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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 24, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 27, 2025

Nearly 70 years later, Seafair queen
looks beyond ‘bubblehead’ image

By Clay Eals

Seattleites could be forgiven in 1956 when they opened their newspapers and thought the new queen for the seventh year of the city’s Seafair celebration might be Grace Kelly.

While her resemblance to the previous year’s Oscar-winning best actress was uncanny, the regal honoree was 18-year-old Laurelhurst resident Dixie Jo Thompson.

Today, when daughter Kim Brillhart says others likely compared her to the movie star, the nearly 88-year-old — who uses her married name, Porter — scoffs at references to her appearance. “Maybe I look more like Grace Kelly than their dog did,” Porter says. “Really, are you kidding me? Well, I was blonde and white-skinned.”

The animated resident of the Mirabella Seattle retirement community wields a tongue both thoughtful and tart, countering what she says could be seem as the “bubblehead” image for a festival queen. Her observations frequently turn to a cogent conclusion: “Seafair was something that happened to me rather than something that I chose to do.”

Her fate, she says, was dictated by her parents, who determined that the Utah native and only child attend the University of Washington and join the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which, she says, “assigned” her to compete for Miss University District. Winning that title eventually led to her being named the city’s “Queen of the Seas.”

It was a time (and perhaps still is) when society’s view of women focused on looks. To a degree, Thompson confounded that. Her 3.4 freshman grade-point average triggered this Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline: “Beauty, Brains All In One Royal Package.” But the paper also thrice reported her body measurements, even in a headline. Said another P-I head: “She Dimples Her Way To City’s Heart.”

Even then, she saw herself as “part of a fake kingdom, like being in the theater,” and she played the part to full expectations. Her oft-reported quote was, “It’s like a fairy tale.” In this volunteer role, she donned a crown and gown to smile and preside at countless events. She also endured repeated waist clutches from countless older men whom she dutifully kissed on the cheek.

Gradually, she left the role behind. A YWCA leader starting at the UW in the 1950s, she married Tom Porter, raised three children and became a financial adviser.

Last month, as requested by a Seafair fan at Mirabella, she delighted a crowd of 139 with her life story and details of Seafair’s evolution as part of a “Resident Revelations” series. She told of her “personal fear beyond belief” of the unrestrained Seafair Pirates. “Sorry, pirates,” she said, “you can trash me sometime.”

She also said she tired of visits from celebrities like Bing Crosby and Phil Harris, who “pawed me like I was some kind of cat” during required photo ops that she thinks influenced later Seafair changes.

Indeed, titles and programs evolved at Seafair over the years. What started as Queen of the Seas (1950-71) became Miss Seafair (1972-2024) and was replaced this year by a Community Hero. From 1950 to 1999, a King and Prime Minister were selected, but in 2000 the King became King Neptune, the Prime Minister was dropped and Queen Alcyone was added.

She cheered this year’s Queen Alcyone selection of former Seattle police chief Carmen Best. And with a grin, she cracked that since her younger years, “I have lost 5 inches of height and 22 pounds of weight, so yeah, this is what you’ve got to deal with now.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Judy Waring, Kim Brillhart, and especially Dixie Jo Thompson Porter for invaluable help with this installment!

No 360-degree video this time, but below you will find video of Porter’s Mirabella talk, along with a transcript. You also will find 6 additional photos and, in chronological order, 68 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

Click the above image to see Dixie Jo Thompson Porter’s one-hour talk on June 10, 2025, at Mirabella. The sound is a little murky, so click here to open a transcript of her remarks and use it to follow along.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 17, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on July 20, 2025

In 1898, their grandfather and a school chum answered the cry of ‘GOLD!’

By Jean Sherrard

On July 17, 1897, after the steam ship Portland docked in Seattle bearing treasure from the Yukon, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s front-page-topping headline incanted, “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!”

A day later, the New York Times ran its own front-page article, “Wealth of the Klondike.”

With the rest of the country, two Cornell Law School students, Mark Odell and Ellis Aldrich, read these accounts of vast easily acquired wealth and tossed their hats in the ring.

By March 1898, the ambitious chums had secured funding from a syndicate of investors, likely including Syracuse’s Lyman C. Smith, after whom Seattle’s Smith Tower was named. They dropped out of school and boarded a train for the Northwest.

In their just-released book, “From Cheechakos to Sourdoughs: Two Ivy Leaguers’ Quest for Yukon Gold,” Odell’s maternal grandsons Steve and John Lundin tell a compelling tale drawn from journal entries, letters and 12 rolls of photographs found in a shoebox.

