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

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

By Clay Eals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A simple snapshot. A lesson for a lifetime.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Washington Department of Transportation staffers Robert Webster, Stan Zal, April Leigh and Stefanie Randolph, as well as Lauren Koslowsky Bakken, for their help with this installment!

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

Below are (1) links to a contemporary video interview, a Feliks Banel story (with vintage audio) and three historical accounts of the 1940 bridge collapse, (2) an additional photo, (3) a 1994 Paul Dorpat “Now & Then” column on Tacoma’s “other bridge,” (4) a link to a 2007 Seattle Times article by Mike Lindblom on 1950 Narrows Bridge steelworker Earl White, plus, (5) in chronological order, 22 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Also, new film footage from a more distant site has been found of the 1940 bridge collapse. That fascinating story, and the footage, can be found here.

Vintage audio from 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse

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

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

By Clay Eals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEB EXTRAS

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

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

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

Also check out these online articles for further background:

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

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

Like a visit from Father Christmas every Tuesday night

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

By Clay Eals and Jean Sherrard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Clay Eals

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

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

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

Gerhard grinned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But riddles remain: Who took the photos?

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

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

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

Can any of you come aboard with more details?

WEB EXTRAS

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: March 22, 2023, KING5-TV news

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 17, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 20, 2022

Longtime ‘sanctuary’ nursery to be uprooted by six-floor complex

By Clay Eals

On Thanksgiving, many of us will gather with family and friends to share a cornucopia of cuisine, including garden greens and other symbols of nature’s bounty.

Now instead of the food, envision a mammoth building dropped onto the table. With this unwieldy centerpiece, you couldn’t see or talk with many of your fellow guests. You might even be shocked enough to wonder why you pulled up a chair in the first place.

That’s how some locals feel about a retail-residential project slated at 2939 E. Madison St. in the Madison Valley. The new structure — six floors, 87 market-rate apartments and 140 parking stalls with a ground-level supermarket — would end the site’s seven-decade run as a single-floor hub that plant fans deem an oasis crucial to Seattle’s psyche.

The lowland setting is near Washington Park Arboretum and Broadmoor Golf Club and its gated community. Clifton’s Nursery and Garden Store (owner Hubert Clifton) operated at the site starting in 1951, succeeded by Lynn’s Garden Center (owner Lynn Meyer) in 1981. City People’s Garden Center took over in 1988.

Alison Greene, City People’s owner, says garden lovers converge there from all over Seattle and out of town. “It’s like a park, it’s filled with beauty, and it’s inspiring,” she says. “One customer told me, ‘This is my church, my safe place.’ In this crazy world we live in, it’s a sanctuary.”

“Gardening brings people a lot of joy. It’s not like buying a washing machine,” adds Steve Magley, City People’s owner from 1990 to 2016. “Plants bring people satisfaction on a different level.”

Velmeir Companies, the developer, hasn’t responded to requests for comment on the project. But directly across the busy arterial, City People’s already faces the four-floor Madison Lofts, built in 2008, which only furthers fears of a concrete canyon.

The symbolism of losing a growing, nurturing, life-giving enterprise is not lost on Save Madison Valley, a nonprofit that opposed the project for years and is dismayed that Seattle approved a master-use permit for it in June. Tony Hacker, on the group’s board, laments the pending demise of a neighborhood cornerstone.

Greene has searched in vain for a new site within the city. She anticipates having to shut down at year’s end, with her annual Christmas-tree sale a bittersweet finale, but she hopes for an extension.

“Where is the soul of Seattle going?” she asks. “Current zoning doesn’t take into account a business like ours that creates community, and we seem to be forgotten in the name of maximizing profit. It would be really tragic if this had to close forever.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Alison Greene for her help with this installment!

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

Below are 10 additional photos and 24 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 10, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 13, 2022

Legendary Red Robin chain arose from a tiny site near a bridge

By Clay Eals

It’s a behemoth restaurant chain with 546 outlets in 44 states and British Columbia, known for lighthearted TV commercials that end with a resonant voiceover chorus of “Yummm!”

However, the enterprise reportedly took root in 1916 as a tiny grocery perched above Portage Bay just a stone’s toss from the south end of University Bridge. By 1926, it was an eatery. Seattle Times classified ads reflect a tenuous tenure:

• July 1, 1926: “HAMBURGER, waffles: busy corner; rent $30.”
• March 31, 1929: “FOR SALE — Cheap, lunchroom; rent $30 per month. Owner leaving town. Come to see it Monday if you want a bargain.”
• Jan. 7, 1930: “PARTNER — Established café; small investment; new taxi stand; must stay open nights. Too long hours for one.”

Ads and Polk directory listings reference a succession of 12 proprietors and a bevy of business names for the property at 3272 Furhman Ave. E. It was the Zimmerman Cafe, the Bridge Cafe, Bee’s Corner Cafe, Ann’s Corner Cafe and, starting in 1942, the Red Robin Tavern. That name stuck.

Legend has it that in the 1940s the watering hole’s avian appellation originated from tavern-keeper Samuel Caston, whose barbershop quartet warbled the 1926 hit “When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along)” and who added “Sam’s” to the name for good measure. But Polk listings indicate that Caston assumed ownership later, in 1953. No matter. Legends can befit a storied sudshouse.

By the late 1960s, the Robin, as it was known, was a Bohemian hangout, says Paul Gillingham, then a University of Washington philosophy and history student, folksinger and motorcyclist. “Strictly a tavern,” offering popcorn and “horrible” Polish sausages as the only food, the 1,500-square-foot pub bulged with students, Gillingham says. Some “would take bets on who would jump off the bridge.”

One morning in 1969, Gillingham vroomed by and photographed the dilapidated saloon, its awning ragged and sagging. That year, Caston sold the Robin to fledgling Seattle restaurateur Gerry Kingen, triggering a final-night, legendarily rowdy free-for-all.

Kingen expanded the Robin, adding a huge deck, and dropped “Sam’s” from its name. Later, he transformed it into a hamburger “emporium” and opened namesakes citywide. Starting in 1985, the chain went to outside interests that eventually grew Red Robin into a national presence. The initial eatery closed in 2010 and was razed in 2014, yielding to a three-floor retail-residential complex dubbed the Robin’s Nest.

Today you can find a Red Robin in 31 Washington cities. Perhaps fittingly, if sadly, only one remains in Seattle, at Northgate, five miles from the original site.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Ron Edge and Joe Bopp for their help with this installment!

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

Below is a collage of 8 images of the Red Robin site from 2007 to 2019, plus 30 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 3, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 6, 2022

Like fine wine, this Ravenna Avenue anchor has aged well

By Clay Eals

Do you yearn to travel in time — say, to a century ago? For the trip, you might hail this jaunty, four-cylinder touring car, a 1917 Studebaker Series 18 Model SF.

The gent standing by is likely the taxi’s driver. His territory, indicated on the windshield, was Cowen Park, west of Ravenna Ravine in northeast Seattle. If we assume the city license (left of the driver’s right shoulder) is current, you likely would be stepping into the year 1921.

We look almost due east across Ravenna Avenue at its intersection with 65th Street, just out of frame at right, which was Seattle’s northern boundary at this crossroads until the mid-1940s.

Beyond the taxi stands a charming, two-floor brick façade built in 1920. Topped by an apartment, its street-level retail space over the years supplied a range of what broadly could be called apothecary assistance, medicinal and non-.

In its earliest days, the building housed Ravenna Pharmacy, assuredly a center for prescriptions, but also general-store dalliances such as locally made Stokes Ice Cream (“supremely good”) and wind-driven whirligigs, both promoted in the front window.

The pharmacy signed on to newspaper ads offering free enticements, from Kotex sanitary pads (“each sample wrapped in plain paper”) to Gillette safety razors (“complete with blade”). Shoppers also could find Sunset dye (“58 fashionable shades, 22 standard colors”), Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral (a fix for coughs or colds “in a day or so” or money back) and Calport wine grape tonic (“brings to a tired world tingling, vibrant force”).

It also served as a polling place for elections, a meeting site for the Masonic-based Social Club of the Seattle Court (Order of Amaranth) and a hub for free tickets to see Independence Day fireworks at nearby University of Washington Stadium.

In 1937, the pharmacy became Monsen Cleaners and Self Service Laundry, which in the early 1960s gave way to Car-Tel TV Radio (featuring the Philco Cool Chassis TV “with 82-channel VHR-UHF tuning”), then Monsen’s Ivory Jade Collectors.

In the mid-1970s, Puget Mercantile, an adjunct of today’s PCC Community Markets, moved in. Also hosting speakers and gatherings there were King County NOW (National Organization for Women, promoting the Equal Rights Amendment, still unratified today) and the North End Housing Cooperative.

The edifice assumed its most enduring identity in 1980, as an award-winning wine shop that adopted the name of owners McCarthy & Schiering and continues today under new owners who kept the appellation.

In a city bursting with redeveloped business corners, such a mainstay anchor earns esteem. You might say it’s part of the cure for what ails you.

SIDE NOTE

Did any of you wonder about the little vehicle at the left side of our main “Then” photo? Reader Bob Bernstein did. And we have an answer from our automotive expert, Bob Carney:

“It’s probably a home-built version of a ‘speedster,’ which was an early version of a hot rod in the 1910s and 1920s. You remove the body and fenders and add a big gas tank and bucket seats, and you then have your personal version of a Mercer Raceabout or Stutz Bearcat at a fraction of the cost. Most were based on the Ford Model T, but any car could be the basis for a speedster. The one in the photo looks too big to be a Ford, and also has right-hand steering, which the Model T did not have. I think the wheels shown toward the front of the little car are not part of it, but rather leaning against it. Not sure why.”

Thanks, Bob (both of you)!

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Peter Blecha for his help with this installment!

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

Below are 43 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

UPDATE: The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board voted to nominate the Cettolin house for landmark status on March 1, 2023, and voted to designate it a landmark on April 19, 2023. It awaits Seattle City Council approval once “controls and incentives” are negotiated.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct.20, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 23, 2022

‘A dream to do good’ inspired steelworker to build Italian villa

By Clay Eals

The phrase “hidden in plain sight” could have originated with the Cettolin house in West Seattle.

Nestled along the unpretentious, extended block of 32nd Avenue between the Fauntleroy Expressway (opened in 1965) and Nucor Steel (opened in 1905 as Seattle Steel), the dwelling, upon further examination, looks to be a villa straight from Italy.

Which was the intention. It was created by Fausto Urbano Cettolin (sett-oh-LEEN), who came to the United States in 1913 from the northern Italian town of Pianzano. In 1921, he married Erma Dina Monti, also a 1913 newcomer, arriving from Italy’s coastal city of Livorno.

In 1926, the industrious Fausto, who worked in the steel mill’s open hearth, began giving shape to a vision. “My father had a great love for my mother. That’s why he built the house,” says Virginia Cettolin, youngest of their six children. (Her sister Emma Dina Wislocker is the only other living sibling.) The project took 13 years.

“It was all in his head. He never had a plan as far as we knew,” says Virginia, an 87-year-old retired teacher and Dominican nun, visiting the three-story house from the Washington border town of Blaine. “I think it was just in him to create a family memory.”

Fausto’s pride materialized in the house’s slender stature, terrazzo floors, leaded windows and the arches and columns of its front porch, which also bears a colorful, if weathered, inlay circled by the words “Cettolin Autore” (Italian for “author”).

Stewarding the house are Marilyn Kennell, a former yoga teacher, and Alan McMurray, a cabinetry engineer, owners since 2014. The charm of the light-filled home brings tears to Kennell’s eyes: “It’s got such a good feeling to it.” Adds McMurray, “There’s nothing like it around.”

Welcoming Virginia Cettolin to their home is part of the couple’s dogged effort to gather data to support a Seattle landmark nomination they have commissioned.

While they would vouch for preserving the home in any event, the two hope landmark status would help persuade Sound Transit not to threaten their neighborhood by constructing its West Seattle light-rail extension through their street. The light-rail decision could come in 2023.

In early years, the Cettolin house stood alone on three lots, with the Pigeon Point bluff, south Seattle and downtown as a stunning backdrop. Today, with subdivisions by later owners, the home is hemmed in, and the growth of greenery makes it nearly hidden and easy to miss.

But not for Virginia Cettolin: “It’s the fulfillment of an immigrant, and to me, that’s why it’s very important. It truly shows from nothing to something in America. You come with a dream to do good in America.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Deb Barker and especially Virginia Cettolin, Marilyn Kennell and Alan McMurray for their help with this installment!

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

Below are 35 additional photos and 26 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 6, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 9, 2022

Aided by a Rodriguez, baseball flag last flew over Seattle in 1966

By Clay Eals

Once upon a time, a Seattle baseball team thrived on playoff hope. News stories brimmed with “pennant,” “flag” and “magic numbers” to success.

Sound familiar? Except we’re not talking about the 2022 Mariners. Instead, we salute the last Seattle pro-baseball team to win a championship — the Seattle Angels, who, one step below the majors, topped the Pacific Coast League in 1966.

Based at venerated Sicks’ Stadium (razed in 1979, now the site of a Lowe’s home-improvement store ) and managed by former pitching stalwart Bob Lemon (Hall of Fame, 1976), the team was dubbed the SeAngels by sportswriters to distinguish it from its Los Angeles-based parent club.

Dotting the roster were former and future big-leaguers, including pitchers Jim McGlothlin, Roger Craig and Andy Messersmith and outfielders Jay Johnstone, Al Spangler and Bubba Morton. Veteran third-baseman Felix Torres led the team with 20 home runs and 90 runs batted in. Young first-baseman Charlie Vinson hit 19 homers, with 84 RBI.

But firing up the SeAngels in their final weeks was a sensation from the Mexican League, an 18-year-old infielder whose last name matched that of Julio, today’s megawatt M’s star — Aurelio Rodriguez.

In his first game Aug. 18, the 5-foot-10, 170-pound shortstop went three-for-four. The Seattle Times’ headline: “SeAngels Pick Up Three Hits at Airport.” The future longtime major-leaguer played 17 games down the stretch for the ’66 SeAngels, hitting 254 and adding vim to the lineup. He made his first appearance in the majors the next year.

Unlike latter-day M’s luminary Alex Rodriguez, he was not nicknamed A-Rod. In fact, his first name often was shortened to Leo. He didn’t speak English, writers said, so he used sign language and was assisted in conversations by roomie Hector Torres, an infielder. After the SeAngels’ Western Division clincher, the Times’ Gil Lyons noted Rodriguez’ “ear-splitting smile.”

Rodriguez played 17 seasons for seven big-league teams, most notably the Detroit Tigers from 1971 to 1979. He was a strong-armed third-baseman in the majors, winning a Gold Glove in 1976. Rodriguez appeared in 2,017 major-league games and hit 124 homers. Tragically, he died in 2000 at age 52  while walking in Detroit when a car jumped a sidewalk and ran over him.

The 1966 season  became a jolly run for a team that synonym-seeking journalists called the Halos, Cherubs and Seraphs. The nailbiter playoff victory against Tulsa (head-scratchingly far from the Pacific Coast) stretched to all seven games. The SeAngels won the final contest 3-1.

Masterminding 44 player transactions that year was SeAngels general manager Edo Vanni, no stranger to pennants, having starred for the PCL-leading Seattle Rainiers in 1939-1941. “It’s a thrill, I’ll tell you,” Vanni said as the Halos entered their playoff. “If that’s what it takes to get major-league ball here, Seattle is in.”

His words were prescient. The Pilots arrived at Sicks’ for their solitary year in 1969, and one year after the old Kingdome opened in 1976, the M’s sailed into Seattle for good.

The rest is history — to be made.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to the incomparable  Dave Eskenazi for his 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.

For a comprehensive look at the SeAngels’ 1966 season, click here.

Below are 23 additional photos and 43 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 22, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 25, 2022

Roosevelt alums create film to prompt ‘difficult’ talks about race

By Clay Eals

It probably was intended purely as creative expression, but today it holds potent symbolism.

When Roosevelt High School students designed their 1968-69 yearbook, on the title page and on each of six section-introduction layouts they paired two versions of a large photo — the first appearing conventionally and the second in a reversed, negative format, as in this week’s “Then.”

Thus, in the first version, the faces of students at the largely white north-end school appeared as just that, largely white. In the reversed version, the faces became dark.

It was the first year in which Seattle Public Schools implemented its Voluntary Racial Transfer Program, an effort to avoid litigation over a perceived failure to integrate schools as mandated by the famous 1954 Supreme Court decision that struck down “separate but equal” education.

As shown in Roosevelt’s 1969 yearbook, the program had a relatively small but visible impact there. Of 1,865 students, about 75 (or 4%) were people of color, many bused from southern neighborhoods. One of those was Lea Vaughn, a biracial sophomore whose parents (father Black, mother white) chose for her to bus from the Central District, near Washington Park, to highly regarded Roosevelt and back.

Vaughn, a retired attorney and emerita University of Washington law professor, is at the core of a grassroots nonprofit, Roosevelt Alumni for Racial Equity (RARE), formed via Zoom during the national upheaval over the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

With a 21-member multi-ethnic board, RARE provides scholarships for students of color and has produced an engaging half-hour documentary, “Roosevelt High School: Beyond Black & White,” which aired twice this year on KCTS-TV and is available online.

