While searching, typically, for something else I came upon this heartening piece of Kodachrome from the winter of 1943.  The original 35mm slide has a caption written the flip side from the “Kodachrome”  stamp.  It reads, in toto,  “Jan. 43  Our favorite spot to rest in summer under trees on shore E. Green Lake Way. Beautiful in Winter as well!!!”

For the moment I do not know where this slide came from, although I think it was mostly likely picked (by me) from one of two large collections of slides.  One I purchased in a basement sale from a home near the east shore of Green Lake.  The other I got from Lawton Gowey, a since deceased friend, who shared with me many images, stories and enthusiasm for regional history.  Earlier he was given the collected slides of Horace Sykes, a long-time member of the Seattle Camera Club,  and Lawton passed the collection on to me.

Sykes’ work is often wonderful and we should show more of it in this blog and will.  But for the moment the image reminded me of Jean’s frequent early morning visits with his camera to this shore of Green Lake, which is also near his home, and the results that he has published here.  So this is my first “Jean Challenge.”

Can he – or rather, you Jean – repeat this shot with a “now.”  A warning through.  It may be more difficult than we think.  There have been some changes on the east shore since 1943.

JEAN GRABS THE GAUNTLET:

Here’s my best effort, slightly wider than the orginal, but pretty close I think.

I emailed the Sykes original to Kathy Whitman, Aquatics Manager for Seattle Parks and Recreation and she replied:

I can’t be certain but I think it is the northern shore of Green Lake looking across the west. West Green Lake Beach would be located just outside the area of vision to the left side the distant shore… the wading pool located to right side outside the area of vision.  It is on the shore about 2/3’s of the way toward the wading pool when leaving Evans Pool.

That had been my best guess as well, as this spot has always been a favorite of Green Lake strollers. As I recall, the trees in the ’43 photo were cut down and replaced by smaller trees, to general opprobrium, but I can’t recall why.  As can be seen, they’ve grown up a bit.

Back a few insertions or entries in this blog we put up seven, if memory serves, panoramas of Meridian Park from the same prospect as the one attached  here, and recorded this afternoon, 12/14/8.  In the now 28 months I have been walking through the Good Shepherd campus, sticking snow has been rare indeed.  This is the third time.  Another of the three is included in the mentioned group below.

(Please click to enlarge)

Paul writes:

In March of 2005, my oldest brother Ted celebrated his 80th birthday with a banquet for kith and kin at Ivar’s Acres of Clams.  It was a family custom that whenever the Dorpat boys returned home for a reunion or whatever, they would join with their father, a robust bass, in another singing of the song “What Will the Poor Birdies Do Then.”

We never knew the actual title for the song, but that may well be it for the line appears in all four verses, which follow and may be named for the four seasons. Ordinarily we began with the Winter stanza.

There are two important tips for the performance of this pathetic song.  First, whenever possible, Norwegian pronunciations are substituted for English – e.g. “Vinter” for “Winter”.  Second, with the singing of the same last line in all four verses, “…and put their heads under their wings”, the singers are obliged to do just that: bend or dip their head and crook their arm over it, as if protecting themselves from something falling from the sky.

So here, left to right, are Ted, David, Norm and Paul, the four sons of Rev. Theo Dorpat and Eda Gerina Christiansen Dorpat, singing in a kind of unison “What Will the Poor Birdies Do Then.”  It was the last time, for before they could meet and sing and raise their arms again Ted and Norm passed.  Actually, Ted never confessed to singing, and if you listen closely, at the beginning of this clip you will hear him announce, “I can’t sing.”

(For those planning to attend ‘Up the Down Chimney’ with Paul and Jean at the Good Shepherd Center on Monday the 22nd, please use the preceding video as a rehearsal tape.)

First, the last of these five recordings of the fall of fall looks up into some of the trees that border the Meridian Playfield in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood.  The park was once an orchard for the Roman Catholic Good Shepherd Home for Girls, and a favored few of the old fruit trees survive.   The panorama merges four images photographed on Saturday the 6th of December, 2008, around 3:30 in the afternoon  The center of the scene is to the northwest.  (Click the image to enlarge it.)

One month and four days earlier (Nov. 2, 2008) I recorded the several parts for this about 260 degree panorama that includes part of the P-Patch (far left)  and most of the Tilth garden.  At the center this pan looks northeast from a Tilth prospect that is near the southern border of the Good Shepherd Campus.  The home seen in part on the right is off-campus and faces Corliss Avenue at its campus dead end north of 46th Street.  The pan is a stitching of eight photos.

The trees that break the horizon above Tilth’s A-Frame greenhouse, left-of-center in the above panorama, appear again in the next recording which looks east towards the Good Shepherd Center and on the same second day of November, 2008.  My back is to the Meridian playfield.  The popular Pergola on the left supports and shelters several concerts during the warmer months, and below the tapping feet of the musicians several families of Rabbits have used the pergola as a hutch.   It is thought that these opportunists made their way to the campus from Woodland Park.

Wet leaves and the bouquets they make can be found throughout the campus resting in and beside the bushes.  This arrangement, however, was discovered a block off campus near the intersection of 46th and Corliss on November 11, 2008.

The last signs of fall included here are the reflections of an autumnal sunset off the west facades of the glass-curtain University District Building at the southeast corner of 11th Avenue and 45th Street – for many years the District’s unofficial mayor, Cal McCune, had his office there – and behind and above it the old corporate Safeco Building recently purchased by the University of Washington. It is the school’s first true high-rise and a symbol of sorts for many developments in the culture of higher education including grade inflation in the school’s undergraduate classes.  B’s continue to rise to A’s at a pace more relentless than global warming.  They are compassionately engineered by human forces in the interests of both comforting and complimenting the often anxious students and also avoiding their sometimes impetuous wrath.   The school recently replaced the insurance company’s banner sign with its own across the top of their new skyscraper.  The photograph was snapped while leaving Trader Joe’s with some pre-cooked brown rice and 73% dark chocolate in the purple wrapper on Dec. 6, 2008.