horn whose bell forms a “T” and whose swirl suggests a “b.”

But what exactly is a music store? Over time, the definition has twisted more than the tubing of a tuba.

Early sales products were pianos and sheet music. Close behind came radios, phonographs, records and televisions. After those items spun to specialized stores, electronics emerged: guitars, synthesizers, digital keyboards, public-address systems and home studios.

Dominant through it all has been music education, providing band and orchestra instruments and lessons for students. Since 2007, that has included a nonprofit for music therapy and used instrument giveaways.

“For us to enjoy music as humans, somebody’s got to learn how to play an instrument in the first place,” Grisaffi notes. “In the United States, that takes place in the schools. We’re so lucky because that’s a unique situation worldwide. You start on an instrument in school and figure out, ‘Wow, this is me.’ All the retail, whether you walk into the store or find us online, is supporting those people once they’ve become musicians.”

Supporting Grisaffi is the fourth generation, her adult sons Garrison and Carson Grisaffi. Both aim to sustain the enterprise. In Garrison’s two tots is the glimmer of Generation Five.

“I get to wake up every day and work in the music industry,” Garrison says. “I can help run the legacy, I can help people make music, and who the heck doesn’t listen to music?”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Whitney, Garrison and Carson Grisaffi and David Meredith 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 9 additional photos and 27 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.

BONUS: Below, under Web Extras, see a newly posted history of the house at 6315 22nd Ave NE, by its owner Bruce Finlayson.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 30, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on May 3, 2026

Whose feet have walked your floors? Bill Schrier can supply clues

By Clay Eals

It’s easy to imagine that where we live begins and ends with us. Bill Schrier is proving otherwise.

By assembling an illustrated history of his house in West Seattle’s north Admiral neighborhood, he’s setting a potent and universal example.

For nearly a half-century, Schrier and his family have lived there. He easily places their $65,500 purchase to November 1978 because it came just six months after a gypsum freighter infamously rammed the low-level Spokane Street Bridge, prompting construction of today’s high-level West Seattle Bridge.

But the house was hardly new. It had been built to its present size between 1908 and 1910, just after West Seattle’s 1907 annexation to Seattle. It stands on a typically quiet, wooded street so narrow that when cars line both sides, drivers from opposite ends take turns squeezing through.

Though appearing smaller, the “Plain Early”-style structure has three floors, including a daylight basement, encompassing six bedrooms, two kitchens and two dining rooms. Over the years, the house was remodeled inside and out.

What intrigues Schrier more is whose feet once walked its floors. A sampling of inhabitants:

• 

  Millard F. Mitchell, a self-described farmer, bought the in-progress home from noted engineer-surveyor Richard Stretch and lived there through 1914, with his wife, Jennie, and five children.

• Stanton Patton, second director of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in the 1930s, was married there in 1914.
• Edmund Bourdage Sr. and Jr. lived there in the 1930s, both later serving in law enforcement, the dad as a county sheriff’s deputy and the son as police chief in Longview.
• Ray Gerring, regional artist and community-college teacher whose paintings can still be found online, rented the house’s basement unit in the 1950s.

These particulars and countless others derive from city, county and state records, newspaper archives and genealogical data uncovered by Schrier, a former police officer and retired government official who for nine years directed 200 staff as Seattle’s chief technology officer. Aiding his eye for detail is his wife, Kathy, a longtime public high-school journalism teacher who directs the Washington Journalism Education Association.

“I’ve always been curious and fascinated by what things must have been like,” he says. “There’s satisfaction in understanding our place in history. Scratching that itch of fascination gives me pleasure.”

So far, Schrier’s project, which still awaits his family’s own saga, tops 40 pages. The book’s specifics provide a roadmap for tapping readily available information that is normally invisible.

Though he allows that his book might hold wider interest, Schrier mainly wants to pass it to whoever owns the house next.

And who knows? The next owner may add another chapter.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Bill Schrier and his family 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find a downloadable pdf of Schrier’s book (a work in progress), 3 additional photos, and 11 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.

And in an uncanny parallel to Bill Schrier’s efforts, here is a newly posted history of the house at 6315 22nd. Ave NE by its owner Bruce Finlayson (right).

After seeing this column installment in print, Bruce attended a recent “Now & Then” talk and gave  Clay a copy of his history, which he completed in 2019.

Bruce said he would be happy for us to share it with our blog readers. Click here to download the 28-page pdf. Thanks, Bruce!

And here are the Web Extras related to Bill Schrier’s house:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 16, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 19, 2026

Artifacts of ‘Americanism’ drew 15,000
to Freedom Train here April 9-10, 1948

By Clay Eals

Was it really such a different time? We’re talking 1947: post-World War II, the baby boom, new prosperity, nuclear anxiety, the Red Scare and a just-minted United Nations peace mission.

That year, with President Harry Truman’s “strongest endorsement,” a National Archives brainchild became reality. A traveling museum called the Freedom Train began a $10-million, 37,000-mile trek to 329 cities, including seven in our state. Its purpose: to display, behind half-inch glass, the Bill of Rights, a Declaration of Independence draft in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, the UN charter and 125 other artifacts of “Americanism.”

The red-and-blue-striped, seven-coach train welcomed people age 12 and older at its send-off Sept. 17 (Constitution Day) in Philadelphia. The following April 9, it reached Seattle’s King Street Station, where 15,000-plus boarded to see the Marine-guarded exhibit over two days.

“In these hardened days when too many feel that it’s sissified to give way to sentiment and emotions,” wrote Seattle Times columnist Carl E. Brazier, ”the actual sight of these original documents will do more to instill a personal sense of pride in this country of ours than all the soap-boxers, microphone-ranters and dime-a-word writers we’ve had in years.”

The train encountered bumps. The Communist Party — “Commies” in a Seattle Times headline — attacked its “Wall Street imperialism.” In Philadelphia, 30 picketers sought amnesty for conscientious objectors imprisoned during the war. And the train’s sponsoring American Heritage Foundation bypassed Memphis and Birmingham altogether when their officials threatened to segregate visitor lines.

Here, crowds were reverent. Billy Johnson, 12, of Broadview Elementary, praised a “Star-Spangled Banner” draft (“We sing that in school all the time”). Col. Desmond Canavan of Lake City savored a sooty U.S. flag from Iwo Jima (“That flag means a lot to us who came back”).

A city judge let Ike McCoy, 38, serving an 80-day sentence for drunkenness, tour the train unsupervised. After a five-hour wait in line, McCoy visited, then walked back to jail. “It was very inspirational,” he said. “I tried to explain to a couple next to me that I was in jail. I figure they thought I was nuts.”

Seattle’s embrace of mobile heritage lingered in late 1975 when a Bicentennial train rolled through town. It continues this summer when the Museum of History & Industry hosts a “Freedom Plane” exhibit as part of “America 250” events.

But Truman’s message at the first train’s launch remains timeless — and, some would say, especially so today:

“I pray that each individual citizen everywhere will determine in his heart to continue to fight against bigotry and intolerance and will determine to do all in his power to assure the blessings of liberty in full measure for every American and for mankind.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Leonard Garfield, Joy Guo, Michelle Acuna and especially Allie Delyanis 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

In chronological order, here’s the full Museum of History & Industry schedule of “America 250” events this summer:

• Virginia V America 250 Tour: Mosquito Fleet — July 8 and Aug. 26, 2026: A unique, on-the-water experience connecting regional maritime history to national narratives.
• Power of the Press — July 18, 2026: A program examining journalism’s role in shaping democracy — past and present.
• There is No Single American Story: Clint Smith — July 22, 2026: A major keynote address from acclaimed author and historian Clint Smith, exploring how history is remembered and interpreted.
• Freedom Plane—July 30-Aug. 16, 2026: Freedom Plane stops at MOHAI in Seattle.
• Seattle Democracy and the 21st Century — July 31, 2026: A forward-looking discussion on civic life, governance, and participation in modern America.
• America 250: Tribal Treaties — Sept. 29, 2026: A program centering Indigenous perspectives on sovereignty, history and nationhood.

More historical info at two official web pages:

• The history of the Freedom Train
• The timeline of the Freedom Train

Below, you will find 1 additional photo, 1 video and 76 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 April 2, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 5, 2026

‘Invisible’ stories of century-old Harbor Island come alive in April

By Clay Eals

Harbor Island could be the most visible invisible place in Seattle.

Noticeable to anyone viewing the waterfront from any angle, it’s a busy south-end industrial center and catalyst for international commerce. Yet for most, it’s off the beaten path. Unless you’re among the 2,000 who make a daily living there or you pilot trucks, trains and ships to and from, it can be a mysterious place.

Elke Hautala of Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood and Cari Simson of Edmonds aim to change that. The friends operate Lake City-based Invisible Histories, an educational enterprise supported by a nonprofit fiscal sponsorship. Their playful logo cleverly combines a shovel and microphone.

The initial foray of these pop historians came five years ago when they forged the Halloween season’s popular Georgetown Haunted History Tours. They have branched into monthly podcasts and live shows that seek to entertain while they inform. In that vein, their next retro extravaganza on Thursday and Friday, April 23 and 24, focuses on Harbor Island.

The fundamental fact about the 397-acre island is that before 1909, it simply didn’t exist.

Trade ambitions sparked by imminent completion of the 1914 Panama Canal triggered a multi-decade transformation of Seattle’s only riverbed. Mudflats and shifting channels at the Duwamish River’s mouth thus became an artificial land bar, composed of 24 million cubic yards of dirt dredged from the straightened, widened and deepened waterway and sliced from the city’s regraded Denny and Beacon hills.

Seen from the air as roughly a trapezoid, Harbor Island boasts an equally irregular past — perfect grist for theatrics planned by Hautala and Simson.

For their April shows,  home base will be the ground-level soundstages of King County’s Harbor Island Studios, part of the island’s massive former Fisher Flouring Mill. From its opening in 1911, Fisher’s towering silos and a pervasive retail presence (including Fisher Scones, a staple of Northwest fairs) made the mill the island’s most eye-catching business until its 2002 closure.

Beyond the island’s evolution, the presentations will examine the site’s geologic and indigenous pre-history. It also will explore the waterway explosion of Russia-bound munitions pre-World War I, the Prohibition reign of Fisher family-connected bootleggers Roy and Elise Olmstead and a segregated Black soldier base nearby during World War II. Another topic: the infamous 1978 ramming of the low-level Spokane Street Bridge, which instigated the 140-foot-high West Seattle Bridge that soars above the island today.

The goal, Hautala and Simson say, is to assemble “artists, performers, filmmakers, storytellers, musicians and more to share diverse cultural and creative perspectives as we peel back the layers of Harbor Island history.”

In short, to make the invisible visible.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Elki Hautala and Cari Simson 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 6 additional photos and 8 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.

For an UPDATE as of June 28, 2026, click here.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 19, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 22, 2026

Mixed feelings vex mainstay owner of beloved Wedgwood Broiler

By Clay Eals

What can you say about a guy who never left his childhood neighborhood?

In 1981 at age 19, he became a dishwasher at a restaurant 10 blocks from home. Over 15 years, he worked his way up. In 1996 he bought the business, helming it for three decades, to the present day.

“I don’t know too many people who have done that,” Wedgwood native Derek Cockbain says with understatement. “The day I started, it wasn’t my plan. It just sort of fell into place.”

Cockbain, 64, stands on the cusp of giving up arguably the district’s best-known diner, bar and community hub — the beloved Wedgwood Broiler.

This classic steakhouse anchors a two-acre, 1960s-era shopping center on 35th Avenue Northeast. In recent years, the three-block-long property faced a high-profile proposal for a six-floor retail-residential development. It fizzled, but while no new project has been announced, such a plan could return.

Will the Broiler survive? Will its building be razed? The questions haunt its modest, strip-mall exterior and warm, dark interior whose layout, décor and furnishings have stayed largely the same for 50-plus years.

A tiny eatery began onsite in 1965. With a remodel in 1969, it became Sir Wedgwood Broiler. “Sir” fell off the name in 1973, but the initials, “SW,” carved big in north entry doors, remain.

“We try to stay consistent,” Cockbain says. “People who came in 20 years ago to have a teriyaki steak will come in today and have it, so it should be exactly the same. That’s one of the things we pride ourselves on.”

Another constant, however, is uncertainty. He’s had to rent month-to-month since COVID. Will he give up the ghost? His feelings are deeply mixed.

On one hand, a lifelong ethic prods Cockbain to make things work. That grit surfaced during a soccer stint at Nathan Hale High School, where he topped the Metro League in scoring. After he recovered from a broken ankle, his coach Joel Waters told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1979, “Derek can score with either foot. In fact, he scores more with his off foot than his right foot.”

But with dreams of traveling with his wife, Alycien, and other properties to tend, Cockbain also feels “done,” ready to retire. “I don’t want to work until I can’t enjoy it.”

Still, tenacity and heart come to the fore.