Hot on their grandfather’s trail to the Yukon, the Lundins offer an indelible portrait of the young “stampeders” and their transformation from greenhorns (“cheechakos”) to veteran prospectors (“sourdoughs”).

Within a week of arriving in boomtown Seattle, the industrious Odell and Aldrich purchased more than a ton of supplies from local outfitters and booked passage on the S.S. Alki to Skagway. Throughout, Odell’s observant voice enlivens the narrative.

Steaming up the Inside Passage, he marvels at the “wonders of the sea” whose “delicate changing azure tints” seemed to conceal “mermaids [who] had just slipped off into the dark green waters.”

Arriving in lawless Skagway on April 3, the pair prepared for the first of their countless ordeals — many days of hauling their mass of supplies over

legendary Chilkoot Pass. “From a distance … it looks much like a string of ants creeping up a small mound,” Odell wrote. “Such scenes I never saw nor imagined.”

Over grueling months, the partners continued their northbound journey, often narrowly skirting disaster. Building a cabin near Wolverine Creek, a Yukon River tributary, they mined and prospected throughout a brutal winter, digging 30-foot deep

“placer” shafts through permafrost in forbidding temperatures. “Holy Smut!” Odell noted on Nov. 11. “It was 51 degrees below last night!!!!!”

Approaching mental and physical exhaustion, the two ended their quest for treasure, making a laborious

return from the Yukon February-March 1899, a full year after setting out.

After 126 years, the Lundins write, one mystery remains. Contemporary newspaper accounts suggested that Odell and Aldrich arrived in Seattle laden with gold. But both sourdoughs firmly denied it to the end of their lives.

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 degree video of this week’s column, click right here.

For a fascinating 90-minute PNW Historians Guild lecture by the Lundins, head in this direction!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on July 3, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 6, 2025

For 40 years, Wallingford’s critter column
has sensed the Animal Storm all around us

By Clay Eals

In a sense, it’s all about the senses.

In 1975, sculptor Ron Petty, then 36, moved to the hillside neighborhood north of Lake Union and took note of “the tremendous amount of wildlife here.” Ten years later, thanks to $30,000 contributed by Wallingford residents and businesses, he shaped life-size versions of more than 60 critters from 32 species clambering around and peeking out from a monumental column of bronze and aluminum.

To great fanfare, he installed the 16-foot tower on July 27, 1985, across from the old Food Giant at the southeast corner of Wallingford Avenue and 45th Street. He named it Animal Storm.

“It was just kind of like a storm cloud raining animals,” he reflects today, summoning another palpable fact of local life, what some call Seattle sunshine. In fact, on the pillar Petty even represented our legendary showers as narrow, rectangular bars slipping angularly between the creatures.

Rain or shine, the sculpture draws people who want to see, photograph and touch it close-up, especially kids. And at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 12, 2025, during the 2025 “Wild in Wallingford” parade, Petty’s first and best-loved major creation will get a 40th-anniversary salute. Amid drill teams and floats, inhabitants are encouraged to attend in animal garb.

That would please Petty, who relishes seeing newcomers and returnees examining the pole and finding its squirrels, birds, geese, slugs, bats, cats, fish (one is concave with eggs inside), raccoons, ducks and even a dog wearing a tiny peace-sign collar pendant. He delights in recalling a class of blind grade-schoolers who caressed and identified the critters.

Capping the pedestal is a pounce-ready feline modeled after the artist’s “Mama Cat” at the time. “When I was doing the drawings for the piece, the cat kept walking across the drawing table,” he says. “One of the final times I kicked the cat off, I told her if she stayed off the table, I’d put her on top of the sculpture. And I did.”

Circled by a base of engravings and a broad, curved bench and backed by courtyards of the landmarked Wallingford Center retail and service hub (formerly Interlake School, built in 1904-1908), Animal Storm quickly became the community’s most prominent visual and tactile showpiece.

Petty, also known for his similar but more somber 1988 memorial sculpture at Ballard’s Fishermen’s Terminal, remains grateful for the early faith that Wallingford placed in him to create an enduring tribute to the smaller breathing beings nearby us all.

It’s a profusion, he says. “We just don’t realize that until we actually look close to see what is here.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Ron and Marjan Petty and especially Sarah Martin of Historic Wallingford for invaluable help with this installment!

The Historic Wallingford page on Animal Storm has lots of background information, photos, news clips and videos, including the filmed 1985 dedication ceremony, thanks to Sarah Martin.

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

Below, you also will find 1 additional video, 9 additional photos and 4 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 26, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 29, 2025

Lake Sammamish town’s fiery 1925 demise echoes today

By Jean Sherrard

History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. Accordingly, burning 100 years ago were conflagrations whose embers rekindle today with the threat of literal and figurative five-alarm fires.