With historical data and footage, along with provocative observations from 20 alums, educators and present-day students, the film seeks to “stimulate difficult discussions about race and education.” Interviewees conclude that despite Seattle’s efforts at voluntary, then mandatory busing, racial equity in city schools remains elusive.

They also characterize a perceived “Seattle nice” as “performative, not reformative” and address the “baked-in” effects of racist covenants and redlining in real-estate sales and rentals that the city finally upended in 1968. Startling is a 1936 Kroll map that codes areas of Seattle as green (“best”), blue (“still desirable”), yellow (“definitely declining”) and pink (“hazardous”).

Today, Vaughn lives in a Ballard neighborhood that her family would have been disallowed to inhabit when she was young. But she asserts, “I think because we used busing as the Band-Aid to not face redlining, we never really dealt with it.”

Clearly, the complexities of race bolster the longtime name of Roosevelt’s yearbook: “Strenuous Life.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Lea Vaughn, Peggy Sturdivant and the members of RARE for their help with this installment!

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

Below are two PowerPoint presentations prepared for RARE by Vaughn and a list of discussion questions from the RARE video.

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UPDATE:

The Coliseum has been sold. For more information, visit this link. from July 9, 2024.

Letters from the late-1950s Coliseum marquee (see background below) soon may see the light of day, thanks in part to historian and neon-restorer Mike Shaughnessy of West Seattle. The former theater, which in 2023 is serving as a rotating art space, houses the letters and may make one or more sets available for an exhibit of old Seattle artifacts. The photo above represents the first time in more than 30 years that Coliseum marquee letters have been arranged to spell the theater’s name. Stay tuned for details!

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

Priteca’s captivating Coliseum still shines brightly downtown

By Clay Eals

Back in 1989 when I was helping to save West Seattle’s Admiral Theatre, word came out that downtown’s Coliseum Theatre, which opened in 1916, also was endangered. So I did what came naturally — went there to see a film. In it, Morgan Freeman portrayed the notoriously tough New Jersey high-school principal Joe Clark. Based on a song, its title was “Lean on Me.”

To appreciate the grandeur of what was considered the nation’s first movie palace, I climbed to the top of its balcony. The view was startling. I sat mere feet from the Italian Renaissance-style ceiling beams. The rake was so steep that only by splaying my knees could I glimpse the screen far below.

Today, as a theater, the Coliseum is largely a memory, its closing night coming 32 years ago, on March 11, 1990, with the sci-fi thriller “Tremors.”

When a plan emerged in 1992 to restore and convert the Coliseum to a Banana Republic outlet, then-Seattle Mayor Norm Rice declared, “There won’t be a more stunning building this side of the Taj Mahal” in India. The clothier operated inside the city-landmarked structure from 1994 until the pandemic sank the store in 2020.

The trendsetting, terra-cotta Coliseum was one of 60 major West Coast theaters (including the Pantages chain and, yes, the still-operating Admiral) designed by architect Bernard “Benny” Marcus Priteca (1886-1971). With 2,400 seats and hailed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as “the last word in picture playhouse construction,” the Coliseum opened when Priteca was just 26.

Scotland-born into an eastern European Jewish family, Priteca had been lured to Seattle by the city’s first world’s fair, the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. His affection blossomed. As he told The Seattle Times’ Don Duncan while puffing on a cigar eight months before his death, “Washington and Oregon are the world!”

His designs — the lifelong bachelor never retired — extended to Seattle’s Bikur Cholim synagogue (now Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute), Renton’s now-gone Longacres racetrack and even a Paige auto grille and windshield. But the stage was his steadfast siren.

Arguably his most captivating creation was the Coliseum, whose showcase signage changed with the times. Notably, its concave corner half-dome, topped by a massive glass cupola, gave way in late 1950 to a rotating circular marquee and neon pillar featuring filmdom’s golden Oscar. The weather-damaged statue was removed in 1966.

Priteca told Duncan he wished that “Seattle would just stop growing, period.” Perhaps he also would have liked his Coliseum to screen movies forever. It still shines at Fifth & Pike. As the “Lean on Me” lyrics proclaim, “… there’s always tomorrow.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Lawrence Kreisman , Wendy Malloy, Dave Eskenazi, Colin Campbell and Gavin MacDougall for their help with this installment!

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

Below are an additional video, 28 additional photos (including a gallery of 22 early 1920s Coliseum images from Historic Seattle) and 50 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column. These include five previous “Now & Then” columns related to Priteca and the Coliseum by column founder Paul Dorpat!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 25, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 28, 2022

The magical Virginia V: a century of weaving maritime memories

By Clay Eals

We all seek to create indelible memories. One of mine came in 1988 when I helped lead a Southwest Seattle Historical Society cruise to celebrate the first voyage of the City of Seattle, the first ferryboat on Puget Sound. Sadly, the original craft had ventured south to become a houseboat in Sausalito. So, standing — or, shall I say, floating — in was another vintage vessel, Seattle’s legendary passenger carrier, the Virginia V.

What a glorious two-hour trip we had. Though 200 were aboard, the steamer felt like a comfy cottage, a buoyant sanctuary. Our vice-president, Neal Lockett, joked that everyone must have had a good time because no one left early. But the sentiment transcended jest. We’d been soothed equally by tradition and tranquility.

For 100 years, the Virginia V has woven such maritime magic. It is the last of five “Virginia” ships, the first incarnation named for Virginia Merrill, whose later marriage resulted in a vast Bainbridge Island garden known today as Bloedel Reserve.

The 120-foot-long Virginia V originally was operated by West Pass Transportation Company, an indication of its headquarters and midway stop in regular runs between Tacoma and Seattle along the west side of rural Vashon Island. On the National Register of Historic Places since 1973, the Virginia V remains the sole surviving Mosquito Fleet steamship among hundreds of private craft that once plied Puget Sound like a swarm of busy bugs.

Before transporting farmers, freight, excursionists and even World War II soldiers, the Virginia V forged its earliest identity as the summertime vehicle for hundreds of Seattle Camp Fire Girls to reach the recently purchased Camp Sealth on Vashon’s southwest shore. Before being towed to Seattle for installation of its boilers and engines, the Virginia V was christened March 2, 1922, by Camp Fire secretary Ellen Bringloe.

“If sea traditions are to be trusted,” the Seattle Times reported, “Dame Fortune smiled favorably upon the Virginia V, for with one blow Miss Bringloe shattered the bottle of grape juice over the keel, and as if cheered by this good luck, the boat glided smoothly down the ways, splashed gently into the Sound and floated proudly off.”

After a century of service — including a 1934 wreck during a storm near the Kitsap County hamlet of Olalla and a brief 1942 Portland-Astoria run on the Columbia River, along with expensive latter-day restorations mounted by a dedicated foundation — the Virginia V still invites passengers to tour Puget Sound.

Seemingly unscathed by modern modes of transit, it continues to make memories for us all. Did I mention its exhilarating steam whistle?

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Debra Alderman, Alicia Barnes, Wendy Malloy and the crew of the Virginia V for their help with this installment!

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

Below are 2 videos, 9 additional photos and 42 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

You can find additional Virginia V photos by Tad Bixby here.

UPDATE: a KING5-TV tribute to John Spaccarotelli on April 4, 2024.

UPDATE: The Seattle Times on John Spaccarotelli, ballplayer, July 15, 2024.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 18, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 21, 2022

Scandals and soul fueled ‘Lost Roadhouses’ at Seattle’s outskirts

By Clay Eals

A new book by historians Peter Blecha and Brad Holden, “Lost Roadhouses of Seattle,” showcases more than 60 dance halls and speakeasies on the city’s outskirts whose heyday foamed in the Prohibition and repeal days of the 1930s and 1940s.

“It’s a nod to Seattle’s naughty past,” Holden says.

Blecha adds, “It’s almost like a lost civilization.”

So it brings a smile that the book also profiles something easily found — the last roadhouse still operating on a local highway, the Shanty Tavern at 90th and Lake City Way. On Fridays from 4:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., the Shanty rocks with live music and conversational buzz, moderated by 91-year-old John Spaccarotelli and his daughter Dayna.

“I like the music, I like the people. I like to talk with people especially,” says the elder owner, who leased the place 61 years ago and bought it two years later. “It’s just a fantastic thing to have a business and not only love it but live it.”

Built by Doris McLeod in 1932 on 22nd Avenue Northeast, the Shanty building moved twice before settling at its current site in 1948. The “Mack” nickname of Doris’ son Bill adorned the nightspot until Spaccarotelli took its reins in 1961.

Over the years, it’s drawn celebrities from actor David Arquette to hydroplane racer Chip Hanauer, who have mixed with neighbors and motorists spotting the tavern’s unpretentious sign in the shape of a shack, complete with off-kilter stovepipe.

The sign is an uncanny cue to the devil-may-care spirit of the book’s neon-lit dine-and-dance establishments, where chicken dinners and musical spectacle consorted with headline-grabbing liquor and gambling scandals. All of this was fueled by car culture and a desire to flee the city limits via Highway 99 and the Bothell Highway to find, as the book asserts, “the sordid underbelly of Seattle’s peripheral nightlife.”

With Arcadia as their publisher, the authors sprinkle the book with 93 photos, ads and news clippings, but its text also covers a broad swath, from the countless musicians who played the roadside “joints” to cleanup efforts by Snohomish County prosecutor (and later U.S. senator) Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Showing up throughout are the detailed legal travails of infamous impresario John H. “Doc” Hamilton.

Page by page, from the north-end Duffy’s Roadhouse to the south-end Spanish Castle, it’s like the old Lay’s potato-chip commercial: You can’t read about just one. And the vignettes reveal that behind the roadhouses’ notoriety lay a lot of soul.

Dayna Spaccarotelli would agree. The Shanty means “everything” to her. “This is my life,” she says. “It’s like a second home.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Bob Carney for his help with this installment!

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

Below are two videos and 10 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 11, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 14, 2022

Century of Mukilteo ferrying leads to new Native-themed terminal

By Clay Eals

Sooner or later, for functionality or fun, most of us living in Puget Sound get out on the water. So let’s time-travel to the era when motor vehicles first came into vogue.

You’re a saltwater town at the foot of a hill, near the mushrooming metropolis of Seattle, and also just four miles across the brine from a beckoning island paradise. What do you do? Launch a ferry.

Mukilteo did so in 1916, connecting with equally tiny Clinton on the southern tip of Whidby (no “e” at the time) Island. The ferry ran two times daily, twice that on weekends. The fare was $1 for car and driver, a quarter per additional passenger.

The Mukilteo-Clinton ferry cinched a scenic loop that had been fostered three years earlier with establishment of a north-island ferry at Deception Pass, whose classic bridge wouldn’t be built until 1934.

The outcome: a trip of “much beauty,” wrote Douglas Shelor, automotive editor, in the Sept. 20, 1916, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “a diversion that every motorist looking for something a little different from the general run of two-day trips should not fail to take.”

Vessels were small, holding only a few vehicles at a time, but the P-I assured that “those who may feel timid in driving their machines on the ferry under [their] own power may roll the car on in perfect safety.”

Fast-forward through a century of growth: Puget Sound’s cluster of competitive ferry operations morphed into the Black Ball Line, which the state bought in 1951. Mukilteo’s dock was reconstructed in 1952 and modernized in 1980.

But usage also ballooned. During 2019, the most recent pre-COVID year, the 20-minute crossing carried 2,276,967 vehicles, the highest number of any route in the state system. To say Mukilteo suffered traffic tie-ups would be like saying Elvis sold a few records. Standstills became the norm.

In response, the state built a much larger, seismically safe terminal one-third mile east. Partly in recognition of Mukilteo as the site of the landmark 1855 Point Elliott Treaty signing, the state fashioned the $187 million terminal as a Native American art-filled longhouse summoning the rich heritage of the Coast Salish People, specifically the Tulalip tribes. Since the terminal opened in December 2020, it has netted more than 25 awards.

The terminal’s designer, Seattle-based LMN Architects, will be showcased Aug. 20-26 at the Seattle Design Festival, SeaDesignFest.org. Given the terminal’s ties to the past, improved transit links, sustainable elements and the potent symbolism of travel, the festival’s 2022 theme of “Connection” is apt.

Just like our relationship with the water itself.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Peter Anderson, archivist for the Mukilteo Historical Society; Molly Michal of the Seattle Design Festival; Alicia Barnes of Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society; Diane Rhodes, Suanne Pelly and Ian Sterling of Washington State Ferries; Priscilla Strettell of the Northwest History Room of Everett Public Library; Bob Carney, automotive expert extraordinaire; and especially photographer Colleen Chartier for their help with this installment!

A good backgrounder on the Mukilteo ferry terminal is an article from the Dec. 30, 2020, edition of the Lynnwood Times.

Below are two documents and 24 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

And in lieu of a 360 video, we top off this installment with a gallery of 43 additional present-day photos of the Mukilteo terminal by Colleen Chartier!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 28, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 31, 2022

Born of war, Woman’s Relief Corps fed nation’s ‘higher sphere’

By Clay Eals

One of my mentors — the late Elliott Couden, an open-housing advocate in the 1960s who 20 years later founded the Southwest Seattle Historical Society — once lamented that as a boy, he had to learn history by memorizing timelines keyed mostly to wars. “We didn’t get very much into what relation we as individuals have to this society,” he said.

He could have been reading the mind, and heart, of Richard Heisler. During the pandemic, the energetic equestrian artist and historian, 49, focused his research on the estimated 3,500 Civil War veterans and their families who migrated to King County near the turn of the 20th century. Heisler, of Bothell, has unearthed direct links between these vets and the rise of the town east of Lake Washington’s northern tip.

Nationally, starting in 1866, many of the war’s surviving Union soldiers formed the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) fraternal organization. In 1883, their wives, along with daughters and other descendants and supporters, began gathering in posts of an auxiliary, the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC).

The Bothell WRC post began in 1902, and 22 of its members (plus two discreetly positioned men) populate our “Then” photo from 1908. They pose outside the city’s 1893 William Hannan home, which stands today at Bothell Landing along the Sammamish River, a half-mile west of its original site. Pristinely restored, it houses the Bothell Historical Museum.

Bothell, the city, derives from a family by the same name. Heisler pointedly notes that the only graphic symbols on a Bothell Pioneer Cemetery monument for founder David Bothell (1820-1905) and his wife Mary Ann (1823-1907), parents of George, the city’s first mayor, are of the GAR for David and WRC for Mary Ann.

Other local luminaries had ties to the war’s Union forces and their abolitionist, Lincoln Republican ways of thinking, Heisler says. “We think it was all so distant,” he says, “but many veterans and their families came west and walked the streets all over this county.”

WRC posts produced patriotic Memorial Day observances, installed flags and monuments and even supported women’s suffrage. At an 1885 Seattle gathering, the GAR’s J.C. Haines saluted their role: “We welcome you because you have demonstrated that woman has a higher sphere than any that man can ever lay claim to — a sphere as broad as human sorrow, as lasting as humanity itself.”

Today, the WRC has receded locally, but it lives on in Heisler’s talks, including one set for 6 p.m. Aug. 3, at the Bothell Library, for the Bothell museum. “This is not an abstract thing,” he says. “These are people.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Bill Woodward, Pat Pierce, Jill Keeney and especially Richard Heisler for their help with this installment!

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

Below are two additional photos, two videos and 22 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and Washington Digital Newspapers, that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 21, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 24, 2022

‘Eight Arcs’ tableau signifies transformation on Alaskan Way

By Clay Eals

You can see it looking south along Alaskan Way, but only for a block and a half at street level starting at Pier 66 or atop the Bell Street overpass, and only on clear days. To me, it symbolizes a century of transformation for Seattle’s shore. It’s a tableau that I call the Eight Arcs.

In our “Now” photo, front to back, count ’em:

• The Seattle Great Wheel (2012).
• The twin roof ridges of Lumen Field (2002, originally Seahawks Stadium then Qwest Field).
• The four roof ridges of T-Mobile Park (1999, originally Safeco Field).
• The curved countenance of Mount Rainier (1 to 2 million years ago, originally Tahoma).

This pleasing juxtaposition serves both today’s saltwater tourists and the roadway’s recently arrived condominium dwellers. For them, it’s a place of play.

But little — besides the pointed Smith Tower (1914) in the distance — is the same when you zip back nearly 90 years to our “Then” scene, along what had long been named Railroad Avenue.

Taken on an overcast Friday, June 22, 1934, from the Lenora Street overpass (1930-1983), the photo reveals what we characterize as a working waterfront, with side-by-side wharves, rail tracks and a divided, wooden boulevard beneath which washed the tides of Elliott Bay.

With much of its former train traffic undergrounded in a nearby tunnel, and as cars used the timber trestle to bypass the upland business district, this byway spelled sporadic trouble. To wit, on Nov. 24, 1934, a car skidded on tracks near Lenora, plunged 15 feet through the center split and landed upside down in 3 feet of water. The stunned driver was unhurt.

