(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 18, 2024
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 21, 2024

League takes no junior role in supporting women and social causes

By Clay Eals

Digging into the origin of the Junior League of Seattle demands a contemporary vocabulary lesson.

The operative word for members 100 years ago, when the league began, was “debutantes.” It’s a term not commonplace today, but in the Roaring Twenties it often turned up in headlines and news stories. No doubt readers readily understood it to mean young women entering fashionable society.

The same dynamic applies for another vintage descriptor for members: “younger matrons and girls,” an allusion to youthful women, married and not.

Moreover, the derivation of the organizational name was, and remains, elusive. Junior to what? National and local sources reveal no specific historical rationale other than members’ budding ages.

“It’s funny the name has never changed,” says Maria Mackey, past Seattle president who triggered the league’s upcoming centennial exhibit at the Museum of History & Industry.

Nevertheless, the name persisted, from the founding of the first Junior League, in 1901 in New York, to the Seattle league’s formal inception in 1924, to the present day, when 291 such leagues with 140,000 members operate throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico and the UK.

In Seattle as elsewhere, Junior League has pursued a steadfastly two-pronged path — a women’s social forum and training ground for a variety of professional and personal pursuits, coupled with an investment of time and money for social-welfare projects, with and without fanfare.

Local league projects have ranged widely, all fueled by altruism. In the 1920s, the league opened a day nursery and operated the only stereotyping machine in the western U.S. to mass-produce metal Braille language plates for the blind. Intervening years helped launch what became Childhaven family services, along with endeavors in youth literacy and the sharing with schoolchildren of traveling works by diverse Northwest artists.

Flashy events to inspire financial contributions are a Junior League tradition. Its first Follies in 1926 featured “a riot of song and dance,” with seats going for 50 cents to $3. In the mid-20th century, the league operated the Wise Penny thrift shop on Capitol Hill. Today, the league raises money via “Touch a Truck,” a kids’ activity with real fire engines and ambulances. The organization’s latest Gala, on Nov. 20, raised $263,000.

While the league once re-labeled active members as “sustainers” (dues-paying only) as they reached 40, the age distinction evaporated more recently, says Jen Siems, president. Members range from new moms to seasoned professionals. “All the different stages of women’s life cycle,” Siems says, “we’re there to support.”

Accordingly, Mackey, recently retired from Vulcan, adds that Junior League “taught me the good part of how the city works” and “gave me my life, really.”

WEB EXTRAS

Thanks to Kay Ray and to Kelsey Novick, Wendy Malloy, Julianne Kidder and Devorah Romanek of the Museum of History & Industry, and especially Jen Siems and Maria Mackey of the Junior League of Seattle for their invaluable help with this installment!

Due to technical difficulties, there is no 360-degree video this week. However, below you will find 2 additional photos and, in chronological order, 18 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.

A few years ago, I asked Paul Dorpat, Seattle Now & Then founder and noted raconteur, if he knew any ghost stories. He offered up the outlines of a haunted tale told by his dad, the Rev. Theodore Dorpat, about a man trapped inside a terrifying box threatened by another box.  I adapted it, filling in a few blanks.

Here it is, for those in Xmas doldrums or just exhausted by the exertions of the day! Click on the photo to begin…

Richard Berner died around 2:30 pm last Saturday Nov. 3, 2018. At the time Jean and I were in West Seattle helping the West Seattle Historical Society with it’s annual “gala auction.” That benevolent huckstering went so well that the gala ran both bountiful and long, and our plan to visit Rich following the auction was prevented by the small worries of slipping time.  Two days later we learned that it was also snipped by the singular one of Rich’s death.  Born at the very end of 1920, Richard did not make it to 100.  As the founder of the University of Washington Library’s Archive he was a mentor to many of us, and friend too.  Rich was a fine blend of ready compassion and good humor.

(click to enlarge photos)

We are pleased now to introduce Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence to Restoration, the first of Richard C. Berner’s three books named together Seattle in the 20^th Century.When the details, stories, and insights are explored with a close reading, Berner’s accomplishment is by far our widest opening into Seattle’s twentieth century, the first half of it, from the 1900 to 1950.  Those fifty years were also the second half of Seattle’s first hundred years, if we begin our counting with the footsteps of mid-western farmers settling here in the early 1850s.

Volume one was first published in 1991 by Charles Press, and the publisher – “Rich” Berner himself – made a modest list of its contents on the back cover. We will repeat it. “Politics of Seattle’s urbanization: dynamics of reform, public ownership movement, turbulent industrial relations, effects of wartime hysteria upon newfound civil liberties – all responding to the huge influx of aspiring recruits to the middle class & organized labor as they confronted the established elite. Includes outlines of the economy, cultural scene, public education, population characteristics & ethnic history.”

For this “printing” we have added many captioned illustrations, some of them copied from news reports of the events Berner examines, and we have almost always succeeded in placing each next to the text it illustrates. On-line illustrated editions of Volume 2: Seattle 1921-1940, From Boom to Bust and Volume 3: Seattle Transformed, World War 2 to Cold War will follow – but not at the moment. The collecting of illustrations and putting them in revealing order with the narratives for Volume 2 and 3 is still a work in progress. Readers who want to “skip ahead” of our illustrated presentations of Berner’s three books here on dorpatsherrardlomont can find the complete set of his history as originally published in local libraries or through interlibrary loans.

How Rich Berner managed it is a charmed story. He undertook what developed into his magnus opus after retiring in 1984 from his position as founder and head of the University of Washington Archives and Manuscripts Division. Between the division’s origin in 1958 and his retirement Rich not only built the collection but also studied it. Berner worked closely with Bob Burke, the U.W. History professor most associated with the study of regional history who first recommended Berner, a University of California, Berkeley graduate in history and library science, for the U.W. position.Together, the resourceful professor and the nurturing archivist shepherded scores of students in their use of the archive. Rich Berner is the first to acknowledge that he also learned from the students as they explored and measured the collection for dissertations and other publications. By now their collected publications can be imagined as its own “shelf” of Northwest History.

Rich Berner showed himself also a good explicator of his profession.His influential book, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: A Historical Analysis was published by the University of Washington Press in 1983 and was awarded the Waldo Gifford Leland Prize by the Society of American Archivists. Composing this historical study on top of establishing and nourishing the University’s Archive and Manuscripts Division may be fairly considered a life’s achievement, but, with his 1984 retirement Berner continue to work in the archive at writing his three-volume history. He published Volume Three in 1999, and so, continuing the charm of this entire production, he completed Seattle in the 20^th Century before the century (and millennium) was over.

(Lest we imagine this scholar chained to his archive we know that with his wife Thelma, a professor of Physiology and Biophysics in the U.W. Medical School and the first woman appointed Associate Dean of the UW graduate school, this famously zestful couple managed to often take to the hills and mountains.)

Rich was born in Seattle in 1920 – the last year explored in this his first volume. His father worked on the docks as a machinist, and for a time was “blacklisted” by employers because of his union advocacy.During the depression, while Rich was attending classes at Garfield High School, his mother ran a waterfront café on the Grand Trunk Pacific’s pier at the foot of Madison Street.

During the war Rich served with the Army’s 10^th Mountain Division. Following it with help from the GI Bill he matriculated at Cal-Berkeley with degrees in both history and library science. It was also in Berkeley that he first met Robert Burke, then Director of the Manuscript Collection of the Bancroft Library. Rich worked part time there.

For Seattle, as for any city of size, there is a “canon” of publications that are necessary reading for anyone wanting to get a grip on local history. The first half of the Seattle Canon may be said to begin with Pioneer Arthur Denny’s Pioneer Reminiscences of 1888. The pioneer canon receives its own magnus opus with the combined works – multi-volume histories of Seattle and King County – of Clarence Bagley, himself a pioneer. That Berner was already attending Seattle’s T.T. Minor grade school in 1926 when Bagley was still three years away from publishing his History of King County is evidence of the “Boomtown” included in the title of this Berner’s first of three books on Seattle history.

With rare exceptions the books included in this first part of the Seattle Canon were published by their subjects, like Denny’s still revealing Reminiscences, or under the direction and/or support of their subjects, like Bagley’s still helpful volumes. They are generally “picturesque histories” written to make their subjects seem more appealing than they often were. The stock of motives for “doing heritage” are there generally supportive or positive, showing concern for the community, admiration for its builders, the chance to tell good stories, and often also the desire to learn about one’s forebears although primarily those truths that are not upsetting.Not surprisingly, and again with rare exceptions, these booster-historians and their heritage consumers were members of a minority of citizens defined by their wealth, race and even religion. It would be a surprise to find any poor socialists, animists or even affluent Catholics among them.

Part Two of the Seattle Canon may be said to have popularly begun with Skid Road, historian-journalist Murray Morgan’s charming and yet still raking history of Seattle. Published in 1951, the year of Seattle’s centennial, it is still in print, and has never been out of it. Richard Berner has dedicated Seattle 1900-1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence to Restoration to Morgan. The post-war canon is often corrective of the sins of the pioneers. The works of Morgan and many others, certainly including Berner, are not generally clothed in the pious harmonies of their predecessors, the ordinarily stress-free narratives expected of those who were writing under the “pioneer code.”

