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Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 14, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 17, 2023

Where to find ‘golf utopia’ in 1931? No lie: at Mount Rainier!

By Clay Eals

It was outlandish 92 years ago. It’s outlandish today. But out on the land immediately south of Mount Rainier, there once arose, in golfing vernacular, an alluring ace.

For two Depression-era months in the summer and fall of 1931 at aptly named Paradise, the gem was a nine-hole golf course.

Don’t believe it? Photos, news stories, a logbook and even a blueprint prove that Paradise Golf Course was no high lie.

On opening day, Aug. 8, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it “golf utopia,” and not just for the up-close views of the 14,411-foot peak. Paul Sceva, then Rainier National Park manager, claimed that every drive had 30 yards more carry than on any other course in America. The reason? The 5,000-foot altitude sliced air resistance to a minimum.

“There is no question about it,” said its architect, Roy Herbert Dobell, of Aberdeen. “The ball travels 25% farther up here in the skies. I’ve proved it many times.”

The course also provided “a most interesting feature to the tired business man,” the P-I reported. “Every fairway is downhill.” A car regularly waited at hole No. 9 to carry golfers back to the first tee, which teetered over a bluff, a breathtaking 300 feet above hole No. 1’s fairway.

The Northwest Hickory Players, a 10-year-old, no-dues club of 125 golfers who play with vintage clubs and duds, recently drove to Paradise to revel in the place of their period predecessors. The club’s Martin Pool, of Kenmore, labels the setting a “spectacular novelty.”

By the 1920s, golf’s national popularity had soared. Pool’s research indicates that the park’s concessionaire proposed the course to boost sagging business at the mountain’s lodge, especially overnight stays.

“Golf is a country game, not a city one,” responded Horace Albright, then National Park Service director. “It can be justified in parks easier than tennis. Anyway, I want to try out the thing, and as the Rainier Company needs revenue more than any other company, I am disposed to let them try the experiment.”

Some 200 men and women, mostly from Puget Sound but also from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, St. Louis, Niagara Falls and Tokyo, Japan, gave the course a try. Fees at the time were $1.50 for 9-hole play and $3 for all day.

Of course, the remote locale invited unique challenges, including a pair of bears who ambled the greens at dusk, snapping off bamboo flag sticks and pulling out cups. Then there was the weather. When snow blanketed the area in early October, the course closed, never to reopen.

Today, it’s one of history’s sweet spots.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Martin Pool, Gary Smyres, John Quickstad, Rob Ahlschwede of the Northwest Hickory Players, along with Ben Nechanicky and Mount Rainier National Park curator Brooke Childrey for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below are 2 documents , 2 additional videos, an additional photo, a 6-page log book and blueprint and, in chronological order,  4 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.

The above video is contributed by Kevin Davis, who used blueprints, news clips and LiDAR data of Mount Rainier to re-create the 9-hole Paradise Golf Course.

 

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A BONUS!

This column installment begins below, But first a delightful bonus above. Here we present a one-minute radio commercial for First Bank, which is how Seattle-First National Bank branded itself from 1975 to 1977. Click the red promotional record below to hear the commercial, titled “Another Nice Thing.” Next to the record are images from its sleeve. Enjoy!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 24, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 27, 2023

A former bank on Denny Way, but not its site,
retains its status as a Seattle landmark

By Clay Eals

Can a Seattle landmark lose its protection? If can if the Seattle City Council overrules its Landmarks Preservation Board.

In the 50-year history of the city’s landmark program, the council rarely has approved such a reversal. But it almost did so last January, before a compromise saved a building but not most of its surrounding site.

The site, at 566 Denny Way, is known mostly for its notable neighbors: the Space Needle, the Monorail, the KOMO-TV complex, the Chief Seattle statue, Denny Park (the city’s first), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the gaggle of South Lake Union mid- and high-rises informally known as Amazonia.

Since 2009, the site has operated as a Walgreens, but it took shape in 1950 as a Seattle-First National Bank branch, among the firm’s “customer-friendly” banks built after World War II.

The building — with its gently concave roof, stone logo plaques and brick-faced and limestone entries, augmented by a curved drive-through lane, parking lot and prominent identifying brick pillar — embodied design known today as Mid-Century Modern. It also brought stature north of downtown to a district of wood-frame houses leveled in 1928-30 during the final phase of the hill-sluicing Denny Regrade project.

