I’ve grown fond lately of returning to the snapshots I took of the neighborhood during my nearly daily Wallingford Walks between 2006 and 2010. (I should probably still be at it.) I’ll share (or push) some of these over the next few days or longer, and find a general name for them all later. Here is No.1, which is really twenty settings I made for a fallen Wallingford leaf in 2008. [click to enlarge]
In response to our last blog feature, the one about the Fremont Car Barn and the rest, an old friend and officer in these trenches, archivist Ernie Dornfield, answered our question regarding what was the use of those ghost-colored solid forms in the otherwise vacant lot between the house on the left of the subject and the car barn beyond both? Here’s Ernie’s letter plus a “grab” from this computer’s screen of a City Archive photograph that shows one of those “gray things” being installed. If you follow his advice and access the city clerk’s information service you will find many more and even much more beyond gray concretions.
THE DORNFIELD LETTER – please CLICK TO ENLARGE
THE ARCHIVES’ ON LINE EXAMPLE – please CLICK
Hi Paul,
The Sunday Seattle Times article gave a nice overview of the history of the Villa Apartments. It did not mention Capitol Hill Housing’s role in reviving the building. While rooms may no longer rent for $2.50 a week, the Villa Apartments still stands because of the work of Capitol Hill Housing. In the late 1990s, this affordable housing and community building organization purchased the Villa, which had fallen into disrepair. The commercial facades were restored, strong retail tenants were attracted, and a major extension was added on to the back side of the property. The renovation was a key early act in helping transform Pike/Pike from a driving corridor to a destination. In a neighborhood where new studio apartments now rent for more than $2,000 a month, the Villa is an example of CHH’s efforts to strengthen the community and keep rents affordable for regular working people.
A few years ago, in collaboration with the Northwest School, CHH added a mural to the west side of the site. I’ll attach a photo of it. The muralist was Derek Wu working with NW School students.
Michael Seiwerath, Capitol Hill Housing
THE MCGILVRA ESTATE
(First published in Pacific, March 4, 1990)
In 1867 John and Elizabeth McGilvra moved into the first ome on the Seattle shore of Lake Washiongton. Six years earlier, John had been appointed the first United States attorney to Washington Territory. His friend Abraham Lincoln had given him the job and McGilvra responded by trekking the entire territory twice a year as both federal judge and attorney. It was an exhausting task for which McGilvra did not seek reappointment, In 1864, the McGilvras moved to Seattle and, once John had completed a wagon road to the their 450 lake shore acres, they moved in.
This, apparently, is the oldest surviving view of the McGilvra home. It was photographed around 1880, or about the time the McGilvras began running a sonce-a-day round-trip stage coach to Seattle. Most of their paying passengers were persons who had settle somewhere on or near the lake, man of them on the east side. Throughout the 1880s the McGilvra dock was the busiest on the lake.
The wagon road and the daily stage were abandoned in 1890 with the completion of the Madison Streete Cable Railway, an enterprise in which the McGilvras made a sizeable investment and which included Madison Park, the grounds for many amusements. Beisdes a large dance pavilion, lakeside bandstands and boathouse, exotic gardens and promenades, the park included a baseball diamond, and after 1890 connection with the city’s growing system of bike paths.
In the summers Elizabeth and John’s acres became the site of a tent city raised on platforms provided by the McGilvras. The couple also allowed the construction of cottages, but not houses, on their land. It was a peculiar arrangement: the builders were not sold the land but were required to pay a yearly tithe. One local newspaper of the time described the McGilvras’ development as “perhaps the only feudal estate in the U.S.” This arrangement held until the 1920s, long after John McGilvra’s death in 1903.
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MADISON STREET CABLE, ca. 1891
(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 9, 1992)
Judge John J. McGilvra, the pioneer who laid out the line of Madison Street, wanted to get to his homestead on Lake Washington the quickest way possible. So after climbing First Hill and crossing Broadway, Madison street continues on its own way cutting through the city grid. East of First Hill Madison Street was “first,” and the developing of the grid on Second Hill and beyond it to Lake Washington followed. McGilvra’s short-cut negotiated the city’s ups and downs with considerable ease, and, of course, still does. Beginning in 1890, these gradual grades helped considerably in the construction of a cable railway the entire length of Madison from salt water to fresh.