In our opinion Rich Berner’s three-volume Seattle in the 20^th Centuryis the greatest single achievement of our Seattle Canon – “part two.”It has the scope and details required. It is profoundly instructive and filled with the characters and turns of fate that any storyteller might admire and wisely exploit. Within Berner’s three books are the wonders of what they did, the touchstones of their devotions and deceptions, their courage and hypocrisy, meanness and compassion.Certainly, it has been our pleasure to help illustrate this the first volume and to also continue on now with volumes two and three.

Paul Dorpat 10/1/2009

Didier  at the Kiosk Place Monge

My first record was  offered for Christmas , it was a Johnny Hallyday’s 45 rpm with the  famous song “Teenage idol”  (“l’idole des jeunes “).  In the sixties, he brought in the french musical landscape a sacred wind of youth, Rock and Roll and America .

For 60 years of career , his songs have been always in the mood of the time, he became a monumental and popular singer.

We have been all singing so loud on our moped “Que je t’aime ” “Nous avons tous quelque chose du Tennessee”…

Mon  premier disque était celui de Johnny, c’était la célèbre chanson  l’idole des jeunes. Dans les années 60 , il apporta dans le paysage musical français un sacré vent de jeunesse, de Rock and Roll et d’Amérique.

Nous avons tous chanté a tue-tête “Que je t’aime” ” Nous avons tous quelque chose du Tennessee”

Johnny I photographed in 1987 during  a rehearsal

Johnny, que j’ai photographié  en 1987 pendant une répétition

Greetings.  We discovered that this weekend’s contribution to The Times PacificNW mag has been dropped, or rather postponed, for this January One, 2017 the annual “Pictures of the Year” (last year) takes every page, except, of course, those with the ads.    In its place we will assemble a miscellany: a  pile of oddities.

PIONEER AGING

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The INTERLAKEN BIKE TRAIL – Perhaps An Early Pause to Tweet

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WORLD WAR ONE SURGERY BASE HOSPITAL NO. 50 ( IN FRANCE) SUPPLIED WITH DOCTORS AND NURSES FROM WASHINGTON STATE

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CAPITOL HILL BUS STOP at the Southwest Corner of BROADWAY and REPUBLICAN –

In 1976-77 during my residency above Peters on Broadway I snapped two thousand or more photographs – both bw and color – of those waiting for a bus and/or boarding it.   It was part of an art in public places program, which, I think or bet, Anne Folke at the And/Or Gallery (and performance space, also on Capitol Hill) was behind.   Some of the photographs wound up on the busses – beside the interior ads.  (Or they might have had busses that were dedicated to the public arts project sans commerce.)

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POLITICALLY CORRECT GRAFFITI – CA. 1975 on Eastlake

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MERIDIAN PLAYFIELD – From WALLINGFORD WALKS, 2006-2010 [click to enlarge]

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REST IN PEACE

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PROVERBS FROM 1889 AND A PROHIBITION-SYMPATHETIC CARTOON FROM A SEATTLE TIMES CLIP FOR MARCH 18, 1913. [CLICK TWICE to Read]

PIONEER SQUARE BAR and only 45 DRINKING DAYS LEFT

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BRAIN POWER – FOUR FREE LECTURES – MOORE THEATRE

[No video this week as Jean is off visiting Juneau. He will, however, return with visual treasures for a future blog post!]

(click to enlarge photos)

Most likely the name for this classical structure, the Prince Rupert Hotel, was chosen as an allusion either to then proposed British Columbia port city, about six-hundred miles north of Seattle, or to that city’s namesake Prince Rupert of the Rhine (1619-1682), the first Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. A contest, for a prize of $250, was held to name the town.  The naming match was held by

the Grand Trunk Pacific, the Canadian railway that built its West Coast terminus at Prince Rupert, and, constructed the Grand Trunk Pacific Wharf on Elliott Bay as a link to Seattle’s booming commerce.  When completed in 1910 on our waterfront between Madison and Marion Streets, it was the largest wooden pier on the Pacific Coast.  Prince Rupert was increasingly in the news.

When the hotel was first noticed in this newspaper it was named the Hotel Prince Rupert.  Sometimes it took new hotel builders or managers time to decide between introducing their newest gift to local hostelries with the generic ‘hotel’ at the front or the rear of their chosen name.  The Prince Rupert was built during the winter of

1906-07 and opened at 1515 Boren Avenue in May of 1907.  Listed in classifieds, the attractions of this five-story fireproof hotel with 115 rooms included “strictly modern, outside windows in every room, short walking distance of business center, within a half-block of four car lines, first-class dining room in connection.”  In an August 4, 1907, short report on the hotel, the Seattle Times noted that it “at once became extremely popular, and although it was opened less than three months ago, it is impossible to accommodate all who apply.” 

While exploring the former location of the Prince Rupert Hotel’s front door and its four classical columns that faced Boren Street, one will be careful not to fall into the I-5 ditch that took with its cutting this hotel and many others along the western slope of the First Hill/Capitol Hill ridge in the early 1960s.  The ever-alert Jean

Sherrard has widened the frame for this week’s ‘repeat,’ second from the top, to include the most western corner of Plymouth Pillars Park. There, although still off-frame to the left, the rescued columns of Plymouth Congregational Church, which formerly faced Sixth Avenue between Seneca and University Streets, are nicely blended within a copse of deciduous trees in their own triangular park at the northwest corner of Pike Street and Boren Avenue. 

It is a satisfying coincidence that both the four surviving Plymouth Pillars and those that supported the top floor portico of the Prince Rupert were of the Ionic order, although in their 1966 removal from the demolished church, the Plymouth pillars lost their scrolled capitals.  Still we permit ourselves to fashion an Ionic irony that the church’s pillars were saved and moved to Boren Street to replace those of the razed hotel.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, lads?  Not at this moment.  It is early Saturday morning.  Soon Jean and Karen will be flying to Juneau for two days with friends there, their first Alaska visit.   Also sometime later today Ron will put up about fifteen links to this week’s feature about a  hotel and-or apartment, and a swath of its neighborhood lost to the I-5.  Late today, in the evening and on into Sunday, I’ll add a few things more that are relevant either to the subject or the neighborhood.  For the lead-off video we thought or had hoped to interview Dianna James, author of “Shared Walls,”  and local apartment house historian whom we have often featured here.   We  could not squeeze it in, but will the next time we feature some shared walls, and that’s inevitable.  Bon Voyage to Jean and Karen.

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Jean and Karen have arrived in Juneau and right-off visited the Mendenhall Glacier, which is practically in town.   He sends this picture, which I have joined to a Google Earth detail of downtown Juneau (lower-right) and  the Mendenhall (upper-middle).  Jean explains his position as “South of the glacier  and north of the visitor’s center.  Taken on my cell phone.  Sent from my iPhone.”  Jean and Karen are both well-equipped and clothed for the elements.   [Click to Enlarge]

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UP THE HILL on BOREN, TWO MORE NEIGHBORS

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SURE, AND A PUZZLED JUDGE PONDERS THE CASE

Before this coming Sunday’s feature is published we want to insert an addition to last week’s feature about the Galbraith and Bacon Wall Street Wharf and the Bark Montcalm that was tied to her south side most likely in early November, 1910 and not “circa 1912” as we speculated last Sunday.   Here’s the feature photo, again.

We received three letters responding to our uncertainties about which Montcalm this was and, as noted, the date it visited Seattle.  Reader Kyle Stubbs was first to respond, and noted that “I am only aware of one Montcalm that was a barque-rigged sailing vessel.  That is the Montcalm of 1902, 2,415 tons built at Nantes, France, which was used in around Cape Horn service by La Societe des Voiliers Nantais.  The vessel was broken up in the Netherlands in 1924.”

The next letter came from Douglas Stewart, a seasoned cardiologist with the University Medical School and hospital, whom I first met last winter after I fell to the kitchen floor, tripped by my oxygen gasping heart’s tricks with consciousness, or loss of it.   The good doctor is also an enthusiast for most things maritime, and even rows to work from his home, which like the hospital sits beside Portage Bay.   He found that the original nitrate negative for this photograph is in the keep of the University Libraries Special Collections. In their terse cataloging of it a librarian concludes that this was the “decommissioned sailing ship Montcalm at dock, probably in Seattle ca. 1912.”   The date is almost certainly wrong, and the “decommissioned” attribute is unclear or uncertain.   Decommissioned when?   The library’s data also describes this Montcalm as an “armored sailing corvette . . . originally built for the French Navy in 1865.”  While a Google search for everything that is a Montcalm and floats will surface a French corvette with that heroic name dating from the 1860s, it is, again, almost certainly not this Montcalm.  The first French corvettes of the 17th century were much smaller than this bark or barque and were built to carry cannons.  They got bigger, surely, but not this big. and continued to be built for cannons not concrete and wheat like our Montcalm.