Thankfully, progress on the route already was afoot. In this Depression decade, work had begun to pave the thoroughfare and close its gap, remove its above-ground electrical wiring and poles and, most important, construct a protective western seawall, finished in 1936.

Such enterprise inspired the city to give the water-hugging street a more relevant, elegant name. More than 9,000 ideas poured in, many invoking the expansive sobriquet of “Way.”

With a decision nigh on July 6, 1936, the leading contender was Pacific Way. However, in a nod to the role Seattle’s waterfront played in the late-1890s Klondike Gold Rush, as well as to the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (the city’s first world’s fair), Alaska Way slipped in as the finish-line favorite.

To honor “the men and women who pioneered the territory,” councilman and former mayor Robert Harlin appended the letter “n.”

The result, Alaskan Way, still provides a touch of humanity along the road to today’s Eight Arcs.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Ron Edge, Bob Carney , Gavin MacDougall and Mike Bergman for their help with this installment!

Below are two additional alternate images from our NOW view and 41 clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column. Among the clips are 20 exploring the fascinating process of renaming Railroad Avenue, plus 8 historical pieces by our column founder, Paul Dorpat!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 14, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 17, 2022

A parade of community continuity thrives in tiny Fall City

By Clay Eals

Is anything so timeless and appealing as a parade? From musical to commercial, from patriotic to protesting (which in turn is patriotic), a parade engages countless participants and onlookers, encompassing every age, setting, group and cause. All you need is two feet — or wheels — and the willingness to move.

Parades happen so often that movie characters on the run momentarily evade capture by joining one. In 1984, I saw a local political candidate become so entranced by a parade’s effect that after one cruise along the route he circled back to the end of the line and motored through again.

There’s just something innate that draws us together in person, what I’ve learned to label the Original Social Media: Face to Face. Especially in a neighborhood or small town, a parade embodies this, weaving a powerful spell. Seemingly everyone sees everyone, breathes the same air and exchanges smiles and waves.

And this summer, after a two-year pandemic hiatus, parades are back all over the county. One of the earliest took place June 11 in Fall City, the unincorporated burg 25 miles east of Seattle. The route, on Redmond-Fall City Road paralleling the Snoqualmie River, has served the tiny town’s annual processions since the post-World War II early 1950s.

Greater gatherings surrounded the parades, of course. Initially, the event was called the Strawberry Festival before morphing into Fall City Derby Day, saluting a Cub Scouts soap-box race and showcasing Derby Darlings atop a float. (One year, in 1968, the parade gave way to a River Drift, in which a 35-gallon metal barrel was dropped into the Snoqualmie, and citizens guessed how long it would take for the barrel to float 3.2 miles to a finish line.)

A new name emerged in 1971: Fall City Days and Logging Show. This year’s post-virus rebound was simply Fall City Day, celebrating 150 years since establishment of the hamlet’s first post office. Accoutrements included the traditional dunk tank and watermelon-eating contest.

One sign of community continuity along the parade route is a building at 337^th Place Southeast whose legacy stretches to the late 1880s, when it began life as a hotel and restaurant. Over the decades, its name, functions and roofline have changed, but it has stood as a parade touchpoint, next to the reviewing stand.

The Fall City Historical Society’s history books have tracked those incarnations faithfully, thanks in no small part to the group’s longtime director, the vigilant Ruth Pickering, this year’s parade grand marshal. “Rural towns are an important thing,” she maintains. “They’re kind of an endangered species.”

Unlike, thank goodness, their parades!

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Bob Carney, Emily and Bruce Howard and Ruth Pickering for their help with this installment!

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

Below are four documents from the Fall City Historical Society, an offbeat historical blurb from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), and three sets of additional photos that augment this column.

Parades R us!

In three groups, here are 93 additional photos (click twice on each one to enlarge it):

• 15 photos from the Memorial Stadium endpoint of the 1965 Seafair Torchlight Parade, by Katherine Drazic, courtesy of Teresa Anderson.
• 30 photos from the June 11, 2022, Fall City parade by Jean Sherrard. Click twice on each photo to enlarge it.
• 48 from the 1956 Fall City parade by Larry Divers and courtesy of the Fall City Historical Society.

Update Aug. 8, 2025, from Des Moines Historical Society on the City of Des Moines EIS authorizing demolition and preservationists’ GoFundMe for an appeal. And these recent Cascade of History podcast interviews by Feliks Banel: the Des Moines city manager, and a King County preservation architect and a Des Moines citizen group.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 30, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 3, 2022

Will Des Moines’ majestic Masonic Home be demolished?

By Clay Eals

Near the south King County waterfront suburb of Des Moines, 10-year-old Richard Kennedy tickled his accordion keys to perform the “Lone Ranger” TV theme (the “William Tell Overture” finale) in a 1964 recital on the stage of the Masonic Home of Washington.

He had no idea he would grow up to be mayor of Des Moines and later lead the Des Moines Historical Society’s effort to save the same structure inside which he’d played the clarion call.

What would Kennedy’s hometown be without the majestic, 95-year-old edifice, sparkling from its hillside for all to see from land and Puget Sound?

“Des Moines would slowly become just another place without anything to denote it from the next town,” he says. “We’ve lost so much. The history is gone, there’s very little left. The Masonic Home is the most outstanding building in the city.”

Technically, the Masonic Home — built in 1925-27 by the European-rooted Freemasons fraternal assembly as a statewide residence for elderly members and wives “who have ceased to bear the heat and burdens of the day” — was erected not in Des Moines but one mile south in the community of Zenith.

But in 1982, Des Moines annexed Zenith, and in a town known for massive retirement complexes, the Chateauesque, five-floor Masonic Home stands preeminent. As city-council member JC Harris told the Waterland Blog earlier this year, “The Masonic Home is Des Moines. We all just live here.”

Closed as a retirement center in the mid-2000s, it hosted events for several years. The Masons studied its conversion to assisted living, a tourist casino or communal workspaces but determined that rehabilitation, costing $40 million, would not pencil out. In 2019, they sought a city demolition permit and sold the home. The current owner is Sumner-based Zenith Properties, which has filed its own wrecking-ball permit request.

In response, Des Moines began an environmental review, inviting citizen comments this spring and triggering an advocacy alert by the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation. But the city, says Bonnie Wilkins, city clerk, has advised its council members to stay mum to achieve an appearance of fairness during the extended study because council comments could prompt a developer lawsuit. “It’s pretty serious stuff,” she says.

That doesn’t deter the passionate JC Harris, who promotes the Masonic Home’s preservation, envisioning it as a park, city hall and/or community center, complete with coffee or wine bar: “It’s one of the most beautiful things in all of Puget Sound, which makes it one of the most beautiful things on the planet Earth.”

The stage is set for a Lone Ranger-type rescue.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Mike Shaughnessy, Richard Kennedy, Kevin Hall, Chris Moore and Huy Phan for their help with this installment. Additional kudos go to the more than 100 people who turned out in the hot sun of May 22 to pose in our “Now” photo.

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

Below are a video of Des Moines City Council member JC Harris, six additional photos, a 1938 booklet, four reports and documents, six web links and two historical articles from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Web links:

• City of Des Moines: Zenith Properties Building Demolition Application
• City of Des Moines: Zenith Properties Building Demolition Application comment tracker
• City of Des Moines City Clerk
• Seattle Times story, Dec. 20, 2020
• Waterland Blog, Feb. 11, 2022
• Washington Trust for Historic Preservation Advocacy Alert

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 16, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June19, 2022

Bleitz’s consumer-first legacy enlivens 101-year-old funeral home

By Clay Eals

From death can spring life. Case in point: the feisty, long-lasting Bleitz Funeral Home.

The 101-year-old edifice represents a customer-focused tradition at a prominent corner, hovering over the Lake Washington Ship Canal at the south end of the Fremont Bridge.

Serving bereaved families until 2017, the same year it was designated a Seattle landmark, it has entered a new phase as a fully leased office building, anchored by The North Face apparel firm. The pandemic-era preservation triumph was stewarded by its current owner, Pastakia & Associates of Seattle, and general contractor, Bellevue-based Foushée.

The stately, 2-1/2-floor concrete structure arose just four years after the ship canal and bridge were completed. Illinois-born Jacob Bleitz (pronounced “Blites”) had worked as an undertaker in Wichita before establishing a funeral business in 1904 in Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood. After short partnerships in Fremont with morticians Edgar Ray Butterworth and John Rafferty, he crossed the bridge and settled his sole-owner mortuary in 1921 along Queen Anne’s industrial northern edge.

From the start, dealing with death transcended mere business for Bleitz. He promoted affordability and excoriated undertakers he called predatory. “The People of Seattle Have Been Outrageously Overcharged for Funerals and Materials,” roared a full-page notice in the Feb. 18, 1915, Seattle Star. His ads promised the “lowest” prices. One even warned of “graft” by competitors whom Bleitz said gave away hundreds of Christmas turkeys to induce referrals.

Long before it became popular, Bleitz also encouraged a cheaper alternative: cremation. In the late 1930s, he went further, patenting and using an ultra-hot-flame technique leaving no remains, called evaporation: “The New And Better Way … COSTS NO MORE … Gives a comfort never before known.” It didn’t catch on.

In the year Bleitz died, 1939, the family firm partnered with the new People’s Memorial Benefit Association, a cooperative that emphasized spiritual rather than material aspects of attending to the bereaved. Later, the Bleitz company became known in funeral circles for serving AIDS victims and the LGBTQ+ community when other mortuaries rejected them.

Over the years, Bleitz Funeral Home handled more than 180,000 deaths, including the cremations of famed grunge rockers Andrew Wood in 1990 and Kurt Cobain in 1994. Today the building showcases “adaptive reuse,” meriting an award in May from the Queen Anne Historical Society.

Historian Michael Emmick embodies the Bleitz legacy via family connections. Working stints at Bleitz were Michael’s great-grandfather, Sam Frederiksen (1970s-80s); father, Craig Emmick (1975-2004); and wife, Desirée Emmick, (2015-17). Since 2014, the Emmicks have operated their own West Seattle funeral business, guided by the Bleitz approach — as Michael says, “not selling people something they don’t need.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Eric Jones, Tejal Pastakia, Bob Carney and the Emmicks — Craig, Desirée and especially Michael — for their help with this installment.

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

Below are interviews of the Emmick family on video, two 2017 Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board documents, 41 additional photos, and 34 historical articles and ads from Washington Digital Newspapers (available via the Office of the Secretary of State) and The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 2, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 5, 2022

Index’s only inn perseveres amid historic charm and challenge

By Clay Eals

For more than 100 years, as a gravel road or streamlined pavement, the Stevens Pass Highway has beckoned as a cross-Cascades catalyst to intimate scenic bliss.

As we motor through a succession of tiny towns on the west side of the mountains, a rich palette of trees, bridges and railroad tracks along the Skykomish River feels so fresh, green and close, it’s as if we can reach out and touch the wide, deep swaths of crisp, wooded splendor.

The former timber and mining burg of Index, roughly 60 miles northeast of Seattle, once welcomed such pass-through traffic along its few unpretentious blocks via a 10-mile winding road from Gold Bar.

But the early 1930s brought modernization. The state constructed a shorter stretch of the highway that bypassed Index, leaving the hamlet one mile northeast of the new artery. It was, The Seattle Times stated on Sept. 13, 1931, part of “the steady movement to minimize the blockade of the Cascade range against the vast hinterland that feeds Seattle and Tacoma with produce for export and manufacturing.”

Accessible via a turn-off road and ringed by four “Washington Alps” from to 5,464 to 6,244 feet in height, Index has persevered through the decades as a mini-paradise. Remoteness has both bolstered the town’s charm and embodied its challenge.

Enter the Bush House Inn. Built in 1898 (some say earlier), the three-floor structure competed with four other hotels for hungry lodgers when the Index population topped 500. Now it’s the only hotel in the riverside town of 150.

It presides on Index Avenue, nestled against a sheer, 1,270-foot climbing wall and a stone’s throw from Great Northern rail tracks whose freight trains and Amtrak cars regularly roll through town.

The inn suffered from disrepair and closure early this century. But after a decade of energy and financing marshaled by a pair of couples — Blair and Kathy Corson, proprietors of an Index recreational firm, and Dan Kerlee and Carol Wollenberg of Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood — the extensively restored and remodeled 10-room hotel reopened last fall.

This effort merited a salute at last month’s gala of the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, which in 2009 placed the inn on its list of Most Endangered Places.

The building holds promise as not only a travelers’ getaway but also a center for weddings, events and, with a new, expansive stage, concerts and dramatic productions. To echo its original incarnation, the owners are even searching for an on-site restaurateur.

Invisible from the highway, however, the Bush House Inn begs a “Field of Dreams”-like riddle: If you rebuild it, will they come?

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Blair & Kathy Corson, Dan Kerlee & Carol Wollenberg, Louise Lindgren of the Index-Pickett Historical Museum, Jack & Heidi Miller of Husky Deli, Huy Pham of Washington Trust for Historic Preservation and Bob Carney for their help with this installment.

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

Below are 7 additional photos, 2 video interviews of the couples who co-own the Bush House Inn and 38 historical articles and ads from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Also, check out links to stories on the Bush House Inn  from the Daily Herald of Everett on Dec. 27, 2021, and July 3, 2017.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 19, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 22, 2022

A lovingly preserved house can help us find our way home

By Clay Eals

Can we go back home again? An oft-quoted aphorism says we can’t. But we all yearn to click our figurative ruby slippers.

In March, I learned that the home my grandparents had built 97 years ago on Walnut Avenue in West Seattle was up for sale. At its open house, I languished for two hours.

I imagined my young mom and her three older sisters running up and down its stairs and singing by an upright Ludwig piano in the first-floor sunroom. I pictured their pranks, one mischievously flushing a toilet while another talked with a boy on the nearby phone. I envisioned my parents’ wedding in front of the golden-brown tiled living-room fireplace, where in 2000 I posed them for a matching “Now” photo on their 50th anniversary.

Preschool-age recollections also surfaced as I sat on front-porch benches that opened into ostensibly secret storage pods. And I lingered in the remodeled kitchen where, in its former breakfast nook, I learned to sip from a straw.

In one sense, this house isn’t distinctive. Just a two-story, four-bedroom prairie Craftsman.

Yet its context, a stone’s throw from Seattle’s first indoor-outdoor community center at Hiawatha Park, has, for nearly a century, conveyed unspoiled neighborhood warmth. Seemingly everything one could want — schools, stores, even a library, ravine, wading pool and movie theater — was mere steps away.

Mainly, however, I marvel at a dwelling that has been owned by only three families, each one stewarding it with loving care.

The soon-to-be fourth family, Brandon and Alisa Allgood, hail from California’s Silicon Valley. Brandon, 47, is an artificial-intelligence executive, and his wife, Alisa, 53, is an architectural and interior designer.

Because Brandon grew up in Marysville and on Capitol Hill and has family near Arlington and Darrington, the two have long eyed a move to Seattle. They got serious in February, gravitating to the Walnut house because of its streetside stature, open floor plan, plentiful light, proximity to Alki Beach and what today is called walkability. “We didn’t want run of the mill,” Brandon says. “We like aesthetics and uniqueness.”

The pair anticipates electrical and plumbing upgrades but will retain the house’s integrity. “We realize,” Alisa says, “we have a responsibility to keep it up.”

In Seattle’s dizzying real-estate spiral, preservation comes with a price — in this case, a purchase in excess of $1.4 million. As the cliché goes, for many the so-called American Dream remains just that: a dream.

But I also know that my early time at the Walnut house eventually led me to claim West Seattle as my own Emerald City base. May similar homes survive everywhere to inspire us all.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Bill Reid, Whitney Mason, Midori Okazaki, Ann Ferguson, Mahina Oshie, Joe Bopp and especially Deb & Bill Bigelow for their help with this installment.

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

Below are a video interview of Deb Bigelow, 7 additional photos, a property record card from the Puget Sound Regional Branch of Washington State Archives and 12 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 5, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 8, 2022

Seward Park’s torii was a welcome gateway, especially for a child

By Clay Eals

Unaware of her parents’ painful memories of World War II incarceration at Camp Tule Lake in northern California, preschooler Diane Taniguchi found that weekends in the early 1950s promised a family frolic.

“We used to take joy rides on Sunday afternoon after church,” Diane said in a 2015 video, citing drives from their home in the Publix Hotel in what is now called the Chinatown-International District to a South Seattle peninsular paradise — Seward Park.

“Dad called it ‘Suwado Pock’ because he couldn’t say r’s, and his pronunciation was still very Japanese right after the war. But those were great times. It was carefree. I was 4 or 5 years old. Not a worry in the world.”

Welcoming the Taniguchis and myriad other park visitors was a cultural symbol that Diane “really loved” — an imposing, reddish span modeled on entrance structures at Shinto shrines in Japan, called a torii. Pronounced “torr-ee,” the word means “bird perch,” but such structures have become known more broadly as gateways to extraordinary spaces.

The wooden Seward Park torii had a 50-year life, starting on University Street downtown at the 1934 International  Potlatch and bearing a pro-trade sign: “Seattle — America’s Gateway to the Orient.”