“The neighborhood doesn’t want us to go,” he says. “The problem for me is that I grew up here. I know everybody. I’ve got the kids I went to school with, I see my old friends, their parents still come in, and I don’t want to close the doors.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Valarie Bunn of the Wedgwood in Seattle History blog well as Derek and Alycien Cockbain 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 3 additional photos, a flier and 2 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 March 5, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 8, 2026

Seattle chose its first woman as mayor 100 years ago

By Clay Eals

In 1981, as newspapers struggled to employ non-sexist terms and I was in Oregon covering education for the Corvallis daily, the woman heading the school board pulled me aside.

“Please don’t write that I’m the chairperson,” she said. ”It sounds like I’m the one who sets up the chairs!”

In that vignette’s spirit of gender equality, this week we celebrate a centennial. Monday, March 9,  marks the 100th anniversary of the 1926 election of the first woman as Seattle mayor — and the first woman to helm any major U.S. city.

She was Bertha Knight Landes, serving just one term, when mayoral terms were only two years, unlike today’s four.

With her husband, Henry Landes, whom she later labeled her “tower of strength,” she moved in 1896 from Massachusetts to Seattle, where he became science dean at the University of Washington. Gradually she attained leadership in local women’s clubs whose influence swelled with passage of statewide women’s suffrage in 1910. She won election to the City Council in 1922 and 1925, serving two years as its president.

As acting mayor in 1924 while Mayor Edwin Brown attended the Democratic National Convention, Landes fired the police chief, whom she said was lax about bootlegging and gambling.

Two years later, seeking the city’s top job, she invoked domestic wordplay — “municipal housecleaning” — while promoting a pushback on vice.

Landes, just over 5-feet tall, was reserved and plain-spoken, choosing to neither accentuate nor duck her gender. “If the men will not show enough interest in their city government to get the right kind of candidates in the field, the women must,” the 57-year-old said the night before defeating the incumbent by 48,700 to 42,802 votes.

Ironically, her novelty in 1926 became a liability in 1928. “Her sex is against her,” read a New York Times subhead in capital letters. An elusive, wealthy businessman, Frank Edwards, whom Landes labeled “a name, a photograph and a rumor,” ran against her with the slogan “the man you would be proud to call mayor.” Though endorsed by newspapers and labor, Landes lost re-election, 39,819 to 58,873.

Landes died in 1943. After her mayoral term, it took 91 years for Seattle to elect a second woman to the post. Jenny Durkan served from November 2017 through 2021.

In our “Now” photo, we place new Mayor Katie Wilson, the third woman voted into the office, next to a Landes reception chair gifted to the city in 2006. It stands behind glass in a vast, first-floor City Hall meeting room named for Landes. In its honorary promontory, this chair is unlikely to be set up or taken down again.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Thuch Mam and Sage Wilson 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 4 additional photos, a 1928 Annual Report and 11 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 Feb. 26, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 1, 2026

Whimsical details from 1968 Seattle enliven classic Caplan poster

By Clay Eals

Eye-level, it’s push-pinned to my hallway wall. If I’m not in a hurry, one of its details arrests and rivets me, always inducing a grin. I imagine the same experience for countless others over the past nearly 60 years.

Our “Then” image is a 30-by-40-inch poster, a fanciful take on downtown Seattle and the West Seattle shore in 1968.

It looks like a cockeyed cross between a bird’s-eye map and “Where’s Waldo?”

As period caricature, it emphasizes some aspects and conflates others, but that’s part of its charm, invoking memories and inviting comparisons to today.

Commissioned by the revered but long-gone Frederick & Nelson department store (now, there’s a memory), the poster was the vision of Seattle artist Irwin Caplan (1919-2007).

Throughout his life, from his upbringing in Madison Park to Garfield High, the University of Washington and beyond, Caplan created images in plentiful styles and forms. But he made his fame after World War II as a premier magazine cartoonist.

His panels graced an astonishing array of mid-century periodicals: Look, Time, Liberty, True, Holiday, This Week, Argosy, Esquire, Ladies Home Journal, the New Yorker and, in syndication, from Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Later, he created commercial art and Seattle Times Sunday magazine covers, also teaching drawing and painting at the UW.

It was as if a pencil, pen or brush never left his hand. “If he was awake,” says Robert Caplan, oldest of three offspring, “he was doing art.”

Caplan’s dizzying Seattle poster became a career highlight. Priced at $1.95 (mailing tube 10 cents extra), it sold enough to go into second printing. “The longer you look,” the Frederick’s ads aptly strutted, “the more familiar names and landmarks you see!”

Therein, the Space Needle whirls, while downtown’s soon-to-open Seafirst Building (now Safeco Plaza) —then the city’s highest high-rise, nicknamed “the box the Space Needle came in” — sports a “Big Daddy” pennant.

Flying past the Smith Tower is a plump jet from which five mechanics dangle. A trailing banner, oblivious to imminent corporate calamity, proclaims, “Boeing Job No. 50327.”

Six superimposed ovals spotlight districts like Seattle Center, in which Caplan asks “Where’s Zollie?” — a salute to Zalman Volchok, who booked the Beatles’ first Seattle concert in 1964, at the Coliseum (now Climate Pledge Arena), and later general-managed the city’s then-new, now-departed basketball SuperSonics.

Another oval highlights the UW, framed by the motto “Lux Sit” (“Let there be light”) alongside a “Love” picket sign and a nod to the Helix underground paper.

Hydros, Chief Seattle, the ferry Kalakala, Pacific Science Center and future Rainier Tower architect Minoru Yamasaki — the references seem delightfully endless.

The scene is jam-packed, busy, vibrant. Also, some would say, prescient.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Joan Clarke, Steve Caplan, Robert Caplan and especially Raulin Sterne 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 25 additional photos and 22 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.

We’ll begin this array of extras with several rarities submitted by readers in response to this post:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 12, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 15, 2026

Early Japanese barbershop image reflects Seattle library’s care

By Clay Eals

By itself, our “Then” photo poses a multifaceted mystery. Not coincidentally, the story behind our “Now” photos — in which I’ve had a small hand — offers satisfying answers.

A nearly 115-year-old image reveals an immaculate barbershop, three workers, a customer and the view of a city streetscape through the front window. The scene abounds with signs and rich visuals. But who are these people? Where are they? Why?

This shot shows a storefront just off Yesler Way along a curved, diagonal side street near the brand-new Smith Tower. It’s little more than a stone’s throw from what was, and still is, known as Japantown (Nihonmachi), where immigrants began settling in the 1880s to work in fisheries, railroads and logging.

The barbershop owner, perhaps one of the depicted men, was Kashiro Kawakami. Born circa 1886 in Japan, he likely first came to the United States in 1902. A farmer, he returned to Japan in 1910, marrying and sailing back to Seattle with his wife. They had three children here while he worked as a barber at the photographed site in about 1911-14. Records go silent after 1916. Perhaps the family moved back to Japan.

These details and many others about this photo emerged, starting in summer 2023, during detective-style research by Seattle Public Library’s Special Collections staff on a massive collection donated by historian and “Now & Then” column founder Paul Dorpat following his 2019 retirement.

Before his donation and at the library’s request, I was honored in early 2018 to spend 17 afternoons in Dorpat’s basement in Wallingford, logging negatives, prints, slides, discs, tapes, films and other media that he amassed for four decades to document a constellation of Seattle-area scenes. The total, covering a century and a half, exceeded 309,000 items. Many, including a glass-plate negative of the Kawakami image, were unlabeled.

Dorpat, 87, who now lives in a Shoreline care center, contributed his collection to the library because of its mission to provide free public access. But he also knew its staff would first marshal extensive tools — city directories, index files, databases and other collections — to give the materials meaning.

The barbershop photo is a telling example, says Sean Lanksbury, the library’s Special Collections service manager, who assumes that painstaking scrutiny of such images eventually pays off.

In this case,  he says, the library contemplates a potentially wide-ranging impact down the road, “whether it be someone seeking images from that Seattle neighborhood, researchers on minority-operated businesses or, better yet, a relative of these particular Kawakamis.”

Work on the Dorpat collection continues. Public access — and posterity — await!

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Knute Berger, Sean Lanksbury and Gergana Abernathy 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column. (Notice anything different in this week’s 360 audio? If so, email your hunch to Clay Eals or Jean Sherrard.)

Below, you will find 2 additional photos and 3 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.

Plus, you now can browse part of the Paul Dorpat Collection at Seattle Public Library. Click here!

To see answers to the three questions posed in the first paragraph of text, scroll down to “Web Extras.”

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 29, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 1, 2026

Pioneering ‘Quizdown’ showcased local students’ wisdom, futures

By Clay Eals

Quick quiz: When the Ice Age ended, was the terrain rocky and rough or flat and fertile? What type of engine burns oil, not gasoline? If you turn a quart of water into steam, would the steam be more or less than a quart?

For answers, many of us today would dive into Google. Not so, however, for children who starred in 366 episodes of Seattle’s first locally produced program, “Quizdown,” which featured 5,000 fourth- through sixth-graders from public and private schools across King County.

Broadcast on Saturdays, “Quizdown” began on KOMO radio on Jan. 8, 1949, converted to TV on KING on Nov. 1, 1952, and on Dec. 12, 1953, returned to KOMO, where it remained on TV for the rest of its 16-1/2-year run.

From schools, KOMO and the co-sponsoring Seattle Post-Intelligencer solicited students’ questions, which numbered in the tens of thousands and probed topics in science, history, math and civics.

Longtime “quizmaster” Millard Ireland then interviewed and popped questions to pre-teens during the half-hour shows. Installments featured six students from each of two schools (plus alternates), competing for their schools to win encyclopedias, record players and other prizes.

“That it was on TV made it an example for countless kids that education is important, it can be fun, and it can lead to rewards,” reflects former longtime KING-TV anchor Jean Enersen, who helped represent Magnolia’s Our Lady of Fatima Parish School at age 11 in 1956.

The show’s name stemmed from “spelldown,” an event in which all contestants start standing, then sit as they’re eliminated. In “Quizdown,” though, students sat at school desks, facing cameras. Signs hung from their necks indicating their names and grade levels.

The show’s peppy personality derived from Ireland, an early newscaster who later became a U.S. Civil Defense official. His encouraging, rapid-fire exchanges with kids hinted at their later lives. On Feb. 1, 1958, for example, he ferreted out the interests of John Hay Elementary sixth-grader Norm Ahlquist.

“I like to work with radio and television,” Ahlquist said. “When they don’t work, I like to find out what’s wrong with them. … One time there was just a raster [grid pattern] but no picture. There was only one video tube in there, so we checked it, and it turned out to be completely dead.”

“You know,” Ireland deadpanned, “you might be teaching our technicians something about how to fix their own sets.”

Today, Ahlquist, 79, of Capitol Hill, boasts a long career in computers and civil engineering.

For another student from the same show, former Colman Elementary sixth-grader Cris Krisologo, (pronounced kris-OH-luh-go), 80, of Columbia City, “Quizdown” was consequential:

“It was like, ‘I can do that. I could probably answer those questions.’ Doing a show with younger kids really makes a difference. You start to get their juices going and thinking, ‘What do I want to really be?’ ”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Norm Ahlquist, Cris Krisologo, Darwin Mitchell, Cal Ernst, Jean Enersen and especially Lindsy Ireland and Joe Wren 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find answers to the quiz questions posed in the first paragraph above, a video of the Feb. 1, 1958, episode of “Quizdown”; a video interview with a participant in that show, Cris Krisologo; 2 additional photos and 42 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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Answers to quiz questions in the first paragraph above:

1. Rocky and rough.
2. Diesel.
3. More. (One quart equals 1,600 quarts of steam.)

UPDATE: Post Alley article, April 27, 2026

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 15, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 18, 2026

Past is present: Immersion in the Depression’s day-to-day ordeal

By Clay Eals

When people picture the Great Depression in Seattle, one scene usually comes to mind. It’s depicted in in our “Then” shot looking north along the waterfront to downtown.

Even in bright sunlight, it’s a dark landscape. While smoky piers bespeak activity, the foreground paints a dispiriting amalgam of scattered, makeshift dwellings. This “town that forgot the straight line,” as dubbed by American Architect magazine in 1933, appears devoid of people. But contrary evidence abounds, including light-colored clothes flapping in the wind.

Overseen by the Seattle Tower (1929, center) and Smith Tower (1914, right), this formerly vacant acreage had been the site of World War I concrete machinery pits before it became known as Hooverville, a jab at Herbert Hoover, the new president when the stock market crashed in 1929, triggering the Depression.

The landscape portrait was taken early in Hooverville’s nine-year existence. What many don’t realize — and what may resonate in today’s homelessness debate — is that the city declared the Hooverville huts hazardous and twice used kerosene to burn them down before letting the 600 inhabitants, nearly all men, rebuild with a promise to keep order. The pact lasted until 1940, when the site was cleared for use by U.S armed forces as the country again mobilized for war.

Those are among countless details in the narrative carved by former Seattle Times editorial board member Bruce Ramsey in his book “Seattle in the Great Depression” (2025, WSU Press). Therein, the retired, longtime regional business reporter, a child of Depression parents, offers two noteworthy approaches to the topic.

First, Ramsey mines material straight from the city’s three daily newspapers and other period publications, including a master’s thesis by a University of Washington student who lived in Hooverville. Second, unusual for history books, Ramsey casts his tale entirely in the present tense.