The third and last contributor to this quest for a proper caption is our old friend Stephen Lundgren, who for this sort of investigation into maritime history prefers the sobriquet Capt. Stefan Eddie.   I confess to having used the Captain at times as a capable “World Authority on Everything,” resembling the Professor played by Sid Caesar on his TV show in the 50’s – the best part of that decade.  Capt. Eddie also did what I should have done, which is consult the Seattle Public Libraries assess to the key-word search opening into The Seattle Times on-line archive between 1900 and 1984.  Stephen found, for instance, the clipping above, which was almost certainly photographed by the same camera or camera person as the featured photo on top.   From reading the Times reporting during the Montcalm’s few days stay in Seattle, the Captain concludes, “Took about an hour trolling the Times database and verifying the ship history facts.  That it is rigged as a bark, with a steel hull, narrows the search. It’s at the Galbraith Dock probably between discharging the cement cargo in West Seattle and before loading outbound wheat at Smith Cove.  The Galbraith Co. dealt in Cement.  Question is what buildings were constructed with this Belgium-shipped concrete?”  Capt. Stefan Eddie’s last question really goes too far.   How could anyone be expected to follow the concrete from ship to foundations?

Finally, Captain Stephan Eddit added to his missive something more  of his charming familiarity with the Montcalm subject.   He explains, “Lars Myrlie Sr. tells me (in Norwegian) ‘I gots off that damm frenchie ship as soon as it gots to Seattle, it was a hell ship and I damm near gots my head stove in off the coast when the load shifted and knocked the other cargo loose cement in bulk, which meant our sure deaths if we gots a leak.  Sure it was a steel ship but them damm rivets popped when a hard one hit, like a bullet they was and then came the squirt.  My brother gots me off the Galbreath dock and over to Port Blakely and no more damn frenchies for me, Tusende Tak Gotts!”

It took the Montcalm 195 days to carry its 3,000 tons of concrete from Antwerp to Seattle.   The ship was registered at 1,744 tons, so the concrete gave it lots of steadying ballast for the storms.   However, there were no storms except the expected ones around Cape Stiff, the sailors’ name for Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America.   Otherwise her crossing of the Atlantic was one of constant calms and so not of great speed.

About two hours ago our friend and expat in Lima, Bill White, was honored on a stage at the Seattle Public Library.   Or rather his e-book CINEMA PENITENTIARY was honored, he could not make it from Lima.  CINEMA PENITENTIARY is one of three books selected by the Seattle Public Library to be included this year in its lending collection.  We hope that some blog’s will remember that now a few years back we included an excerpt from CINEMA PENITENTIARY. Now, below, Ron Edge will return it to the front of this blog (before the week’s now and then comes forward this evening) that posting.  It will be linked to five reports that Bill made while on his long journey to his New World by ship in the fall of 2012.   We miss you still Bill and CONGRATULATION, of course.  As agreed we should try to resume the posting of Helix issues later this fall. (Once we figure out our Skype tangles.)  A WARNING:  Bill is fond of re-writing so the chapter from CINEMA PENITENTIARY that we printed here two years ago, may have been polished or something since then.  If so now you can compare them.   Contact the library.   It is a treat.

Click the festive photo from Bill to review all his post for his “Journey to a New World”

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

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]

Our old friend (who yet does not seem to age), rock-n-roller, bluesman, front-stage photographer, party-thrower, columnist, incessant wit and politico, Jef Jaisun sends this press-photo and clipping – his creations from a 1979 concert at the Capitol Hill Masonic Temple on Pine Street, the site of the Link Lingenbrink’s Artist League balls covered here earlier this week.  Thanks to Jef.

ANOTHER CLIPPING from RON EDGE

[Click TWICE to Enlarge the Below to a SUPER-SIZE for Reading.]

BERANGERE, JEAN and PAUL return with a few recommendations for the new year grabbed with century-old postcards.

Above: This Post-Intelligencer press photo, courtesy of MOHAI, is too soft to read all the posters held high in 1948 for this demonstration against the state legislature’s Canwell Committee.  The legible ones, left-to-right, read that “Every Canwell Committee member for [the] Lien Law” – “Atom Bombs and military training will not build houses or lower prices!” – “Canwell . . . want more pension cuts!” . . . “The Canwell Committe is illegal, unconstitutional and UnAmerican!” . . . “Every Canwell Committee member voted for Pension Cuts!”  The business of the Canwell Committee is briefly described in the “now and then” printed at the bottom.  Below:  Late summer Bumbershoots are often visited by “get out the vote” activists. Like the 1948 protestors above, these activists do their work beside the south facade of the Centerhouse, AKA Food Circus: the old Armory.

Above: At the 42nd Street entrance to the U.W. students protest the Canwell hearings of 1948.  Photo courtesy Museum of History and Industry.  Below: The University District’s Methodist Temple is seen in part on the right of both views.  Readers may remember the parking lot across 15th Avenue in the “now” scene.  It was created in the late 1960s from the wreckage of the old white frame Wesley House – seen in the “then” – which was a residence hall for coeds.  The lot was recently developed for housing, with some retail and office space as well.  With this the popular and by now venerated Allegro Coffee House in the alley lost both the morning sunlight and its view of the campus green.  The Allegro, either the oldest espresso house in Seattle or nearly, opened on May 10, 1975.

REGISTER YOUR PROTEST

(First appeared in Pacific April 20, 2008)

When the University of Washington opened its first classes on the new “Interlake Campus” in 1895 none of the students lived on campus and few in Brooklyn, the name then of the university district.  Most came from town by trolley and were let off at “University Station,” 42nd Street and University Way.   To reach campus they walked a mere one block east to the incline pictured here, and for many years this was the most frequented way to enter and leave the campus.  For pedestrians it may still be.

Since the lawn here is exposed for sightseeing into the ‘district and sunbaths in the afternoon it has seen a lot of leisure through the years.  I remember it as “hippie hill” in the late 1960s.  Here, however, we see a protest underway on July 15, 1948.

The students are comfortably listening to speeches broadcast from a flatbed truck that is parked on the 15th Ave.  You can see the banner near the center of the “then,” and it reads, in part, “Register Your Protest, Hear and Now, the Canwell Committee.” Albert F. Canwell was the one-term state legislator from Spokane who proudly campaigned on two planks only: no new taxes and no communists.

The speakers this noon were Lyle Mercer, president of Students for Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party, Ted Astley, a veteran’s counselor at the UW and Al Ottenheimer of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, which was just off campus.  The Canwell Hearings injured them all.  The University fired Astley.

However, the real targets in this “red scare” theatre were on the UW Faculty.  After Canwell’s “I will not tolerate questions” proceedings were over, three lost their professorships, scapegoats for the school’s board of trustees who were relieved that the number did not approach what another legislator proclaimed to be the total accounting of communists on the faculty.   That was 150: the same as that estimated by The Times for the number of students who attended this barely on-campus protest.

WE POST another colorless MASTHEAD without body as we continue to exercise our RIGHT to RECESS, and include NO NEW HELIX this week as we wait for BILL WHITE to reach his PARAMOUR IN PERU before continuing our weekly commentaries on FRESH ISSUES OF HELIX via SKYPE – or something else that is cheap as well.

For DIVERSION we post now a BILL OF BILLS – SIX BILLS with (unidentified) WOMEN.   One of these pairs includes our Bill who is now still on the Caribbean with hundreds of tourists heading for Panama and the passage there from the Old World into the New – so FITTING for our Bill.    The remaining Bills are a mix pulled from our growing horde of scans.  We may hint at their identities.   Some will still know themselves.

(Click TWICE to Enlarge)

TWO TOWERS

(First appeared in Pacific, March 18, 1990)

At different times, two towers have looked down on the neighborhood around Fourth Avenue  and Thomas Street.  As landmarks go, they can be compared, although hardly.  One tower is the city’s present baton, the Space Needle.  The other tower belonged to Fire Station No. 4 with in its original form its elegant English-style architecture.

Station No. 4 was built in 1908 and first was occupied on Oct. 15 of that year.  Its three grand double doors opened to a steamer, a pump and a hose wagon, all of them horse-drawn.  Engine Company No. 4 had moved over from an old clapboard station nearby at Fourth Avenue and Battery Street, which had been razed that year during the Denny Regrade.  According to fire service records preserved faithfully by Seattle Fire Department historian Galen Thomaier, only 13 years later the company moved back to Fourth and Battery into yet another new station.  It is still there.

For four years following this final move in 1921, the still relatively new but deserted structure was idle until the Seattle Fire Department transferred over it alarm center from the SFD’s old headquarters at Third Ave. and Main Street.

For some reason, when this station was picked for the alarm center, its third-floor gables were cut away.  The tower looked awkwardly stranded beside its flattened station before it too was lowered.

Fire Station No. 4 in its original stone-and-brick beauty  – as pictured on top – was designed by one of Seattle’s more celebrated historical architect, one best known for his school designs.  After James Stephen won a 1902 contest for school design, he was employed as the city’s school architect and designed more than 20 Seattle schools.