In the early 1890s passengers enroute to the excitements of McGilvra’s many lakefront attractions, after first passing though still largely forested acres, dropped into the scene recorded here: grounds cleared primarily for the enterprises of leisure. The view at the top looks along Madison Street from near its present intersection with Galer Street. The Madison Park Pavilion, left of center, and the ball park – the bleachers show on the far left – were the cable company’s two largest enclosed venues. But the beach itself was an equal attraction with floating bandstands and stages for musicals, farces, and melodramas in which the villains might end up in the lake.
McGilvra’s fiefdom – he would only lease lots, not sell them – and the railway’s end-of-the line attractions also featured dance floors, bath houses, canoe rentals, restaurants, promenades, a greenhouse filled with exotic plants and a dock from which the “Mosquito Fleet” steamed to all habitable point on Lake Washington.
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A NEIGHBORHOOD ECCENTRIC
(First appeared in Pacific, Feb. 20, 2005)
It is pleasure to have stumbled upon another neighborhood eccentric. This one appears on page 99 of “Madison Park Remembered,” the new (in 2005) and good natured history of this neighborhood by one of it residents, Jane Powell Thomas. The author’s grandparents move to Madison Park in 1900. In her turn Thomas raised three children in the neighborhood and dedicated her history of it to her seven grandchildren. (The historical photo is used courtesy of the Washington State Archive – Puget Sound Regional Branch.)
Much of the author’s narrative is built on the reminiscences of her neighbors. For instance, George Powell is quoted as recalling that the popular name for this dye works when it still showed its turrets was the “Katzenjammer Castle.” Seattle’s city hall between 1890 and 1909 was also named for the fanciful structures in the popular comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids,” and George Wiseman, the Castle Dye Works proprietor in 1938 (when this tax photo of it was recorded) certainly also traded on this association.
The vitality of this business district was then still tied to the Kirkland Ferry. Wiseman’s castle introduced the last full block before the ferry dock. Besides his castle there was a drug store, two bakeries, a thrift store, a meat market, two restaurants, a tavern, a gas station, a combined barber and beauty shop, and a Safeway. And all of them were on Wiseman’s side of the street for across Madison was, and still is, the park itself.
Studying local history is an often serendipitous undertaking charmed by surprises like Dorothy P. Frick’s photo album filled with her candid snapshots of district regulars and merchants standing besides their storefronts in the 1960s. Introduced to this visual catalogue of neighborhood characters by Lola McKee, the “Mayor of Madison Park” and long-time manager of Madison Park Hardware, Thomas has made good use of Frick’s photos.
“Madison Park Remembered” is now (in 2005) in its second printing, and although it can be found almost anywhere, Jane Thomas was recently told that her book had set a record by outselling Harry Potter — at Madison Park Books.
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MADISON PARK PAVILION
(First appeared in Pacific, Dec. 19, 2004)
Like Leschi Park, Madison Park was developed as an attraction at the end of a cable railway line. Both featured exotic landscapes, waterside promenades, gazebos, greenhouses, refreshment stands, garden-lined paths, bandstands, and boat rentals, even lodging. Leschi’s early novelty was its zoo. Madison Park’s was the baseball diamond. (The roof of the bleachers can be seen on the far left of the historical scene.)
Both parks featured monumental-sized pavilions with towers on top and great ballrooms within. The theatre-sized room in this landmark could also seat 1400 for melodramas, minstrel shows, musicals, farce, vaudeville and legitimate theatre. For many years members the ever-dwindling mass of the Pioneer Association chose the Madison Park Pavilion for their annual meetings and posed for group portraits on the front steps.
Here the grand eastern face of the pavilion looks out at Lake Washington. The pleasurable variety of its lines with gables, towers, porticos and the symmetrically placed and exposed stairways to its high central tower surely got the attention of those approaching it from the Lake. (For many years beginning about 1880 Madison Park was the busiest port on Lake Washington.)
However, most visitors came from the city and the real crush was on the weekends for ballgames, dances, band concerts (most often with Dad Wagner’s Band), theatre, and moonlit serenading on the lake — ideally with a mandolin and receptive ingénue looking for pointers on how to navigate a rented canoe.