Today, it bears unfortunate earmarks of decline: persistent graffiti and a closed front entrance to deter theft. But in 2006, the Landmarks Preservation Board designated the building exterior and site a landmark for its design, architects (Lister Holmes, John Maloney) and contribution to neighborhood identity.

Last year, the building and site faced the final step in the landmark process. Specific controls agreed to by Walgreens and the landmarks board and staff headed to the City Council, which routinely OKs such negotiated agreements. Not this time, however.

Backed by urbanist housing advocates, a council committee voted 4-0 on Dec. 9 against landmark controls for the building and site. Led by chair Tammy Morales, committee members said preserving a one-floor, auto-centric building and parking lot in a dense neighborhood “doesn’t make sense” amid a citywide housing crisis.

Heritage advocates disagreed. They also said the committee vote threatened the landmark board’s autonomy and expertise.

Their lobbying produced a compromise: On Jan. 10, the full council voted 9-0 to protect the ex-bank building but open most of the rest of the site to development. No plan to develop the site has surfaced.

The debate spotlighted the council’s desire to foster affordable housing despite its inability to compel property owners to build it. In addition, it addressed transfers of development rights, and it refocused attention on which landmarks are worth saving, especially those that express the city’s more recent history of change.

Discussion surely will continue.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Michael Houser, Michael Herschensohn, Leanne Olson, Tom Rasmussen, Nick Licata, Deb Barker, Kathy Blackwell, Karen Gordon, Erin Doherty, Midori Okazaki and especially Eugenia Woo for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below are 4 landmark-related documents  and, in chronological order, 33 historical clips (including 11 clips that detail how Seattle’s landmark ordinance came to be in 1972-1974) 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 Aug. 10, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 13, 2023

Photographer grateful his images can ‘hit the moment in time’

By Clay Eals

You grow up an ordinary guy on the outskirts of Los Angeles. You’re not great at academics, but in the late 1960s you pick up a camera and shoot for the high-school newspaper and yearbook. Later, you work at McDonalds and a Ford plant. You deliver sailboats around the country. In 1979, you move north, bouncing from Granite Falls to Green Lake to the Alaska town of Valdez and, finally, to Shoreline.

All the while, you immerse yourself in enormous concerts by the biggest names in rock, blues, country and folk, your camera a constant companion. Over more than 50 years, you amass a rare archive.

You’re Steve Schneider, whose musically panoramic imagery fills “The First Three Songs: Rock & Roll at 125th of a Second,” a 220-page coffee-table compendium whose title alludes to the brief time at the opening of shows when promoters typically let photojournalists work up close. The tome bolsters Schneider’s uncomplicated mantra: “It’s always been about excitement, about fun. I just want to get the shot.”

The 71-year-old has earned day-job pay from documenting conventions of professional associations and occasional journalistic assignments (UPI had him shoot a 1984 Seattle campaign visit by Democratic VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro, see below). But nights and weekends are a different story.

His “Who’s Who” concert subjects range from CSNY to Pearl Jam, Dylan to Cobain, Bonnie Raitt to Carlos Santana, Willie Nelson to Paul Simon, to McCartney, Clapton, Jagger, Springsteen, Bowie and, yes, the Who. Whew!

Schneider’s most enduring focus, however, has been the trippy Grateful Dead, known for its freeform shows and faithful “Deadheads.” He has seen at least 100 Dead concerts. More than 20 appear in the book.

His Dead shots began with a May 25, 1974, gig at UC Santa Barbara featuring then-beardless leader Jerry Garcia. Exactly 21 years later, Schneider captured a greying Garcia at his last Seattle concert, at Memorial Stadium. Garcia died 76 days later at age 53, and Schneider’s portrait filled a page in Time magazine’s tribute.

The band persisted in various forms, most recently as The Dead & Company, which disbanded in July. Its fourth- and fifth-to-last shows were at The Gorge Amphitheatre. Schneider was there, part of “the family.”

For the Dead, and all of Schneider’s star subjects, the most compelling factor has been the music itself. “It once was all new,” he says. “The songs hit the moment in time. Today you enjoy the song, and it brings back good memories. I just preserve a bit of history, that moment in time that I saw.”

You might say it’s what keeps his Dead soul alive.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Steve Schneider for his invaluable help with this installment!

Below are 26 additional photos (not enlargeable here)  and, in chronological order, 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.

 

 

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Published in The Seattle Times online on Aug. 3, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Aug. 6, 2023

Water cannons evoke big blazes fought by fireboat Duwamish

By Clay Eals

Wildfires often command today’s attention. But how’s this for a different kind of wild?