This small bistro has kept all the soul of rue Mouffetard market.

The name of the bistrot is a pun. Of course, we walk there because the street is pedestrian, and the wine glasses have stems too, it is an opportunity to meet and talk, read the newspaper, eat very well, see exhibitions and raise glasses to our friends …

Ce petit bistrot a gardé toute l’âme du marché de la rue Mouffetard. Bien sûr on y vient à pied car la rue est piétonnière, et les verres à vin sont à pied aussi, c’est l’occasion  de se retrouver pour discuter, pour lire le journal, se restaurer superbement, voir des expos, et  trinquer à la santé des amis…

Claude Derrien, the owner of the bar and the barman Nicolas

Rue Mouffetard

Le verre à Pied, 118 rue Mouffetard Paris 5th

The “now-then” recent feature about the “row house” at the southeast corner of 5th Avenue and Madison Street (now the home of the College Club) triggered this response from Mary and Leslie Norton, descendents of the Reinig family that built it.  Read on . . .

THE LETTER

Hi, Paul,

My sister and I were pleased to see the photo of the houses at 5^th and Madison in this week’s Times magazine section.

The Reinig Apartments were built by our great-grandparents, Margarethe and Leonard Reinig;  we believe the 1889 date is accurate.

Leonard Reinig came to America in his 20’s from Diedesfeld, Germany, and learned the bakery business in St Louis, and The Dalles, Oregon, where he also learned Chinook.  He came to Seattle in 1869 to start his own Seattle Bakery, in a building rented from Henry Yesler on Mill Street (now Yesler Way). This included a delicatessen and he would deliver baked beans and brown bread to customers on Saturday mornings. It is said he produced Seattle’s first bakery cookies, and in 1872, made and sold the city’s first ice cream.  Later he and a partner built a two story brick building at 1^st and Marion, the Reinig-Voss building, where he ran a grocery in front, a bakery in the rear, and upstairs had a large hall for meetings, concerts and performances.

Our great-grandmother, Margarethe Schafer Reinig, was the daughter of German immigrants from Witterschlicht, Germany, who settled first in Wisconsin, then took up a large farm on the Satsop River, in Grays Harbor county.  She met Leonard Reinig when she came to Seattle as a young woman, to work for family friends, the Bailey Gatzert family.  After their marriage, they built a home at 5^th and Madison, where they raised their three sons, Otto, Dionis (Dio) and Eddie. The family owned this property until surviving sons Dio and Otto sold the land to the College Club in the 1960’s.

In the photo in the paper, the family home (house on the left) has been moved uphill from it’s original site at 5^th and Madison, facing Madison, and turned to face 5^th Avenue.  At this time, the family had already purchased their new home farm in Snoqualmie, and were preparing for a move there in 1890.  We are told that in the photo, sons Dio and Eddie are in the buggy, and Otto is on the porch.  The horse is Nellie, a fine driving horse that they shipped to Snoqualmie by rail when they moved.

The property where the house was moved was an extra lot that Leonard purchased so that Margarethe could have a small garden and raspberries close at hand.  The family also owned land at 12^th and Spring, where they had a large garden and kept pasture for the horses.  My grandfather (Dio) told us that from the house, they could see the ships coming into the docks;  if their father was expecting an order, they could run down to the store to tell him, then up the hill to get the horses, and have the wagon at the pier by the time the ship was docked.

In Snoqualmie, Leonard Reinig opened a grocery store, and ran a farm, while the family kept up business and social interests in Seattle.  Later Otto took over the Snoqualmie grocery store, Dio managed the farm, and Eddie, an electrical engineer trained at the California School of Mechanical Arts, worked for Seattle City Light until his tragic death.

Several years ago, our late mother, Leslie Reinig Norton, gave the original plan drawings of the apartment building, and the Reinig-Voss building to the Seattle archives at the University of Washington.

Sue Schafer, our “cousin”, has written an interesting book, “Voices of the Past”, an annotated collection of early letters of Margarethe Schafer Reinig’s family, including correspondence between Margarethe and Leonard and from them to her parents on the farm in Satsop. We are also fortunate to have some written recollections from our grandfather, Dio Reinig.

Thank you for your interest in this photo.

Mary Norton

Leslie J. Norton

(Click TWICE to Enlarge)

This Friday afternoon (April 6, 2012) while visiting the MOHAI library with Ron Edge to process illustrations for the second volume of Rich Berner’s “Seattle in the 20th Century” series, I took a break and revisited the “Repeat Photography” exhibit that Jean, Berangere and I curated.  The exhibit opened last April, and so it is now up nearly a year.   For it and much else at MOHAI  we recommend visiting the museum before the doors are closed mid-June next.   I took from the hip snapshots of all the exhibit’s parts and include a very few here to make the point.

Our exhibit is made from four parts: the world (represented by Paris, France), Washington State, Seattle and its Wallingford neighborhood.

Today I also visited many of the museum’s regular exhibits including the “Great Fire of June 6, 1889” mural and a revealing (of age) cross-section of a fallen Douglas Fir.

While Ron continued to do his research in the MOHAI library I took a walk across the MOHAI parking lot to the trail that leads to Foster Island.  Below are the bridge to the island and two details taken from very near its west, or MOHAI, end.

At least from the parking lot the best sign that MOHAI is moving is the impressive red van that is parked there.  It is marked or signed by the Hansen Bros. movers that started in the University District long ago.

These two aerials from June 14, 1939 spot a Boeing Clipper resting at dock in the residential cove between what is now Matthews Beach Park and Discovery Park.    They are copied from a collection owned by the courteous Dan Eskenazi thru the help of citizen Ron Edge.  [Click TWICE to enlarge]

Hello Paul.

I enjoyed your article on the Jolly Roger restaurant and remember it well.   I read your column every weekend on your web site.  In fact I prefer it over the much shorter version in the Times.  The Item that really caught my attention was the one about the Boeing Flying Boat.

I came to Seattle in January of 1938 at the age of 6 weeks old.  My father had been transferred here by the J.C.Penny C..  He was the head of the advertising and display department of the downtown Penny’s store.  In early 1940 we moved into a new house in the NE part of Seattle, just North of the city limits, on 48 Ave NE just off NE 97th.  It was just 3 blocks north of “old man” Mathews lake front home (which was later to become the start of Mathews Beach Park).  I lived all of my life until 2005 in Seattle and found it a wonderful place to grow up and live.  I now live in Snohomish.

My folks told stories about the Jolly Roger and of the Boeing Flying boats taking off from Lake Washington.   At the South end of what is now Mathews Beach Park was the staging area for the Boeing Flying boats.  It contained work sheds, a reception facility, parking lot, and a very substantial dock running out into the lake past the shoreline sand bar.  The dock was so substantial  that trucks could be driven out to the plane tied up there.   The reception facility had a fireplace, a full kitchen and large open spaces.  I don’t know who actually owned the property but after the war it was turned into a water ski club with lots of activities, Bar-B Q’s, beer drinking, and parties on the weekends.  We had neighbors that would take us kids down there to water ski and watch the boats.

During the fifties it was turned into community supported swimming and social club.  There were no public beaches for swimming and lots of new post war homes in this area at that time.  Teenage dances, potlucks, and adult square dancing were the mainstay activates.  The area around the facility at that time was mainly small family homes and “old Man” Mathews farm, barn, out buildings, and home.  Diagonally across from the entrance to the social club was the home of the Edson’s ( not sure of the spelling).  Oren Edson and his brother spent much of their time at the water ski and social club and would later put there boating interest to work.  They became the founders of the Bayliner boat company.  They honed their entrepreneurial skills by buying mail order fireworks and then retailing them to the neighborhood kids at highly inflated prices.  They were the only game in the neighborhood.

This entire neighborhood would eventually be bought up piece by piece, by the city of Seattle, to become what is now Mathews Beach and its parking lots.

I hope I haven’t bored you with my remembrances.  Cheers Fred Rowe

Cheers in Return Fred.  I read – and published – the whole thing with kind regards.

Jean has enlightened me concerning the fate of items added to any of our posts.  Depending upon the timing, some readers will never see them.  The reason is that the original contents of a posting  – and this part is mysterious still to me – are copied by entities, which then share them with others who ask for them.   The mysterious but still mighty servers are only interested in “beginnings” and do not write over or add the additions to their original copies of the page. They resemble teachers who will not take late changes – including additions – to a term paper.  And so you see the problem of adding information  – mostly illustrations – later on.  Consequently, we here add addenda (or addendums, if you prefer) fresh and at the blog’s top as late additions to the Riverside story that appears in its greater part below Jean’s restaurant review of Green Lake’s Trattoria Cioppino, which is just below.