The Pavilion stood for a quarter century until destroyed by fire on March 25, 1914. The attentive eye may note how the Seattle Park Departments playground equipment at Madison Park repeat the lines of the grand central tower of the Madison Park Pavilion. (Historical photos courtesy of Lawton Gowey and Larry Hoffman)
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Here’s another fine contribution from our Stephen. [Click twice to enlarge and so the better to follow Stephen’s points.] He must have given most of an afternoon to polish my “1904” date – a fleet speculation – for the Curtis photo that Rob Ketcherside (or his editors) chose for the cover of his new and first book “LOST SEATTLE.” Thanks again to Rob for a fine addition to the local canon and thanks to Stephen too for his admonishments. [Somewhere I have a portrait of Stephen, which I’ll add later. The rest is Stephen’s.]
Rob – CONGRATULATIONS! Hardcover, no less and in color. Far better than Arcadia . Good show!
Checked it out at University Bookstore who reported that it’s been flying off the shelf today. Sales! And Publicity by Paul. Very good.
My, my, nostalgia. My wife and I took in the Music Hall shows a couple times, Julie Thompson and her first Svengali, Jack McGovern, including at his other venue, the now China Harbor. So much else, I can remember it well. Thanks for not mentioning my Dad in the Kalakala story.
The Yesler Hill and the Courthouse story are very good and accurate. You are hereby adjudged an honorary Profanity Hill expert now. The hanging may proceed. Sez Judge McCann, who was the police court judge. Next case!
You even knew about the secret 1928 City Council ordinance to level the entire hill. Pretty damn obscure. I bet Richard Conlin voted for that. Before he voted to create Goat Hill. Pity he was replaced by a Wobbly.
Now as for the cover harbor photograph – Where’d you find it? Corbis? Hah. They don’t create anything.
what makes somebody think it for 1904 as date for this partial panorama? I don’t think so.
Since you didn’t ask. And didn’t state that in the book, fortunately.
I am more inclined to 1905, even more likely mid1906, having tentatively identified some of the ships in the harbor or at wharf and found what are perhaps contemporary photographs of the Moran Bros Co shipyard – all three “anonymous,” one a AYPE era colorized postcard, and two of them sourced to Joe Williamson, who collected earlier photographers’ works (My bet is Asahel Curtis for all of these aerial views, esp the colorized verson, although Frank Nowell is a possibility, as he was known to climb rooftops and courthouse towers at the time )
One of the white curving prowed steam schooners is very surely the revenue cutter Grant (three masts and tall steamer stack, it was a coaler, to the right), moored as was usual at one of the harbor buoys. It spent a lot of time at these in the final years up to its surplus sale in late 1906, its iron hulled geriatric engines condition usually keeping it within Puget Sound. The other white hull is another 19th century federal revenue steam cutter, I have several suspects that were active here at the time. It shows up at the launch of the Nebraska.
The 4 stack torpedo boat destroyer is most likely the USS Perry (Bainbridge class) which also spent a fair amount of time in Puget Sound waters 1904/1905, as part of the Pacific torpedo boat fleets guarding us from errant Russian and/or Japanese fleets. Or British. I was hoping it was the USS Decatur but that was elsewhere in the SE Asian fleet at the time.
Paul would remember a similar torpedo boat destroyer in a harbor, included in one of the works of nostalgic art donated to the MOFA last month. Probably the Decatur “opening up” the Japanese ports.
On the very far left within the coal smoke is either the USS Nebraska being fitted out after its October 1904 launch, before its late 1906/7 delivery to the US Navy OR another battle cruiser which was also moored at this dock, the armoured cruiser USS New York (3 stacker). I’ve seen a Times photo of this cruiser but missed noting the publication date, as if one can trust the Blethen press as being accurate. As noted above, there are three existing photographs of that ship from somewhat aerial perspective, one including the full-length postcard of the SS Orizaba et al, and two others which show the stern and bow of same, and including the 3 stack warship etc. It very much resembles your harbor shot edge. See attached montage.
However, here’s the curveball, or sinker (more appropriately). The 1889 launched tropical steamer SS Orizaba, single raked stack, two masts, is said to have first arrived in Seattle June 1, 1906 after its purchase by the Northwestern Steamship Co for the Alaska trade and then made her first trip to Nome, arriving June 25 and returning with $750,000 of gold. On Aug 7 1906 her name was changed to the SS Northwestern. At some point c1909 its cabins were expanded, enclosed/rebuilt (Alaska is not the Caribbean!), it was transferred to Alaska Steam and it continued its storied if notorious Alaskan career for three decades as the most often sunk, beached, refloated, and eventually in 1942, bombed West Coast/Alaskan ship. What survived is still in Dutch Harbor.