The result is that, in 344 pages and with 120 photos, readers can experience how Seattle lived through the nationwide economic and social crisis day by grueling day. As Ramsey puts it, “Newspaper stories are first impressions, fresh takes. Because I wasn’t there, I want to listen to the people who were.”

Today, the Hooverville site is near the Port of Seattle’s Terminal 46, eerily empty since the 2017 collapse of cargo giant Hanjin Shipping Co. The governing Northwest Seaport Alliance is seeking a replacement.

Meanwhile, Greg Nickels, tagged with his own Nickelsville jab for homeless villages arising late in his 2001-2009 Seattle mayoral term, argues in a recent Facebook post that the land should “come back in the heart of the city” as a vibrant urban center like Granville Island in Vancouver, B.C.

Whatever its future, the area’s haunting past persists in perspectives of the present.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ensign Santiago Vazquez and Petty Officers Daylan Garlic and William Kirk of the U.S. Coast Guard for photo access to their building and especially Bruce and Anne Ramsey 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find a 1982 “Now & Then” column on Hooverville, 8 additional photos and 2 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 Jan. 1, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 4, 2026

Meadowbrook Pool turns 50

‘A sense of belonging’ where there’s ‘nothing but water’

By Clay Eals

If you zip along busy 35th Avenue Northeast, Meadowbrook Pool is hard to miss, just as when it opened 50 years ago.

The building bears a distinctively broad and slanted roof. Up a wooded sweep of steps and inside the entry, its bustling lobby acts as a prelude to action in the pool itself. Swimmers dot the pool’s water beneath a wood-beamed vault ceiling that creates the aura of a mountain lodge.

Smiles are everywhere — exactly the point when the natatorium was dreamed up with six other city pools  and voter-approved as part of the Forward Thrust campaign in 1968.

“In a place like Seattle, there was really nowhere to learn to swim except the lakes,” recalls 94-year-old Green Lake resident David Towne, city Parks superintendent when Meadowbrook opened. “I think the idea was to teach everybody to swim and live in this part of the world where we have nothing but water.”

Designed by Seattle architects Calvin/Gorasht, the 44-by-75-foot pool was dedicated Oct. 28, 1975. It presides at the southeast corner of Meadowbrook Playfield, a site with deep roots. Formerly part of Meadowbrook Golf Course, established in the early 1930s, the complex abuts the 1963 Nathan Hale High School, mirroring school/pool placements elsewhere in Seattle.

Though fueled by Forward Thrust money — bond measures that created the Kingdome, neighborhood improvements, arterial highways and other projects — Meadowbrook Pool’s construction was no easy endeavor.

Hindered by swampy land near Thornton Creek and bids more expensive than forecast, plus economic fallout from the notorious Boeing Bust in the early 1970s, the project took several years longer than anticipated to complete.

Today, however, the pool — with a newer community center built next door in the late 1990s — is a point of pride, what Towne calls a “mark of achievement” for a district tucked between Lake City Way and northern Lake Washington. Of course, he allows that not everyone is a swimmer, but the pool and community-center combo provides a sum greater than its parts, a place “to socialize, be involved. It adds a sense of belonging.”

Embodying that spirit is Jenson Yuen, who grew up in the neighborhood and began swimming at Meadowbrook at age 4.

He started volunteering at the pool in 2010, has been employed there for 11 years and is now senior lifeguard and assistant coordinator.

“Connecting with various generations” inspires him, he says. “In our recreation swim, we have grandmothers bringing their grandkids. We have parents who take the day off, who take their newborn babies here, and they swim. It’s truly a way for everyone to come together, and it’s a really great place to just have fun.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Valarie Bunn, Jeanette Voiland, Dave Belanger, Stacy Moe, Jenson Yuen and especially David Towne 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find a video interview of Jenson Yuen,  the pool’s dedication program, 14 additional photos and 8 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.

Click each headline or photo to see the complete Postscript!

City Light surplused ‘Evolution of Lighting’ panels as scrap metal
— by Clay Eals

Newly restored, Marvin Oliver’s poles soon will return to Steinbrueck Park — by Jean Sherrard

Click each headline or photo to see the complete Postscript!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 4, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 7, 2025

Rollin’ on the river: 1975 Red Barn move launched flight museum

By Clay Eals

To soar, sometimes you’ve first gotta float.

The 22.5-acre Museum of Flight near Boeing Field south of Seattle is no secret. The world’s largest independent, nonprofit aerospace museum — home to 175 aircraft and spacecraft, thousands of artifacts, millions of photos and dozens of exhibits — is bedrock here. But few know of the spectacle that set its course.

Fifty years ago, on a foggy Tuesday, Dec. 16, 1975, a battered, two-story, 1909 building eased off Port of Seattle property along the Duwamish River in West Seattle. Once a boat shop and Boeing’s original airplane factory, the edifice had been long abandoned. That day, its 150-by-65-foot frame, weighing 325 tons, began a two-mile barge journey upriver, arriving at the Duwamish’s east bank. The next day, it rolled across East Marginal Way to its eventual home base.

Bright red, with distinctive white lettering, the building was Seattle’s beloved Red Barn.

On the eve of the nation’s bicentennial, the move became what the first executive director, Howard Lovering, calls the museum’s “fulcrum” — the pivotal moment turning civic nostalgia into collective action.

The move, following the shortest route from points A to B, was a nail-biter. “The industrial canal was a wonderful way to do it,” says Lovering, 88, “but it wasn’t easy. The structure was in such bad shape that it was going to fall apart if you tried to move it. It had to be secured.”

The bigger challenge was an electricians’ strike. “We had to cross East Marginal Way, and the high-tension wires there carried an awful lot of power,” Lovering says. “Facilities people said we needed a three- to four-foot rise, and there was no crew to do it. They said, ‘If you cross the street, this wood structure with its wrought-iron fire exits, you’d have the world’s largest toaster.’

“It scared the heck out of all of us. I ended up in the union hall saying, ‘Is there some way we can get those raised?’ They cared enough about this building to say, ‘No, we can’t do that, but we know a non-union firm that might.’ And those wires were raised just adequately for us to pass under. When we got across, everybody breathed a sigh of relief, and we headed for the taverns.”

And the museum’s new home began to soar.

A 1976 open house drew 20,000. The restored Red Barn opened in 1983. Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush headlined the 1987 opening of the next-door Great Gallery. Today, the much-expanded museum lures a half-million visitors and serves 140,000 students each year.

Lovering still marvels: “I’m not sure all of that would have happened without the move.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ted Huetter, Alison Bailey, Peder Nelson, Cody Othoudt, Jeff McCord and especially Howard Lovering 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 while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find a video of the 1975 Red Barn move, a present-day video interview of Howard Lovering, 7 additional photos and 9 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.

See this 2020 article on Howard Lovering at MarketingNW and listen to Lovering being interviewed earlier this fall by Feliks Banel on Cascade of History.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 20, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 23, 2025

‘No way’ to keep couple from UW stadium’s new roof in 1950

By Clay Eals

At age 19, many of us dream of rising above it all. In 1950, Nancy Knox did just that — literally — by climbing onto the brand-new southern roof of University of Washington Stadium.

This was no sanctioned visit. Nor was it entirely safe. Newspapers had reported two weeks earlier that a steelworker had fallen from the cantilevered construction site to his death.

But for Nancy, a Roosevelt High graduate and incoming freshman who aimed for a job in teaching or librarianship, it was merely a sneaky transgression with her new boyfriend and future husband Charley Lennstrom.

“There was no way I should have been up on the roof,” the 94-year-old Normandy Park resident says, “but there was no way to stop us. When stuff is under construction, sometimes they don’t have all the barriers in place. So it wasn’t hard to get up. There were stairs that took you to the upper level of the ceiling, right? And then we were on the back side, outside of it, and went on up.”

Proof lies in 11 black-and-white snapshots taken by the pair with Charley’s camera during a late-summer caper just 12 days before the expanded stadium opened Sept. 23, 1950, for UW Husky football.

The images show the pair in various rooftop spots, along with impressive vistas. Long before drones and Google Earth, the soaring, 210-foot-tall roof — atop a distinctive zigzag grandstand and twin spiral walkways — provided glimpses never before seen from that vantage because until then, the 30-year-old stadium had resembled a flattened bowl.

Long known as Husky Stadium, the gridiron shrine in 1987 gained a twin north grandstand that famously collapsed during construction when support cables were prematurely removed. Repairs were completed in time for fall ball.

From Nancy’s and Charley’s trespass in 1950 grew a shared lifetime, which began at her family’s U District rooming house. The quieter Charley was a UW engineering student who later worked for Boeing. Outgoing Nancy, after they had four children, finished her degree in 1974 and worked at the Highline Community College library.

Over the years, they followed the Huskies, even attending the Rose Bowl in 1964. Charley died in 2007. Today, Nancy fondly recalls their rooftop rendezvous.

“It was an afternoon adventure, and there’s always the call to look at the view,” she says. “You could see all around to the north part of Lake Washington, around to the east and quite a bit to the south, the Montlake Bridge, all this stuff from above. You know how kids are. They like to explore. And it was our university.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Kathleen Lennstrom Bogue, Diane Lennstrom and especially Nancy Knox Lennstrom, as well as UW information officers Victor Balta, Dan Erickson, Kurt Svoboda Chip Lydum and Jeff Bechthold 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 will find 5 additional photos and 10 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.

Also, click here to download the 2010 Seattle nomination report for Husky Stadium.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 30, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 2, 2025

 In new ‘secret’ book, dancing maidens sweeten Tacoma’s stature

By Clay Eals

Modeled on Grecian nymphs, two French-cast statues of dancing maidens have welcomed visitors at downtown Tacoma’s showcase Wright Park for an astounding 133 years.

Their pale patina glows against the rich green of the 27-acre park’s abundant woods. Yet the maidens also hide, says Chris Staudinger, within the persistent persona of a city of 228,000 that’s shadowed by its Space Needled northern neighbor.

Tacoma, dubbed the City of Destiny when it was named the Northern Pacific Railroad’s western terminus in 1873, is “close to my heart,” says the 40-year-old ex-journalist. In the past nine years, Staudinger’s guided-tour business, Pretty Gritty Tours, has grown to 26 employees who mount a busy slate of excursions around the state, especially in Tacoma.

“It is such an incredibly important and historically rich city that gets passed over by a modern lens all the time,” he says. “There’s so many firsts or huge achievements that took place here. But the City of Destiny is still better known as the ‘Tacoma aroma.’ And I aim to fix that.”

In his 190-page book, “Secret Tacoma: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure” (2025, Reedy Press), Staudinger transforms the odiferous paper-mill/smelter reputation into a fragrant, fun collection of 94 unique, quirky spots that anyone would want to visit or revisit.

Notably, they include Tacoma’s oldest existing building, the 1873 Old St. Peter’s Church, which still operates in the city’s Old Town, and, not far away, the 1907 Engine House No. 9, now a pub.

Back at Wright Park, the maiden statues, like many of Staudinger’s entries, bear a colorful backstory. They arrived with Clinton P. Ferry (1830-1909), a booster known as the “Duke of Tacoma.” Ferry acquired them and other pieces, intending them for a new marital home, during a late-1880s European trip with his second wife.

One day on that trip, as recounted in Murray Morgan’s Tacoma-centered tome “Puget’s Sound,” Ferry returned early to their Parisian suite and caught his wife and her French tutor in flagrante delicto. Heartbroken, Ferry ended the marriage and gave his collected art to the city of Tacoma.

Over the years, the sculptures acquired nicknames — “Annie” (for her Annie Wright Seminary, now Schools, and for the wife of park donor Charles Wright) and “Fannie” (for nearby Fannie C. Paddock Memorial Hospital, now Tacoma General Hospital) — as well as a few bruises. Fannie’s right hand once reached her chin but now crosses her midsection. And today her right foot is missing.

Each mini-chapter in “Secret Tacoma” ends with a “Pro Tip.” The one for the maidens is “Be good to your loved ones.”

Short and, yes, sweet.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Boo Billstein and Chris Staudinger 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 will find a video interview, 2 documents, 4 additional photos and 5 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 Oct. 9, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 12, 2025

Explosive legacy underlies Rainier Valley’s serene hilltop park

By Clay Eals

In this age of political pyrotechnics, what could be more welcome than a compact, peaceful park with a trail that winds through tall trees and native plants?

Inside this blufftop preserve we find no evidence, other than its namesake, that it once hosted an anything-but-tranquil fireworks factory that produced flares and explosions seen, heard and renowned the world over.

We are in the Columbia City neighborhood at Hitt’s Hill Park, named for Thomas Gabriel (T.G.) Hitt (1874-1958). An immigrant chemist from London by way of Victoria, B.C., he parlayed a childhood fascination for things that go boom into an international business based atop Rainier Valley’s highest slope.

In 1905, two years before Columbia City joined Seattle, Hitt Fireworks Co. took shape in what became 26 tarpapered shacks, each hand-numbered in red on galvanized grey signs, and spaced several yards from each other to prevent manufacturing accidents from obliterating the whole lot.

A frequent overseas traveler to negotiate deals, Hitt employed up to 200 people on his hill.