The following spring, the torii (sans sign) found a verdant site at Seward Park’s entry isthmus, joining other Japanese elements, including cherry trees and an 8-ton stone lantern. It oversaw festivals and countless informal meadow gatherings through mid-1984, when Seattle Parks removed it due to decades of decay.

In 2011, the park’s centennial organizers vowed to build a new version. Fueled by $360,000 in grants and donations, a 20-foot-tall basalt-and-cedar replacement stands today in a plaza 20 feet north of the original’s tree-confined concrete foundations. At an April 2 ceremony, a crowd of 200 enjoyed musicians, dancers and speakers exulting beneath the edifice.

Officiants included Don Taniguchi, 76, honoring his younger sister, Diane, a preservationist who helped raise money for the new torii but died of cancer in 2016. Don’s thoughts also drifted to their dad, originally from Hawaii, and mom, of Tacoma, who both stayed silent about their camp challenges and the complexity of their new life while working “all the time” managing the Publix.

“They didn’t talk about the hardships,” Don says. “I guess it hurt them too much.”

From youthful eyes, he says, Seward Park and its torii bespoke “family time,” a cheerful refuge. “You felt a little prejudice, like somebody getting in line ahead of you, but you didn’t really understand why,” he says. “You didn’t think about those things. You just played. … You cherish those days now.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Paul Talbert of Friends of Seward Park and Karen O’Brien of the Rainier Valley Historical Society, as well as automotive expert Bob Carney and former Seattle Parks staffer Bob Baines for their help with this installment. For more info, visit their Seward Park torii page.

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 Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are 5 videos, 9 additional photos and 4 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Congrats! Award goes to our column founder

Longtime Seattle historian Paul Dorpat, founder of the “Now & Then” column that appears Sundays in The Seattle Times (and with “web extras” on this blog), will receive the 2022 Board Legacy Award of the Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO).

The honor will be presented during AKCHO’s annual awards event, online, from 5:30 to 7:15 p.m. Tuesday, May 24, 2022. To view the event, visit this link. Paul’s award is being saved for the end!

The award to Paul is triggered by his recent donation of a vast collection of historical photos, videos and printed materials to the Seattle Public Library so that they eventually can be accessed by anyone free of charge.

The donation reflects “your legendary loyalty to identifying and celebrating Seattle history,” says Pat Filer, award chair.

Paul, the author of many local history books, originated “Now & Then” in the Sunday magazine of The Seattle Times in January 1982. He prepared more than 1,800 columns over 37 years before retiring in 2019.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on April 28, 2022
(visit that link for many extra photos!)
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on May 1, 2022

The Beatles found good fishing for young fans in 1964 Seattle

By Clay Eals

A long-ago best friend sometimes offered a question at social gatherings as an icebreaker: “What was your first concert?” One by one, all would mention fond memories of musicians and venues. Taking the final turn, my friend would stun everyone with three words:

“Beatles, 1964, Coliseum.”

The show was an instant Seattle legend. The third in 23 cities of the Beatles’ first North American tour, the Aug. 21 stop at what today is called Climate Pledge Arena drew a sellout throng of 14,045. Mostly young teens, reportedly “20 to 1” girls to boys, each paid just $3, $4 or $5 to contribute and/or endure waves of nearly continuous ear-splitting screams that all but drowned out the foursome’s half-hour, 12-song set.

This “Beatlemania” and attendant controversies typified the entire tour, reporters summoning the swoons historically incited by the likes of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and even silent-film’s Rudolph Valentino.

What gave the Beatles’ visit a distinctly Seattle touch was their overnight at the waterfront Edgewater Inn, then 2 years old. From room 272, the “moptops” leaned out a window and famously posed with fishing poles over Elliott Bay.

Did they catch anything? No, they agreed at a press conference. Drummer Ringo Starr deadpanned, “Someone on the other side of the bay kept shouting, ‘There’s no fishing here.’ ”

Endearingly, one floor above them, 11-year-old Sandy Fliesbach, attending a wedding at the Edgewater, cast her own line. On hotel stationery she wrote a note seeking the Fab Four’s autographs, lowering it out her window with ribbon from opened gifts. She whistled, and someone below pulled in the note. A minute later, it came back out the window, and Sandy reeled it in. All four had signed it. Hundreds of girls chanting outside the inn’s temporary plywood and barbed-wire barricade were not so fortunate.

Two years later, the Beatles returned for two shows at the Coliseum. After the group’s 1970 break-up, John Lennon never had another Seattle gig (he was shot and killed in 1980). George Harrison played the Coliseum in 1974 (he died in 2001). Starr and Paul McCartney have performed here in several separate incarnations, the latter’s Wings group notching the first concert at the old Kingdome in 1976.

Astoundingly, the still-boyish McCartney, just six weeks shy of age 80, will play Climate Pledge on May 2-3. Perhaps he would twist and shout over a 58-year-old crack by parodist Allan Sherman (“Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”), who played the Opera House and bunked at the Edgewater during the Beatles’ 1964 Seattle stay:

“The Beatles are really quite unpopular, but nobody knows it yet.”

Beatles, 1964, Coliseum — just the facts

• Set list: “Twist and Shout,” “You Can’t Do That,” “All My Lovin’,” “She Loves You,” “Things We Said Today,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “If I Fell,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Boys,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Long Tall Sally.” To hear audio of their show, click here.

• 

  Sound: The Beatles’ set, measured by acoustic expert Robin Towne, was 95+ decibels for 60% of the show and 100+ decibels for 30%. (Maximum exposure without earplugs, such as an industrial plant, was recommended as 85 decibels.)

• Bucks: The show grossed $64,000. The Beatles were to earn $25,000 or 60% of the gross, whichever was greater, so after $7,000 in taxes, they were paid $34,200. Minus fees for warm-up acts, their take-home was $32,000 ($278,000 today).
• Warm-up acts: the Bill Black Combo, the Exciters, the Righteous Brothers and Jackie DeShannon. (Smash hits for the latter two came later.)
• Security: At the Coliseum were 50 Seattle police, 4 King County deputies, 14 firefighters, 6 Armed Forces police and 100 Navy volunteers from Pier 91.
• Health: Hospitalized were 2 teens; 35 others received first aid. On hand were 5 ambulances, one of which carried the Beatles back to the Edgewater.
• Souvenirs: After the Beatles left Seattle, their room 272 rug at the Edgewater was cut into 2-inch squares that sold for $1 apiece at MacDougall’s department store, to benefit Children’s Orthopedic Hospital.
• Airwaves: The Beatles had five songs on KJR-AM’s Fabulous 50 the week of their Seattle show.
• Silver screen: Playing the Paramount Theatre during the show was the Beatles’ first film, “A Hard Day’s Night.”

(Sources: The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive, and a recording of the show.)

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Kelsey Beniasch and Claudia Lew of Wagstaff Marketing, to staff of The Edgewater Hotel, to Joe Wren and Gavin MacDougall and especially to Teresa Anderson, Garnis Armbruster Adkins, Carol Griff Reynolds, Joey Richesson and Kate “Bobbey” Blessing, for their help with this installment.

Click here to see a previous “Now & Then” column  on the Edgewater.

We offer no 360-degree video for this installment, but instead we feature a video with interviews of all the participants in our “Now” photo (plus a backup), in which they reflect on the Beatles’ 1964 show at the Coliseum. To see it, click here or on the image below.

In addition, below are 8 photos, an historical essay and 58 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

To start off the extras, we have an essay by Clay examining the orientation of our “Then” photo:

‘All I’ve  got is a photograph ‘ : Flipping over the Beatles

By Clay Eals

The topic du jour is the orientation of our color “Then” photo, the well-known image of the Beatles fishing out the window of their room 272 suite at the Edgewater Inn on the afternoon of their evening show Aug. 21, 1964, at the Coliseum.

On the internet, it’s easy to find our “Then” in two versions, one in which the Beatles face right, and one in which the Beatles face left.  But which version is correct? I was determined to solve the puzzle prior to our “Now” shoot.

Details of the Beatles’ hair parts and shirt collars in the photo, compared to the same details in several other photos from Getty Images of the Beatles inside their Edgewater suite, seemed to indicate that that the facing-right version was correct. I also was skeptical of a facing-left orientation because the low-level, indistinct masses in the background appeared to me to likely depict Harbor Island and its ships and shipyards. However, the Edgewater’s website, as well as a blown-up display inside room 272 and a framed photo in the hotel lobby all use the facing-left version.

With these conflicting notions in mind, before our “Now” shoot I made a separate trip to the Beatles Suite (still room 272) of The Edgewater Hotel (formerly Inn) in the hope of figuring out the correct orientation. The Edgewater staff asserted that room 272 is in the same west/southwest-facing corner spot today as it was in 1964. When I examined the room’s windows and leaned out them, taking sample photos, it seemed clear to me that the facing-left version had to be correct.

I had two reasons for this conclusion: (1) The positioning of the fishing window immediately adjacent to the building’s corner in the facing-left version is consistent with the present-day position of a similar window along present-day room 272’s exterior wall that runs northwest/southeast. (2) Given this, if the facing-right version were correct, from the window of today’s room 272 the photographer would have looked southeast and captured in the distance the Smith Tower and the rest of Seattle’s 1964 waterfront and downtown scene, but instead we see the low-level, indistinct mass. This argued for the photographer shooting in a northwestern direction — the direction shown in the version with the Beatles facing left.

As I looked northwest from outside the room 272 window, I noted that the end of Pier 69 that jutted out in the background was not present in the 1964 “Then.” But this could be explained by separate newspaper research indicating that Pier 69 had been redeveloped in the early 1980s.

Thus, the facing-left orientation seemed the better bet when Jean Sherrard and I shot our “Now” photo on March 24, 2022. Jean looked northwest, and our four “Now” posers matched the Beatles, facing left. That’s how they appear in this post and in the Seattle Times online and in print.

But on April 29, 2022, after this column had been posted for a day, the plot thickened. New evidence and insight emerged from one of our column’s stalwart volunteers, Gavin MacDougall.

Though I had searched Google Images and Getty Images for relevant Beatles fishing photos, Gavin’s own search turned up two Getty black-and-white versions of out-the-window Beatles fishing photos that I hadn’t seen — and that obviously were taken slightly before or after our “Then.” These photos, which you can see at this link, and at this link, provide definitive evidence that the correct orientation of the photo has the Beatles facing right, not left.

Here’s why: The background of these black-and-white photos is much more distinct than in the color photo of the same situation. Clearly in the background are not only Harbor Island and silhouetted ships in for repair but also a ribbon of white further in the distance reflecting construction underway on the Fauntleroy Expressway snaking diagonally up the east bluff of West Seattle.

But how could this be, if this view is not possible from the windows of present-day room 272? The answer, as the Edgewater had told me, is that in 1964 when the Beatles stayed in room 272, the room was larger and/or likely connected to adjacent rooms, whereas today’s room 272, marketed as the Beatles Suite, is smaller and designed for a couple, not a Fab Foursome. So in 1964, the larger version of room 272 had to extend around the corner along part of the adjacent exterior wall that ran due north and south and included windows that faced due west. Thus, when the Beatles fished out the southernmost window along that wall, the photographer leaning out the window to its north would have been facing due south and would have shown Harbor Island and West Seattle in the background of the resulting photos.

That room 272 was larger and provided windows straddling the Edgewater’s west/southwest facing corner is apparent from the Getty photo at this link. There, the fishing window is shown at right, and drapes cover another window at left on a wall that is at an irregular angle to the fishing-window wall, indicating the corner.

Bottom line: Though I tried hard to suss out this question before the “Now” shoot, I should have been able to dig up the Getty Images that served as the “smoking gun.” Had I done so, we would have flopped our 1964 “Then” photo so that the Beatles were facing right. We also would have sought access from the Edgewater to the room next door to — and around the irregular corner of — today’s Beatles Suite in room 272 to shoot our “Now.”

Why take pains to explain this how this error occurred? A whimsical answer may lie in the chorus of a 1973 Ringo Starr song, “Photograph”:

“All I’ve got is a photograph
And I realize you’re not coming back anymore …”

Incidentally, while versions of the out-the-window fishing photo have been widely circulated in both orientations, its photographer is rarely mentioned. KOMO-TV archivist Joe Wren notes that in a 1995 interview that Beatles companion and confidant Derek Taylor did with the station, the photographer for the exterior fishing shot was identified as the Beatles’ official photographer, the late Curt Gunther. But such attribution is made difficult by the assertion on the Getty Images website that several photos of the Beatles inside their Edgewater suite were taken by a William Lovelace. The mystery continues, but here’s the KOMO-TV story, aired April 28, 2022:

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More photos, a ticket stub, a letter, another video, an essay,
an array of news clippings and the Beatles’ 1964 tour booklet

Here are additional photos taken March 24, 2022, the day of our “Now” shoot, of the Edgewater’s Beatles Suite and of our “Now” posers therein. At the end of this gallery you will find a brief video of our posers standing before a Fab Four portrait in the suite’s bathroom gamely making their way through a minute or so of one of the songs the Beatles sang at their 1964 show: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

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These 57 newspaper clippings document the Beatles’ 1964 show in Seattle:

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These photos depict the Beatles’ 1964 tour booklet “Beatles (U.S.A.) Ltd.,” available for purchase at their shows. The images are courtesy of Teresa Anderson. Click once or twice on each one to enlarge it. At the very bottom is the cover for the Beatles’ 1966 tour booklet, contributed by Deb Bigelow.

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Published in the Seattle Times online on April 14, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 17, 2022

A trio from a century ago bids a
warm welcome to ‘Preserving Ballard’

By Clay Eals

From about 100 years ago, three young women cheerfully invite us into Seattle’s northwesterly neighborhood of Ballard.

Their sanguine salutation seems germane, given the area’s geographic separation; the formidable length of its namesake 1917 bridge; and its storied, early concentration of work-seeking northern European immigrants who arrived by train.

As the late longtime Ballard resident Maxine Shallow Tuck genially noted in an oral-history interview, “Bus drivers used to say, ‘You got your passports ready? We’re going into Ballard.’ … Because it was a foreign country. It was Scandinavian.”

In fact, when the Ballard News-Tribune produced a 304-page, large-format history book in 1988, the title reinforced that theme: “Passport to Ballard.”

The latest “passport” will be published this month by the all-volunteer Ballard Historical Society. “Preserving Ballard” is trimmer and slimmer at 128 pages, and, as an Arcadia book, it favors visuals over text.

But its narrative and nearly 200 images cover a wide swath, including the life of the Shilshole branch of the Duwamish people and Ballard’s 27-year stretch as an incorporated city before its 1907 annexation to Seattle, along with ample views of industries, businesses, residences and churches.

The book’s cover features our “Then” photo. Clad in bloomers (less restrictive than heavy dresses and promoted by women’s rights activists), the jolly trio looks south while cavorting on Ballard’s west-flank railroad tracks, symbolizing the area’s rapid initial growth.

“For non-Native settlers, this part of the world was about resource extraction from the get-go,” says Laura K. Cooper, who led production of the book. “This was a great place for timber. That’s what really built Ballard, and the fishing industry came along after that. So from the beginning there was the need to move things around.”

The rail line, opening in 1891 and featuring a Ballard depot from 1914 to 1948, runs roughly perpendicular to the Ship Canal locks, built from 1912 to 1917, and borders the bridge-hugging Fisherman’s Terminal, established in 1914. This formative infrastructure helps define Ballard to this day.

The book complements an online innovation of the historical society, funded by 4Culture, that lets visitors click a map to see photos and data linked to 60 Ballard residences and listen to complete, decades-old audio interviews of those who lived therein, some from Polish and other underrepresented nationalities. This parallels another project that tracked more than 2,200 Ballard buildings over 100 years old as of 2016.

The overall aim, Cooper says, is as straightforward as a welcoming wave: “There are a lot of cool things that have happened here over time, and we want people to know about them.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Laura Cooper, Peggy Sturdivant and Mike Bergman for their help with this installment.

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

Below are a video of Laura Cooper plus a historical clipping from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in the Seattle Times online on March 31, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on April 3, 2022

Smile! Here’s where you can find a DNA test for your home

By Clay Eals

Whether we’ve been here 40 years or 40 days, we all yearn to embrace the place we call home. One way to do so is to see what came before.

The Puget Sound Regional Branch of Washington State Archives — a godsend to some, unknown to others — provides just such a peek, drawing 5,000 research requests annually. Among its wide-ranging governmental records is a showcase collection that can touch nearly every King County resident.

The collection, starting in the late 1930s, assembled a Property Record Card for each of 146,000 buildings, revealing year of construction, structural materials and myriad other specifics, often with crisp black-and-white photos of same.

Taken with large-format view cameras, the photos bear dates and addresses hand-scratched into their negatives, appearing in white in corresponding prints. Today they might be called a DNA test for your home. But that wasn’t their original purpose.

In 1935, King County Assessor Roy Misener sought to jettison poor data and subjective appraisals that had produced incomplete property-tax valuations. With federal Works Progress Administration dollars, over five years he hired 700 workers to create maps, interview residents and create photos to equalize assessments.

