That’s where we caught up with Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, president of the Black Heritage Society of Washington. These are lightly edited highlights from a live interview with Ms. Johnson-Toliver that was broadcast on “Seattle’s Morning News.”

Feliks Banel: It is a beautiful morning here at Jimi Hendrix Park, which is right next to the old Colman School along the south side of I-90 just west of the Mount Baker Tunnel. This is a historic location. The school was occupied 40 years ago (by activists) and became the Northwest African American Museum.

Today, there’s going to be a big event. The Africatown Community Land Trust is putting on eight hours of music and family entertainment as part of its Summer of Soul series. It’s free admission, but you have to register online.

Joining me here now is a great friend of “Seattle’s Morning News.” Stephanie Johnson-Toliver is president of the Black Heritage Society of Washington State. She’s here to give us a bigger picture perspective on Black history around our area on this Juneteenth holiday.

One of the things I’ve been wondering about is the Juneteenth holiday is not new by any stretch of the imagination, but its status as a federal holiday is really new – I think this is only the fourth national observation. So I was wondering, Stephanie, has this national holiday changed the work you do with the Black Heritage Society in terms of preserving and sharing African American history?

Stephanie Johnson-Toliver: It’s a beautiful day at Jimi Hendrix Park. The sun’s out, and the tradition and long celebration, and commemoration of Juneteenth, you’re right, is not new. It was first celebrated in 1890 in Washington State. Seattle residents jumped on a train from downtown Seattle and headed to Kent for a big celebration. But I think as a federal holiday, what it does is to bring more visibility to that struggle, the tenacity within the community to thrive, and gives us the opportunity to talk about understanding the liberation of Black people.

Banel: You and I have talked about this before, we wrestle with this notion. You have February as Black History Month, but really, every month is Black History Month. But I mean, it’s nice to have attention called to a specific ethnic group (at a specific time of year), but it’s also important for people to realize that Black history is just local history.

Johnson-Toliver: Yeah!

Banel: (With this in mind), what kind of projects is the Black Heritage Society of Washington working on lately?

Johnson-Toliver: Well, we’re really excited recently, mostly, about the things that are behind the scenes that people don’t see. We are really moving strongly toward digitizing our collection, a new collections management system, which is huge for us, that will allow us to share more broadly our collections. And so that work is very important for us right now. And then we’re working in community with other groups on oral histories, we understand the importance of collecting the stories of people, and documenting our history in Washington State. So that, along with other partnerships, our partnership with the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) and others, this is something that we continue to do.

Banel: I love museums, but what I love more than museums are those parts of the community where something happened or somebody lived or something like that. And oftentimes, there’s not even interpretive signage, you just have to kind of have to know the information or look up it on an app or something (one example is an old house that was once home to Annie Smith’s restaurant, an eatery featured in the Green Book listings for Seattle). Do you have favorite places like that, that are “Black history spots” in the Seattle area, but that maybe aren’t known about by too many people?

Johnson-Toliver: I love that question. Because every day, I and others, pass these sites and locations and have no idea what happened there. So whether it was a place where there was joy or harm, or some sort of civic engagement, we may not know. So I’ve been thinking as we approach summer (that) the Madison Street corridor that was so important to the Black community. In the 1920s 30s and 40s, it was a vibrant business hub that celebrated the need in the community, the Black community, but also the livelihood and lifted that livelihood.

So there were sites along Madison. (One place) was a spot just across the street, kitty-corner from where the Cayton Corner Park is now happening at 19th and Madison. It was a gas station owned by a man by the name of Eugene Moszee who was a widely known activist in Seattle. And he was the victim of a police shootout on that corner. So it’s a huge story that created a controversy in Seattle. But not many people know that about (it) as they round that corner or pass that corner.

But the Madison Street corridor was also this place of joy, where the first Mardi Gras parade and festival (in Seattle) happened. It started at 21st and Madison and moved around and southward and then back to Union Street and then back up the street and was a joy in the community. And what it’s done is to create a new and vibrant participation and community that is led by Africatown, the Umoja Fest that happens during the summer, that coordinates with Seafair.

So there’s much, much good energy and civic engagement opportunities to remember about the Madison Street corridor again. I should say that Jackie Lawson, who was one of the co-founders of the Black Heritage Society, wrote a little booklet that was called “Let’s Take A Walk” that is now available at Seattle Public Library online. They digitized that little booklet that talks about the businesses and the people who lived there.

Banel: Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, president of the Black Heritage Society of Washington State, thanks for joining us so early here in the morning at Colman School and Northwest African American Museum and Jimi Hendrix Park where a celebration (will be held).

Go online to summerofsoulseries.org to register for this event, all day, noon to 8:00 p.m. for the whole family, marking the Juneteenth holiday here in Seattle. I really appreciate the work that the Black Heritage Society has done. I’ve known you for more than thirty years. I think the way the organization — the programs you guys are providing now, and the archival stuff you’re saving — you guys are a tremendous asset to the community.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

Legendary performer Frank Sinatra played for thousands of vigorously clapping fans at what’s now McCaw Hall on June 9, 1957. It was part of an unusual tour of western cities that stretched out over three consecutive weekends that month, with stops in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Denver; El Paso, Texas; Vancouver, British Columbia; Portland, Oregon; Seattle and three cities in California: San Jose, San Francisco and Sacramento.