Early on May 20, 1910, at the foot of Vine Street along Elliott Bay, a kettle of melted asphalt sprang a leak, mushrooming into a “blazing pile of more than 100 tons of inflammable asphalt” and producing “the thickest smoke that ever rolled up from a city,” reported The Seattle Times.

The fire destroyed Independent Asphalt Co. and damaged Occidental Fish Company nearby but could have been catastrophic for the waterfront if not for gushers from “the highest powered fireboat in existence,” the Duwamish. Thousands of tons of water — shot from the vessel’s cannons for more than an hour, aided by two land-based engines along Railroad Avenue (now Alaskan Way) — doused the flames.

Eyewitnesses said the sight of “streams from the fireboat playing across her bow was the prettiest firefighting spectacle ever witnessed in this city.”

The inferno came 10 months after the launch of the steam-driven Duwamish, named for the city’s Native American tribe and only river. The fireboat fought decades of water-proximate fires, many with dramatic smoke plumes from both the conflagrations and the fireboat’s aging steam engine. Dieselized in 1949 and retired in 1984, the Duwamish endures as a city and national landmark at South Lake Union.

Seattle’s first fireboat — and the first one on North America’s west coast — was the Snoqualmie, launched in 1891. Sold in 1932, it became a freighter in Alaska, where it burned in 1974. The city’s third fireboat, the Alki, launched in 1927, lingered for decades at Lake Union and recently was scrapped. Thus, the in-between Duwamish is the sole old-time survivor.

West Seattle’s Bob Carney, a retired electrical-parts salesman who first toured the Duwamish at age 8 in 1968, could be its biggest historian and fan. He is rivaled only by Beacon Hill’s Steve Walker, who traces his maritime affection to “The Sand Pebbles” (1966) starring namesake Steve McQueen, “the king of cool,” as a military steamship engineer.

Walker, a state ferry retiree, helms the Duwamish, moored permanently at the Historic Ships Wharf next to the Museum of History & Industry. He and Carney lead Sunday tours, spouting gentle cannons of marine lore for visitors.

Today’s four operating Seattle fireboats are the Chief Seattle (launched in 1984), the Leschi (2007), Fire One (2006) and Fire Two (2014). During summer festivals, their pumps propel a sizeable spray. But the most inspired show emerges from the deck of the Duwamish where, for a few gripping moments at its disabled water cannons, anyone can imagine being a waterborne hero.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Molly Michel, Seattle Design Festival; David Cueropo, Seattle Fire Department; Xin Tong, Kristin Wong, Tom Liu, Devon Lawrence, Tom Smith and especially Bob Carney and Steve Walker for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below are a video interview of Steve Walker, a historical timeline and fact sheet by Bob Carney, 38 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 6 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 27, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 30, 2023

An overdue return trip for railway workhorse and zoo touchstone

By Clay Eals

We at “Now & Then” usually take our “Now” photos at, or near, the same spot as the “Then” images, but this week, the spatial spread is greater. We’re talking 35 miles.

At least the locales are in King County, and you may abide the distant pairing because the fundamental function of our subject is to move people and things from one place to another.

Those who lived here as children between 1953 and 1980 (or as adults with kid-like awe) likely recall with warmth and admiration, if not worship, the colorful locomotive #1246 that greeted visitors inside the south entrance of Woodland Park Zoo. The Great Northern Railway gifted the steamer to the city on the cusp of dieselizing its locomotive fleet.

Built in 1907, it had what today would be called a “wow” factor. To fully appreciate the gleaming engine, more than 15 feet tall, you had to look way up. In person, it demanded honor and deference — more than could be conveyed by mere visual or verbal depiction.

Of course, #1246 possessed a mobile past that long predated its stationary role as a zoo touchstone. For decades, it toiled on rails from Portland to Vancouver, B.C., and over the Cascades to and from Wenatchee.

For a time during the locomotive’s zoo stint, a placard heralded #1246’s historic status as a consolidation-style engine, featuring two small pilot wheels followed by eight 55-inch-diameter drive wheels:

“They were slower and less spectacular than earlier, lighter types, but their initial (starting) tractive effort was superior, and they could start and pull longer trains. For more than 75 years, they were the workhorses of American railroads, and their performance in mountainous terrain played a significant part in the development of the west.”

The narrative fits “The Railroad Changed Everything” tagline of Snoqualmie’s Northwest Railway Museum, which brought #1246 back to King County in late April after nearly 30 years of negotiations with owners in desert-like southern Oregon. Though looking “like it was pulled up from the bottom of a lake,” says Richard Anderson, executive director, it is reassuringly intact, complete with “grime and grease” from when it last operated 70 years ago.