After initial work ended in 1940, if a building was upgraded, staff updated its data and took a new photo. In 1972, high-grade imaging ended. Seven years later, the collection transferred to the state archives. Ever since, copies and reprints (digital scans today) have been available to the public for nominal fees. The reasons for such requests range from nostalgic to legal.

Photos for a few sites, such as areas beneath Interstate 5, are missing. But the collection, which often provides a historic building’s only visual evidence of existence, has remained largely intact— from 1979 to 1998 inside the jet-noisy former Sunset Junior High in the north clear zone of Sea-Tac Airport and since 1998 at a facility built for the archives at Bellevue College.

That the collection survives and thrives owes to a tenacious staff led by a regional archivist who retired in March after 46 years, Michael Saunders. He is quick to credit the “innate stubbornness” of his team and support from the Secretary of State’s office, partner agencies and scores of volunteers.

Of course, digitizing, gatekeeping and otherwise managing the records is an endless task fit for the mythical Sisyphus. It requires, Saunders says, “the ability to see how a bunch of mundane and even sometimes tedious work gets you to a better outcome.” Which is, he says, to serve “a legacy of societal memory.”

In other words, for our collective psyche, there’s no place like home.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Michael Saunders for his invaluable help with this installment.

Below are 2 additional photos, 4 pages of a 20th anniversary program, a newsletter page and 24 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Also helpful was a HistoryLink essay on the King County Land Use Survey.

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Published in the Seattle Times online on March 17, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 20, 2022

Fifth Avenue Theatre endures as the pride of downtown Seattle

By Clay Eals

Pearls of promotion can bear timeless truths, as in this pair of catch-phrases 95-1/2 years apart:

• “The Magic Sign of a Wonderful Time.”
• “Joy is essential. Laughter is essential. Escape is essential. Inspiration is essential.”

The former graced ads for the Sept. 24, 1926, grand opening of downtown Seattle’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. The latter exhorts from today’s marquee. Either can apply to each era.

Beneath the hype is a bedrock message: An alluring array of entertainment venues can bolster a downtown’s durability and buoy the soul of an entire city.

No doubt the Fifth’s first-night throng — its girth likened to the spontaneous celebration that broke out at the end of World War I eight years prior — heartily agreed.

“More humanity to the square inch than was ever crowded into a similar space in this northwest corner of these United States packed the streets of seven city blocks radiating from the Fifth Avenue Theatre last night,” exulted the next-day Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The turnout, spurred by an outdoor carnival and free streetcar service, equaled “the populace of Ballard and Georgetown, Ravenna, Alki and the whole Rainier Valley.” It was “the closest approach to a human sardine can that Seattle has seen since Armistice Day.”

Inside the 2,400-seat, elaborately Chinese-themed palace, those with tickets enjoyed three stage shows, each climaxed by Cecil B. De Mille’s silent cinematic drama “Young April.”

Emblematic of a raft of vintage downtown theaters, the Fifth has stood tall through the years, supported crucially by a massive 1978-80 renovation. Sadly, many Seattle showplaces (notably the Orpheum, Music Box and Blue Mouse) have fallen, while one was preserved for a different use (the Coliseum, as the now-closed Banana Republic clothier) and two others (the Moore and Paramount) survived largely intact.

After a two-year pandemic-induced closure, the Fifth reopened in January, providing hope for all who see such institutions as instrumental to the physical and mental health of Seattle’s core.

Surveying more than a century of context and detail about the rich history of downtown theaters, longtime Seattle architectural historian Lawrence Kreisman has assembled a lavishly illustrated online talk, “Another Opening, Another Show,” which he will present at 5 p.m. March 31, for the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation.

The sponsor couldn’t be more apt, as the Trust, with the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, launched in 2020 a grant program to bolster the viability of 80 eligible historic theaters statewide.

That aim catches the 1926 sentiment of the P-I, which proclaimed the Fifth “a large asset to this city” that “far excels the ordinary.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Larry Kreisman and Huy Pham, program director for the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, as well as Victoria Dyson and Kara Terek at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel and Rachel Liuzzi of the Fifth Avenue Theatre, for their help with this installment.

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

Below are 15 added photos and 24 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in the Seattle Times online on March 3, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on March 6, 2022

The inexorable trend on many Seattle street corners: small to big

By Clay Eals

We at “Now & Then” usually focus on places we find distinctive. Meanwhile, on our city’s everyday corners, change is churning. So inured are we that our reaction is often a wan shrug.

Which brings us to this week’s “Then” photo, looking southwest across busy Northeast 45^th Street at 11^th Avenue in the University District.

Relatively few are old enough to recall this unpretentious 1906 home, with charming third-floor gables and a second-floor bay window. In this late-1930s view, the first-floor store sold furniture. In 1914, the retail space was touted in The Seattle Times as a “dandy little grocery.”

To its west, a General Motors billboard presages the property’s coming incarnation. In October 1949, the building was razed. In its place in 1950 arose a Shell service station, which, remodeled, survives today. But not for long.

A careful peek at our “Now” photo reveals a vandalized Seattle land-use sign. Beneath the graffiti, it discloses the planned construction of a 27-story edifice with 366 apartments and 52 parking spots, plus room for street-level stores and offices.

The working name of the high-rise, developed by global Onelin Capital Corporation, reflects the firm and the neighborhood: OneU. It’s one of several tall towers in the works between the University of Washington and Interstate 5, triggered by a 2017 upzone that allows construction up to 320 feet.

Julia Nagele, principal of Hewitt Seattle, which designed OneU, pinpoints the boom’s catalyst — last October’s opening of a new light-rail U District Station. “Because of light rail,” she says, “a person easily could work downtown while living near a very cool university.”

To her, the project’s symbolism is both stark and apt. “We are converting the site from auto-centric and not environmentally friendly to more than 300 places for people to live,” she says. “It’s going full-stop in a 180-degree direction, which is a good thing.”

An eye-opening feature is that into the face of floors 7-9 and 16-18 are to be carved “social greenways.” Drawings depict them as huge, open stairways to encourage residential mixing.

Symbolism and innovations aside, OneU is destined to become yet another big box in a metro area of so many new ones. Unsurprisingly, demolition permit applications have soared citywide: 609 in 2019, 676 in 2020 and 739 in 2021. Small to big is the inexorable trend.

So we are well beyond Joni Mitchell’s 1970 “Big Yellow Taxi” punchline: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” But the lyric’s lead-in line still stings: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Larry Kreisman, Joe Bopp, Wendy Shark, Sean Ludviksen, Julia Nagele and Midori Okazaki as well as to Kurt Armbruster (who brought this corner’s pending development to our attention and is featured in this week’s 360-degree video) for their invaluable help on 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 Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below are three added photos, two documents and nine historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in the Seattle Times online on Feb. 17, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 20, 2022

What can we learn about liberty from a replica at Alki?

By Clay Eals

When I led a tour for a mother and her 3-year-old daughter along Alki Beach a few years back, we stopped at the Statue of Liberty replica. I asked the girl to look up and tell me what she thought the statue was raising aloft in her right hand. Her innocent, timeless response:

“An ice-cream cone!”

The next question was tougher. What was the statue cradling in her left arm?

“A phone?”

Of course, the correct answers are a flaming torch and a tablet, the latter inscribed with the Declaration of Independence date of July 4, 1776.

The replica, in two renditions over the years, has prompted countless moments, teachable and otherwise, ever since 200 of the 8-1/2-foot-tall miniatures — modeled on the 151-foot, 1886 original in New York harbor — were erected across the country by the Boy Scouts of America following World War II. The patriotic campaign was dubbed “Strengthening the Arm of Liberty.”

At Alki, after filling a 15-block-long parade, 2,000 scouts dedicated a water-facing replica along the park’s promenade on Feb. 23, 1952. This Wednesday marks its 70^th anniversary.

Weather and dispiriting crime took a toll. By climbing her ridged foundation, vandals repeatedly yanked off Lady Liberty’s right arm, flame and seven-point crown. In 1975, she even was knocked off her base.

Further heartache surfaced in 2000 when, as scheduled, a 1952 time capsule of thousands of scout names and other ephemera in the base was opened, but water had destroyed much of its contents.

The replica assumed new poignancy after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. For days, locals congregated at its base, inscribing 1,000 paper bags that held tea-light candles and lined the Alki promenade as luminarias.

Messages ranged from anger (“You can hide, you cowards, but we will find you”) to hope (“We have really only one thing in common: freedom to believe what we want, in peace”). The Southwest Seattle Historical Society preserved and later displayed the bags annually.

A new replica arose on the old base in 2007 and, thanks to a campaign funded by inscribed bricks, was rededicated in 2008 on a sheer, lighthouse-themed base in a redesigned plaza. The battered earlier version was moved to the historical society’s nearby Log House Museum.

In 2009, fueled partly by children’s items, the historical society and Alki Community Council buried near the new replica’s base a better-protected time capsule, to be opened in 2059.

Only 100 of the replicas still stand nationwide. With liberty’s hard truths and stern ideals buffeted by today’s tyrannical forces, those visiting the Alki statue just might rediscover a measure of honest inspiration.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Sea Scouts skippers Steve Grassia, Al Bruce and Robin Kolke for their invaluable help on this installment. Also thanks to Mary Kay Walsh, who loaned the U.S. flag!

Below are 8 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and West Seattle Herald that were helpful in the preparation of this column. At the bottom, we also present a brief reflection by Paul Monk, as related via his niece Kirstie Cameron.

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Building love over time

Our “Now & Then” column often focuses on the built environment, but in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, we turn our cameras (and hearts) to the architecture of romance.

We are delighted that PacificNW magazine of The Seattle Times granted Jean and Clay the opportunity to prepare this “Now & Then Special” cover story on four longtime couples for the print edition of the magazine’s pre-Valentine’s Day edition of Feb. 13, 2022.

Below are links to:

• The personal backstory
• The stories of the four couples, with “web extras”

You also can visit the Seattle Times website for the four couples in our cover story plus the backstory. Enjoy!

THE BACKSTORY

How much do we love love? Let us (re)count the ways

And here is the Seattle Times link for the backstory.

THE BRISCOES

‘A lot of damn questions’ helped romance bloom in their 40s

And here is the Seattle Times link on the Briscoes.

ILUMIN-ROTH

From stool to stool, and house to home, their love endures

And here is the Seattle Times link for Ilumin-Roth.

OSEGUERA-WILLENDORF

‘Could I have this (second) dance for the rest of my life?’

And here is the Seattle Times link for Oseguera-Willendorf.

THE SEDLIKS

Interruptions can’t interrupt this 55-year marriage

And here is the Seattle Times link for the Sedliks.

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Published in the Seattle Times online on Feb. 6, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Feb. 6, 2022

A walk can reveal the wonder of Willcox’ walls — and words

By Clay Eals

The key to outdoor living may be short and sweet. No big plan. No long trips to the hinterlands. No special equipment. Just get up on our feet and walk.

And one of the joys of life in geographically and topographically diverse Seattle is that so many enjoyable strolls and vistas beckon outside our doors, a short bus ride or drive away.

Among the most cheerful is a 4.74-mile boulevard encircling the crown of Queen Anne Hill. Technically, the scenic route’s southwest curve is a continuum of West Highland Drive and Eighth Place and Eighth Avenue West, but most people probably think of it as the stately street just west of popular Kerry Park.

One might say the promenade is Queen Anne’s version of Alki Beach. Or, Queen Anne might say, vice versa.

What makes this corner’s panorama possible is what’s beneath it: a retaining wall featuring criss-crossing steps and horseshoe arches, highlighted by decorative herringbone brick and 60-plus sphere-topped green light standards, a bold infrastructure known by locals as the Willcox Walls.

The name is that of architect and educator Walter Ross Baumes Willcox, who from 1907 to 1922 guided some 60 projects in the Seattle area, mostly residential but a few more publicly focused, including this massive west Queen Anne hillside undertaking whose construction began in 1913 and finished in 1916.

So unusual and simultaneously artistic and functional were the walls that they — and the entire boulevard — became one of Seattle’s first official landmarks in 1976. Thirteen years later, after residents complained of the walls’ deterioration, a voter-approved levy funded their restoration.

The walls reflected the activist philosophy of Willcox himself. Acquainted with and influenced by famed architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, he advocated for consulting engineer Virgil Bogue’s visionary 1911 Seattle comprehensive plan, which fell to voter defeat in 1912.

A selection of Willcox’ words, taken from the Feb. 16, 1910, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, bespeaks an articulate approach, both utilitarian and grand:

“Open air spaces in the heart of a city, as convenient to those who must dwell therein as are the parks and boulevards to the more fortunate, make for peace, happiness and good manners, which are conserving forces in the community. …

“A haphazard, piecemeal growth of a city defeats economy, efficiency and uniform contentment, while a systematic ensemble, encompassing the convenience, comfort and pleasure of its citizens, makes for all these things and results in a city from which those who have prospered largely do not hasten, nor those less fortunate long to depart.”

It’s as if Willcox were out on a Queen Anne constitutional, talking about today.

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to longtime historian and former president of the Queen Anne Historical Society Michael Herschensohn for invaluable help on 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 Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column as soon as it’s posted mid-day.

Below are (1) four added photos, (2) a video interview, (3) a map of Queen Anne Boulevard, (4) a Dec. 13, 1974, Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board nomination for Willcox Walls, (5) a Willcox chapter from an architectural history book, and (6) four historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

An update from Jan. 19, 2023:

That’s a Wrap! Guild 45th Theater to be fully demolished — makes way for 70-unit apartment building

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Published in the Seattle Times online on Jan. 20, 2022
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 23, 2022

Wallingford’s main-street movie theater is ‘ever in our hearts’

By Clay Eals

Along Wallingford’s main street has stood a theater known since 1957 as the Guild 45^th. It’s been shuttered since 2017. Early this month, its sign and prow marquee, deemed a safety hazard after a delivery truck hit them, were torn down.

The marquee recently had injected pandemic-era whimsy and inspiration. Starting Dec. 18, 2020, its east face displayed just one word: “Scarfface.” It switched last July 18 to another movie pun: “Vax to the Future.”

The pointed humor masked a dour trend. Virus-related restrictions have sent revenue plummeting at movie theaters nationwide. Insiders note that some demographic groups (such as older women) have stopped going to movies altogether, which in turn affects the types of films in production.

’Twas not always thus. Before video rentals, DVDs and the internet, not to mention TV, neighborhood movie theaters were ubiquitous magnets. For Wallingford, the love affair started a century ago.

What became the Guild 45th at 2115 N. 45th St. was opened in 1921 by W.C. Code as the Paramount Theatre. The 40-by-90-foot building seated 475 and hosted movies and live productions, with occasional political or business gatherings.

It was rechristened the 45th Street Theatre on Sept. 1, 1933, by its new owner, theater veteran H.W. Bruen. With a neon marquee, the art-deco mini-palace became what The Seattle Times called “symbolic in architecture and design of the Century of Progress.”

Two-plus decades later, in December 1956, the fledgling, non-mainstream Seattle Cinema Guild began bookings of classic U.S. and foreign films at the 45th.

The next year, the remodeled theater acquired its present name and became a so-called art house, screening “the world’s greatest” foreign films, banning anyone under 18 and supplying free coffee and cigarettes between shows. The first offering was a French sexploitation flick, “Companions of the Night.”

The fare had broadened considerably by February 1983 when, four years after joining the Seven Gables chain, the Guild 45th appended an auditorium with 200 steeply raked seats two storefronts to its west. In 1989, it became part of Landmark Theatres.

Citing too many alterations, the city landmarks board voted 6-2 in May 2016 not to protect the Guild 45th, and it closed abruptly 13 months later. Early in 2021, its deteriorating structures, including an ex-restaurant between them, were painted with a colorful mural by Urban ArtWorks to deter random graffiti.

What will become of the Guild 45th site? One clue is that last November, LA-based owner 2929 Entertainment applied for a demolition permit.

The 1933 films on the marquee in our “Then” photo provide us with additional insight: While the theater certainly is “Ever in My Heart,” no one would be surprised if it were to give way to yet another faceless, modern monolith — like the disaster befalling the characters in “Deluge.”

WEB EXTRAS

Special thanks to Feliks Banel for his help on 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 Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column as soon as it’s posted mid-day.

Below are two added photos taken Dec. 18, 2020, by Seattle architect and guerrilla artist Todd Lawson of his clever and uncannily realistic marquee posts, 6 additional current photos by Jean Sherrard of the bedraggled Guild 45th (4 from Jan. 5 and 2 from Jan. 20), a late 1937 photo from the Puget Sound Regional Archives, 2 sets of Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board minutes, and 22 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Also, here is a link to Paul Dorpat’s Jan. 31, 1993, column on the Guild 45th Theatre!

And the best “web extra” of all may be this innovative, time-lapse account of the changing Guild 45th prow marquee in 2008, created by none other than Paul Dorpat.

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We are delighted that PacificNW magazine of The Seattle Times granted Clay the opportunity to prepare a cover story on Ruth Prins for the print edition of Jan. 9, 2022.

Below are links to:

• The cover story
• The personal backstory
• A wide array of “web extras.”