Products ranged from panoramic set pieces for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and other prominent fetes around the country to extra-loud “Flashcrackas” and other novelties that fit in the palm of a hand.

His craftsmanship also bolstered Oscar-winning Hollywood films, in the war scenes of “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930) and the burning-of-Atlanta sequence of “Gone with the Wind” (1939).

Not all was safe and sane, however.

Fiery onsite calamities occasionally made banner news, especially when on May 8, 1922, exploding powder killed 17-year-old employee Nora Bailey. One day later, the suicide of a same-aged female friend was attributed to her demise. Angry locals demanded the plant be banned from the city, but the city resisted, providing that Hitt obey fire-marshal regulations.

The heyday of Hitt, also a perfumer and inkmaker, started fading after his accidental arsenic poisoning in the 1930s, says great-grandson Ray Akers, but family continued the enterprise past his death into the 1970s. The company’s arc paralleled society’s love-hate relationship with fireworks, eventually resulting in Seattle banning their manufacture (and, later, their private use) and business moving abroad.

By century’s end, invasive ivy, blackberries and rats flourished onsite. Locals including Akers fought back plans for dozens of houses to be built on the 3.2-acre parcel. Open-space advocates successfully lobbied the city to make it a park and volunteered muscle and money to transform it into a natural refuge.

Today, the only major noise in the sanctuary comes from periodic jet overflights. The uninitiated would never suspect it once had been home to big bangs and fabricated flash.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Katie McClure and John Bennett 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 will find 6 additional photos and 30 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 Oct. 2, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 5, 2025

Ready for 50 years of riveting riddles? Game on in Woodinville!

By Jean Sherrard

Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” may recall a scene featuring youthful protagonist Bilbo Baggins exchanging riddles with the gruesome, elder Gollum who threatens to eat him if he fails to answer.

The historical questions we pose here may be playful and seemingly of local import only. But I would argue the stakes are high. Every place matters, every story counts, especially when history itself is on the line.

In its century and a half, Woodinville — just east of the north end of I-405 — contains more than a whiff of rural wizardry. Bounded by gentle rivers and lakes, and now a town known for dozens of picturesque wineries, its earliest brain-teasers are well worth exploring.

“Why was it named Woodinville?” asks a smiling Cherry Jarvis, co-founder of the Woodinville Heritage Society, celebrating its 50^th anniversary.

“So much timber maybe?” co-founder Phyllis Keller answers with a chuckle.

For those who don’t know the forest from the trees, the giveaway: Ira and Susan Woodin fled “urban” Seattle in 1871 and rowed up Sammamish Slough in search of new beginnings.

OK, that was easy. But the next sticklers may require attending an event. For details, read on.

Those following the Woodins found work in the village’s surrounding forest and farmland. They included lumber magnate Frederick Stimson, who built a baronial mansion in 1911 and opened a prize-winning dairy. He named it Hollywood Farm. Why? Were holly bushes abundant? Did Charlie Chaplin pay a visit?

A Woodinville blacksmith, born Johann Koch in Germany’s Baden-Baden, set up shop near the town cemetery. Why did he change his name to John Cook?

Tools of Cook/Koch’s trade (anvil, forge, hammer and tongs) pose even more mysteries. Why does his anvil anchor his grave?

Popular Norm’s Resort on bucolic Cottage Lake became nationally famous. Was owner Norm Fragner an early PR genius?

When one of our state’s largest wineries, Chateau Ste. Michelle, sought land to fulfill world-class aspirations, why did Woodinville stand out?

Such queries are enough to create enduring ties that bind.

“When we founded the heritage society in 1975,” recalls co-founder Jarvis, “Woodinville was small enough that we all knew each other.” Today, the town population approaches 14,000. “Together, we can honor the past,” says Kevin Stadler, the society’s president, “while inspiring connections for generations to come.”

Want to catch the inspiration?

Join “Now & Then” co-columnist Clay Eals and me at 10:50 a.m. (doors open at 10:15 a.m.) Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025, at Brightwater Environmental Community Center, where Woodinville Heritage Society will host a gathering of passionate, crackerjack history buffs who will supply “pocketses” of answers to all these riddles, and much more.

WEB EXTRA

So we return after a delightful program featuring the Woodinville Heritage Society historians to answer a few of the questions posed in the column.

A video of the hour-long program should be forthcoming with further solutions – we’ll post it as soon as it becomes available.

• Why did Frederick Stimson, lumberman, name his estate Hollywood? Most likely, says direct descendant MaryAnn Feczko, because of family connection to Southern California, specifically Los Angeles. Two Stimson brothers ended up living there and Frederick visited them often. So Charlie Chaplin never visited the farm, although President William Howard Taft put in an appearance!
• Woodinville blacksmith Johann Koch changed his name to John Cook to avoid anti-German sentiment during World War I. In future decades, he reverted to Johann Koch, which appears on his unique anvil tombstone. He requested that the anvil be inscribed “The Woodinville Blacksmith” but as he was not the only smithy in town, the inscription was altered, depriving him of a solo act.
• Norm Fragner of Norm’s Resort was, by all accounts, a genius of PR. His unique logo spread across the country on signs and post cards — bringing to mind the somewhat earlier Wall Drug marketing campaign in the 1930s promoting Wall, S.D., as a destination. Reportedly, signs for Norm’s Resort could be found from Alaska to the Mexican border.
• Finally, the reasons Chateau Ste Michelle chose Woodinville were various, if somewhat obvious. The already bucolic setting of the the Stimson estate combined with proximity to a major urban center provided the ideal environment to replicate a traditional French winery. Over the decades, dozens of winemakers have followed suit.

When the video presentation is completed, we’ll post it here with some fanfare. Congrats again to the Heritage Society on its 50th anniversary!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 26, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 28, 2025

For 36 wayward metal-art panels, let there be (city) light!

By Clay Eals

An exquisite set of 36 long-unseen city art treasures has come to light, at least most of it. A few panels are still missing. Was the set misplaced, lost, stolen? As with previous mysteries, we at “Now & Then” ask you, dear readers, to be detectives.

Ninety years ago, their owner, Seattle City Light, named the set “The Evolution of Lighting.” The silver-sheened panels trace an inspiring story, from ancient (“Primitive man’s first source of light, a forest fire caused by lightning”) to modern-day (“Edison’s First Incandescent Lamp, Perfected 1879”).

The wafer-thin panels are made of Britannia metal, a pewter alloy. Each 3-by-2-foot panel exemplifies a French relief art crafted by hammering the metal’s reverse side, a technique called repoussé (reh-poo-SAY), meaning “pushed back.”

The first 34 panels were designed by Albert E. Booth and hammered out by John W. Elliott, both Seattleites, in 1935 for the just-opened City Light building at 1015 Third Ave., encircling the lobby from above. Elliott — whose elaborate art adorns three-dozen prominent Northwest edifices — added two panels to update the exhibition for the expanded and remodeled City Light building in 1958. The aggregation was rearranged into a 27-by-8-foot wall, nine panels wide by four panels high.

The mystery? When City Light moved to the Seattle Municipal Tower at Sixth & Cherry in 1996, the panels were to follow.

“That never happened,” says Tom Parks, a 1979-2015 City Light employee who heads the Retired City Light Employees Association. “I think it was a task that fell through the cracks.” He says it’s possible they were filched, that someone thought, “They’re pretty cool, they’re old, and we can get some money for them.”

The evidence? In May, West Seattle antique dealer Mike Shaughnessy purchased four of the panels, each in a wooden frame, from a fellow “picker.” In August, after seeing a 1960 City Light booklet depicting all 36 panels, he doubled down, discovered 28 more and snapped them up. He is four shy of the whole set.

He envisions selling the set back to the city for the $12,000 he’s invested. But first he contemplates a downtown gallery display, including mockups of the missing panels, hoping to scare up the real ones.

Parks applauds the quest. “They were unique,” he says. “It was a key feature in the old lobby. It was the first thing that people noticed when they came in.”

How did the panels get into private hands? Where are the outliers? Shaughnessy’s trail has run dry. Our own inquiries and dives into local archives turn up nothing.

Clues, dear readers?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Gary Zarker, Tom Parks, Mike Wong, Jeanie Fisher of Seattle Municipal Archives, Laura Spess of University of Washington Special Collections and especially Mike Shaughnessy and Bradi Jones 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.

Here is other local coverage of this “history mystery”:

• West Seattle Blog, Sept. 27, 2025
• SPACE 101.5 FM, Sept. 28, 2025

Below, you will find Seattle City Light’s two booklets that display “The Evolution of Light” panels. The 1935 booklet shows 34 panels, and the 1960 booklet shows 36. Also there is the Jan. 30, 1996, program for the ceremony noting closure of the City Light building at 1015 Third Ave.

You also will find 3 additional photos and  8  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 Sept. 18, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 21, 2025

Kirkland historian brings web close-ups to Seattle’s silent-film era

By Clay Eals

When was the last time you saw a movie in a theater? Today, many stream movies from anywhere but theaters. No surprise, given society’s embrace of the convenience and selectivity of the internet.

So maybe it fits that a comprehensive new history of our region’s early movie exhibition is virtual, not physical.  The fledgling but voluminous website “Northwest Picture Show” supplies chronologies and anecdotes aiming to lure movie-maven Alices into a rewarding rabbit hole.

It’s the creation of Eric Flom, by day a benefits writer but at all other times a deep documenter of local theater lore. The 57-year-old Kirkland resident has devoured vintage trade magazines, newspapers and theater programs for the past 25 years.

With 236,000 words posted on his illustrated site (and 128,000 more coming this fall), Flom admits, “Brevity is not my strong suit.”

A fan of the pre-sound era, Flom isn’t averse to the limiting yet tangible medium of books to tell its stories. His 300-page tome “Silent Film Stars on the Stages of Seattle” (2009, McFarland) appraised our city’s turn-of-the-20th-century stage performances by scores of future celluloid luminaries, from Theda Bara to Buster Keaton.

But today the internet is Flom’s vehicle. Arguably his most significant narrative examines the Clemmer Theatre, which opened April 10, 1912, at 1414 Second Ave. downtown.

Capitalizing on widespread film fervor, James Q. Clemmer, the theater’s dream-big owner, became the first to construct an enduring palace in Seattle expressly designed for movies, not stage shows. The $100,000 project featured interior Roman columns and murals, 1,200 seats and a $10,000 pipe organ.

The alternate claim to fame, or infamy, for Clemmer is that he outflanked other local operators to mount lavish screenings of “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s cinematically innovative but racist 1915 epic about the Civil War and its aftermath.

Clemmer, who thrived in the Seattle theater business until his 1942 death at age 61, was a lifelong pitchman. In 1915 for Moving Picture World, a Seattle financier illuminated Clemmer’s aggressive approach:

“He came rushing into my office, pulled off his coat, unrolled a set of plans and started to talk. I excused myself, rushed into the next room and locked the safe. I was afraid he would grab my money, push me into the safe and run. Before he was through talking, I began to tremble in my boots for fear that I could not remember the combination to the safe in time to grab some of the stock of the Clemmer [Theatre] before it was all gone.”

Just one of myriad in-person, scene-stealing stories that Flom brings alive online.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Tom Blackwell and David Jeffers of the Puget Sound Theatre Organ Society, Lisa Oberg of University of Washington Special Collections, Bob Carney, Gavin MacDougall and especially Eric Flom 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 link to “The Birth of a Nation” plus 1 additional photo and 19  historical clips (including two Paul Dorpat “Now & Then” columns) 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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Free all-day history conference Saturday, Oct. 11, downtown

If you’re enjoying “Now & Then” every week, you may want to immerse yourself in local history for a full day — and for free, no less.

The Pacific Northwest Historian Guild ‘s 32nd regional history conference will take place all day on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025,  at the Seattle Public Library downtown.

With the theme “Challenging History,” the conference features a keynote address by local historian Lorraine McConaghy, as well as sessions covering a wide range of topics, from research challenges and waterscapes to labor politics and historic preservation.

The conference also includes a special lunch presentation by yours trulies Clay Eals and Jean Sherrard, and it will conclude with a wrap-up session.

In addition to the presentations, attendees can visit a book table with works by conference presenters and displays from sponsors.

Financial support comes from the Washington State Historical Society, 4Culture, Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, and HistoryLink.org.

Registration is required but is free. You can register and find the full schedule here. Day-of check-in begins at 8:15 a.m., and the program starts at 9 a.m. The wrap-up runs from 4:45 to 6 p.m.

In addition, a night-before reception and annual meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10, 2025, at the Mountaineers Seattle Program Center. Admission is $15 for Guild members, $25 for others.

Hope to see you there!

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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. 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 July 24, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 27, 2025

Nearly 70 years later, Seafair queen
looks beyond ‘bubblehead’ image

By Clay Eals

Seattleites could be forgiven in 1956 when they opened their newspapers and thought the new queen for the seventh year of the city’s Seafair celebration might be Grace Kelly.

While her resemblance to the previous year’s Oscar-winning best actress was uncanny, the regal honoree was 18-year-old Laurelhurst resident Dixie Jo Thompson.

Today, when daughter Kim Brillhart says others likely compared her to the movie star, the nearly 88-year-old — who uses her married name, Porter — scoffs at references to her appearance. “Maybe I look more like Grace Kelly than their dog did,” Porter says. “Really, are you kidding me? Well, I was blonde and white-skinned.”