On Thursday, June 25, 1925, the thermometer atop Seattle’s18-story Hoge Building recorded the then-warmest temperature in Northwest history. As the mercury climbed to 98 degrees, the city’s two major dailies sported banner weather headlines.

Although “numerous small fires” had broken out across Western Washington, the Seattle Times assured its readers that “they were reported under control.” Further, “fire wardens [will] exercise every precaution as long as the dry weather remains.”

The next day, however, hopes evaporated when the Lake Sammamish mill town of Monohon, four miles north of Issaquah, went up in smoke. The fire began just after noon, reported the Post-Intelligencer’s R.B. Bermann, when “a cigarette tossed aside in the [sawmill’s] washroom started a conflagration which raged unchecked until the whole settlement was virtually destroyed.”

Along with dozens of homes, Monohon’s railroad depot, hotel, general store and the J.E. Bratnober sawmill were “blotted from the earth,” Bermann said, “as though some gigantic monster had stepped on [them], crushing everything to the ground.”

The intense heat had shriveled vegetables on their vines and blackened trees within hundreds of yards. Young chickens in their coops were “baked to a crisp.”

Firefighting efforts were stymied when the road running through town was engulfed in flames. Inadequate hoses and pumps having failed, “attempts to check [the fire] with dynamite … blew blazing timbers all over town, starting dozens of new fires.”

Historian Phil Dougherty, whose HistoryLink essay offers a thorough and colorful account of the disaster and its aftermath, wrote, “The mill rebuilt and survived

in various incarnations until 1980, but Monohon itself was gone.” Though no deaths or injuries were reported, “everything that had made this little town of 300 souls almost the Valhalla of Lake Sammamish — gone.”

A century later, these events continue to send up smoke signals.

The National Forest Service, whose hotshot crews of firefighters have battled wilderness infernos for the past hundred years, has been decimated by workforce cuts from the Trump administration.

As recently detailed in The Seattle Times, significant personnel losses are reported by individual forests across Washington state.

Forest Service officials privately predict disaster for the upcoming fire season, one Washington manager saying that without experienced employees, “the West will burn.”

This is one rhyme we can only hope against hope not to repeat.

WEB EXTRAS

Noting a compass correction: As several readers have commented, Monohon is not 4 miles west of Issaquah, but due north. I was misled by the P-I article printed the day after the fire, which sent me in the wrong direction!

Click on through for our narrated 360 degree video.

A fascinating and somewhat alarming side note: only two weeks later, on July 10, 1925, the Scopes “monkey trial” was about to commence, in which the pugnacious perennial populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuted a science teacher who broke a Tennessee law forbidding mention of evolution in the classroom. On the Scopes trial centennial, a bell tolls for scientific inquiry and education, ringing out another rhyming echo.

UPDATE: Congrats to Sunset Hill Community Hall, which will receive Historic Seattle’s 2025 Community Advocacy Award at the organization’s annual Preservation Celebration on Sept. 25, 2025, at the Labour Temple downtown. For more info, click here.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 19, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 22, 2025

For nearly a century, Sunset Hill clubhouse has built community

By Clay Eals

We all revere the concept of community, but how do we put it into practice? It boils down to joining forces for the common good — for desired improvements and mutual enjoyment. And as with many things, it can be as much about perception as reality.

In 1929, University of Washington master’s student Irene Somerville Durham documented Seattle’s then-108 community clubs, mostly in middle-class and working-class residential neighborhoods. She related the legend of two north-end gents repeatedly stumbling into puddles in the dark and failing to persuade the city to illuminate the area.

One “conceived the bold idea of getting out some letterheads with a community-club name, calling himself the president and his neighbor the secretary. On behalf of this mythical organization, the two demanded a street light in front of their houses. Within a week … the light was in the desired spot.” The letterhead originator “thought the secret too good to keep, and the community-club movement had its beginning.”

Within Ballard, annexed to Seattle in 1907, the western sub-neighborhood of Sunset Hill (from the Locks to the city’s then-northern border of 85th Street) spawned a club in 1922. Two years hence, it bought land at the southwest corner of 66th Street and 30th Avenue. By 1929, the club’s stately home — with two large meeting floors, the upper one with a stage — opened for meetings and parties alike.

It remains a happy survivor, along with similar neighborhood clubhouses in Mount Baker (1914), Lakewood-Seward Park (1920), Haller Lake (1922) and Rainier Beach (1923). A few other such structures also endure citywide but in other uses.