These items include kinescopes of “Wunda Wunda” shows unseen since they first aired in the 1950s and 1960s, along with photos, children’s drawings, fan letters, news clippings, songs, promotional items and original writings by Ruth Prins — all of which document the saga of the local TV pioneer who many of us as youngsters learned from and knew fondly as Wunda Wunda.

Enjoy!

COVER STORY

A pioneer for preschoolers: With ‘Wunda Wunda,’ Ruth Prins reached kids as an educator, an entertainer and an enduring emotional touchstone.

Enjoy this illustrated profile of a local legend!

THE BACKSTORY

Ruth Prins inspired an early devotee — and an entire audience

THE KINESCOPES

Enjoy this ever-expanding collection of recently transferred films of Ruth Prins’ “Wunda Wunda” shows, most of them not seen since their original broadcast — until now.

‘NOW’ VIDEOS

Longtime fans of “Wunda Wunda” sing the show’s welcome song and “I’m a Little Teapot” on Dec. 5, 2021, in Ruth Prins’ home neighborhood of Magnolia.

They also are interviewed about Ruth’s enduring and endearing legacy.

THE EXTRA PHOTOS

Enjoy this assemblage of additional images of Ruth Prins from her early days acting at the University of Washington up through her KING-TV and preschool days and beyond.

THE DRAWINGS

This sampling reveals artwork sent to Ruth Prins by her youngest of fans.

THE LETTERS

The parents of preschool “Wunda Wunda” fans overflow with praise and appreciation for Ruth Prins.

THE NEWS CLIPS

More than 200 articles, photos and ads from local — and occasionally national — publications illustrate Ruth Prins‘ impact.

THE PROMOTION

No effort was spared by KING-TV and others to promote the jewel they had in Ruth Prins.

THE ENDORSEMENTS

From tasty treats to delightful dolls, Ruth Prins was an eager saleswoman, as reflected in these materials.

THE SCHEDULE

“Wunda Wunda” generally aired at noon weekdays, but not always. Click here to see the schedule changes over its nearly 20-year run.

THE ARTIFACTS

What did Wunda Wunda’s costume, hat, puppets and dolls look like in color? Find out here.

RUTH’S WRITINGS

Unknown to many were Ruth Prins‘ writing skills. Out of her typewriter came down-to-earth, conversational and amusing prose. Here we present key samples.

THE MUSIC MAN’S SONGS

In her nearly 20 years as TV’s Wunda Wunda, Ruth Prins collaborated with several off-screen Music Men. The two longest-serving were Elliott Brown and Edward Hansen.

Here are two of Brown’s songs with a public-service theme.

See two more of Brown’s songs on The Endorsements page.

SPECIAL THANKS

This package of materials wouldn’t have been possible without the generosity and trust of Ruth Prins’ daughter, Debra Prins.

Click here to see acknowledgments as well as the clever birth announcements Ruth created for Debra and her brother Bob.

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Published in the Seattle Times online on Dec. 30, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 2, 2022

Daughter’s ‘superpower’ uncovers father’s early Seattle story

By Clay Eals

Helen Sing thinks her father is the story, but I think it’s Helen.

Last May, her brother Allen opened a box in his garage and discovered a photo of 44 Frye meat-packing workers in what today we call Sodo. Therein, Helen’s father, James Sui Sing, stands eighth from the left.

The Frye plant was destroyed by the shocking Feb. 18, 1943, test-flight crash of a top-secret Boeing XB-29 bomber that killed at least 32 people. Helen knew her father was not among the deceased, but his early life remained largely a mystery that she longed to solve.

A DNA test had helped her locate hundreds of cross-country relatives and a flurry of photos and documents. Also, Helen had retained, after her dad’s 1985 death, 50 letters she had rescued from the garbage, written in Chinese from relatives in China.

The pandemic further unleashed the Rainier Beach resident’s inner bloodhound. Dating the Frye photo was key.

She consulted Seattle Public Library, Wing Luke Museum and Frye Art Museum (it holds the surviving art collection of plant owner Charles Frye and wife Emma). She studied everything from U.S. Census records to period fashion and hairstyles.

Her chief corroboration was a wall calendar in the photo itself (on post at far left). A high-res scan revealed its month: November 1931.

Along the way, Helen unearthed myriad other details, such as her dad’s true birthdate, Feb. 29, 1904, his tenure as a Frye printer (1930-1935) and later as a restaurateur, plus the surprise that he served, likely in the late 1940s, as Seattle chair of the Chinese Nationalist Party.

Her resulting dossier is an enduring family portrait and gift that reflects skill and tenacity. “I know a little bit about a lot,” Helen says, “but I like to think that my ‘superpower’ is that I know who to ask and where to search for information.”

She also feels “the guiding hand of my father, gently pushing me toward clues and answers and people to help me.” It’s “the stone that ripples through the water.”

Her lesson nestles snugly in this time of New Year’s resolutions:

“If you can understand the circumstances of your relatives’ lives and the choices required of them, the struggles they endured but kept hidden from their children, then you might arrive at a point of respect and gratitude for the sacrifices they made to raise their families to the best of their abilities.

“I regret not knowing my dad’s history until well after he passed away. I encourage everyone to start collecting memories from their elder relatives and document as much as you can.

“Now.”

WEB EXTRAS

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 Eals, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column!

Below are three historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Also, we include (1) a video interview of Helen Sing, (2) an illustrated essay by Helen, “The Stone That Ripples Through the Water: A Journey Through Time,” and (3) a portfolio of photos of a current exhibition kindly provided by the Frye Art Museum.

And at the very bottom, courtesy of stalwart archivist Gavin MacDougall, we add a link to Paul Dorpat‘s original 2013 “Now & Then” on the Frye plant, plus a related column from 1996.

= = = = =

Video of Helen Sing

= = = = =

The Stone That Ripples
Through the Water:
A Journey Through Time

Notes for My Family by Helen C. Sing

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Standing at the water’s edge, as you pick up a stone and drop it into the water, ripples extend out in concentric circles. The stone creates waves that grow wider from its point of entry.

This is a story of how with one dropped stone into the water, I found myself unexpectedly unwrapping family mysteries, each revealing more discoveries about my dad, James S. Sing, as he established his life in Seattle after his 1928 arrival.

My four brothers and I knew about our dad’s life after he married our mom in February 1946. From that point, our lives were documented with black-and-white photos of a growing family, typical of many Americans.

We knew very little about our dad’s life, “pre-mom.” As kids growing up in the late 1940s and 1950s, we exhibited an extreme lack of curiosity about our parents’ histories.

After collecting family narratives from our mom’s Canadian Chow branch for a 2006 family reunion in Vancouver, B.C., and updating the 190-plus family narratives in 2020, our paternal Sing side weighed in at a paltry 15 members at the time. In January 2019, we knew only that our dad had an older brother who lived in Portland, Oregon, by the name of Frank, whom we met, perhaps once or twice.

Dad James passed away in January 1985, and mom Nellie in March 2016. In our combined family trees, the Chow branches facing the West grew in leaps and bounds compared to the Sing branch, sadly lopsided. We knew next to nothing about our dad.

STONE #1

In November 2018, I bought a “23andMe” DNA test kit at a Black Friday sale because it was half-price. Why not?

By January 2019, the initial results had started populating my emails. By the beginning of 2020, I received three “2^nd cousin” hits from New York and one from Boston. A 2^nd cousin match has a greater-than-99% likelihood of being detected.

On February 15, 2020, just as the coronavirus became big local news, with Seattle as the initial ground zero, I started communicating with these cousins. None of the them knew each other. I asked the three New York cousins if they would be willing to move from “23andMe” messaging to a group email to share information and photos.

On February 25, 2020, we started sharing information, trying to figure out if they were related on my maternal or paternal side. On March 4, I visited mom Nellie’s grave on the fourth anniversary of her passing, took a photo of my parents’ headstone and sent it to our group chat.

By March 5, a translation of dad’s headstone showed that James was from the same village and had the same family name as the great-grandfather of Bet and Jeff.  Nearly five hours later that day, cousin Kat emailed a 1979 photo to me showing her grandparents, father and uncle immigrating to the United States, stopping in Seattle on their way to New York City.

In the middle of the photo, taken at Sea-Tac Airport, was my dad, James, sitting in a wheelchair! It was eventually confirmed that James was Kat’s great-grandmother’s big brother. I had an Aunt Chun! I was able to send a photo of my grandmother “DONG Shee” to these cousins. She would be these younger cousins’ great-great grandmother.

From February 25 to March 5, in a matter of 10 days after sharing photos and information by group email, we determined that Bet and Jeff’s great grandfather Frank was James’ older brother and that Kat’s great grandmother Chun was James’ younger sister.

I knew that a young James had traveled to the United States in 1917 with his father CHOO Chung Hock and his uncle. At some point, James’s father told him to return to China, as his mother was ill. Older brother Frank (b. 1896) was married with two daughters and had remained behind in Guangdong Toishan, China.

James married wife #1, who later miscarried twins. When James and Frank left for America, Frank left behind his wife and two daughters, ages 4 and 2. Based on these ages, we determined that they left China in 1925.

In May 2021, Kat and I determined that the 2^nd cousin from Boston (Henry) was descended from their great-grandmother Chun’s branch. Kat’s grandfather and Henry’s grandmother were siblings. We believe that between all branches, including those of James, Frank, Chun and their uncle, whose family also settled in the northeastern United States, along with the family of their younger brother, Siu Wai, there are likely more than 100 living relatives!

The East side of my family tree started sprouting sturdy branches. What are the odds that five cousins, strangers to each other, living in different parts of the country (Seattle, New York city, Brooklyn, Rochester and Boston) would take the same consumer DNA test around the same time? These younger cousins are my first cousins, twice removed, due to our age and generational differences.

STONE #2

In spring 1985, in one of my visits to mom Nellie after Dad James passed away in 1985, I saw that Mom had thrown away a stack of blue aerogram letters addressed to Dad. Mom explained that they were of no value to us because we could not read Chinese and we didn’t know the people in the letters.

Instinctively, I grabbed the whole stack of correspondence from the recycle bin, stuffed the pile into a garbage bag and placed it in the back of my closet.

Fast forward to June 2020: After Frank left for America with James in 1925, his wife adopted a son. KS was born in 1929. Frank’s two daughters eventually married Americans and immigrated to New York. KS remained behind in Hong Kong, married and had two sons, all eventually immigrating to the U.S.

After locating the two sons (my nephews CT and TM), I pulled out that garbage bag full of letters left untouched for 35 years in my closet. Of the 50 letters, 15 were from KS to his Uncle James in Seattle. After scanning the letters, TM provided general translations for the letters from James’s mother, younger brother, wife #1, daughter-in-law and granddaughter as well as correspondence from his father to his Uncle James.

After I had James’ headstone translated, I noticed that his 1904 birth year did not match “1903,” his listed year of birth on his legal documents. James wrote his headstone inscription and provided it to the monument company before his passing.

Translated, it says that he was “born in the 29^th year of Guangxu.” Emperor Guangxu lived from 1871 to 1908. I found an article online on how to read a Chinese tombstone. It stated that you add the number of years to the start of the emperor’s reign.

In Guangxu’s case, he was a 4-year-old child emperor beginning in 1875. So, 29 + 1875 = 1904.

Eventually searching through the lunar calendars for 1903 and 1904, along with a clue from one of the 1970 letters from wife #1, in which she stated that she celebrated his (Western) birthday in April that year, I determined that dad’s lunar birthday of Jan. 14 (1^st lunar month, 14^th day) converted to a Gregorian/Western birthday of Feb. 29, 1904, a leap year.

Because 1970 was not a leap year, wife #1 mistakenly took his Gregorian birthday (Feb. 29) as his lunar birthday (second lunar month, 29^th day) and converted it to a Gregorian date of April 5, 1970.

I don’t know why he recorded 1903 as his birth year unless he needed to be older, or perhaps because 1903 was a leap year in the lunar calendar, or he was confused with the Gregorian calendar.

STONE #3

In May 2021, brother Allen scanned and sent a photo he found in a box in his garage of Dad James standing among 44 employees while working as a printer at Frye & Co., a meat-packing plant in Sodo on Airport Way S. I wanted to date the photo to determine when dad worked at the plant.

Nieces Vanessa and Nicole scanned the photo at high resolution and noticed a wall calendar that seemed to indicate 30 days in a month starting on a Sunday, with the name of the month appearing to indicate a longer month such as September or November.

After finding articles about the Feb. 18, 1943, crash of the Boeing XB-29 bomber from nearby Boeing Field into the Frye plant, I wondered if James was still working at the plant in 1943.

In my research, I read that plant owner Charles Frye and wife Emma had an extensive collection of paintings, many of which were hung at the plant when they ran out of space at their First Hill mansion. Noticing that many large paintings could be seen on the plant wall in the Frye photo, I contacted Cory Gooch, chief registrar at the Frye Museum.

One of the men in the photo looked like the owner, Charles Frye. She confirmed that it was he. Charles Frye passed away on May 1, 1940. This left the calendar options of November 1931, September 1935 or November 1936.

Another man in the photo, wearing a heavy overcoat over his suit, seemed to indicate November rather than a balmier Seattle September. A search of women’s fashion and hairstyles suggested an early 1930’s date. An ad showing women’s fashion had a dress and hairstyle very similar to the one worn by the young woman standing in front of the counter (center) in the Frye photo. The ad line says, in part, “Only 1932 conditions make these low prices possible.”

Cory and Kayla Trail, collections & exhibitions assistant at the Frye, found a 1931 plant survey that seemed to indicate that due to the location of the Frye office, the fire would have been survivable. Frye property records from the Puget Sound Regional Branch of Washington State Archives sent from a friend showed that the office building constructed in 1927 contained a full basement.

Both my brother Phil and I remember seeing a second photo of James and another Chinese employee standing at their print-shop workstation seemingly in a basement along with other employees at their workstations. The photographer may have stood on a stairway or floor above the workstations. In the first Frye photo, another Chinese man stands 12^th from the left.]

In June 2021, while searching the Seattle Public Library website, I found the 1940 U.S. Census and located “James S. Sing.” James’s entry stated he was living at 719 ½ King St., Seattle. James filed his “paper son” documents (see footnote below) on Jan. 19, 1928 in San Francisco. By December 1928, James was already in Seattle.

In July 2021, I went to Chinatown to try to locate where dad lived in 1940 and at least from 1935 on, based on the census. I found that the current location of the Wing Luke Museum is at 719 King St. and that the Freeman Hotel was located in the upper two floors of the museum.

In August 2021, I emailed Special Collections at Seattle Public Library trying to determine when James worked at the Frye plant and when he worked as a printer at the print shop in Chinatown. Our family knew he had also been a printer in a Chinatown print shop.

A wonderful librarian replied that James Sing worked at Frye & Co as a printer from 1930 to 1935, based on the R.L. Polk city directories.

From 1937 to 1946, he worked as a printer/manager at the Chinese Star Printing Co., at 711 King St. We had not known the name of the print shop in Chinatown.

The mention of “star” jogged a memory, and I looked in Dad’s stack of correspondence and found a receipt/invoice pad with the name “Chinese Star Printing Co.” with a photo of a military man on the cover. Further research revealed that the star emblem was the official symbol on the flag of the Republic of China (1928-1949; Taiwan). The military man was a young Chiang Kai-shek, the military leader of the Republic of China.

The information on dad working at Frye & Co. (1930-1935) along with the fashion ad, would confirm that the Frye employee photo was taken in November 1931.

STONE #4

In September 2021, brother Allen found two more photos of Dad James in group photos of the Kuomintang (KMT), a political party of the Chinese Nationalist Party (anti-Communist).

One photo was definitely dated “December 9, 1928” and was the first meeting (grand meeting) of the NW branch of the KMT with nearly 70 people in the photo, taken in South Canton Alley, Seattle Chinatown.

On the back of the 1928 photo was a note “13 Goon Dip” and “9 James Sing” identifying the photo location of Dad James and businessman Goon Dip, who owned the Milwaukee Hotel. Revered by the community, Goon Dip was appointed honorary consul of China during the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and, later, permanent consul until his death in 1933.

I contacted the Wing collections manager, and after showing him the second photo, taken on Oct. 24, 1948 (likely for the 20^th anniversary of the original 1928 grand meeting), the manager indicated that it was taken downstairs on King Street in front of the KMT office, which also housed the Chinese Star Printing Co. I now knew where Dad James worked on his second job in Seattle.

With the knowledge that the print shop and the KMT office shared the same address, our family realized that our dad was more involved with the KMT than we had known. As a child, I remember Mom mentioning the “Kuomintang,” but I did not know what it was. According to the Seattle Public Library librarian, the Chinese Star Printing Co. was no longer listed as a business in the Seattle Street Address directory in 1947.

In February 1946, James married Nellie, and by October 1946, twin sons were born, with another son born in August 1947. It would seem that James, with a growing family, needed to earn more income.

By 1948, “Jim Sing” was listed in the Polk directory as working at Louie’s Chinese Garden. No Polk directory was produced in 1947, so James could have been working at Chinese Garden in 1947.