The animated resident of the Mirabella Seattle retirement community wields a tongue both thoughtful and tart, countering what she says could be seem as the “bubblehead” image for a festival queen. Her observations frequently turn to a cogent conclusion: “Seafair was something that happened to me rather than something that I chose to do.”

Her fate, she says, was dictated by her parents, who determined that the Utah native and only child attend the University of Washington and join the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which, she says, “assigned” her to compete for Miss University District. Winning that title eventually led to her being named the city’s “Queen of the Seas.”

It was a time (and perhaps still is) when society’s view of women focused on looks. To a degree, Thompson confounded that. Her 3.4 freshman grade-point average triggered this Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline: “Beauty, Brains All In One Royal Package.” But the paper also thrice reported her body measurements, even in a headline. Said another P-I head: “She Dimples Her Way To City’s Heart.”

Even then, she saw herself as “part of a fake kingdom, like being in the theater,” and she played the part to full expectations. Her oft-reported quote was, “It’s like a fairy tale.” In this volunteer role, she donned a crown and gown to smile and preside at countless events. She also endured repeated waist clutches from countless older men whom she dutifully kissed on the cheek.

Gradually, she left the role behind. A YWCA leader starting at the UW in the 1950s, she married Tom Porter, raised three children and became a financial adviser.

Last month, as requested by a Seafair fan at Mirabella, she delighted a crowd of 139 with her life story and details of Seafair’s evolution as part of a “Resident Revelations” series. She told of her “personal fear beyond belief” of the unrestrained Seafair Pirates. “Sorry, pirates,” she said, “you can trash me sometime.”

She also said she tired of visits from celebrities like Bing Crosby and Phil Harris, who “pawed me like I was some kind of cat” during required photo ops that she thinks influenced later Seafair changes.

Indeed, titles and programs evolved at Seafair over the years. What started as Queen of the Seas (1950-71) became Miss Seafair (1972-2024) and was replaced this year by a Community Hero. From 1950 to 1999, a King and Prime Minister were selected, but in 2000 the King became King Neptune, the Prime Minister was dropped and Queen Alcyone was added.

She cheered this year’s Queen Alcyone selection of former Seattle police chief Carmen Best. And with a grin, she cracked that since her younger years, “I have lost 5 inches of height and 22 pounds of weight, so yeah, this is what you’ve got to deal with now.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Judy Waring, Kim Brillhart, and especially Dixie Jo Thompson Porter for invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video this time, but below you will find video of Porter’s Mirabella talk, along with a transcript. You also will find 6 additional photos and, in chronological order, 68 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.

Click the above image to see Dixie Jo Thompson Porter’s one-hour talk on June 10, 2025, at Mirabella. The sound is a little murky, so click here to open a transcript of her remarks and use it to follow along.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 3, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 6, 2025

For 40 years, Wallingford’s critter column
has sensed the Animal Storm all around us

By Clay Eals

In a sense, it’s all about the senses.

In 1975, sculptor Ron Petty, then 36, moved to the hillside neighborhood north of Lake Union and took note of “the tremendous amount of wildlife here.” Ten years later, thanks to $30,000 contributed by Wallingford residents and businesses, he shaped life-size versions of more than 60 critters from 32 species clambering around and peeking out from a monumental column of bronze and aluminum.

To great fanfare, he installed the 16-foot tower on July 27, 1985, across from the old Food Giant at the southeast corner of Wallingford Avenue and 45th Street. He named it Animal Storm.

“It was just kind of like a storm cloud raining animals,” he reflects today, summoning another palpable fact of local life, what some call Seattle sunshine. In fact, on the pillar Petty even represented our legendary showers as narrow, rectangular bars slipping angularly between the creatures.

Rain or shine, the sculpture draws people who want to see, photograph and touch it close-up, especially kids. And at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 12, 2025, during the 2025 “Wild in Wallingford” parade, Petty’s first and best-loved major creation will get a 40th-anniversary salute. Amid drill teams and floats, inhabitants are encouraged to attend in animal garb.

That would please Petty, who relishes seeing newcomers and returnees examining the pole and finding its squirrels, birds, geese, slugs, bats, cats, fish (one is concave with eggs inside), raccoons, ducks and even a dog wearing a tiny peace-sign collar pendant. He delights in recalling a class of blind grade-schoolers who caressed and identified the critters.

Capping the pedestal is a pounce-ready feline modeled after the artist’s “Mama Cat” at the time. “When I was doing the drawings for the piece, the cat kept walking across the drawing table,” he says. “One of the final times I kicked the cat off, I told her if she stayed off the table, I’d put her on top of the sculpture. And I did.”

Circled by a base of engravings and a broad, curved bench and backed by courtyards of the landmarked Wallingford Center retail and service hub (formerly Interlake School, built in 1904-1908), Animal Storm quickly became the community’s most prominent visual and tactile showpiece.

Petty, also known for his similar but more somber 1988 memorial sculpture at Ballard’s Fishermen’s Terminal, remains grateful for the early faith that Wallingford placed in him to create an enduring tribute to the smaller breathing beings nearby us all.

It’s a profusion, he says. “We just don’t realize that until we actually look close to see what is here.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ron and Marjan Petty and especially Sarah Martin of Historic Wallingford for invaluable help with this installment!

The Historic Wallingford page on Animal Storm has lots of background information, photos, news clips and videos, including the filmed 1985 dedication ceremony, thanks to Sarah Martin.

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 1 additional video, 9 additional photos and 4 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.

UPDATE: Congrats to Sunset Hill Community Hall, which will receive Historic Seattle’s 2025 Community Advocacy Award at the organization’s annual Preservation Celebration on Sept. 25, 2025, at the Labour Temple downtown. For more info, click here.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 19, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 22, 2025

For nearly a century, Sunset Hill clubhouse has built community

By Clay Eals

We all revere the concept of community, but how do we put it into practice? It boils down to joining forces for the common good — for desired improvements and mutual enjoyment. And as with many things, it can be as much about perception as reality.

In 1929, University of Washington master’s student Irene Somerville Durham documented Seattle’s then-108 community clubs, mostly in middle-class and working-class residential neighborhoods. She related the legend of two north-end gents repeatedly stumbling into puddles in the dark and failing to persuade the city to illuminate the area.

One “conceived the bold idea of getting out some letterheads with a community-club name, calling himself the president and his neighbor the secretary. On behalf of this mythical organization, the two demanded a street light in front of their houses. Within a week … the light was in the desired spot.” The letterhead originator “thought the secret too good to keep, and the community-club movement had its beginning.”

Within Ballard, annexed to Seattle in 1907, the western sub-neighborhood of Sunset Hill (from the Locks to the city’s then-northern border of 85th Street) spawned a club in 1922. Two years hence, it bought land at the southwest corner of 66th Street and 30th Avenue. By 1929, the club’s stately home — with two large meeting floors, the upper one with a stage — opened for meetings and parties alike.

It remains a happy survivor, along with similar neighborhood clubhouses in Mount Baker (1914), Lakewood-Seward Park (1920), Haller Lake (1922) and Rainier Beach (1923). A few other such structures also endure citywide but in other uses.

With a succession of four names (Community Hall is the latest), the Sunset Hill club stated from the start that it welcomed all residents of the district, historically a Nordic American enclave that gradually has diversified. From securing street, water and transit improvements to presenting speeches, dances and performances, its leaders apprised members: “You are part of an organization that is getting results, and you would find great pleasure in doing your part.”

This rich mixture of the political and social over a near-century of service allowed the gleaming yellow hall to attain designation as a city landmark in March. The hall’s response was — what else? — to hold a party the following month, drawing a capacity crowd.

John Munroe, the club’s energetic president, acknowledges herculean efforts to keep intact both the building and its legacy.

“We’ve done tons of work on it over the years,” he says. “We will survive anything … We have all kinds of fun all the time because this is a community.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Robert Loe, John Munroe and especially Holly Taylor and Peggy Sturdivant 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 2 additional videos, 2 documents and 5 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, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 5, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 8, 2025

Road trip! AAA’s early 20th century arrows showed us the way

By Clay Eals

Talk about signs of the times …

Most of us know that automobiles rumbled into general use roughly 120 years ago. However, we don’t think much about the roads on which they rolled. Initially, many were unmarked, and without GPS or phone apps, how did drivers know which path to choose? Printed maps helped. But what if you were mapless and came to a fork in the road? While governmental road signs guide us today, it was not always thus.

Enter the nation’s upstart auto clubs, some of which affiliated with the national American Automobile Association (AAA or Triple-A), founded in Chicago in 1902. Soon afterward in our state came the launch of what became the Auto Club of Western Washington, organizational ancestor of today’s AAA Washington.

Over the years, the club advocated for quality byways and safety education and became known for emergency road service, maps and travel advice. But through the mid-1940s, it also built countless directional signs and installed them at key intersections.

The club installed its first signs in 1906, planning 500 pointers within 30 miles of Seattle. Twelve years later, the club reported that “at least” 1,500 signs had been placed on 3,200 miles of roads and streets in western Washington. “This, however, is just a start.”

The white-painted signs were instantly visible and recognizable — a bouquet of arrows pointing every which-way, identifying places near and far, with numbers indicating mileage. An accompanying diamond-shaped sign identified the club, an ingenious brand for a captive driving audience.

In both urban and rural settings, the signs became ubiquitous. Guidance and safety were an obvious part of their motivation and appeal. But an equal factor, the club said in 1920, was aesthetics: “We want to rid our splendid scenic highways of the signs on trees and stumps and rocks along the right-of-way, which distract so seriously from their beauty.”

Pointing out everything from telephone booths and scout camps to speed limits and speed traps (!), the signs drew “innumerable compliments” for “assisting the stranger.” The club spent $300,000 on sign installations from 1916 to 1945, when signage became the legal responsibility of cities, counties and the state.

The club maintained sign shops and took pride in photographing the signs when installing them. Many surviving prints, however, bear no dates or documentation of their locations.

Even so, it’s fun to view them today. Eyeing their posted place names and doing the mileage math, we can speculate about the intersections where they once stood sentinel to show us the way.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Bob Carney, Cindi Barker and especially Sam Murphy, Mellani McAleenan and Kelsey Bumsted of AAA Washington 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 5 additional photos, 2 AAA Journeys magazine stories from 2004 by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

BONUS: Links to obituaries for key figures in the Rainier Beer documentary: Gordon Bowker and Terry Heckler.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 8, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on May 11, 2025

Site for 1979 Rainier ad, conceived by students, is rural no more

By Clay Eals

It’s what I call an all-too-common Northwest reality: One of our region’s best-remembered idyllic landscapes is now a vast housing development.

This rural Pierce County site, one hour’s drive southeast of Seattle, where 230th Avenue East becomes Buckley Tapps Highway, once was a narrow, two-lane curve flanked only by backwoods, meadows and aging wooden fence posts.

Long-timers know it as the setting for a 30-second commercial first aired in 1979, in which a solitary motorcycle sweeps by, heading in pre-sunset magic light toward a glowing Mount Rainier. Besides crickets, the ad’s only sound is the bike’s overdubbed, seemingly changing gears: “Raaaaiiiii-neeeerrrr-Beeeeerrrrrr.”

It could be the most talked-about local TV spot ever. Its saga — and that of other hilarious Rainier commercials, including super-sized “wild” beer bottles “hunted” by actor Mickey Rooney — is told in an irresistible two-hour documentary, “Rainier: A Beer Odyssey.” It debuted at the 2024 Seattle International Film Festival and has had several later runs.

Where did the motorcycle idea come from? Not Rainier or its ad agency. Many insisted to the documentary’s director, Isaac Olsen, that they knew someone who dreamed it up. But they offered no proof, so the doc skirted the question.

After I saw the film last May, I informed Olsen that I happened to write a 1979 story for the Oregonian newspaper about two Eugene high-school students who sent in the idea in 1976 and were paid $500.

That evidence helped Olsen locate and verify the true originators: Brian Nyjordet, a Poulsbo carpenter, and Jack Inglis, a Portland coffee-wine bar proprietor. Olsen plans to feature them in a sequel focusing on the motorcycle spot.

Nyjordet (who conceived the idea after seeing the sketch-parody movie “The Groove Tube”) and Inglis (who captured it in a storyboard and handled communication) remain thrilled that Rainier embraced their basic concept and executed it at a perfect location.

Of course, the mountain’s still there. So are the two lanes, wider and still divided by a double-yellow line, but surrounded by (no typo) 350 one- and two-floor suburban homes built over the past 10 years, with high perimeter fences, gravel berms, tree saplings, trimmed grass and shrubs, tiny pink marker flags, speed-limit and street signs, fire hydrants, a stormwater facility and a streetlamp.

Typically whizzing along the gradual turn is a sporadic stream of sizable cars, trucks and the occasional motorcycle. Many flout the posted 35-mph limit, slowing only to turn onto side streets.

Posted blue and orange placards promote “Up to 6 Bedroom Homes,” “Up to 5 Car Garages” and, naturally, “Mountain Views.”