In the last Seattle Now and Then contribution – Jan. 15, this year – we included a feature titled “Dear Old Seattle.”  It was a quote taken from one of the many letters sent by Fred Stanley Auerbach, the young man pictured above, to his parents in the east.  As explained, Auerbach was visiting here looking for the best investment chances for family money.  Archivist-historian Greg Lange uncovered the letters several years ago and we copied them.  Auerbach stayed in the Seattle Hotel, using its stationary.   He liked the hotel but in one letter he considers moving to less expensive quarters.   We have pulled a few pages – only – from the many that are collected in a bound album.   Auerbach was here in 1906, still the time of Seattle’s greatest booming.   His handwriting is negotiable and his descriptions often lively.   “This is the damnedest town I ever saw . . . I never was in a city in my life where I felt such a stranger and I think the reason is that nobody has been here long enough to feel at home . . . It is all business. You couldn’t imagine anyone saying ‘dear old Seattle.’ If you ask anyone on the street where such and such a street is, one out of every three will say ‘I don’t know I am a stranger myself.’ ” (The letters, as I pulled them, are not always in the order he wrote them.)

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Auerbach came west on the Canadian Pacific Railroad and crashed with it.  The top of the two remaining selections describes, in part, that adventure.  The last letter witnesses to another crash – a “remarkable accident” – at a Seattle intersection.

First, Ron Edge – of our Edge Clippings – comments that Frank Shaw’s unidentified shoreline Gazebo (somewhere on Puget Sound) is prefigured with the Madrona Park gazebo.   Following that comparison, we include four panoramas of work-in-progress on the Jackson Street Regrade.  One of the four is a completion of the half-pan shown here with the Dec. 24 feature on the regrade, which looked northwest into it from near the southeast corner of 7th and Weller. Taken as a cluster the four pans are very revealing and exquisite for study.  (They are used courtesy of the Seattle Public Library.)

The JACKSON STREET REGRADE ADDENDUM (for Dec. 24, 2011)

CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE

To me the above gent  holding a paper looks something like the old Capitol Hill Times Editor of the 40th thru the 70s, Louis Magrini.

The one looks east on Pine toward its intersection with 3rd Ave.  The facades of both the Bon and Frederick and Nelson show on the left.

This gent at least resembles Louis Magrini, the long-time editor of  the Capitol Hill Times.  More likely that it is the newsman tending the sales box for the daily pulps.

Some of these required, it would seem, some snapping with quick withdrawal.   When I first attempted to include this, my computer denied me, explaining that the image was withheld for “security reasons.”  In the tone or temper of the times, “National Security?” I thought – seeing the sailor.  Then checking the file I discovered that the “jpeg” ID had not yet been affixed.

Donovan’s Brain Part 1

Donovan’s Brain Part 2

Orson Wells at the microphone.

There were fewer musicians and people in the street of Quartier Latin this year,

still  the mood was enthusiastic and the pop music of the seventies was very loud.

Here are a few photos.

Cette année,  il y avait moins de musiciens et moins de spectateurs au Quartier Latin.

Mais l’ambiance était enthousiaste et la pop musique des années 70, à fond.

Quelques photos…

Rue SoufflotBoulevard Saint GermainRue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève

An old friend experienced  with the lifts, downhills and mountains around Snoqualmie Pass called me and suggested that my description of Guys peak as resembling a “pile of sugar” in the winter was a poor analogy for Guys peak is in places – like those facing  motorists and skiers at the lodge beside the highway – too steep to hold snow.   In the worst and coldest of snowfalls it might resemble a sculpted scoop of Rocky Road Ice Cream but never a pile of pure sugar.  We accept this admonishment and print below several looks at Guys Peak, all of them by the “postcard artist” Ellis and none of them showing Guys behaving like any shape of sugar.  Guys, if you don’t already know, is the forward peak that resembles a pile of sugar, or would if it could hold on to it. (Thanks to Ellis collector John Cooper for sharing these scenes.) I will conclude the list with one by Jean, taken while we were working on the book Washington Then and Now.  CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE

November 27th last we published a photo essay – or several – that gathered around the subject of candid street photography.  We began with pictures of our friend Clay Eals’ mother Virginia Slate Eals snapped on Seattle streets during the Second World War.  Now Clay has found a few more examples from out of town and we happily add them with his captions. The top two have come from Donna Crowe, his co-worker at Encompass in North Bend. Donna is pictured as a child in the second image.  From Clay’s many years as editor of the West Seattle Herald we know that they will be spelled and punctuated correctly.

We’ll finish the quartet with another of Clay’s mom, but this time not in Seattle.

(What follows is lifted from “Keep Clam” a work-in-progress on the life of Ivar and Ivar’s.   This is part of the longer of two books, and will appear somewhat polished only on the net.  The smaller book will be published between covers and available early in 2012.   The longer book will begin to appear on its own webpage sometime early next year and “with many extreas” including recordings, video bits, and a reading of the serial installments by the author for those who like to be read to.)

MEETING TED ABRAMS & GUY WILLIAMS

In her revealing memoir “Wash Your Hearts with Laughter”, following her description of meeting Ivar at a Theosophy meeting, Maggie introduces Ted Abrams, the brilliant craftsman, cook, collector and raconteur. “We became friends with the most interesting man two young and green people could associate with.”  Raised in a southern Jewish family, Abrams came to Seattle a short time before World War One.  He escaped the war years living in Japan, working as a buyer for Seattle’s Frederick and Nelson Department store.   Otherwise Ted Abrams lived in Seattle until his death in 1942.  In a recorded conversation with Emmett Watson and Guy Williams, Ivar begins to describe Abrams, until Williams interrupts him. “Allow me to interpolate. Abrams! I’ll swear he knew everything.” Ivar continues, “He was a genius.”  Guy Williams, Ivar’s college friend and sometimes his press agent as well, was encyclopedic on his own.  As a young boy he was already an accomplished auto-dictate.  Growing up in the gypo lumber camps that his dad managed, Williams read a multi-volume encyclopedia from A to Z and it would seem he remembered much of it.

Ivar and Maggie met Abrams at his Club Mauve on First Hill.  Abrams was both the chef and the entertainer with a gift for rendering blues and gospel music he learned growing up in Savanna, Georgia.  Maggie credits Abrams with inspiring Ivar to a more earnest life as a folklorist and songwriter.  Club Mauve was designed around Abrams own collection of antiques and exotic art.  The young couple was so taken with him that when Abram’s club fell victim of the wrecking ball they invited him to join them in West Seattle.  After first distinguishing the old Haglund home on 59^th Ave. SW with decorative brick work, Abrams built his own home from salvaged materials on a lot that Ivar donated across a Horton Street that was more an alleyway than a street.  A visit to Abrams charmed construction became a kind of pilgrimage for members of Seattle’s Bohemian community in the 1930s.  Artist William Cummings recalled the interior of Abrams home in his published, Sketchbook – A Memoir of the 30s of the Northwest School.  “The house was crammed with paintings, drawings, sculpture, etchings and first-edition volumes signed by names famous and infamous.  Ted managed to live just above the alleged level of poverty with an aristocratic grace that seldom showed the strained and stressed crevices of daily life.”

MEETING IVAR & THE BEES

Another visit to Ted Abrams home is recounted in Bill Cumming’s memoir. It is titled for our subject, “Ivar Haglund.”  He might have titled it “Meeting Ivar Haglund” for nearly a half-century later he notes that their bumping “remains vivid” and a bit creepy.

On a spring Sunday afternoon Cumming accompanied Ken and Margaret Callahan aboard their Model A for a visit to Abrams little salvaged manse next door to Ivar’s and Maggie’s place.  Abrams’ “tiny astonishingly fragile and graceful elderly nymph” of a sister had moved from Georgia to help take care of her fading brother, (Anguished, Cumming could not remember her name.) and the pair accompanied the Callahans for a visit to the nearby Alki Point.  Cumming stayed behind, to explore Abrams’ library and watch his cat Mike “who dozed in a corner while I curled up in a big chair engrossed in a book.”  The stage was set for meeting Ivar.  Cumming continues.

“I was raised from the chair by a thunderous knocking on a fragile door, which threatened to collapse under the attack.  Before I could open it, the door sprang open and on the threshold stood another short stocky figure in ample flesh, pale eyes set over drooping lower lids.  At the moment the whole apparition gave off an air of general hysteria. ‘I’m sorry to bother you.  My name’s Ivar Haglund and I live next door.  I’m a friend of Ted’s and the Callahans’.”  Cummings replied, “Yes.  They speak of you a lot.” However, before he could complete his observation, Ivar “blurted out, ‘Listen! You wouldn’t know how to get rid of a room full of bees, would you? I mean an entire room full, my bedroom!’ . . . Driven by a Spartan sense of duty I walked back with him to his yard.  Creeping through the long grass for all the world like marauding Indians in a B Western, we gained the relative safety of the wall of his house directly beneath the bedroom window, which gaped slightly open.   From within floated the ominous hum of multitudinous wings, a hum of anger and threat.  Rising up until our eyes just cleared the sill, we gazed into the room, then froze in terror and abject fear.  The room was indeed filled with bees, flying, standing on edges and ledges, crawling over bed covers, crawling into and out an hollow containers, into lampshades, out of pillowcases . . . In front of our eyes, barely out of striking distance, the sill was three deep in black and yellow malcontents who glared balefully into our eyes, not yet collected enough to launch themselves across the scant inches between us.  Hurriedly we ducked back down and retreated on all fours through the grass, praying that we would not be hit by a sudden raid from the rear.