So I’d go with summer of 1906 – the Nebraska was still at the Moran yards, the destroyer Perry still hanging around, and the cutter Grant often moored in the harbor. The Hanford building on the corner of First and Cherry wasn’t finished until sometime later in 1906, so that is the outside of the timeframe.
Ironic aside: if indeed the Orizaba and the New York were at the same shipyard in 1906, they both died 35 some years later in the Pacific War (New York scuttled in Manila Bay December 1941, the Orizaba/Northwestern in Dutch Harbor May 1942), and both remain where they lay. The iron hulled mechanically failing Grant sank in a storm up in northern Canadian waters in 1910 after being converted to a fish freighter, and the torpedo boat Perry was eventually scrapped after WWI.
Collegially, as I get back to my own work
Stephen Edwin Lundgren
such as revisting Gorden Newell’s work, with Lost Ships of the Pacific Northwest
Orizaba/Northwestern’s career : Alaska at War, 1941-1945: The Forgotten War Remembered
Side note: The Grant ended its career with two involvements with the salvation of survivors and later resurrection of the victims of the doomed steamer Valencia off the British Columbia coast. But that’s another story, mine.
Can’t help you with the street clocks. I don’t wear a watch anymore.
Does anybody really know what time it is? or really care?
Paul: bottom line, I say photo is June 1906 not 1904. Sez me and Ace Curtis. He sez send him two bucks for the publication fee. Payable to his account at Dexter Horton downtown. And who the hell is Mr. Corbis? I still got the plate somewhere in the root cellar unless it ended up on the greenhouse roof.
We received a fine comment from the mildly anonymous Phil D. today in response to a blog post we made some time ago about the killer whale Namu’s time at Pier 56. The link is http://pauldorpat.com/ivar/pier-56-aquarium-in-the-1960s-very-big-sharks-and-namu/
Phil’s comment follows.
“2013, and 1966 was a long time ago…but what an outstanding experience in my life. I was privileged to be hired by Ted Griffin to work with Namu at Smith Cove in the early part of 1966 until Namu was brought to Seattle. Then, I was given a wireless microphone and said to present demonstrations of Namu to the public…which I did many times that summer.
“I really came to love Namu with the closeness of feeding, petting, scratching his back, sides and belly. Many times I was able to get very close to Namu while feeding him with a slice of salmon. I was 21 at the time, and really enjoyed the people who came to see the show.
“At times, Namu, when demonstrating a high jump, would go back into the water without hardly a splash. Other times, however, he would come down kinda falling over so as to completely soak the ones in the way of the huge wave & spray! One incident in the evening took place with no one there, but two men and a lady who were dressed to the hilt for a night on the town. For them, I’m sure it was as memorable an evening as it was for me. When I cautioned them they’d be safer from getting wet if they went up the ramp and observed from there, they decided to take a chance and see at float level. You guessed it…it was the greatest of Namu’s jokes on the crowd…the got entirely drenched. Their reaction??? They all, after catching their breath from the cold water drench, broke out laughing, and even grateful for this fantastic memory…seeing the huge body of Namu nearly leap completely out of the water (after having carefully popped his head out of the water prior to the jump, scoped out the situation…including the three observers and the ball held out high above the water by yours truly). Then, with no time to react, they saw Namu falling toward them! You can well imagine the rest…as I see it still clearly in my minds eye.
“Thanks for the memories, Namu and Seattle”
We learn in this issue that it is the last of our bi-weekly offerings. After this we went weekly until the end. We surely felt confident. Here again, although thousands of miles apart, Bill White and I read an issue together with the generous help of Skype. These edited versions are shorter than the time we took and recorded, but still even with Bill’s pruning we do ramble and sometimes stumble. Each trip (issue) we discuss is, however, certainly instructive, and considerably more than smoldering nostalgia for our lost youth. Well I should speak for myself, for Bill, much my junior, is still living lucky and in his prime. Thanks – repeated – to Ron Edge for doing the scanning. It certainly suites his assiduous side, and boundless love for old publications. [If you have any old regional papers – really old – please consider sharing them with Ron. He’ll make a disk for you, Id’ bet.]