But during breaks in traffic, you can still hear an intermittent cricket.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Dave Lamar, Brian & Joele Nyjordet, Jack Inglis, Bobbi Lee Betschart (of the Elk Run development) and especially Isaac Olsen 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.

Here is a June 11, 2025 story on Brian Nyjordet and the famed motorcycle commercial, by Mike De Felice of the Kitsap Daily Sun. And click here and here to download pdf files of Mike’s story and photos as they appeared in the Port Orchard Independent and North Kitsap Sun.

Below, you also will find 4 more videos, 3 additional photos and 5 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, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Above) The Rainier Beer motorcycle commercial filmed in 1978 is re-created April 5, 2025, at the same spot, with motorcyclist Dave Lamar of Tacoma doing the honors. The rural Pierce County site, one hour’s drive southeast of Seattle, is where 230th Avenue East becomes Buckley Tapps Highway. Here are three versions. (Clay Eals)

(Above) The classic Rainier Beer motorcycle commercial filmed in 1978 is re-created April 5, 2025, at the same spot, with three different nameless motorcyclists doing the honors. The rural Pierce County site, one hour’s drive southeast of Seattle, is where 230th Avenue East becomes Buckley Tapps Highway. Here are three versions. (Clay Eals)

(Above) Here is the original 1979 Rainier Beer motorcycle commercial, embedded in a trailer for the documentary “Rainier: A Beer Odyssey.” The trailer includes sound effects from a previous “frog” commercial.

(Above) Brian Nyjordet, of Poulsbo, reflects on how he came up with the idea for the classic Rainier Beer motorcycle commercial that was filmed in 1978 and first aired in 1979. He is standing on April 5, 2025, at the site the commercial was filmed. (Clay Eals)

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 24, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 27, 2025

Deadly, damaging 1965 quake reminds us: Should we run?

By Clay Eals

The boy was maybe 8. He resembled TV’s Beaver Cleaver, but his smirk was more Eddie Haskell.

Interviewed briefly on a downtown Seattle sidewalk by KOMO-TV reporter Howard Shuman on April 29, 1965, about that morning’s 6.5-magnitude earthquake, the boy said he had been “in my house,” which “started to rumble.”

What did he do? “Ran outside. What else?”

Lasting 45 seconds at 8:29 a.m., the quake, centered in Northeast Tacoma, shook residents and structures over an area of 190,000 square miles. Three died from falling debris and four others from heart attacks.

The temblor marked the memories of many Northwesterners still living today. With its 60th anniversary upon us, the boy’s cheeky response merits reflection.

Running outside may be a natural gut reaction. But it goes against longstanding advice, which is to stay inside, move away from objects that could fall and crouch under a table or near a wall.

The boy’s sentiment, of course, wasn’t unique. Shuman’s other unnamed interviewees provided chilling echoes.

A Queen Anne High School girl, queried downtown, described a scene of panic before classes were to begin: “At first we saw someone running down the hall. There was a lot of noise, and the building started moving and the floor shaking up and down, and everybody started running out.”

A middle-aged man who had been in an elevator in the Great Northern Building at Fourth and Union said, “The elevator wouldn’t work, I pushed all the buttons, and it was shaking, and I didn’t know what to do. Finally the door opened, I looked down, and it was still shaking, and I walked right out of the building.”

At Harbor Island’s Fisher Flour Mill, a wooden tank fell seven stories, brick walls broke away from the sixth floor and two died. A jittery young worker said, “I didn’t have any control over my legs, so I dove underneath a post until I quit, and I ran out, and I ran about a 5-second 100-yard dash in street shoes.”

Admonitions to the contrary abound for an in-the-moment response. So do longer-term tips, such as those provided by Seattle disaster-preparedness coach Alice Kuder. Her firm, Just in Case, outlines a comprehensive “Flee Bag” of key items needed when a quake knocks out basic services.

All of which is immediately relevant, as geologists repeatedly tell us the Big One is imminent. Not if but when, and it could happen tomorrow. Our region’s most recent major earthquakes warned us in 1949, 1965 and 2001. Logic points to getting educated and taking precautions.

Indeed, “What else?”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Alice Kuder and especially Joe Wren, longtime KOMO-TV archivist, 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 two videos, 5 additional photos and 15 historical pages from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 10, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 13, 2025

Neighborhood views from the air school us in new perspective

By Clay Eals

Throughout our lives, we often yearn to be close-up. But sometimes the farther away we get, the more we learn and appreciate. I’m speaking of distance — not only in physical space, but also in time.

Consider today’s pair of photos looking northwest at the West Seattle hub of Admiral Way and California Avenue. Taken from high up, they grant us perspective we rarely glean on the ground. They reveal how neighborhood icons can endure and how radically the rest of it can change.

Recently I received the main “Then” above — an oversized, mounted print — from a Fall City friend. Cars and other elements date it between 1930 and 1932. The photographer is unknown, but the image’s purpose is clearly to showcase its centered subject, Lafayette Elementary School.

Built one-half block south of Admiral Way in 1893 before West Seattle became a city of its own (1902) and annexed to Seattle (1907), the schoolhouse was first called West Seattle Central, drawing students of all grades peninsula-wide. With a bell tower and spires, it took on the nickname of “The Castle.”

Growth prompted an eight-room addition in 1908, and after West Seattle High School opened nearby in 1917, it focused on lower grades. In 1918, it was renamed for French Gen. Lafayette, who aided the Continental Army in the early 1780s during the U.S. Revolutionary War.

An April 1949 earthquake, fortunately during spring vacation, reduced much of the edifice to rubble, so in 1950 a much flatter Lafayette opened on the same site, featuring nine rows of innovative brown “saw-toothed” rooftop skylights.

The school presides at the center of our “Now.” But both airborne views display much more that survives:

At upper right is the narrow 1919 Portola Theatre, predecessor of the expanded 1942 Admiral Theatre, today a beloved landmark moviehouse. At lower right is the 1929 former Sixth Church of Christ, Scientist, also a landmark and home of the newly opened Washington State Black Legacy Institute. And at bottom center is the northwest tip of 1911 Hiawatha Playfield, an Olmsted-designed landmark, with two lone tennis players on its courts in each photo.

What’s changed in nearly 100 years? Oh, my. Lot sizes are far smaller. Houses and commercial buildings are more plentiful, many of them much taller.

The comparisons are seemingly endless, which is why drone shots and Google Earth are popular successors to the airplane- or even balloon-based photos of yesteryear, says Ron Edge, an expert on local aerial photography.

“The interest has always been there,” he says. “People have just loved to see what their towns looked like from the air.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ron Edge for his invaluable help with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard’s aerial video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, visit here.

Below, you will find 9 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

You also will find 107 photos from the Laidlaw aerial negatives in the Webster & Stevens Collections at the Museum of History & Industry, along with an index, courtesy of Ron Edge‘s scanning.

And here is a brief history of aerial photography!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 27, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 30, 2025

A 36-second thrill ride immerses us in a 1973 route to Seattle

By Clay Eals

Homemade time capsules can be uniquely evocative. This I know from the creativity of a long-ago best friend.

Seattle native Mark Tyrrell, a buddy starting when we both were 5 and growing up on Mercer Island, had an offbeat and entertaining affection for our regional milieu, revealing it in unexpected ways.

In the early 1950s, the vortex of the baby boom and long before seemingly everything was digital, our fathers purchased home-movie cameras, captured soundless 8mm vignettes of family events and regularly screened them for us.

At age 22, as shown in this video and in “then” screen grabs (below), Mark took this pastime to the next level.

With his dad’s two-lens Ampro Eight 350 camera — and its “Accurator” viewfinder, with adjustments for light and frames per second — he fashioned a fast-motion film in 1973 that documented the west end of U.S. Highway 10 before completion of its successor, Interstate 90.

In an impossibly swift 36 seconds for a real-time 9-minute journey, his rollicking, windshield’s-eye footage covered 7.2 miles, from Mercer Island’s forested Gallagher Hill Road to the James Street exit of Interstate 5. It’s a westbound thrill ride both startling and smile-inducing, especially for those of us who recall the route.

Therein, coming alive on grainy, color celluloid are many sights that evaporated decades ago, including:

• The thoroughfare at ground level, instead of elevated, sunken in a trench or covered by a concrete “lid.”
• The prominent TraveLodge motel in the Mercer Island business district. (During childhood, I’m embarrassed to say that I took its sign too literally and mistakenly called it the “Trave Lodge.”)
• The Lacey V. Murrow floating bridge, just two lanes each way. Built in 1940 across Lake Washington with a 40 mph speed limit, it featured a midway water pocket for large-boat openings but also a dangerous “bulge” for cars and trucks to navigate.
• The bridge’s equally perilous reversible lanes, with red “X” and green arrow markers that switched during rush hours. Unsafe as well: abrupt pre-tunnel entry and exit turns.
• A pullout lane near Rainier Avenue for crossing against full-tilt traffic (!) to a ramped shortcut to Beacon Hill. (My brother, Doug, recalls a similarly dangerous cross-traffic turn opportunity to reach the upper Shorewood apartments on Mercer Island.)
• A come-to-a-halt stoplight at Dearborn, near Goodwill, on the way to Interstate 5.
• The isolation of downtown’s then-tallest tower, the 1969 Seafirst Building (now Safeco Plaza), “the box the Space Needle came in.”

Sadly, Mark died way too early, at age 46, of myelodysplasia after a dozen years of multiple sclerosis. But his breathtaking mini-travelogue and other filmed and written pieces survive for us to ponder and enjoy.

Today, what Seattle sites do our smartphones and dash-cams record that soon will vanish?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Howard Lev for his invaluable chauffeuring assistance with this installment!

To see Jean Sherrard’s 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect through an automotive sunroof 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 6 “Then” and “Now” comparisons from the route, a high-school paper on Interstate 90, and a children’s book illustration of the infamous floating-bridge “bulge.”

You can see many other vintage Washington state highway videos at this YouTube channel.

Also below, look for another fast-motion video by Mark Tyrrell from 1972 (of him changing the readerboard at Look’s Pharmacy on Mercer Island) and a booklet of Mark’s writings, prepared by Clay for a gathering of friends following Mark’s death in 1997.

COMPARISON 1

COMPARISON 2

COMPARISON 3

COMPARISON 4

COMPARISON 5

COMPARISON 6

AN APPRECIATION OF MARK TYRRELL:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 13, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 16, 2025

Librarian hears 20 years later how ‘her kids’ felt they belonged

By Clay Eals

In some pursuits, you have to trust that you’re having an effect that lasts. Teaching is like that. Journalism, too. So is being a children’s librarian. The kids you engage may never again pass your way.

Not so, however, for Laura Meyer. An educator/entertainer of kids for Seattle Public Library for 35 years, mostly in Lake City, Meyer was known for puppet shows and employing X-ray vision (actually a keen memory) to tell stories while facing a book forward for all to see. She retired at age 58 in 2005. Two years later, she and her husband moved south to Vancouver.

She made periodic trips to Seattle to see relatives. But years passed, and the youths she captivated became adults. Do they remember her?

Enter Casey McNerthney. An ex-newsie who is the spokesperson for the King County prosecutor, he recently pondered his mid-1980s affection for Meyer.

As a tot, he asked Meyer for the in-demand book “A Chair for My Mother.” When it came available, she telephoned him at home.

“I thought it was so cool that she called specifically for me,” he says. “She said she would save it for me. It was like having Taylor Swift play the song you requested.”

A father himself, McNerthney absorbed Meyer’s lesson: “She was the first person I remember meeting, outside of my family, who conveyed to children that they mattered.”

Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if she could reconnect with “her kids,” whose ages would now be roughly 20 to 65?

He organized a Lake City reunion, spreading word via social media. On the day-of, two-dozen people streamed through the branch door. Scores more sent well-wishes from across the country, even Ireland.

The branch had been renovated twice since she last worked there, but Meyer, it seemed, was no different. Same broad, crinkly-eyed grin. Same bold, expressive voice. Same flower in her hair.

It was Story Time again. Only this time, the grown-ups told as many as did Meyer.

“She was the kindest, most caring person you’d ever want to meet,” said John Desgrosellier. “I still remember a couple of books she shared with us when we were younger — ‘The Boxcar Children’ and ‘The Iron Giant’.”

“She always made me feel like I belonged here,” said Kristine dos Remedios Edens, who brought her daughter Avery to meet Meyer and to convey thanks. “It’s important to tell people like that,” she added. “Usually, you don’t get to tell them the impact that they’ve made.”

Meyer’s response: Tears, smiles and, of course, more stories! Mission accomplished, Casey.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Laura Meyer, Casey McNerthney and “Mrs. Meyer’s kids” for their invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video this time, but below you will find:

• A half-hour video of the Laura Meyer reunion on Feb. 1, 2025.
• A downloadable pdf of transcripts of 1998 and 2025 interviews of Meyer.
• A selection of 8 additional photos.
• And 7 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 27, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 2, 2025

Unassuming for generations, a Seattle site zigzags to the heavens

By Clay Eals

Each day is a steppingstone to something next. Take, for example, a corner just north of Denny Way at Dexter Avenue and Thomas Street. Circled by Seattle Center, today’s Amazonia and downtown, the parcel was rather unassuming for generations.