With a succession of four names (Community Hall is the latest), the Sunset Hill club stated from the start that it welcomed all residents of the district, historically a Nordic American enclave that gradually has diversified. From securing street, water and transit improvements to presenting speeches, dances and performances, its leaders apprised members: “You are part of an organization that is getting results, and you would find great pleasure in doing your part.”

This rich mixture of the political and social over a near-century of service allowed the gleaming yellow hall to attain designation as a city landmark in March. The hall’s response was — what else? — to hold a party the following month, drawing a capacity crowd.

John Munroe, the club’s energetic president, acknowledges herculean efforts to keep intact both the building and its legacy.

“We’ve done tons of work on it over the years,” he says. “We will survive anything … We have all kinds of fun all the time because this is a community.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Robert Loe, John Munroe and especially Holly Taylor and Peggy Sturdivant for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below, you also will find 2 additional videos, 2 documents and 5 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 12, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 15, 2025

Tallest US Masonry Dome stands as our state’s homage to democracy

By Jean Sherrard

A visit to Olympia, which I highly recommend, is a tonic for what ails us. From the lofty architecture of the Legislative Building (aka the Capitol Building) to the generous, Olmsted Brothers-designed landscape, the sense of uplift is palpable.

As in our nation’s capital, the edifices of government were designed to reflect neo-classical themes of the Enlightenment, plus a shout-out to ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy.

In an era when, increasingly, questions arise about the legitimacy and efficacy of our democratic republic, these soaring expressions of harmony, proportion and humanism offer enduring comfort.

First, a few pertinent facts:

Our state Capitol building, at 287 feet, is the tallest masonry dome in the United States and among the tallest in the world. The dome itself weighs 30.8 million pounds. The building’s exterior is made of warm-colored Wilkeson sandstone from Pierce County. Built to last, the structure has survived three major earthquakes, most recently the Nisqually Earthquake in 2001, followed by three years of seismic upgrades and structural rehabilitation.

In their authoritative overview, “Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the U.S.A.,” architectural historians Henry-Russell Hitchcock and William Seale suggest that in Olympia, “the American renaissance in state capitol building reached its climax.”

The long road to achieving this ideal began when Olympia founder Edmund Sylvester donated a 12-acre

bluff as a site for the territorial Capitol. In 1856, the Legislature moved into a two-story wood-frame building on the site, which served first the territory and then the state until 1903.

Early plans for the capitol campus had been shelved following the 1893 financial Panic. The governor

authorized purchase of the Thurston County Courthouse, in whose cramped quarters the Legislature met beginning in 1905.

In 1911, a new State Capitol Commission held a nationwide design competition, enlisting Seattle architect Charles Bebb to serve as lead judge. Out of 30 mostly local submissions, two architects from New York City seized the prize.

For Walter Wilder and Harry White, junior architects in their mid-30s, designing the group of capitol buildings was their first and only major commission. Unexpectedly, their work stretched over the next 18 years.

When announcing the award, the commission also wired the Olmsted Brothers — the renowned Brookline, Mass., landscape firm already known for its many Washington state contributions — asking if they could “prepare plans for Capitol Building grounds.”

The Olmsted designs were adopted and installed by 1930. Their addition of verdant gardens, trees and wide boulevards completed our state’s graceful, human-scaled homage to nascent democracy in a city quite fittingly named Olympia.

WEB EXTRAS

Here’s a “now” of the Thurston County Courthouse, purchased for use by the legislature.

For our narrated 360 degree video of this column, click on through here, pardner!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 5, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 8, 2025

Road trip! AAA’s early 20th century arrows showed us the way

By Clay Eals

Talk about signs of the times …

Most of us know that automobiles rumbled into general use roughly 120 years ago. However, we don’t think much about the roads on which they rolled. Initially, many were unmarked, and without GPS or phone apps, how did drivers know which path to choose? Printed maps helped. But what if you were mapless and came to a fork in the road? While governmental road signs guide us today, it was not always thus.

Enter the nation’s upstart auto clubs, some of which affiliated with the national American Automobile Association (AAA or Triple-A), founded in Chicago in 1902. Soon afterward in our state came the launch of what became the Auto Club of Western Washington, organizational ancestor of today’s AAA Washington.

Over the years, the club advocated for quality byways and safety education and became known for emergency road service, maps and travel advice. But through the mid-1940s, it also built countless directional signs and installed them at key intersections.

The club installed its first signs in 1906, planning 500 pointers within 30 miles of Seattle. Twelve years later, the club reported that “at least” 1,500 signs had been placed on 3,200 miles of roads and streets in western Washington. “This, however, is just a start.”