B.White and P. Dorpat
[audio:http://edge-archive.com/audio/04-08.mp3|titles=HelixVol 4 No 8]
In our last Sunday feature I shared with Berangere and Jean the hope that some reader would respond with explanations for the largely mysterious – for us – submarines that we included there. We were blessed with just such from Bill Hoeller. Now we will print out his explanations beneath the subs they apply to. And we will introduce this with the introduction to his first letter to us. Thanks much Bill.
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Dear Paul,
Having been born and raised in Seattle I always look forward to your Seattle Now & Then feature every Sunday. In 1940 when I was born I lived in the Rainier Valley. My wife and I currently live in Wallingford. I saw you had some questions concerning submarines, which I know a little about, so I thought I would respond. I’m also anxious to see additional posts about submarines.
All the best,
Bill Hoeller
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HOPEFULLY – if we can find it – we intend to return to this SUBMARINE SECTION of our blog with something on THE PRINCESS ANGELINE, the “first atomic submarine built for Puget Sound commuter service.” We doubt that it was ever built. Were we not quoting we would have preferred to write “planned for Puget Sound commuter service.” Please check for it later.
We were not very good about getting every issue of Helix properly noted for its number and date. This was the first issue printed after the first (of 3) Sky River Rock Festivals gathered together over Labor Day. So this is from 1968. Without any confidence in the internal evidence of this tabloid itself, we have dated it above “early September, 1968. It occurs to me that this negligence or uncertainly is, in part or from one prospect, a sign that we were then living in eternity. (This week – for the next Helix and hopefully within a week or two – we will look for other photos taken at the first Sky River. An google search will certainly show others.)
B.White and P. Dorpat
[audio:http://edge-archive.com/audio/04-07.mp3|titles=HelixVol 4 No 7]
We have learned from our friend Bill White – now living in Ilo, Pero (see the snapshot below) – that for a year of his early adolescence he lived on Lake Ballinger and remembers it fondly. And he has written about it too, in CINEMA PENITENTIARY, his manuscript about growing up with movies. Bill, you may remember, before moving to South American, wrote movie reviews for the Post-Intelligencer and other publications. In place of Lake Ballinger, here Bill poses for Kelly Edery White, with his current waterway, the Pacific Ocean from the harbor of his home now in Ilo, Peru.
Paul,
Although I was living on the lake the whole year, it seems than i mentioned it only in the first paragraph. so maybe it is not appropriate for the blog. but here it is anyway, there is a bit more about the region as a whole, which might be of interest to your readers.
Bill
EXCERPT from CINEMA PENITENTIARY
by Bill White
After my mom got married, her new husband took us so far North we weren’t even in King County anymore. The house was on Lake Ballinger and to get there we had to walk up a private street. We had a dock and a rowboat, and every day after school I’d row out to an island in the lake where I’d stay until dinnertime.
On the other side of the lake was the Shriner’s club. If I came too close to the shore, half a dozen fez-topped apes would run at me with waving arms and holy-war expressions. I had seen these characters before, passing themselves off as Seattleites as they waved demurely from their float during the Seafair Parades. I used to think they were harmless weirdos, like the clowns and the pirates, just some old men who liked to dress up and ride in parades. It wasn’t until I had to share my lake with them that I discovered them to be nothing more than hog-greased tyrants.
My school was brand new, and so far away that I had to ride a bus. There was no movie theater within walking distance, so I made do with television shows, which were the main subject of conversation in the lavatory. “So is the one-armed man real, or do you think Kimball really did kill his wife?” some guy asked me while I was trying to take a leak between classes. “What do you think?” I sneered, zipping up my pants and leaving without washing my hands or waiting for an answer.
On dead weekend nights, my stepfather took the family to the Sno-King Drive In, which was North almost all the way to Everett, a town famous for the stink that came from its paper mills. We saw some terrible junk up there, the worst of which was a Bob Hope double feature of “Call Me Bwana” and “A Global Affair.” Now that I think about it, I don’t even know if my mom actually married the guy or not. I don’t remember any wedding or anything. Just us being packed up and moved out of the Queen Anne mansion and into this house on the lake. The girls were told to start calling the guy “papa,” but I wasn’t told anything, so I kept on calling him by his first name. He always liked to leave the drive-in before the second feature had ended, and I learned quickly that it was no use to raise a complaint.