Two floors high with a brick façade, the structure was built in 1933. Over the decades, it housed a trade market, auto-repair and tire-retread shop,  bus headquarters, plate-glass company, wallpaper store, rentable warehouse and storefronts ranging from computer to legal services.

A notable notch in its lineage arrived in the 1990s. Sleepy-looking on the outside, the building exploded on the inside with the chords of grunge and other contemporary sounds. Among Seattle’s 80-odd music studios, it became one of the city’s four largest as it morphed into a haven called Stepping Stone Recording.

“The whole idea,” says founder Mike Foss, “was helping artists move their game up and get into the scene a little bit better by giving them better recordings, better productions.”

Key to that was advanced equipment and a supportive, hands-off approach. “It was about ‘Come and enjoy the studio, and if you want to talk to me, talk to me,’ but anytime you get involved and insert yourself in their creative process, it can usually be a negative. You want to let them walk in and own the place. I think that’s why we did so well, because I understood that.”

Proof lies in the studio’s track record of luring prominent bands, including the Posies, Rockinghams, Presidents of the United States of America and Quiet Riot, and individuals Paul Rodgers (Bad Company), Chris Cornell (Soundgarden), Jeff Ament (Pearl Jam) and Ann and Nancy Wilson (Heart).

Working 12- to 18-hour days, Foss paid $3,000 monthly rent for 7,000 square feet, spending 10 years in the building, sometimes climbing to its roof. “I could see for a long ways,” he says. “We’d look at the Space Needle, watch the fireworks, see the water out there. It was amazing.”

In the building’s place today is Skyglass, a 31-floor complex finished in 2023. Its first six stories resemble the old brick façade, but the upper 25 shoot a reflective zigzag to the heavens. Its 388 luxury apartments rent for an astounding $3,700-$6,800 per month. Goldman Sachs recently bought it for $175 million from its Chinese developer.

Foss eye-rolls at the transformation. “It’s a bizarre feeling,” he says. “This used to be a quiet street. It felt like a little place. It had a really cool vibe to it.”

Change seems inexorable. What, we may wonder, will be the next steppingstone?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Mike Foss and especially Tom Heuser 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 video interview of Foss, 10 additional photos and 16 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Here are 10 additional photos kindly provided by Mike Foss:

Here, in reverse chronology, are 16 news clips about previous businesses in the building:

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Feb. 13, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 16, 2025

Walks throughout Seattle can expand the mind and charm the soul

By Clay Eals

Mass transit always makes massive news. Well, what if the masses transported themselves more often by foot?

That’s a question implicitly raised by David B. Williams’ newly expanded second edition of “Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City” (University of Washington Press).

Filled with colorful maps and photos, tips, trivia and bygone context, the 304-page pocket guide, revised since its original printing in 2017, reaches all corners of the city. The sequel allowed Williams “to rethink my interaction with the landscape” while providing updates and additional walks in three neighborhoods that he identifies as humming with historical diversity:

• The Central District, with deep roots in the Black, Jewish, Asian and Catholic communities.
• South Lake Union, with an archival mix of nationalities and industries.
• And Georgetown, with working-class ambience based on the Rainier brewery that once dominated the district, paired with what Williams calls a “dark” vibe stemming from an infamous legacy of drinking, gambling and prostitution.

Viewing any neighborhood from a pedestrian’s eyes, of course, can reveal striking alterations. “Even if you’ve gone someplace over and over again, you always find something new,” says the author, best known for “Too High and Too Steep” (2015), about Seattle’s transformative regrades. “The city is always changing, whether it’s different weather, different people, different plant life or different animals you might encounter.”

Or different building uses. For instance, Georgetown, a city from 1904 until its 1910 annexation to Seattle, erected a stately, second city hall in 1909. Its classic clock tower presides in both our “Then” and “Now” photos. (The steeple was pruned by a storm and kept that way  to avoid low-flying aircraft.) Today the landmark serves as a Neighborcare Health dental clinic for low-income and uninsured people.

Throughout Seattle, Williams has charted routes meant to expand the mind and charm the soul, not to mention bolster the body. They range from 1.3 to 7 miles, flat where possible, and mostly on pavement, enabling explorations via wheelchair.

Along each path, Williams repeatedly finds validation for his long-held love of walking.

“It puts you at that slow level that allows you to pay attention to what’s around you,” he says. “It also allows you to stop and actually look at things. We never stop in our cars, or when we’re biking. It lets you interact with people and with the place that’s around you. You never know who you’re going to meet. For me, it’s really the best way to get to know a city or a neighborhood.”

We all probably can agree to toe that line.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to David Williams and Molly Woolbright 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 video interview of Williams, 6 additional photos and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 30, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 2, 2025

Compassion bolsters winter fishing for 90-year-old Tengu Club

By Clay Eals

Up, down, up, down.

Over and over.

Perseverance, patience, peace.

This approach has buoyed a little-known organization that has plied the waters of Elliott Bay off West Seattle most every winter for nine decades.

The all-volunteer Tengu Club, an aggregation of Seattle-area Japanese Americans and others, has forged a hearty culture and tradition of yearly fishing derbies.

Early on, Tengu became the club’s name based on reddish-faced supernatural beings in Japanese folklore with long noses that grow as they tell lie after lie — much as those who fish are prone to do.

Tengu Club’s durability, however, is no exaggeration. It stems partly from a fishing method members developed long ago called “mooching” — constantly moving a herring-baited line up and down, imitating the flutter of a wounded fish to entice bigger ones to bite.

The club’s venerated historian, Mas Tahara, 89, of northeast Seattle, also sees significance beyond its fishing. The underlying point, he says, is kizuna, a Japanese word that means enduring bonds.

“Tengu is people,” he says. “”It’s very, very important for anyone. It makes people alive.”

Summoning that spirit was a challenge when the club began in the mid-1930s. Though well-publicized spring and summer fishing derbies proliferated throughout Puget Sound, Japanese people weren’t invited to participate.

Ostensibly this was due to the success of mooching, as noted in the Sept. 16, 1940, edition of Time magazine. Describing the Sound’s 25 established salmon derbies, the article stated, “Japanese are barred (because they are too skillful).” But Tahara and other Tengu Club members assert that discrimination also was a factor.

To provide an alternative, Tahara says, Tengu Club set its derbies in the winter, a relatively unpalatable time for local fishing. The weather is bracing, and the fish typically available then are juvenile blackmouth salmon, smaller than their fair-weather adult counterparts.

Tengu Club’s contests ceased after Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Post-war, in December 1946, Tengu derbies resumed, lasting days and even weeks, and continue today.

Derby data starting in 1946, kept by Doug Hanada, longtime president, show 100-190 annual members through the mid-1990s, dropping to 20-35 in more recent years. Still, they’re a hardy crew.

Tahara emphasizes a pair of longtime Tengu Club philosophies: maintaining dignity and momentum in the face of unavoidable hardships, and extending goodwill by opening derbies to non-Japanese.

“We always try to see things with compassion,” Tahara says, “and we are always interdependent.”

The resulting camaraderie in the cold and wet, he says, is precious.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Mas Tahara, Doug Tanada, Nancy Ishii and Linda Ishii 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 video interview of Mas Tahara and Doug Hanada, a dissertation (at the end), 85 additional photos and 18 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Following are 40 historical thumbnail photos, courtesy Doug Hanada, of Tengu Club events (click once or twice to enlarge):

Following are 17 thumbnail photos, courtesy Doug Hanada, of the Jan. 8-9, 2022, Tengu Club Cracker Derby (click once or twice to enlarge):

Following are 20 thumbnail photos, courtesy Doug Hanada, of the March 25, 2022, Tengu Club Banquet (click once or twice to enlarge):

Following are 3 thumbnail photos, courtesy Doug Hanada, of the April 29, 2022, Tengu Club Fish Fry at the home of member Dan Hicks (click once or twice to enlarge):

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 16, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 19, 2025

Bavarian art-glass window resurfaces, but where will it shine?

By Clay Eals

Long missing, a Northwest art-glass masterwork has re-emerged. But will the enormous window ever again gleam in public?

The puzzle surfaced in 2020 when we profiled Seattle’s Suess & Smith Co., owned by German specialists in leaded, cut and stained glass who worked from 1901 to 1906 on Western Avenue in today’s Belltown. The firm morphed in into Suess Art Glass Co. and moved in 1909 to Virginia Street near Westlake Avenue, operating until at least 1951.

One of Suess’ distinctive creations — a 12-by-8-foot, three-panel landscape — depicted a verdant Bavarian scene and hung inside the Frye apartment hotel at Third and Yesler. There, in about 1980, Smith descendant Curt Green photographed it in hotel owner Abie Label’s office. Backlit, its rich hues glowed.

Later, the piece vanished. Since 2020, readers have filled out some details of its origin and whereabouts.

In 1967, Label first saw the window at the old Arlington Hotel at First and Spring, where a maintenance worker found it stored and damaged. “It had been there for decades,” says Label’s business partner Robert Roblee. Label made repairs and moved it to the Frye, where it hung for 30-plus years. Phyllis Lamphere, a former city council member, was a fan, often showing it to visitors.

Label’s friend, Robert White, a West Seattle dentist, bought the window from Label for $5,000 and crated and shipped it to Alaska in 1998 for display at a Skagway sculpture garden but died before that could happen.

When White’s widow, Diane, sold the garden to the Skagway Traditional Council in 2023, the stored crate emerged. Family shipped it to Seattle, stored it in Federal Way and last summer drove it to Cathedral Glass in Portland for evaluation.

When Cathedral owner Nicholas Heinze uncrated it, he found a mixed blessing. “It’s master-level stuff,” he says. “It blew us away. There’s magic in it. It was touched by hands that really knew what they were doing.” But he also spotted significant degradation.

Restored, it could be insurable for $144,000, but repairs would run $26,000 — sobering ballpark figures. The pressing question is: Where will it land? White family members speculate: a museum, train station, airport? A restaurant in Leavenworth?

“At first it was fun, as in ‘Wow, look at this amazing, historic thing,’ ” says White’s daughter, Launi Treece of Renton. “But the last few months, it’s been disheartening to learn how much damage there is, and it’s been hard to find a buyer. On one hand, it’s a treasure. On the other hand, we don’t know what to do with it.”

Who will supply the next piece of the puzzle?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Launi Treece, Diane White, Dakota White, Nicholas Heinze, Curt and Paula Green, David Label and Robert Roblee  for their invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video this week, but below, you will find 9 additional photos and documents and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

And be sure to click here to see our May 2020 “Now & Then” column about this window for further details and a wealth of “web extras.”

Click the thumbnails below to see the photos taken in August 2024 by Nicholas Heinze of Cathedral Glass of the three Suess window panels — two for (exterior and interior) for each panel:

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 2, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 5, 2025

For 50 years, racing motorcyclists have thrived on ‘need for speed’

By Clay Eals

I’d like to think I can write about anything, but some topics give me the willies. Such as motorcycles.

In 1972, a friend and I, both 21 and riding a Triumph 650, improbably survived an accident unscathed while cruising at 70 mph on Interstate 5 in Oregon. A novice biker, I’d foolishly forgotten a posted “abrupt edge” construction sign, so while crossing to the left lane while passing a truck, I dumped our bike. Astounded and aghast after we spun to a halt, I vowed never to ride a motorcycle again.

And I haven’t.

So last fall when a colleague suggested I showcase the 50th anniversary of the all-volunteer Washington Motorcycle Road Racing Association (WMRRA), I gulped. Could I go there? Maybe I could explore the group’s longevity by uncovering the zeal of its members.

When asked, they eagerly cite a “need for speed,” embodied by events where some exceed (no typo) 140 mph.

“You feel like you’re flying. It’s the most fun you can have outside your house, legally or illegally,” says club historian Bruce Scholten. “Unless you jump in now and then, you feel like your life is meaningless.”

Scholten, of Edmonds, entered sanctioned races in the mid-1970s at Seattle International Raceway, now Pacific Raceways, in Kent. There, on its 2.25-mile course, members seek high average lap-speeds in 10-minute races and hours-long “endurance” runs. They also vie regionally.

Such contests invigorate Shoreline’s Chris Loomis, an oft-president dubbed Mr. WMRRA (spoken as WOMM-ruh) for his half-century’s involvement. He calls the club’s 400 members “family.”

The sentiment also feeds ex-president Colt Bristow, of Auburn. “We all know how dangerous street riding can be between cars, trucks, speed limits and road conditions,” he says. “But this is the only environment of people who are vested in your family and well-being and want to see you have fun and be competitive and provide a prepared, groomed, custom experience at its absolute potential.”

Some, Bristow admits, make “exceeding thresholds” the goal. “Unfortunately, they tend to get hurt more,” he says, but at least WMRRA provides nearby medical response.

Speed, says Dale Zlock of Spanaway, a veteran racer with his brother Dan, fuels success. He says he nearly died at an out-of-town race in 1987. “I broke multiple bones and ruptured some internal parts. I’m lucky to even be here, so yes, that does go through your mind,” he says. “But you put it aside. It goes into another compartment. You go out and do what you got to do.”