“Regaining the safety of Ted’s porch, I slumped in a chair, while Ivar wandered off in search of someone who might be of practical help.  My only suggestion was to burn the house down.  I never met Ivar again.  In fact, I never really found out if it actually was Ivar or not.  If it’s of any significance to scholars, he wasn’t carrying a guitar.”

(The above was written – often copied – during a blizzard sent early from Canada this Monday evening, November 22, 2010.  This morning the 93 year old Bill Cummings died, and the community lost thereby one of its great raconteurs.  He had hosted his last painting class in his home a week earlier.  Last Friday our mutual friend the pianist-producer Margaret Margason serenaded Bill.  She brought with her to Bill’s home some romantic Robert Schumann and some Beatles, and he requested the latter, which she both played and sang.  At the time he was reading again the Jeeves novels by the English humorist P. G. Wodehouse.  About one month ago Bill celebrated his last birthday with the Margasons at their Wallingford home.  A few days earlier I had found in a collection of negatives recorded by the artist Victor Lygdman a series of “artist at work” portraits of Bill that Victor took in the earlier 1960s.  Six of these are included below.)

Bill Cumming, age 93, died this morning of congestive heart failure.  He held his last painting class at his home last Monday.  On Thursday his friend Margaret Margason serenaded Bill.  She brought with her high romantic music for Soprano by Robert Schumann and a Beatles songbook.  This time Bill chose the Beatles – for a sing-along.  The six portraits of the artist “in process” were photographed in the mid-60s by Victor Lygdman, who died earlier this year of the relatively “mere” age of 83.  Victor was born ten years after Bill.

This street snapshot by Victor Lydgman (1927 to 2010) looks north on Second Avenue from its intersection with Pike Street, the southwest corner.  Undated, the negative is yet part of a packet of consecutively numbered negatives, some of them dated 1962, the likely date for this too.   The sun is to the northwest and so later in the afternoon and throwing long shadows.  One of these shadows lends us “Unintended Effects #4” and waits on a reader to unravel its mysteries.   The right leg (here on the left) of the tall and/or slender woman, left of center, seen here in profile, is planted on the pavement and throws an appropriate shadow to the east-southeast – like all other shadows at this time and in this place.  The left leg is beginning its lifting motion that puts the toe – only – in touch with the sidewalk.  It too castes a shadow – but an uncanny one.  The shadow appears to originate to the left of the toe, and so on the sun’s side of the foot.  Since this is not possible – that that part of the shadow be cast by the left leg or foot – what then is casting that shadow – or that part of it in front of the shoe?  In all respects it looks like the darkness in front (to the left and west) of the shoe is continuous with the shadow behind the foot.  There is also no blending of the shadows thrown by the left and right legs.  Although they come close to touching or closing off the light between them, they do not.  The darkness in front of the left foot does not look like a stain or something inserted into the pavement for, for instance, a utility.  What and how is it?  (Click to Enlarge)

Here’s a correction sent by Fleet encyclopedist Rex Lee Carlaw who has been studying the Puget Sound fleet since he was a child.

Dear Paul,

Thanks for “The Fleet.”

Note:  KEHLOKEN, not Kehlokin
Tahlequah, not Tahlequa

(But I don’t know if it can be edited.)

KALAKALA ran Port Angeles – Victoria until 1959, and TILLIKUM came on line in 1959, so that dates this.  It does have errors though.  SAN MATEO is missing; she ran Edmonds-Kingston.  KLAHANIE ran Edmonds-Kingston and Fauntleroy-Vashon-Southworth, not Mukilteo-Columbia Beach.  KEHLOKEN ran Seattle-Winslow, not Edmonds-Kingston.

This was the year I started riding the Edmonds-Kingston route regularly (I was 7).  My parents bought a beach house (now at the foot of Lindvog Rd.) on 01 July that summer.

Rex

SEVEN more CAPITOLS from the HORSE RIDE – ALL UNIDENTIFIED & THE GOVERNORS TOO!

THE JOHNSON HOME at 169 ERTURIA

Like any mill town “Greater Fremont” was once scattered with modest residences. Of the many that survive, a few have been mercifully spared the trauma of remodeling and appear today much as they did in the 1890s.

One example is the Johnson home at 169 Etruria near the south end of the Fremont Bridge.  This is the smaller section of Fremont that climbs the north slope of Queen Anne Hill and somewhere along the way leaves the mill town for the hill town.  (Since I last visited the site the home in 1991 it has been effectively walled away from the sidewalk and street, as testified with Jean’s recent return to Etruria.)

Ion Johnson married Ellen Maud O’Grady in 1893. They had a son, Ralph Waldo, who purchased a camera and built a darkroom in the backyard shed. The first of Ralph Johnson’s pictures above is of the family home.  As noted it was scanned from a photo album that survives with the home. The darkroom-shed is also still standing – or rather was when last I visited 19 years ago.

Johnson’s album is packed with rare glimpses into the life of his neighborhood during the construction years of the ship canal and the bascule Fremont Bridge. The album is also a confession of one young adult male’s interests in boats, women, and motorcycles. The album’s last pages are filled with snapshots Johnson made as an infantryman in France, or on his way to France. Badly gassed in the trenches, he was predisposed to respiratory illnesses the rest of his life. He died of pneumonia in 1980 at age 87.

By his friends’ descriptions, Ralph Waldo was a natty man who loved opera, the theater and dining out. Good-humored and generous, he was active in the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society and sometimes wrote for its publication, the Sea Chest.

As an adolescent Ralph briefly worked as a candy boy on the celebrated Puget Sound steamer Yosemite until his mother overheard some of the language used on deck.  Waldo’s father, lon, died in the early 1920s, but his mother continued to live in the family home until her death in the mid-1940s. Thereafter Waldo’s only sibling, his younger sister Beryl, lived there until her death left the little home to Waldo alone. Heirless, Ralph Waldo Johnson willed his family home to Margaret Wilhelmi, the daughter of a close friend. She has protected (still in 1991) both the little residence’s architectural integrity and Waldo’s revealing photo album.

(Next we visit the home of Ralph’s neighbor Annie Craig, and conclude with a sample of other scenes pulled from Johnson’s surviving album of youthful snapshots.)

[PLEASE CLICK to ENLARGE]

ANNIE CRAIG’S HOME on FLORENTIA

Ralph Waldo captions this recording of his neighbor, “Mrs Craig, 1915.” However terse, this is a good lead. The Polk Directory for 1915 reveals that an Annie Craig, widow of Charles, lived at 200 Florentia at the north end of Queen Anne Hill near the Fremont bridge. The woman standing here with her birds is surely that Annie Craig.  She lived across the alley from Ralph Waldo’s home on Etruria, and her young neighbor took this snapshot and printed it in his darkroom shed on the alley.

Searching back and forth from 1915 through other Polk directories reveals that Anna and Charles Craig moved to Florentia in the late 1890s from a home on the other side of Queen Anne Hill, at 232 First Ave. W., about three blocks north of Denny Way. Charles is first listed there in 1890. His 1899 registry is more elaborate; he is tabbed as a tallyman for the Stetson and Post Lumber Company. That 1899 recording is ‘Charles Craig’s last. Following directories list Anna (or Annie) Craig as his widow.

In the 1909 Polk Directory, Anna is identified as vice president for the Flatow Laundry Company on First Avenue in Belltown. The directory also reveals that Isador Flatow, the president, lived at 69 Etruria, or just up the alley from Annie.

After that listing, there is nothing to quickly learn about Annie Craig except that she nurtured a most inviting flower garden and had more than one parrot to adorn it.

“Annie Craig (widow Chas) 200 Florentia” is last listed in the 1921 city directory.

(A version of the text that follows the “now” below first appeared in Pacific Mag – Sunday Times – for Oct. 12 1997.  You will know from your own experience that 13 years are kept within the envelope named “The Passage of Strange Time” or in the drawer marked “The Strange Passage of Time.”  It seems to me now like I was on this corner taking the “now” much much more recently than that.  But still I have lost – temporarily – the negative.  Jean’s from last week end will do better, and in color.)

Queen Anne  High

While the classical brick-and-tile pile of Queen Anne High School was being raised on the summit of Queen Anne Hill in 1908-09, the major part of Denny Hill was being lowered beneath it.  The school board’s decision to build a new high school here at the then still relatively remote intersection of Galer Street and Second Avenue N. rather than wait a few months for a school site in the Denny Regrade was controversial, although perhaps not for the 650 students and 33 teachers who entered the new school in September 1909.

Otto Luther, a 28-year-old history teacher at Broadway High School, was brought over as principal.  At the school’s dedication ceremony, Luther made the point that “the high school is the people’s college.”