My real dad returned to Seattle on a temporary project with Boeing, and my older sister and I spent several weekends with him in Ballard, where he had taken an apartment to be near his mother, who was sick with cancer. My sister was already sixteen, and would spend most of the weekend with her friends from Queen Anne, while I went to the movies with my dad. Even after he moved on to his assignment in New Orleans, where he once got caught in a flood and spent two days in a tree fighting off snakes, I kept going out to Ballard to visit with my grandmother, who was nicknamed Mop Mop.
We even saw a few movies together. During the World’s Fair, she had taken me to the Cinerama Theater to see “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.” Now we went, in a party of lesser relatives, for “It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.” It appealed to the older people, who recognized all the old-time comics, but to me it was just a bunch of exaggerated expressions on oversized heads. Still, I loved those red, stuffed rocking chairs and a screen that wrapped itself right around my eyes.
Mop Mop lived in a spooky apartment complex filled with Senior Citizens, so the whole place had that old people smell. There was a manager who was always outside interrogating strange people who had wandered onto the property. He was more like a gatekeeper than a concierge. The most memorable thing about her apartment was the T.V. Guide that was always on the top of the set. I had never seen one of them before except in the check-out line at the supermarket, and didn’t realize anybody actually bought them. I thought they were just there to browse through while waiting in line to buy groceries.
Ballard is a Scandinavian neighborhood adjacent to the Western end of the ship canal, a manmade waterway connecting two freshwater lakes with the saltwater Bay. There is a difference in the water levels of the fresh and salt water bodies, so they built the Government Locks, an enclosure where the water travelers are quarantined while the water level is adjusted so they can move from one body of water to the next. The Locks are a popular tourist attraction that also boast a salmon ladder where kids and other curious characters stand around to try to get a glimpse of some fish. As it was close to Mop Mop’s apartment, we often went there for a Sunday afternoon picnic to eat some of the pies my stepmother had baked.
School chugged along until a day at the end of November when the boys and girls gym classes were combined so we could learn square dancing. I liked the way everybody got a turn to dance with everybody, but just as my turn came up to dance with the girl I had my eye on, an announcement came over the public address system to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot.
My dad came by to get my sister and me that weekend, and we watched the funeral on Mop Mop’s T.V. Dad started crying during the ceremony and I asked him why. “You didn’t even like Kennedy. Why are you so sad about him being dead?” He took me by the shoulders and answered emphatically. “When a President of the United States is assassinated, it doesn’t matter what you thought of him, it is a national tragedy.”
Although I wasn’t in drama class, I auditioned for the school play and got the lead role because I played the cornet and the play opened with the kid blowing some notes into the phone to impress a girl on the other end. It had been written in the 1930’s and was called “Make Room For Rodney.” I can’t remember a thing about it except for playing the first bars from “Blues in the Night” and then hollering egotistically into the phone.
We performed the play at in the middle of December and I got razzed by a lot of the guys in the hall for being in it. Later, on a Monday afternoon right before Christmas vacation, a girl came up to me in the cafeteria and asked why I hadn’t been to school the previous Friday. I told her I hadn’t been feeling well so had stayed in bed and read Harold Robbins’ “The Carpetbaggers,” and she answered that she hoped I was feeling better. After I told her that I was, she said she had been planning to ask me if I wanted to go with her family to the drive-in movies that weekend. I asked her what was playing and she told me “In Harm’s Way.” I couldn’t imagine going to see a war movie with a girl, so I just walked away without saying anything, and she went back to the table where her friends were and she never spoke to me again.
It was unusual to be approached like that, because hardly any of the seventh grade girls wanted anything to do with the seventh grade boys. They were all hanging around with guys in the eighth or ninth grade. But when I got to the ninth grade, all the girls had boyfriends in high school. It seemed I never got old enough to do anything.
A movie theater opened sometime after the first of the year. It was a warehouse of a building called the Lynn Twin because it was split into two auditoriums. It was set alongside Aurora Avenue, which was the primary interstate thoroughfare before the freeway was built. In order to get there, I had to be driven by new new-stepfather, and often would be asked to take my little sister along with me.