Well, the gears may not lock into place for me, but these racers’ passion is palpable.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Bruce Scholten and Martha Young-Scholten 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 video of longtime WMRRA members talking of their passion for the association and for motorcycle racing in general, 6 additional photos and 10 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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BONUS: Click here to hear an additional musical tribute to the Kalakala ferry from about 2015, by the late Mike Pryor with the Heartland Country Choir. (Courtesy Martin Westerman)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 21, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 22, 2024

The ferry Kalakala’s rise and demise roll on for maritime musician

By Clay Eals

He’s resurfaced. Still tunefully trolling the seas, Jon Pontrello again embraces a lament, this time for a more recent lost future.

When “Now & Then” first encountered the acupuncturist and singer-songwriter, we showcased his epic ballad “The Bellwether Sheep of the Mosquito Fleet.” It told a heartbreaking story. In severe weather in 1904, a stubborn sheep refused to board the stately SS Clallam, which left Pier 1 downtown and sank in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, killing 56.

Today, Queen Anne-based Pontrello, 38, is musically resurrecting memories of a better-known nautical tragedy. It wasn’t fatal for any mortal, but it evoked neglect and destruction that broke the hearts of countless fans of arguably the most attention-getting vessel in Seattle history.

We speak of MV Kalakala, the streamlined “silver swan” (or “slug”), whose unique Art Deco charm graced our waters from 1935 to 1967. Its Chinook jargon name meaning “flying bird,” the aircraft-inspired ferry was celebrated in spite of design flaws and spooky vibration. Our beloved column founder, Paul Dorpat, once labeled it “the most popular man-made creation on Puget Sound until the raising of the Space Needle in 1962.”

Also oft-recounted has been the Kalakala’s tortuous, extended demise. Pontrello, already having penned a musical obituary for the ship’s would-be savior, Peter Bevis, decided to memorialize the Kalakala itself this January, the 10th anniversary of its 2015 dismantling in Tacoma.

His research turned up melodic gold. He uncovered 1998 lyrics by 30-year Seattle Times journalist Jack Broom for “Roll On, Kalakala,” set to Woody Guthrie’s “Roll On, Columbia,” whose chorus echoed “Goodnight, Irene” by Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”).

The lyrics were upbeat because at the time there was great citywide hope for restoring the rotting ferry. What riveted Pontrello, however, and inspired him to record the song was that following the Kalakala’s demolition, Broom rewrote its final verse, injecting brutal poignancy:

Now you’re no longer guided by nautical charts
They’ve busted you up into 10 million parts
You’re gone from our waters, but never our hearts
So long, Kalakala, so long

Traditionally, sorrow and the sea are eternal musical partners. But Pontrello eyes the theme expansively. He says the Kalakala saga reflects universal truths “about accepting fate with grace and the way we carry loss inside us — a transcendent way to keep the dream alive even though it wasn’t realized this time.”

The sentiment can be all the more vivid and affecting when experienced in person. Accordingly, Pontrello will perform the Kalakala elegy during a 3 p.m. Jan. 19 matinee show at the Rabbit Box, 94 Pike St.  in the Pike Place Market.

Roll on, Jon!

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Jon Pontrello and Jack Broom 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 27 additional photos, plus videos of Pontrello performing “Roll On, Kalakala” (1) at Salty’s on Alki on Harbor Avenue Southwest and (2) his own illustrated recording. Plus, there’s a KIRO-AM radio story on Pontrello, Broom and the song by Feliks Banel.

Also below is a 1999 Seattle Times story by Broom on the Kalakala in the Seattle Times. You can see his original 1998 Kalakala song lyrics here.

To see detailed histories of the Kalakala, click here and here.

Streamline ferry Kalakala rolls on in song

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Dec. 5, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 8, 2024

New Magnolia history project is fired up, ready to go — online

By Clay Eals

What defines a neighborhood, making it a place to call home? You might list grocery stores, restaurants, other businesses, a police precinct, a set of schools and worship spots, a park or two, a hub of transit stops … what else?

Ah, a fire station. It might not seem an active or flashy component, but when we need one, we’re grateful it’s there.

Strange as it may seem, Seattle’s expansive blufftop district of Magnolia, which the city annexed in 1891, didn’t have its own fire station until 1934. Until then, the largely rural peninsula was served by a 1908 station to the east, in valley-based Interbay.

Magnolia’s slow growth accelerated with the 1930 completion of the Garfield Street Bridge (dubbed the Magnolia Bridge 30 years later), so it made sense for the city to establish Fire Station No. 41 in Magnolia’s commercial center, which locals proudly call the Village.

A product of the Great Depression, No. 41 took shape with the aid of federal programs providing jobs nationwide for the unemployed, channeled here through the Washington State Emergency Relief Program. Workers broke ground for the station in July 1934 along 34th Avenue West.

Its design reflected the era’s Streamline Moderne branch of Art Deco architecture. Its long horizontal lines, aerodynamic curves and nautical elements survive today and were recognized when the building became a formal city landmark in 2005. (Its attention-getting neighbor just north, the Magnolia Theatre, opened in 1948 and operated for 30 years before yielding to what is now Chase Bank.)

These details and myriad more are shared in a new project of what also could be labeled a defining neighborhood feature — the Magnolia Historical Society.

The project, “Magnolia: More Memories & Milestones,” is a sequel to the organization’s three previous coffee-table history books, except it is wholly online to save money and allow for unlimited images and the ongoing opportunity to make additions and modifications. It features eight detailed articles on subjects ranging from a giant pumpkin patch to the late Magnolian Ruth Prins (of KING-TV’s long-running “Wunda Wunda” show for preschoolers), all assembled by volunteers.

The story about Fire Station No. 41, written by series sparkplug Monica Wooton, includes a profile of Bonnie Beers, who grew up in Interbay and moved to Magnolia after becoming Seattle’s first woman firefighter in 1981. She retired in 2008 and lives in Edmonds. A former student athlete, Beers says she thought she “could do anything.”

So, apparently, does the historical society. Its October launch drew 40-plus attendees. Seeking new stories, writers and editors, the online project seems ablaze with energy.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Monica Wooton and Bonnie Beers 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 video interview of Bonnie Beers and 7 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Also, to see a recent Seattle Times story on Magnolia resident Greg Shaw‘s giant pumpkin patch, the subject of one of the new online articles in “Magnolia: More Memories & Milestones,” visit here.

Finally, to view the organization’s new website, order history books in print on via Kindle and view the latest (online) book, visit the Magnolia Historical Society website. For questions, to suggest new stories, contribute photos and memorability, write or volunteer, email info@magnoliahistoricalsociety.org.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 21, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 24, 2024

Book reveals novelty of our state’s 19^th century photography

By Clay Eals

How many times have you aimed your smartphone to capture a face, a meal, a repair project, a pleasing scene? Every year, humans worldwide are said to take more than a trillion photos. Many of them graze our consciousness for mere seconds. They are seemingly lifeblood but also, strangely, a shrug.

More’s the pity. If we back up a century and a half, we reach a time when the concept of a photo, let alone a physical print, was novel, even revolutionary, especially in the rugged West.

That photographic era in our state, the latter 50 years of the 19th century, captivates Tim Greyhavens, who recently published “Artistic and Life-Like: Photography in Washington, 1850-1900.” With more than 200 carefully reproduced photos, his 262-page tome documents how and why the earliest image-makers toted heavy cameras, plates and chemicals far and wide to mine for true-to-life pictures.

Greyhavens, 76, from Seattle’s West Woodland neighborhood, grew up in Portsmouth, Ohio. As a grade-schooler, he often visited a local photo studio, whose owner introduced him to his darkroom. “I was hooked as soon as I saw my first print develop in a tray of chemicals,” he says. Reaching college, he wanted to “be the next Ansel Adams.”

Life steered Greyhavens to a different career, directing the Wilburforce Foundation, a Ballard-based nonprofit that dispenses grants for conservation causes. But retirement prompted him to revisit and approximate childhood dreams.

His encyclopedic chronicle of vintage images also profiles many of the state’s 500 earliest photographers. They include Ida Bell Mitchell Smith, who in 1895 took over the Olympia studio of A.D. Rogers and likely learned the trade from him. She offered holiday portraits of “all styles and grades” with “pastel and crayon enlargements.”

Greyhavens covers signature scenes, such as the 1860 Yesler house (considered Seattle’s first photo) and the 1889 Great Seattle Fire, leavening them with substantive and obscure excursions to logging and railroad sites and the portraiture of Native Americans, including Chief Seattle and his daughter, Kikisoblu.

Throughout, Greyhavens supplies researched context while cautioning readers not to make faulty assumptions, such as trusting the words scrawled on the backsides of prints. An overarching theme is the profound importance that Washingtonians placed on such a personalized art form.

The “real meanings” of early photos emerge only “by understanding the culture and society in which they were created,” he writes.

“People soon recognized that having life-like and easily accessible depictions of loved ones was more important to their happiness than almost anything words might contribute.”

In today’s flood of taken-for-granted photos, dare we summon such deep appreciation?

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Dan Kerlee and especially Tim Greyhavens 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 8 additional photos, 1 document and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 31, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 3, 2024

‘Vanishing Seattle’ book trains our eyes on local signs of the past

By Clay Eals

Funny, the word “vanish.” In a magic trick, when something vanishes, it suddenly disappears. But is what we cannot see really gone? What if it lingers in our minds and hearts? Sometimes, collective memory can be as strong — or stronger — than real, physical life.

Cynthia Brothers embodied such thoughts eight years ago in launching a social-media movement to document and celebrate well-known local places that seemingly drop daily from our view. She named it Vanishing Seattle.

Brothers, 43, has grown her mostly volunteer and partly grant-funded following to 117,000. Last year, she mounted a flashy exhibit in Pioneer Square and this year published a book, “Signs of Vanishing Seattle,” which returns to our consciousness the eye-popping branding remnants of more than 75 lost treasures.

Such as Andy’s Diner! If you moved to Seattle since 2008, you may not recognize this unpretentious eatery on Fourth Avenue South, at least by that name. (For the past 16 years, it’s been a Chinese restaurant and karaoke bar, the Orient Express.)

Long before stadiums arose in industrial Sodo, Andy’s Diner embraced the area’s rail-track milieu and created a colorful identity, easily seen from its busy arterial, by piecing together a building made of decommissioned railroad cars.

In 1949, Andy Nagy started with one car at 2711 Fourth Ave. S.. Joined by nephew Andy Yurkanin in 1955, he moved it two blocks south in 1956 and eventually expanded to seven cars. The pair built it into a steakhouse and banquet facility — the most visible element of what became a local food-service empire — revered by a broad swath of return customers, including hungry newswriters.

It wasn’t that railcar eateries were unusual. Such diners have deep roots in the East. It was more the flair of a fun image. “We are after a tradition, an atmosphere,” Nagy told Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Emmett Watson in 1959. A Seattle Times headline in 1973 added a playful pun: “Choo Choo Chew Chew.”

Hence Brothers’ affection for the fanciful Andy’s Diner sign, which collector John Bennett loaned for last year’s exhibit and is included in the “Signs” book. Other Seattle touchstones range from music venues and LGBTQ+ bars to record stores and even shoe and antique shops.

Some signs still hang on. A few, as with Andy’s Diner, are modified. Most have … vanished. The book likens them all to rabbits out of the proverbial hat.

To Brothers, they’re “love letters to the sign artisans and social landmarks that brought soul to our city, and a testament to their ongoing impact and legacies, still being felt today.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Cynthia Brothers, John Bennett and Chuck Flood 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, you also will find 2 additional photos, 4 documents on Andy’s Diner by restaurant historian and author Chuck Flood and 61 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

For an hopeful update on Feb. 6, 2025, from Feliks Banel, click here.

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(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 17, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 20, 2024

‘Life and survival’: Podcast probes 1963 air crash that killed 101

By Clay Eals

As we all know but rarely admit, death can arrive in unexpected and mysterious ways — and touch us for decades, perhaps forever.

Imagine you are 8-year-old Greg Barrowman on June 3, 1963, during the height of the Cold War. At Pierce County’s McChord Field, you wave goodbye to your 17-year-old brother, Bruce, who left high school for the Army and, with 100 others, boarded a four-prop Northwest Airlines DC-7C bound for a military fort in Anchorage.

Later, home from school in Renton, on KIRO-TV you watch “J.P. Patches.” Then you see the evening news’ lead story. It discloses that the DC-7C had crashed. All aboard, including Bruce, had perished.

It falls to you to alert your parents.

The next day, in The Seattle Times, the calamity is second only to banner treatment for the death of Pope John XXIII. No bodies were recovered from the crash, only scant remains, as Flight 293 had drilled 8,000 feet into the Gulf of Alaska.

The cause? No one knew then — or knows today, 61 years later.

Barrowman, now 69, lives in rural Kent. A father of four and grandfather of nine, the retired contractor and Puget Power manager has found a lifetime of solace in Christian faith and in engaging others who lost loved ones in the crash.

“It’s my human experience,” he says. “It’s kept me sensitive to the thoughts and lives of other people, and to be kind instead of aggressive or hateful. It’s taught me to love not only my family, but my neighbors and those around me. It’s important because right now there’s not a lot of that going around in the world.”