Restoration will take years, but Anderson says #1246 already stands as a “massive and powerful” asset among the organization’s 75 rail vehicles. “You can walk right up to it and touch it,” he says, and the steam legacy adds “a sense of life.”

Eventually it will bolster an anticipated 35,000 square-foot addition to the museum’s current 24,000 square feet — just in time to awe the senses of a new generation of children.

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Kevin Weiderstrom, Bob Kelly, Richard Anderson and Dan Kerlee for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below are 34 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 31 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 13, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 16, 2023

A century ago, a Seattle speech foreshadowed a president’s death

 By Clay Eals

Today we ruminate over presidents of advanced age. But a century ago, the U.S. president was Warren G. Harding, then just 57.

In 1923, his third presidential year, Harding mounted a grueling, two-month journey through the American West, with final stops planned in Washington, Oregon and California. Before sailing north to Alaska (then a territory), he addressed 25,000 on July 5 in Tacoma. Back south in Seattle on July 27, he spoke to 30,000, including many Boy Scouts, at Woodland Park and 30,000 at filled-to-capacity University of Washington (now Husky) Stadium.

Six days later … he died.

His Seattle speeches were the last for a president who — despite affability, enthusiasm and a statesman’s countenance — left professional and personal scandals in his wake. Today, historians rate him among America’s worst presidents.

A rural Ohio newspaperman who had risen to U.S. senator, Harding was a reluctant compromise candidate during the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago, emerging from a proverbially smoke-filled room.

Three years after his election, his 5 hours in Seattle played an unintentional role in his demise. He had traveled 5,246 miles via rail, car and steamship in just 22 days. After his Woodland Park appearance, plus a downtown parade and reception at Volunteer Park, his major speechifying ended at the UW.

There, wrote biographer Francis Russell, Harding’s cheeks looked green, and his jaws were “set in pain.” While speaking, the president “hesitated, slurred his words [and] called Alaska ‘Nebraska.’ ”

Midway, Harding “began to falter, dropped the manuscript and grasped the desk,” recounted Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce (and later president), who sat behind Harding, picked up the scattered sheafs and quickly organized and fed Harding the remaining pages. Harding, Hoover wrote, “managed to get through the speech.”

“PRESIDENT ILL!” screamed a Seattle Times banner the next day. Reportedly contracting ptomaine from poisonous crabmeat en route from Alaska, Harding was ordered to bed rest on his train. His tour abruptly ended.

“PRESIDENT IS DEAD” shouted the Seattle Post-Intelligencer front page on Aug. 3. His evening passing, in a San Francisco hotel, came from a heart attack. Five hours later, in Vermont, his vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, was sworn in as his successor.

“He had no business being president, but strange things happen,” says Mike Purdy, presidential historian, of West Seattle, who says Harding lacked the wisdom and vision for the role.

Harding himself offered confirmation: “The presidency is hell. There is no other word to describe it,” he once said. “I knew this job would be too much for me. I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Ron Edge, Greg Lange, Wendy Malloy, Gigi Allianic and Craig Newberry of Woodland Park Zoo, the PBS series “The American President” and especially Mike Purdy for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below are 2 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 60 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 June 29, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 2, 2023

Look closely for the ferries’ floating billboards for Century 21

By Clay Eals

Countless times have we seen this placid, pleasing “Then” scene — two Washington State Ferries passing each other while criss-crossing Puget Sound.

But look more closely.

It’s 1962, and each ferry bears a 40-foot-long banner advertising the Seattle World’s Fair. Three-foot-tall letters proclaim the exposition’s futuristic moniker, Century 21. After “21” is the fair’s official logo, an arrowed circle resembling the biological male symbol and the astrological symbol for Mars. Its arrow points upper right, to space-age progress. Inside the orb is a skeletal cartoon globe. Throughout our region that year, the logo was seemingly everywhere.

But look even more closely.

Before “Century” is the same logo, only in reverse. The arrow points upper left. To the “Northwest,” perhaps? Or representing the double-ended, ambidextrous ferries themselves?

The speculation comes from Paula Becker and Alan Stein, who wrote the definitive 2011 coffee-table book “The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and Its Legacy.” The two otherwise puzzle about the inverted logo, which in their research they never saw reversed in any other context.