I liked taking my sisters to the movies, having been doing it since the oldest among them, who was four years younger than me, had the interest to come along. As the other girls got older, I started taking them as well. My older sister was usually too busy with her boyfriends to take them, but before she discovered boys, she would frequently have charge over me at some parent-sanctioned event, such as Walt Disney’s “White Wilderness.”
That was 1958, and my dad drove us there and dropped us off. We had to wait in line for almost three hours, as the next show was sold out. Consider that the theater held 1,500, and you will get an idea of how popular Disney pictures were back then.
Northgate was the country’s first open air shopping mall. It had an Indian theme, and there was a big totem pole at the Northern entrance. One of the things that mystified me about the theater was a section that was enclosed in glass. I later learned this was the crying room, where mothers sat with their crybaby kids.
My dad was always late picking us up from the movies, usually because he would stop to have a beer at the tavern on the way and he could never have just one. There were times we waited for hours outside a theater before he finally showed up. This new stepfather was always on time, an attribute that did not make me like him any better,
My sister and I saw a Robert Mitchum movie at the Lynn Twin called “Man in the Middle.” Neither of us got much out of it, but Keenan Wynn had one line that became a staple around the house. He was playing a soldier accused of murdering a British officer in India near the beginning of World War Two. Mitchum was the officer assigned to his defense. “You make me want to throw up,” he said in answer to something Mitchum said. I don’t remember why he said it, but we sure had fun saying it to each other in the months after seeing the movie.
We got a lot more out of the ”The Miracle Worker,” which we had seen the year before, shortly after being schooled with the blind children at John Hay. That movie not only gave us some empathy for the handicapped, but lent us many gestures to imitate in play, especially one in which Helen Keller curled her fingers and back-handed the side of her head. We used to do that when we wanted to irritate our mother.
It was sometime in the Spring that our English teacher told us we had to write an essay for a national contest. Remembering that movie about Helen Keller, I decided to read some books to find out more about her because I thought she would make a good subject. My essay won the prize, but I didn’t get anything. The prize went to the school, not the student.
One thing I found out when researching Helen Keller was that the movie was based on a play by William Gibson, the guy who had written “Two For the Seesaw.” That made me realize how much stuff we learn about just because some guy gets the idea to write a play, or a book, or make a movie or something. Without that play, there would have never been a movie, and all those people like me and my sister who saw the movie might never have known about Helen Keller. Even if we had learned something about her in school, we never would have thought of her as a real person. We had even gone to school with blind people, but knowing them in real life didn’t help us to have any compassion for them. But seeing the movie did. Even though it might have looked like we were just making fun of Helen Keller when we played finger games and tried to say water, the truth was that somewhere deep down we were discovering what it meant to empathize with someone.
Once in a while the Lynn would show some scary stuff, and I got to go alone. The poster for “Strait-Jacket” warned that it would vividly depict ax murders. It didn’t. At least not the way “Deep Throat,” a decade later, would vividly depict blow jobs There was one good shot of George Kennedy getting his head chopped off, but the rest of the murders were shown either in shadows on the wall or isolated shots of Joan Crawford swinging an ax.
“Dead Ringers” was the co-feature, with Bette Davis playing twins. It was more serious, and much duller, that the Crawford picture. I had seen the two actresses together a couple years earlier in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” but knew nothing of their past careers as glamorous movie stars. I wasn’t yet old enough to stay up all night watching old movies on television.
Seeing the titles “Love With the Proper Stranger” and “The Stripper” on the Lynn Twin marquee gave me an instant boner. When I found out that “The Stripper” came from a William Inge play called “A Loss of Roses,” the movie made more sense to me. As “The Stripper,” it was a cheat, but “A Loss of Roses” signified that it was supposed to be a sad movie, not a sexy one. “Love With the Proper Stranger” was, like “Two for the Seesaw,” a movie about a guy and a girl who did a lot of talking with each other. I was too young to understand a lot of what was going on, but I loved eavesdropping on the adult conversations, and looked forward to the time when I would be talking about things with girls as they lounged around my apartments in their underwear.
At the end of the school year, I went to my first party and kissed all the girls. I went from one to another, trying each of them out and liking them all. Unfortunately, we moved out of our house on the lake right after school ended, so I never saw any of those girls again, and had to start from scratch.