The Wing sent a copy of an April 10, 1951, Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, “Chinatown Detests Communism Evil,” with a photo of James Sing in front of the “Kuo Min Tang” office at 711 King St. It quotes James and identifies him as “past Chairman of the Seattle branch.”

James was probably the chairman of the KMT in the late 1940s when that 1948 photo was taken. He is standing in the back of the photo, against the KMT building, under the “K” on the window.

One of the translated aerograms (year unknown), which was a letter from a “nephew” from Taiwan, was addressed to James c/o Chinese Garden. James worked at Chinese Garden from 1948 to 1958.

The letter mentions that this “nephew” could make his way to the United States to carry on or share James’ duties so he could take a break due to his old age. He would need a job when he arrived.

In 1949, James moved his now family of six to a home on Beacon Hill. By 1951, James was the past chairman of the local KMT branch.

We knew that dad served as an informal banker, since Chinese families found it difficult to obtain loans from the local Seattle banks. Families paid a monthly fee, which James collected and recorded. When a loan was needed, he provided the funds and the recipient would repay the loan with interest.

While James worked at the Chinese Garden and Gim Ling restaurants, there was a safe that securely held the deposits. Several years ago, the father of one of my close friends recounted this arrangement. Shirley remembers sitting in her father’s car when he would stop by our house to drop off the money from his family. Dad was respected and trusted in the community.

From 1962 to 1972, Dad and a cousin co-owned the Sea Dragon Restaurant in Puyallup after finding Chinatown Seattle overcrowded with Chinese restaurants and hoping to take advantage of the untapped Chinese food scene about 30 miles south of Seattle.

Unfortunately, Dad retired, and the Sea Dragon was sold at the time of President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972, enhancing the popularity of Chinese cuisine in America. Charlie’s Restaurant & Lounge took over the space in 1972 and still stands today.

Dad constantly practiced his calligraphy even during his rest breaks at the restaurant and after he retired in 1972. Businessmen would have him draw Chinese characters for their business signs atop their stores or restaurants.

He once showed me a calligraphy project in which he compiled and demonstrated 10 styles of calligraphy. Dad even convinced a visiting Chinese master erhu musician to come to our house to show him how to play the erhu after he retired. I came home one day to find a University of Washington Chinese art professor showing him water color techniques!

Among one of the retrieved letters, I found one from January 1973 written by a San Francisco friend of Dad. Loosely translated, it said:

“Christmas greetings! I learned that you have retired and closed the restaurant. Good for you to enjoy your old age and have a good family. Your achievements were due to your talents and your abilities to adapt. If other people were in the same boat as yours, they might not have the same achievements.”

In today’s vernacular, Dad was able to “pivot” from immigrant to political party member to chairman, from printer to restaurant manager, owner and community banker. Add calligrapher, amateur painter and musician in retirement. Most important, he was Dad in our family of seven. Here is an overall timeline:

• 1917 arrived in the United States with his father and uncle.
• 1925 arrived in the United States for the second time with older brother.
• 1928 Jan. 19 filed his paper son documents in San Francisco.
• 1928 Dec. 9 in Seattle as part of the first meeting of the Northwest KMT branch.
• 1930-1935, printer at Frye & Co., meat-packing plant, 2305 Airport Way S.
• 1937-1946, printer and manager at Chinese Star Printing Co., 711 King St.
• 1948 Oct. 24, 20^th Anniversary of the Northwest Kuomintang branch.
• Late 1940s-1950, chairman of the Seattle Kuomintang branch.
• 1947-1959, manager, Louie’s Chinese Garden, 516 7^th Ave S.
• 1959-1962, manager & co-owner of the Gim Ling Restaurant, 516 7^th Ave S.
• 1962-1972, manager and co-owner of the Sea Dragon Restaurant, 113 E. Main St., Puyallup.
• 1972-1985, retired at his Beacon Hill home.

In the last three years, with one stone after another, and with the help of family members and the discovery of many more, this journey has filled in so many gaps in my dad’s early life in Seattle. It also has given his children a fuller picture of his struggles and sacrifices to make a life for his family.

I have so much respect and gratitude for both my parents in their respective journeys from China to the United States, twice for my dad, and from Canada to China to Canada and finally, to the United States for my mom.

We will never know their full stories, wasting too many years, left only with faint memories of a childhood full of mysterious clues, waiting to be pieced together to reveal the truth — their truth.

I would encourage you to speak with your parents and grandparents while they are alive, to follow and preserve their “footprints in the sand” before the incoming tide of time washes away their memory, leaving us with regret for time lost.

– – – – –

Helen’s footnote regarding the term “paper son”

A “paper son” is explained here. As an early teenager, my dad illegally immigrated to the United States in 1917 and again in 1925 through Mexicali on the southern California border. He jumped ship at some point before docking in southern California and traveled up through California.

By his second entry in 1925, the Immigration Act of 1924, according to Wikipedia, “introduced quotas for immigration based on national origin, creating a quota of zero for Asian countries, as well as forming the United States Border Patrol.” This required that Dad had to provide documentation. There have been many documentaries done on this “paper son” phenomenon.

In part, due to my dad’s immigration status, my parents were always careful not to tell us everything, although I knew that he came through Mexicali. That is why the translation on his headstone was important in telling the truth of when and where he was born. He literally took the truth to his grave.

That is why I believe he was actually born in 1904, based on his traditional Chinese listing of his date of birth. He would have had no reason to lie in Chinese on his headstone, written in a way that immigration officials would not understand. How many kids grew up knowing the name of prominent Seattle immigration attorney Dan Danilov? He was always concerned with the earlier version of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

Chinese were allowed to remain in the United States if they could document that they were sons or daughters (mostly sons) of legal citizens (Chinese parents). They had to file affidavits declaring that they were the son or daughter of an American citizen (Chinese).

I have my dad’s “paper son” documents. This was common in the early 1900s, and many Bay Area Chinese would testify that their “government” documents were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The affidavit was signed by a known citizen who would testify that he “knew” this affiant was born in “such and such” city to “such and such” American parents.

When I started researching my dad’s early history, I knew that the typical Ancestry.com documents would not be helpful, because it was never going to be a matter of finding a straight-line progression of his footprints through government documents. Only when Dad filed his 1940 US Census, married my mom in 1946, applied for Social Security (enacted in 1935) and paid taxes would his U.S. government documents start to appear.

This is why I have such respect and gratitude for my dad in what he was able to achieve in his lifetime. He spent two years of high school (1940 Census), which was two years of night school at the old Broadway High School, learning English after he arrived in Seattle in 1928. Many immigrants did the same. Then in 1930, according to the Polk Directory, he was working at the Frye plant as a clerk and printer — hired by an American company!

= = = = =

‘Human Nature, Animal Culture:
Selections from the
Frye Art Museum Collection’

The exhibit opened June 12, 2021, and runs through Aug. 21, 2022. It looks at Charles and Emma Frye’s art collection through the lens of their businesses and includes archival materials and photos.

The images below are courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.
To see full descriptions for the entire exhibit, click here.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

= = = = =

Related ‘Now & Then’ columns

To see Paul Dorpat’s Feb. 9  2013, column on the another crash near Airport Way, click here. And to see his column about the fire station that responded to the 1943 bomber crash into the Frye plant, see below.

Here are two of what The Seattle Times calls “postscripts” — items that follow up stories (including “Now & Then” columns) printed in in its PacificNW magazine.

———

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Dec. 19, 2021
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Dec. 19, 2021)

The bigger picture: More rare photos of
Jimi Hendrix’s last Seattle concert emerge

By Jean Sherrard

Last summer, I naively thought it would be easy to visually verify Jimi Hendrix’s final appearance in Seattle and in the continental United States.

After all, the date was only a half-century ago, July 26, 1970, just a few weeks before the legendary guitarist died. The venue was the city’s prominent but fading baseball cathedral, Sicks Stadium. And thousands besides my early teenage self were there. Surely many were clicking away.

How wrong I was.

All the usual sources came up goose eggs. To my relief, however, Dave DePartee’s name popped up on a rock ’n’ roll fan site. DePartee, just 16, had used a point-and-shoot camera to snap two color pictures, one of which we showcased in our July 25 “Now & Then.” Grainy and distant, DePartee’s were seemingly the only stills of a major event in music history.

Wrong again!

After the column was published, an email from Scott Wyatt landed in my inbox. He had stood next to the stage on that soggy Sunday, wielding his Nikkormat camera. Proof was attached: a stunning, close-in black-and-white of Hendrix.

“I was just getting into photography,” Wyatt says, “but Hendrix’s was the only concert I ever shot. And it was like no other I’d ever attended.”

While studying architecture in New York, Wyatt held a summer job at a Longview sawmill. He and friends often trekked to Seattle for weekend shows. The Sicks gig was “uniquely intimate,” he recalls. “To me, Hendrix was a god, and I was right up front kissing his feet.”

In the early 1970s, Wyatt and his wife joined the Peace Corps and traveled to Iran, where his camera granted him special access in a country on the verge of revolution.

Back stateside, he worked as an architect, rising to become CEO of NBBJ, a Seattle-based global architectural firm. Retired after 30 years, he now attends Gage Academy, engaging a new passion: oil painting.

WEB EXTRAS

Here is the original “Now & Then” column on Hendrix at Sicks, published July 25, 2021 — click it to see the column and its own “web extras”:

Here are additional “Then” photos of Hendrix from Scott Wyatt:

For a photo essay by Scott Wyatt about his Peace Corps stint in Iran and Afghanistan, click here.

———

(click and click again to enlarge photos)

(Published in the Seattle Times online on Dec. 19, 2021
and in the PacificNW Magazine print edition on Dec. 19, 2021)

Good and grief, Charlie Brown: The razing of Mercer Island’s
former East Seattle School signifies a mixed preservation year

By Clay Eals

Undergirding this Postscript is one of the more charming homilies in comic-strip history.

“Life is rarely all one way,” says Linus in a Peanuts installment from Sept. 17, 1973. “You win a few, and you lose a few!” Charlie Brown replies, “Really? Gee, that’d be neat!!”

Two “Now & Then”-related preservation wins emerged in 2021:

• The La Quinta Apartments on Capitol Hill became a city landmark March 22, and its new owner signed a controls agreement Sept. 27. Tenants and Historic Seattle, whose quest to save the U-shaped structure we explored last Jan. 31, breathed a collective sigh of relief.
• The stunning, south-facing view of tiny Ursula Judkins Park in Magnolia was protected by a city hearing examiner’s ruling Oct. 19 that blocked proposed mega-mansions on the steep slope nearby. We featured a downtown skyline view from the park on Jan. 5, 2020.

But we were not spared the loss of the former East Seattle School on Mercer Island, near Interstate 90, at the turn of the New Year.

As we noted in “Now & Then” on July 28, 2019, the 1914 building had anchored the island’s first community hub, operating as a public school until 1982 and as a Boys & Girls Club until 2008.

Filling the 2.9-acre parcel will be 14 single-family homes. But the Mercer Island Historical Society is somewhat cheered that the city will require inclusion of a physical reminder of what came before.

“We have identified 200 square feet by the northeast corner of the property,” says Jane Meyer Brahm, co-president of the historical society. “We’ve talked about a paved area with an interpretive sign and hopefully a miniature representation of the archway that faced west, with information not just about the school but the entire East Seattle neighborhood.”

The extrapolated lesson becomes a Charlie Brown corollary: In preservation, often something irreplaceable has to fall for us to make sure that others remain standing.

WEB EXTRAS

Here are the original “Now & Then” columns on La Quinta Apartments from Jan. 31, 2021, and the view from Ursula Judkins Park from Jan. 5, 2020, along with the July 28, 2019, column on East Seattle School. Click on each to see each column and its own “web extras”:

Here are an additional photo and a video on East Seattle School:

Calling all “Wunda Wunda” fans! Come honor her by taking part in a group photo with this “Wunda Wunda” standee at noon this Sunday, Dec. 5, 2021.

Ruth Prins, who played “Wunda Wunda” on KING-TV from 1953 to 1972, died Nov. 6 at age 101. Jean Sherrard and I are staging the group photo so that it can appear in an upcoming tribute to Ruth in PacificNW magazine of the Seattle Times.

The photo will be taken in Ruth’s longtime neighborhood, at Magnolia Boulevard Viewpoint, between Howe Street and Montavista Place. (See map below.)

The viewpoint has a large parking lot, and if it fills up, there is plenty of nearby parking space along the scenic boulevard.

We are grateful that no rain is forecast, but it’ll be a chilly 41 degrees, so bundle up. The backdrop will be the Space Needle, part of downtown and, if it’s visible, Mount Rainier. We will aim to take the photo shortly after noon, and we should be done by 12:30 p.m.

If you have any questions, please call or email me. Hope you can come!

Clay Eals
(206) 484-8008
ceals@comcast.net

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in the Seattle Times online on Dec. 2, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Dec. 5, 2021

Questions light up a childlike look at the Van Asselt flambeau

By Clay Eals

Today we return to you, dear readers, for help with one of our periodic puzzles. This one invokes the delights of childhood.

We speak of a 20-foot brick-and-metal monument that looks to be an elevated gyroscope, standing sentinel at the east end of Van Asselt Playground next to the mixed-income Seattle Housing Authority neighborhood of NewHolly (formerly Holly Park) in South Seattle.

In summer 2020, George Scarola, a friend and NewHolly resident, asked what I knew about this unmarked pillar. Off and on, through sporadic digging, I’ve learned some but not nearly enough.

From the invaluable, handwritten Don Sherwood research files at Seattle Parks comes its name — the French term “flambeau,” which Sherwood describes as “a flaming torch sundial that was common in the South: a gaslit smudge in the orchards and by whose light the children played.”

As verified only by a 1964 Seattle Times photo caption, it was sponsored by local garden clubs and built by the federal Works Progress Administration in 1940. Sherwood adds that it bore a lighted wick, and a paved area and fireplaces were part of its “pageantry.”

Which garden clubs? Who designed it? What did it cost? Why was it erected in Holly Park? Did it salute flight and next-door Boeing? Was it ever lit? And why does no plaque interpret it?

Larry Webb, a retired auto-service manager and pro-racecar driver from Covington, grew up in Holly Park starting as a first-grader in 1943. He and friends played hide-and-seek in nearby brush but never saw the flambeau lit. Once, he recalls, vandals wrested an adjacent softball backstop and hung it from the tower’s speared, rounded top.

Karen Spiel, a West Seattleite who retired this fall after 33-plus years at Seattle Public Library, grew up “a few skips away” from the monument in the 1960s.

“We used to call that thing the sundial,” she says. “We couldn’t figure out how it worked, but we had lots of weird kid games where the sundial was home base. Sometimes we would walk around and peer up at it, trying to figure out how it worked. We were sure that it could tell you the time, if we just knew how.

“When it got dark, we wanted to stay out as long as we could. We pretended that we couldn’t hear our moms calling us, but when Vern’s mom, whose house was closest, started calling Vern, we knew it was time to head home.”

Her youthful wonderment is persistent, even today: “What a charming and mysterious thing it is!”

Indeed.

Readers, can you clear up any more of its mystery?

WEB EXTRAS

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

Below also are six historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

In addition, we report that a reader named D. Carver of Marysville posted this comment on the Seattle Times website today:

“My 1973 book about sundials says that this is an armillary sphere. The slanted spear, i.e. the gnomon, casts a shadow on the lower half of the ring, or band, where the hour marks are.”

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in the Seattle Times online on Nov. 18, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 21, 2021

‘The Spirit Returns 2.0’ unveils a dual look at landing anniversary

By Clay Eals

Time was, a round-numbered anniversary was a straightforward occasion to celebrate. No longer, in the case of our city’s birth. Today we can witness a more complex — and richer — commemoration.

This month’s round number is 170, the number of years from Nov. 13, 1851, the cold and rainy day when the so-called Denny Party famously landed at Alki Beach after traveling west from Illinois and sailing north from Portland to establish a new home.

It’s the date carved into the “Birthplace of Seattle” obelisk that has stood at Alki since 1905.

Of course, complications arise from long-repeated references to that simplified tale:

• The 22 who landed on Nov. 13 were not the first Euro-American settlers who arrived in what became known as Seattle.
• Besides Dennys, other families were in the Nov. 13 group, with the familiar names of Boren, Bell, Terry and Low, calling into question the “Denny Party” designation. (All except the Lows later were rewarded with Seattle street names.)
• The obelisk identified the married women in the group merely as “and wife.”
• The 1851 landing does not denote Seattle’s official birth. The city was incorporated in 1865 and, after its charter was voided, was re-incorporated in 1869.

The most egregious error, however, lies in the story’s neglect for the presence of Native Americans for thousands of years prior to the landing. The obelisk’s “birthplace” reference thus reflected solely the perception of immigrants, many who forcefully dismissed (and later eradicated) the lives and culture that existed before their arrival.

On Nov. 13, 2000, the Southwest Seattle Historical Society began correcting the course, launching “The Spirit Returns,” an exhibit telling the Duwamish and settler stories at the organization’s Log House Museum at Alki.