And it was the proud understanding of that progressive era in local education that the teaching done at Seattle’s high schools was very good.  Luther presided here for 42 years – something that can happen when you are made the “boss” at twenty-eight.  He retired in 1951.  This was three years less than the 45-year service of the school’s physical-education instructor, Mable Furry.

The above view of Queen Anne High dates from the late teens, and the bricks and terra-cotta ornaments – including those clusters of scrolls and wreaths hanging from the cornice – are still like fresh.  In this late autumnal scene, the landscaping is barely adolescent and does not interfere with what is a good architectural record of a city landmark.

But in its yearly years – or perhaps anytime before the TV towers were erected nearby – Queen Anne High School could best be seen from the bottom of Queen Anne Hill or from the Denny Regrade.  From there, its looming classical pile made it Seattle’s acropolis.  Other photographs included here – far below – show that it can also be seen from Fremont  (upper Fremont) and, of course, Capitol Hill.

Here, below, we have lifted a profile of Queen Anne High’s long-time principal Otto Luther (Here he stands) from the popular Seattle blog name VINTAGE SEATTLE.  It describes itself as a “High-resolution blog visualizing the Emerald City’s Past.”  It is always a favorite destination and often much fun.  We might have, however, as local Troglodytes written “the Queen City’s Past” given that “Emerald City” was a replacement for “Queen City.” The green stone was thought more descriptive than royalty and it gave the modern media agents of the Central Business Association or the Chamber of Commerce or the Visitors Bureau (I no longer remember) another chance for a promotion.  That was about 35 years ago only. But then to be fair “Queen City” was first applied by a Portland-based real estate agent in Pioneer times and not following the discovery here of any royalty. Rather the bigger city Oregonians wanted to sell lots of lots in the still fledgling Seattle on the chance that the buyers might expect to find a stump here marking a kings ransom or wearing a diadem.  And they did.

Jean and Ron and all the schleps that see, here is something to ponder: the celebrated Bellingham recorder, J. Wilbur Sandison’s version of that same stretch on Chuckanut Drive that we published together directly below this addendum.   I think it is Sandison who stood on the rock that Jean climbed and bushwhacked to the top and not Jukes, another productive Bellingham photographer who recorded the version that we used in “Washington Then and Now.” (Or does the rock sprawl?)   Study the limbs and power poles, count the fence posts, consider the near-by curve in the highway.  What do you think?

MORE on Those FERRY NAMES

Mistakes can be exciting.  In the original Colman Dock feature on this blog for which this is the 5th Addendum, I put it that the San Mateo was the only ferry transplanted or shipped from California that kept its Golden State Name.  The rest were traded, I explained, for Evergreen State Names.  I did not add at the time that the first ferry that Washington State Dept of Transportation built was named The Evergreen State, and you can find it above in that photographically crude montage pulled from a DOT stapled pamphlet.  Now we get a letter from Rex, who helpfully joins in on this business of ferry names.  The letter follows . . .

Dear Paul,

I loved your Sunday, 05 September 2010, Now & Then in the Times.  I think the Black Ball look at Colman Dock is way better than the modern version!  It always seems to be a struggle to get the state to just call it Colman Dock.  Now they are back to “Seattle Ferry Terminal” but at least they added “at Colman Dock.”

As far as your guess about the SAN MATEO being the only ferry that kept its name, her sister ship, the SHASTA, also ran with her original name.  The NAPA VALLEY used her original name for a while.  She had a fire and was rebuilt.  At some point she became the MALAHAT.  The CITY OF SACRAMENTO ran with her original name or sometimes was referred to simply as the SACRAMENTO.  But eventually she was completely rebuilt for the Horseshoe Bay – Departure Bay (West Vancouver – Nanaimo) run and renamed KAHLOKE.  The steamers apparently were not expected to serve very long and so no effort was expended on changing their names.  SHASTA ran until 1958 and SAN MATEO until 1969.  KAHLOKE came out in about 1951 and ran a quarter century more and the MALAHAT was retired in about 1953.  So actually some of the steamers or their reincarnations lasted a long time.

Yours,   Rex

And thank you Rex.   You have also moved us to attach the few pages on steamers and ferries that appear in the book “Building Washington.”  We will attach them below.   We mean to put this entire history of Washington State public works up on this blog soon.  So the eight pages that follow are a  kind of Public Works Titillation.   They first were printed in the Waterways Chapter, the first chapter in the 400-plus page book.  This is also a kind of test.  We hope you can read it!  By all means please CLICK IT TWICE to ENLARGE IT. The book was published in 1999 (and – we toot – won one of that year’s Governor’s Writers Awards).  At the end of this excerpt we let it run on into the chapter’s description of the Port of Seattle – but we do not continue on with that.  It is just a fragment. 

& Now would be a Good Time to CLICK TWICE!

. . . FOLLOWS A SMALL SAMPLE OF PIONEER WASHINGTON STATE BANKS

(We Do Not Advise Clicking to Enlarge)   Things have gone awry for Horace with this Kodachrome. The focus is soft, the color is shifted so that is seems as rendered from expressionist brush strokes as from emulsion.  The river is running to purple.  And what river?  Perhaps the Styx, border to Hades.  It is the river in which you will drown for eternity if you have been very bad.  Sucking desperately for air but getting only oily water.  Or perhaps this mutilation is somewhere on the Grande Ronde River as it snakes its way across northeast Oregon heading for the Snake River Canyon.  Or another rare but ancient carving stream in arid Utah.  Sykes does not say, but what a possibility: Styx by Sykes.

Related Northwest Green Lake Neighborhood  images and text may be found below, inserted on May 22/2010.   Or search for “Maust.”

(Click to Enlarge)

MAUST MOVERS

From a life of raising chickens and saving souls, Charles Maust, a Baptist minister who ran a poultry farm on the shores of Green Lake in 1902 took to also hauling coal that year.  Maust trucks are still hauling as the company climbs the driveway to its centennial.

Maust built his namesake block at the flatiron corner of 73rd and Winona in 1906.  He rented the upstairs corner office to the physician Herman Greiner and the center storefront to a cobbler, and he attached a gaudy second structure at the north end on which he marketed the range of his service.  Coal, wood, sand, gravel, flour, spuds, brick, lime, cement, plaster: those are the stables of 1906.

Although the company home and stables were beside the lake they did much of their hauling on the central waterfront.  One of the earliest contracts was with Black Diamond coal.  Loaded at the pier Maust wagons carried the coal to both commercial and residential customers all over town.   Eventually, Maust rolling stock was active from Blaine to Olympia.  From canteens to chicken feed Maust trucks helped built Fort Lewis and also service a route of chicken farmers around Tacoma.

The company was also handling fish, and it was as a mover of fish – canned, fresh and frozen – that Maust ultimately got its reputation.  For years it was headquartered at Pier 54, sharing it with Ivar’s Acres of Clams and the Washington Fish and Oyster Company.  Maust however never gave up the claim, “We Haul Just About Everything.”

Three Maust generations  — Charles, Harold and Norman — ran the company until 1996 when long-time company employee — and Norm Maust’s friend — Gary Dennis took over.   Included in the company lore is a recollection by Charles’ son Harold how during the Great Depression his dad laid him off in favor of a married man who had a family.  As Harold noted, “My dad was a fair man – took care of everybody and was well liked.”  Evidently, the Baptist preacher turned trucker kept his interest in souls.

Living close to Seattle’s Green Lake Jean will sometimes visit it and at any hour.  And sometimes he will send me pictures.  Here are three beauties grabbed or gained from a recent walk to the lake.  (Click to Enlarge)

May I be the first to offer some mild corrective details on your fascinating waterfront then/now of this weekend. I happen to be working on that area already.

You caused a few hours of pleasant book searching on my shelves.

I suspect the Art Deco Colman Dock photo is 1938, based on the fashion wear esp of the hot fox in the fur and slit to the thigh sheath silk dress coming off the morning boat from Bremerton. She’s a story in herself. The white straw fedoras indicate spring wear for gents as well.

I note you rightly did hedge on the names of the boats. You could have asked me, I got all the books and besides I checked with Captains Bob and Oscar, my fathers who art in heaven but still standing watch,  who were there so I got the straight poop on the deck here.

There were two others that kept their names:

The second batch of boats that Peabody bought in the Bay and brought north were those he didn’t completely rename, something about war priorities trumping Public relations, etc, Those without name changes included the San Mateo’s sister ship, the steamer Shasta which later joined the WSF fleet until 1959 retirement to the Portland waterfront; also in 1943/44 the single ended fast steamer City of Sacramento, nee the steamer Asbury Park, another high speed veteran of the Golden Gate fleet, which retained that name until going North with Peabody to BC where it became the Kahloke, later Langdale Queen.  The other single ender converted boat, the Napa Valley, became the Malahat once arrived, and after a mysterious arson fire was rebuilt in Winslow in mere weeks. See my WW2 espionage novel for more details on all this jazz.