The white-painted signs were instantly visible and recognizable — a bouquet of arrows pointing every which-way, identifying places near and far, with numbers indicating mileage. An accompanying diamond-shaped sign identified the club, an ingenious brand for a captive driving audience.

In both urban and rural settings, the signs became ubiquitous. Guidance and safety were an obvious part of their motivation and appeal. But an equal factor, the club said in 1920, was aesthetics: “We want to rid our splendid scenic highways of the signs on trees and stumps and rocks along the right-of-way, which distract so seriously from their beauty.”

Pointing out everything from telephone booths and scout camps to speed limits and speed traps (!), the signs drew “innumerable compliments” for “assisting the stranger.” The club spent $300,000 on sign installations from 1916 to 1945, when signage became the legal responsibility of cities, counties and the state.

The club maintained sign shops and took pride in photographing the signs when installing them. Many surviving prints, however, bear no dates or documentation of their locations.

Even so, it’s fun to view them today. Eyeing their posted place names and doing the mileage math, we can speculate about the intersections where they once stood sentinel to show us the way.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Bob Carney, Cindi Barker and especially Sam Murphy, Mellani McAleenan and Kelsey Bumsted of AAA Washington for their invaluable help with this installment!

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

Below, you also will find 5 additional photos, 2 AAA Journeys magazine stories from 2004 by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on May 29, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 1, 2025

Enduring from 1861, columns bring ‘LIFE’ to UW’s Sylvan Theater

By Jean Sherrard

This idyllic grove with four tall columns contains elements that might seem contradictory: youthful expectation and ambition framed by academic tradition and a whiff of mortality — in short, the stuff that educators’ dreams are made on.

The quartet is among Seattle’s oldest extant architectural artifacts. Originally old-growth cedar trees, toppled near Hood Canal and floated to Henry Yesler’s waterfront sawmill, the 24-foot-tall columns

adorned the portico of the 1861 Territorial University building downtown.

Carved by early postmaster O.J. Carr and cabinet makers A.P. De Lin and O.C. Shorey, the sturdy, fluted columns, topped with scroll-shaped “volutes” in accordance with Ionic style, offered potent symbols of classical education. (Shorey and De Lin later applied their carpentry skills to casket-making in pioneer Seattle, founding the funeral home that became Bonney-Watson.)

Some called it hubris when a town with fewer than 200 mostly male inhabitants built a two-story white academy on an overlooking bluff. But it also indicated exuberant faith in the region’s future. For Arthur Denny, donor of much of the academic institution’s land, and Daniel Bagley, an influential Methodist preacher, a university was the tail that was to wag the dog of civic life.

As Seattle boomed and 1889 statehood loomed, the homegrown University of Washington abandoned the then-crowded business district for largely undeveloped holdings then-north of the city in 1895. The original building, though a sentimental favorite, was left to molder before being torn down in 1910.

Its four columns were salvaged and added to the expanding campus in 1911.

Edmond S. Meany, head of the History Department, supplied each column with a name: Loyalty, Industry, Faith and Efficiency, adding up to “LIFE.”

After a decade of being stranded outside Savery Hall on the Quad, the university held a contest to determine their final placement.

The winner: 19-year-old Marshall Gill, architecture student and son of the late Mayor Hiram Gill, who had died a year earlier during the influenza pandemic. His design for an outdoor “Sylvan theatre setting” southeast of Drumheller Fountain was acclaimed as “an appropriate and fitting tribute to the … impressive solemnity” of the columns.

Young Gill, however, witnessed only the first fruits of his labor. Within weeks of the grove’s creation, he died of a brain embolism following a tonsillectomy at age 20.

Two years later, School of Architecture alumni installed a stone bench and commemorative plaque at one end of the grassy stage.

In this tranquil spot, treasured by generations of UW students, Marshall Gill created a lasting monument — his only surviving design — to youth, artistry and history.

WEB EXTRAS

For our narrated 360-degree video, captured on location, click right here.

Also, in a separate video, our MFA actors introduce themselves, reflecting on their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Click on the photo below to see it.

In late-breaking news, here’s a pertinent photo and email just sent in by reader Roseanne Kimlinger:

I had kind of a “Wow!” moment of recognition reading Now and Then in today’s Pacific NW magazine. The Gill memorial bench in your photo looks an awful lot like the one these three UW students are sitting on in the photo I’ve attached! They are my aunt and two of her friends, the year was 1928.

I may have to head over to campus to check it out. Amazing that bench is still there.

Thank you for an unexpected Sunday morning delight!

Thank you, Roseanne!