The banners, which transformed all 21 state ferries into floating billboards starting in June 1961, were prepared by the state and authorized by Gov. Albert Rosellini. The ads not only bolstered fair attendance but also helped boost 1962 ferry traffic to record levels: 3.2 million vehicles and 9.8 million people.

Our main “Then” photo itself is also distinctive. Most extant photos of the bannered ferries are in black-and-white, and they usually show only one such vessel, not two.

The photographer was then-25-year-old William “Bill” Benshoof, who captured a south-facing view of the Kehloken (foreground) and Rhododendron ferries on the Mukilteo-Clinton run while courting 21-year-old Wylene “Willie” Feske, the woman he would marry Nov. 30 that year.

Fresh from a Navy stint, he was working on the Minuteman missile project for Boeing, while she was beginning a phone-company career. Each living with family near White Center in 1962, the two visited Bill’s aunt on Whidbey Island, hence the ferry trip, and took in the big-city fair.

“It put Seattle on the map,” Bill says. “It was our Disneyland.” Willie recalls “how excited people were. They all had to come to Seattle to see the Space Needle and the center.” Bill liked “the funny-looking elevator” called the Bubbleator inside the Coliseum (today’s Climate Pledge Arena). Willie delighted in a Pacific Northwest Bell exhibit “where you could talk on the phone and see each other.” With a laugh, she recalls telling a friend at the time, “That’s never gonna happen.”

Could bannered ferries happen again? Perhaps (wink!) with our next world’s fair?

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Dina Skeels, Jade D’Addario of the Seattle Public Library Seattle Room, Ian Sterling and Christy Grnaquist of Washington State Ferries, Emily & Bruce Howard, Paula Becker, Alan Stein and especially Bill & Willie Benshoof for their invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video this week.

Below are 8 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 31 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 June 15, 2023
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 18, 2023

Soothing steamboat runs ended in upriver Snoqualmie in 1917

By Clay Eals

All 13 of those posing in this week’s idyllic “Now” scene came to the riverbank across from downtown Fall City by car. So did Jean Sherrard and I. Indirectly, the needs and wants of us and our collective forebears are why this section of the Snoqualmie River hasn’t seen a paddle-driven steamboat in well over a century.

In the late 19^th century, steamboats, also called sternwheelers, were part of Puget Sound’s celebrated Mosquito Fleet and a prime mode of transport for hops, timber and people in rural waterways. But their navigation fell victim to unmistakable signs of growth and progress — the complicating cables and booms of cross-channel ferries and bridges, the parallel routes of new railroad lines and the coming popularity (and rumble) of automobiles and trucks. Steamboat runs upriver as far as past Duvall, ended by 1917.

Thus, any rivercraft sailing past Fall City today consists only of recreational rowboats, rafts and kayaks.

But oh, for the days of steamboats, yearn childhood pals Steve Barker and Jack Russell. Now straddling age 78, they devoted their four most recent years to assembling a new, large-format book, “Steamboats on the Snoqualmie.” Its 148 pages overflow with 130 historical photos, six intricate maps and myriad details of elegant vessels from a seemingly gentler time, with names like the Traveler, the Ranger and the May Queen.

The softcover volume focuses on what we might call three “S-es”: the Snoqualmie River and to a lesser extent its downstream siblings, the Skykomish and Snohomish — a system emanating from the Cascades and snaking to saltwater in a northwesterly direction from above Snoqualmie Falls to Everett.

Russell, of unincorporated Skyway (between Seattle and Renton), and Barker, of Duvall, met in the fifth grade in 1955-56 at Hawthorne Elementary School in the Rainier Valley. Their families bore sternwheeler connections that buoyed their 67-year friendship.

Barker, a retired banker, was the primary writer and Russell the researcher. Russell also parlayed his steamer passion into an adult vocation he still practices today. He runs a Fishermen’s Terminal-based charter service on the 1993-vintage Christine W, the only commercial sternwheeler on the Sound. It embodies an appeal the book can only attempt to capture.

“It’s the smell of the steam and the cylinder oil. It’s not a diesel chugging away,” Russell says. “It only goes 5 to 6 mph, so it’s a gentler motion. And steam whistles can be very pretty, very melodious. It just sounds different and feels different than a propeller vessel.

“And when the paddlewheel turns, you can hear the wheel hitting the water. It’s a soothing sound.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Ruth Pickering, Lisa Oberg and especially Steve Barker and Jack Russell for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below are a video of Jack Russell and his Christine W sternwheeler, a newsletter cover, 3 additional photos  and, in chronological order, 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.