One year later, it unveiled new plaques on the beach monument. The markers recast the settlers as the Alki Landing Party, added the wives’ names and honored the generosity of city namesake Chief Seattle and his Duwamish and Suquamish tribes.

This fall, the historical society and the Duwamish Tribe have teamed to go further, mounting a thorough follow-up: “The Spirit Returns 2.0: A Duwamish and Settler Story.” This venture is hosted at two West Seattle sites: the historical society’s 1904-vintage museum and the Duwamish Longhouse, which opened in 2009 on West Marginal Way.

In conversations that shaped their displays, the organizations decided to focus on differing aspects but also to weave a common thread — the early acts of friendship between the natives and settlers. The quest, as the historical society says, is to “uncover a new way to think about Seattle history.”

WEB EXTRAS

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

Below also are (1) a photo of the exhibit poster, (2) an “epilogue” by Alki historian Phil Hoffman, (3) nine more photos from the 2000 opening of “The Spirit Returns” and (4) a photo and Seattle Times coverage of the Nov. 13, 1951, centennial of the settler landing.

Special thanks to West Seattle’s Deborah Mendenhall for preserving and sharing her 2000 slides of “The Spirit Returns” opening ceremony, and to Bruce and Emily Howard for their expert slide-scanning skills in helping make these images available to the public for the first time in color!

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in the Seattle Times online on Oct. 21, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 24, 2021

From Blanchard to Bergman, Seattle’s transit saga keeps moving

By Clay Eals

While leading historical tours in West Seattle’s shopping hub, which in 1907 was named The Junction for its streetcar intersection, I often assert that transportation fuels our very existence. It guides where we reside, work and play. To live, we’ve gotta move.

This, of course, applied at the turn of the 20th century, when autos were new and owned by only a few. So to quickly cross town, Seattleites frequently rode the rails of a cable car or electric streetcar. Originally charted by 13 companies, the routes evolved into a grid that gave shape to downtown and outlying neighborhoods (dubbed “streetcar suburbs”).

To document this, historian Leslie Blanchard, a longtime city engineer, assembled a landmark book, “The Street Railway Era in Seattle: A Chronicle of Six Decades,” published in 1968.

Enter Mike Bergman.

Growing up atop Queen Anne Hill, Bergman pestered trolley-bus drivers about how their vehicles worked. Clerking at the downtown library in 1968 while a senior at the old Queen Anne High School, he repeatedly observed Blanchard examining documents and even introduced himself to the researcher. The seeds of Bergman’s future were growing.

Fifty-three years later, he is a retired planner, with 16 years at Sound Transit and 20 years at King County Metro. Emulating Blanchard with countless study hours at the Pacific Northwest Railroad Archive in Burien, Bergman has produced his own large-format book, “Seattle’s Streetcar Era: An Illustrated History 1884-1941,” to be published by WSU Press.

The book’s launch event will take place 2-4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 4, 2021, at Highline Heritage Museum, 819 SW 152nd St., Burien. Proof of vaccination and masks are required.

Blanchard’s 1968 primer is long out of print. Surviving copies go for hundreds of dollars online. But Bergman’s book, with 130 crisply reproduced historical photos and 13 new maps, offers a fresh chance to, as he writes, “give the reader more of a feeling of being there.”

That feeling — in today’s city of 737,000 people, clogged with 461,000 cars — might be elusive. But Bergman’s book evokes the social and political trends of a time when citizens surmounted Seattle’s legendary hills aboard railcars, akin to San Francisco’s famed fleet but enclosed because of our chillier clime.

Highlights include the saga of the Queen Anne counterbalance, the ingenious, gravity-powered underground rig that propelled cars up and down the district’s 18%-grade hill. Its can-do ethic reflected the era.

Bergman also charts the city’s bumpy takeover of the streetcar network in 1919, when yearly trips peaked at 133 million, as well as the system’s demise and conversion to rubber-tired buses by World War II.

Then, as now, civic debate over public transportation was rife. But as Bergman notes, today’s multi-jurisdictional light-rail web is steadily expanding while shaping a Seattle that just keeps moving.

WEB EXTRAS

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

Below also are (1) a video interview of Mike Bergman, (2) a photo of his book cover and Leslie Blanchard‘s, (3) a 1925 Seattle streetcar map courtesy of Ron Edge , (4) video of a 2017 Bergman presentation and (5), in chronological order, 15 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and other online newspaper sources that document Leslie Blanchard’s pace-setting streetcar research. Of these clippings, six are earlier “Now & Then” columns by Paul Dorpat, our column’s founder.

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We are delighted that the editors of PacificNW magazine of The Seattle Times asked us to prepare a cover-story package for the magazine’s print edition of Sunday, Oct. 10, 2021, on the topic of vicarious vacations. Call it an epic “Now & Then.”

Here’s the introduction:

The places we visited when we were young stand stubbornly, often joyously, in our minds and hearts.

In this collection, we delve into these memories as illuminated by long-ago travel photos — many of them submitted by readers of our “Now & Then” column.

We also return to these sites, in images kindly contributed by professional and amateur photographers in places that we collectively cannot or choose not to revisit at present because of the coronavirus.

It’s a way of taking vacations without leaving home. Enjoy the trip!

And below are links to 12 fully illustrated vignettes, including video interviews, preceded by the Backstory. Special thanks to the friends and others we called upon to snap “Now” photos out of the goodness of their hearts. We hope you enjoy it all.

— Jean Sherrard and Clay Eals

BACKSTORY — by Jean

• 

  Savoring the sweet peach of memory
  ‘Somehow bouncing off all that ageless beauty can prompt the hitting of a reset button’

VIGNETTE 01 — by Jean

• 

  Mount Rushmore, 1994
  ‘When I was young, I wanted to hear about a place and wanted to see it’
  —Hai Thi Nguyen

VIGNETTE 02 — by Clay

• 

  New York harbor, 1963
  ‘I was obviously very secure in myself … that innocent confidence’
  —Marti Dell

VIGNETTE 03 — by Jean

• 

  Copenhagen, 1965
  ‘A text of independence … I passed reasonably well’
  —Astrid Anderson Bear

VIGNETTE 04 — by Clay

• 

  Iguazú Falls, Argentina, 2011
  ‘It was a moment of grace and gratitude’
  —Lizeth Gutierrez

VIGNETTE 05 — by Clay

• 

  The JFK Eternal Flame at Arlington Cemetery
  ‘There was absolute devastation … This was very important’
  —Linda Turner

VIGNETTE 06 — by Clay

• 

  Expo ’74, Spokane, 1974
  ‘This must have been what Century 21 was like’
  —Gavin MacDougall
  

VIGNETTE 07 — by Clay

• 

  Chicago lakeshore, 1988
  ‘To explore without having to go on an expedition’
  —Elancia (Lancie) Williamson

VIGNETTE 08 — by Jean

• 

  Australian outback, 1986
  ‘The most exotic place in the world’
  —Bruce Greeley

VIGNETTE 09 — by Clay

• 

  Lake Michigan chalet, 1966
  ‘It was magical … The soul is still there’
  —Kristen Woodward

VIGNETTE 10 — by Jean

• 

  Banff, Alberta, 1979
  ‘I had never seen a lake that was so blissfully blue’
  —Kara Kyro

VIGNETTE 11 — by Clay

• 

  Pinoy Hill, Seward Park, 1954
  ‘You really want to hold onto your culture’
  —Ranesto (Ron) Angeles

VIGNETTE 12 — by Jean

• 

  Paris, 1967
  A highlight of their lives
  —The Rev. Theodore and Cherry Dorpat

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Published in the Seattle Times online on Sept. 30, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 3, 2021

‘Important conversations’ fuel 130-year Woman’s Century Club

By Clay Eals

For whom is the 19th century known?

Answers abound, but a half-dozen progressive women from Seattle claimed it as their own during the century’s final decade.

Because of educational, occupational, social and political strides, especially the right to vote, this local group adopted the phrase “the Woman’s Century,” forming a club with that name in 1891. The designation also took off nationally throughout the 1890s.

To no surprise, the appellation was appropriated commercially. The Singer Manufacturing Co. placed full-page ads headed “The Woman’s Century” in turn-of-the-century editions of McClure’s Magazine. The ads touted Singer sewing machines and typewriters for providing “increased time and opportunity for women’s rest and recreation or for other occupations from which they had been debarred.”

In Seattle, club founders were more high-minded. An early organizational history states that amid “the sordid atmosphere of a rapidly developing western city,” they felt the need to gather “for intellectual culture, original research and the solution of the altruistic problems of the day.”

Leading them was Carrie Chapman Catt, who soon took on coast-to-coast fame, succeeding Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and, when ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution was nigh in 1920, founding the League of Women Voters.

Such sturdy stock flourished in the club’s early decades. In 1926, members helped elect the first female Seattle mayor, Bertha Landes, a former club president. In 1933, they hosted a reception for famed aviator Amelia Earhart.

The club’s talks and teas held an additional purpose, to raise money for a permanent headquarters and theater on Capitol Hill. A three-story brick edifice, with “Woman’s Century Club” etched above its entrance, took shape in 1925 at the southeast corner of Harvard and East Roy.

Club events took place there for 40-plus years, but thinning membership prompted its sale in 1968 and conversion to what became the charming Harvard Exit Theatre, with movie auditoriums on two floors. The club still met in its parlor, but screens went dark when the building was resold in 2014 and renovated by Eagle Rock Ventures. The main tenant today is the Mexican Consulate.

Now based at Dearborn House on First Hill, the club sponsors provocative presentations and funds an annual scholarship for a young woman “with promise.”

Members appreciate the club’s focus on history and the arts. They also revere its trailblazing legacy. In its 130th year, Debra Alderman, vice-president, says, “We need to continue to have important conversations.”

We are a little more than one-fifth of the way through the 21st century. For whom will it be named?

WEB EXTRAS

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

Here are video interviews of three Woman’s Century Club leaders: (1) Cheri Sayer, treasurer and past president, (2) Debra Alderman, vice-president, and (3) Twila Meeks, scholarship chair.

And here, in chronological order, are 21 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and other online newspaper sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in the Seattle Times online on Sept. 23, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 26, 2021

In celebration out of darkness, Horiuchi mural inspires reunion

By Clay Eals

Memorable moments abound naturally at Seattle Center, our collective keepsake from the 1962 World’s Fair. And for me, its touchstone is the amphitheater west of the Space Needle, anchored by the rich hues and galvanizing composition of its 60-by-17-foot mosaic mural by Paul Horiuchi.

Both arresting and unifying, the juxtaposed Needle, green grass and mural bear a timeless appeal, enveloping us like a hug. Where else, over the past six decades, could we rather have passed time alone in urban contemplation or enjoyed an outdoor experience with a festive crowd?

I’ve long presumed that the mural’s warmth and complexity derived from the art itself, but thanks to a recent reunion of Horiuchis at the mural, I know it also springs from a stinging saga.

Born in 1906 in Japan, Horiuchi first delved into ink-wash painting as a boy. He came to the United States in 1920, becoming a railroad worker in Wyoming until World War II, when he was fired for being Japanese and lived largely in hiding with his young family in a truck while laboring as a janitor and gardener.

Postwar, after a move to Seattle, Horiuchi’s artistic career took off. Fifteen years later, the Century 21 Exposition commissioned what became the soft-spoken collagist’s best-known and most beloved piece. His melding of odd-shaped and multi-colored chunks of glass from Venice, Italy, was touted in 1962 as the largest single work of art in the Northwest.

Brian Horiuchi, a descendant and L.A. screenwriter-director who organized the reunion, sees accessibility and emotional truth in his great uncle’s creation.

“Though it’s abstract, it doesn’t strike me as intellectualized or at all forced,” he says. A family gathering at the amphitheater, he says, becomes a pilgrimage to a tangled but triumphant legacy: “I think there’s celebration with the darkness, for sure.”

His 5-year-old daughter, Cosima, a budding artist, catches the symbolism while twirling before the parabolic mural: “It’s about feelings.”

My own feelings about the mural hover to amphitheater events such as Pete Seeger inspiring a 1997 Northwest Folklife audience to sing along to “Amen/Freedom/Union” with the new Seattle Labor Chorus, as well as, more recently, the perennially mesmerizing performances of Eduardo Mendonça and Show Brazil.

The long ribbon of such occasions bespeaks permanence — and survival amid sporadic talk of redesigning Seattle Center, especially a scuttled late-1980s Disney scheme.

The mural’s endurance also breeds comfort that its maker expressed in a handwritten message, shared at his 1999 memorial service:

“I have always wanted to create something serene, the peace and serenity, the quality needed to balance the sensationalism in our surroundings today.”

WEB EXTRAS

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

Also please click here to see a Queen Anne Historical Society story on the mural’s 2011 restoration.

We present an array of additional extras related to this column’s topic.

Here are video interviews of four Paul Horiuchi descendants attending the July 13, 2021, family reunion at the Seattle Center Mural Amphitheater: (1) Brian Horiuchi, (2) Mark Horiuchi, (3) Grant Horiuchi and (4) Trish Howard.

We also present two other videos from the Seattle Center’s Mural Amphitheater: (1) a May 25, 1997, Pete Seeger performance of “Amen/Freedom/Union” at Northwest Folklife Festival and (2) a May 28, 2018, performance, also from Folklife.

Below we present three examples of other Paul Horiuchi artworks from the private collection of Brian Horiuchi and Rowan Maness.

Here, in chronological order, are 22 historical clippings from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library) and other online newspaper sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in the Seattle Times online on Sept. 2, 2021
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 5, 2021

Tacoma’s totem-pole takedown aims to ease tribal trauma

By Clay Eals

All the arguing over tearing down what some consider to be inappropriate public monuments becomes palpable once you hear the revving-up of chainsaws.

The roar came to Tacoma’s Fireman’s Park, the South A Street vista overlooking the port’s industrial tideflats, at 7 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 3. That’s when Tacoma Power workers hoisted cherry-picker buckets and began slicing into pieces a 118-year city landmark — the Tacoma totem pole.

Capped by an eagle, it was erected just before then-President Teddy Roosevelt’s May 22, 1903, visit to Tacoma as a lasting way to promote the City of Destiny in favorable comparison to northern neighbor Seattle. Described as 75 to 105 feet long, with some 15 feet underground, the pole bore a plaque calling it “the largest totem pole in the world,” a status touted for decades but eclipsed elsewhere.

First it stood at 10th Street next to the old Tacoma Hotel, then was moved one block north in 1954. It came down in 1974-76 for extensive restoration and was steadied in 2014 by a tall metal brace.

Its most prominent national role came in the 1927 silent film “Eyes of the Totem” (working title “The Totem Pole Beggar”), helmed by famed director W.S. Van Dyke and restored and re-premiered in 2015 by the Tacoma Historical Society. As shown in our “Then” photo, the pole figured strikingly in the melodrama.

Trouble is, the pole, long said to have been carved by Alaskan Natives hired by Tacoma businessmen, recently has been deemed both inauthentic in origin and purpose and unrepresentative of the indigenous Puyallup Tribe, which sought its exile. “There has been a lot of trauma,” tribal council chair Annette Bryan has said, “and we have to tell the true story to be able to heal.”

Tacoma officials agreed. They plan to commission new Coast Salish art for the park while storing the pole’s pieces and working with the historical society to display them with appropriate interpretation.

Debate rages on, however. Doug Granum of Southworth, who led the pole’s mid-1970s restoration, calls its amputation tragic. “Destroying history,” he says, “is right out of the Communist playbook.”

The feelings of Don Lacky, former member of the Tacoma Arts Commission who fervently pursued the pole’s preservation, are more mixed. “I can understand why the Puyallup nation finds it offensive,” he says. “It would be like Russia putting up a monument here in the United States.”

Meanwhile, 46-year Tacoma resident Verna Stewart, one of a few non-city staff or media witnessing the two-hour chainsaw takedown, was grateful to see removal of what she calls “another American history lie.”

WEB EXTRAS

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

We present a huge collection of extras related to this column’s topic.

Below are 14 additional NOW photos, four other photos, one postcard and, in chronological order, 119 historical clippings from the Tacoma News Tribune and other online newspaper sources (including two period movie reviews!) that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

We also present four videos: (1) comments from Amy McBride, Tacoma’s arts administrator, (2) comments from Don Lacky, former Tacoma arts commissioner, (3) comments from Verna Stewart, 46-year resident of Tacoma, and (4) a start-to-finish, 43-minute account of the totem pole’s takedown.

In addition, we present a provocative essay by Southworth artist Doug Granum, who led the restoration of the totem pole in 1976 and strongly opposed its takedown. Below the essay are photos of the pole taken by Granum prior to its 1976 restoration.

We also present (1) an Aug. 5, 2021, press release from the Tacoma Historical Society announcing the ability to see online its restoration of the 1927 silent film “Eyes of the Totem” and (2) extensive packets from three recent meetings of Tacoma’s arts and landmarks preservation commissions. The packets include letters from citizens, staff assessments and historical photos and graphics.

In addition, here are two “Eyes of the Totem” video links:

• “Eyes of the Totem” trailer (length: 0:44)
• “Eyes of the Totem” documentary by artTown (length: 8:52)