The Deco Terminal photo was published in Kline & Bayless Ferryboats a legend on Puget Sound, but no credit to source. Looks like a candid, or Times shot. Not sure when the passenger ramp  was built, even the pre-deco terminal had that upper level deck and access.  An earlier shot of the same over the rails viaduct is in Steamer’s Wake, but earlier 1930s (notwithstanding Faber’s caption alleging post-mosquito fleet).   I’d love to get to an original.

Did I ever tell you the nutty idea that was proposed to remove the pedestrian overpass to “enhance the streetscape experience?” Seriously, at a WSF design meeting I crashed several years ago (they had a nice spread of free salmon and oysters, at Ivars, when WASHDOT had money to waste and I was on the Viaduct Consultancy Version I). Myself and a Bremerton councilwoman told them how utterly stupid that idea was. It got dropped (as did the entire Colman Dock rebuild project).

See attached (above) for Miss Thelma Murphy, the hootchy kootchy gal in the red silk dress. Nice figger! 9:35 in the morning?

No I don’t think that’s her mother walking next to her. Her madame, perhaps.

Unless she’s an admiral’s daughter. Now there’s a plot idea – pillow talk to my spy straight from Daddy’s top deck.

Regards, Capt Eddie

THE CITY OF SACRAMENTO

Two readers of last Sunday’s “now-and-then” on Colman Dock have written to correct us (me) on this matter of California ferries losing their Golden names for Green ones when they were moved north to Puget Sound.  I wrote that I thought that the San Mateo was the only one to keep its San Francisco Bay tag.  Or perhaps I just claimed it and had no reservations.  Whatever, I fumbled.  There were others.  Not many, but others.  And The City of Sacramento, above, was one of them.

Here follows the more recent letter on this dropped pass. (I’m keeping to seasonable analogies, although I don’t give a knee injury and shortened life span for football.)  Ron Miller is it’s author, and he mentions the first name, Bob, of the first writer in his first line.   We quote.

“Paul,

I see on your blog that “Bob” already mentioned the City of Sacramento along with a couple other ferries from California. I didn’t know about the others, but I certainly remember the C-of-S from summer days in the 1940s on Alki Beach, where we kids would eagerly watch for it to pass because it made big waves. It served here between 1941 and 1952, when it moved on to BC and was rebuilt and renamed Kahloke. Also, there is the preposterous but also rather touching song “On the Black Ball Ferry Line up in Seattle” by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters that immortalized some of the fleet, with special mention of the C-of-S. I’ve attached the relevant part of the lyrics—it’s worth the trouble (and it was some, at least for me) to track it down on line and listen to it.”

Now we interrupt to note that Ron Miller is an Emeritus Professor of Regional Science connected to the University of Pennsylvania, and that he is now back living in West Seattle on Beach Drive S.W with a view of both the Olympics and shipping, although without, of course, any chance of seeing the City of Sacramento since 1952.   Here’s Bing and the Andrew Sisters – the relevant part.

Get aboard get aboard when the weather’s fine
Take your pick of the ferries on the Black Ball Line
There’s the Illahee and Chippewa
And the Quillayute…the Kalakala…
You’ll find all these on the Black Ball Line…
The Klahanie, the Nisqually, there’s the Malahat
(we’ll think of that!)
The Klickitat
(there goes my hat!)
The S! S! City of Sacramento!
(What are we doing down in California?)

RETURN TO THE SAN MATEO (TWICE)

Just received from Ron Edge, the cover for “The Mountain That Was God” – a resonating attachment to the Daily Sykes #140 directly below it.

Late summer 2005 Jean and I visited Berangere in Paris, but first we stopped in London for a week and walked about.  I started collecting London books fifteen or twenty years earlier and by the time we arrived I was more familiar with the city than probably most tourists.  It was my second time in London.  It had been a half-century since my first visit with about 35 other 16- year-olds, “boys and girls.”  We were also heading for Paris and a convention to which we were all delegates, although not very good ones.  Most of us spent the 10 days of the conference walking about Paris, and missing the convention’s schedule.  (CLICK to ENLARGE)

This look at the Abbey’s west facade – part of it – was managed by setting the camera on a mail box and holding still.  It is a merging of two parts and the sum has been flattened to turn it into a proper architectural photograph.

I enter this in part to encourage Jean to share some of the photographs he took  while on his visit to London, Paris and Berangere this past July.

Please Click the Clip that Follows TWICE to REALLY ENLARGE it.

Click the above TWICE to Make is Much Larger!

HERE FOLLOWS the 2-page limited edition of the Next Day’s Post-Intelligencer for June 7, 1889.   So that you might more easily read them these are big files and will take a bit longer to download.  Once they appear please – as with all else – CLICK TWICE TO ENLARGE and read the next days reports.   Thanks one again to RON EDGE for providing these.

NOW WE INSERT a BLOGADDENDUM – another EDGE CLIPPING.  In a caption to the Post-Intelligencer’s own description of its efforts to get out their two-page paper, Ron Edge points out its heroic qualities.

Under Berangere’s instruction I have been taking my daily French lessons on the chance that I might some day go ex-patriot.  A late life in the French provinces is appealing, but also life in Paris for an old man might be exciting.  So I study my French.  Soon after  we began these lessons both Jean – who is far ahead of me in this business of learning French – and Berangere encouraged me to post these lessons every day.  I am not sure why, but I liked their recognition.   They have either given up on that or thought the worse for it and I’ve not heard a thing from either of them about publishing these daily lessons on this blog for some time.   Among the handicaps of growing old are losing one’s powers and loneliness.  In partial relief from both I’ll now introduce today’s French Lesson in hopes that either Jean or Berangere will bring the matter up again, or that any of you will find it helpful and make some comment that is kind and encouraging.   Today’s French Lesson includes some prudent advise for anyone considering the ball and chain.  And it is illustrated to make the point better.

FRENCH LESSON for APRIL 13, 2010 (The French lesson is followed by its English translation.  The point is, in part, that I get the translation correct.  How have I done?)

Le caméraman-councelor: une tradition française. “Le mariage n’est pas quelque chose à prendre à la légère.   Pour le moment, de prendre une pause dans la cérémonie. Pensez-y.”

The cameraperson-counselor: a French tradition.   “Marriage is not something to enter into lightly.   For the moment take a pause in the ceremony.  Think about it.”

Sally and Ron and Jean did you know that your crows are members of the same family with the Steller Blue Jay?  As are the ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays magpies and nutcrackers.  This afternoon, and very near to my own front door,  I heard this Steller jumping from branch to branch, breaking dried twigs it seemed, and sometimes rattling, which dear Wikipedia indicates is the “sex-specific” vocalization for the female Steller.  See how close – ten feet perhaps – she allowed me to approach her.

“I have been feeding a crippled crow for about a month now.  He has a broken ankle and has learned to walk with his foot bent under.  We have worked out a routine to distract the rest of the crows, giving him time to swoop down and grab the food I throw to the garage roof. They are really bright birds.”

Ron Edge joins the site to give us two for the crow – a crow on his garage roof, and then a sensible reflection on crows, which he has pulled from the Monday July 15, 1878 issue of the Daily Intelligencer, a precursor of the recently demised Post-Intelligencer.  It is titled, “Feeding Instead of Killing Crows.”

Ron notes that if you take some time to browse YouTube you will find pet crows, playful crows, and problem-solving crows, for instance, crows that build tools to fetch food from crannies. For the toolmaker you can use Ron’s links.

http://www.edutube.org/en/video/intelligent-crow-bends-wire-get-food-out-jar

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/crow_photos.shtml

[In order to READ WHAT IS BELOW you will need to CLICK it TWICE!!]

(click to enlarge photo)

The first Downtown Seattle Spring Festival of Fun was promoted mid-march in 1964.  It was another try at adding some zing to a city who felt deprived of it since its Century 21 left it a Seattle Center in the fall of 1962 but not yet much to use it for.  As the southern terminus of the Worlds Fair’s Marvelous Monorail, the Westlake Mall was also developing into another and smaller Seattle center.  The Ides of March – the next day, March the 15th – was designated the festival’s Waterfront Day.  Joe James manager of Ye Old Curiosity Shop was the chairman.  Ted Griffin, the manager of the marine Aquarium at Pier 56, which had done well during Century 21, two years later was struggling to draw visitors.   Days before the March fun  Griffin announced his plans to stage an octopus wrestling match at his aquarium.   Every Old Settler understood that Griffin’s promotion was inspired by the “Great Rassel of 1947” when Ivar Haglund brought out from the east the pugilist Two Ton Tony to take on Oscar, the star octopus at Ivar’s Pier 54 Aquarium.  Griffin’s bout did not make such a splash, but his great celebrity was less than a year away when he captured  and put on show at his far end of the pier the killer whale Namu.  For Ivar’s part in the ’64 Festival he arranged the musical accompaniment for the Ide’s Waterfront Day with Pep Perry’s Fire House Five Plus Two playing for the open house at the new fire station, which still stands at the foot of Madison Street, and next door to Ivar’s Acres of Clams.