Incredibly, Sinatra and his more than two-dozen musicians would play an afternoon show in one city, and, later the same day, an evening show in a different town hundreds of miles away. The band made these quick late afternoon hops via chartered plane between Albuquerque and Denver; San Jose and Salt Lake City; Portland and Seattle; and San Francisco and Sacramento.

The Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland shows were promoted by the legendary team of Zollie Volchok and Jack Engerman, whose Northwest Releasing Company was a force on the local entertainment scene for much of the 1950s and 1960s.

Ed O’Brien, a longtime Sinatra scholar, says that for Sinatra in the late 1950s, taking to the road someplace other than Vegas, New York or international capitals was rare.

“You just couldn’t see him,” O’Brien said. “And he was recording [albums] at the same time, so the idea of doing concert tours was not something that Sinatra did at all, so it was unusual. Very unusual.”

But the most unusual thing about the 1957 Seattle show was that it was recorded. Bootleg tapes of the show circulated among collectors as early as the 1960s, and a CD was even released back in the 1990s.

O’Brien, who wrote the liner notes for the 1995 CD, says that Sinatra the star was at the top of his game in 1957.

“At that particular moment in his career, Sinatra was the biggest selling album artist in the world,” O’Brien said. “He had three albums in the Billboard Top 100 that week when he played Seattle, and he was the number five top-drawing film stars in the box office.”

But while Sinatra was batting 1,000 artistically when he played Seattle, his personal life was full of major league troubles. According to best-selling author and Sinatra biographer James Kaplan, the spring of 1957 was an especially challenging season for Ol’ Blue Eyes.

“He was the most famous celebrity in the world, he was the most famous entertainer in the world, he was a multimedia star, but he was, at the center of his soul, a boiling pit of insecurities,” Kaplan said.

“He was deeply worried during the recording of [an] album in the spring of 1957 that he was losing his voice,” Kaplan said.

“He was feeling sad for a few reasons in 1957,” Kaplan said. “His great friend and idol Humphrey Bogart had died in January. And by early July, [Sinatra’s estranged wife Ava Gardner] would finally divorce him. So he knew that was in process, and I think that was also another great source of sadness for him.“

Kaplan also says that 41-year old Sinatra was carrying on at least two affairs, with 24-year old actress Kim Novak; and with Bogart’s widow, 32-year old Lauren Bacall.

“I think (Bacall) was in the audience in Seattle that night, and I think it gave him a certain amount of confidence,” Kaplan said.

As an artist known for carefully produced, lush and meticulous studio releases, Sinatra isn’t exactly at his technical best in the Seattle recording, including one particularly painful moment when he can’t hit the high notes in “My Funny Valentine.”

“To hear his voice just give out is like watching a Wallenda fall off the high wire,” said James Kaplan. “It is heartbreaking and unbelievable. His voice gives out.”

On the recording, Sinatra acknowledges the blown notes before beginning the next song. “I think I got a shot glass stuffed in my throat,” he tells the Civic Auditorium audience.

Sinatra also pauses between songs to mention that it’s been more than 20 years since he’d been in Seattle. He tells the crowd it was 1935 when he’d first come through town on a tour [with his original group the Hoboken Four] as part of the Major Bowes radio program. The group was part of a revue that played for nearly a week at the old Metropolitan Theatre, where the main entrance to the Fairmont Olympic Hotel now stands.

Sinatra may not be in finest form throughout the show, but Ed O’Brien says that the Seattle recording has some terrific moments—notably, moving renditions of “The Lady is a Tramp” and “One For My Baby”—as well as real historic value.

“What you have there is you have a wonderful artifact of the live Sinatra in 1957 in front of an audience in an auditorium, a large auditorium and that’s what he did that whole tour,” O’Brien said.

“It really does define who he was at the time.”

The recording was made on location by Wally Heider, a legendary Los Angeles audio engineer in those years who also taped at least one more show on the tour. Sinatra apparently gave the rights to the tapes to Heider. When Heider died, Ed O’Brien says that a man named Ed Burke purchased the rights to the Seattle tape from Heider’s widow and then released it on CD.

Why, exactly, the Seattle show was recorded has never really been clear. Ed O’Brien says it’s unlikely the recordings were ever meant to be shared publicly; he says Sinatra was too much of a perfectionist. It also doesn’t seem as if Sinatra ever reviewed the recordings to glean insight for improving future performances.

James Kaplan and Ed O’Brien agree that the tour probably didn’t make any money. Expenses were high, and ticket sales weren’t uniformly great. Ironically, impetus for the western tour was supposedly a need to pay back the jilted promoter of an overseas tour that Sinatra had abruptly canceled earlier in 1957.

“The tour wasn’t a success at all. It was a bomb, an absolute bomb,” said O’Brien. Ticket sales were soft in many locations, O’Brien says, because Sinatra wasn’t yet a good fit for the western U.S. cities on the tour. “Sinatra was really urban America and, I think, much more East Coast.” However, at least one show at The Forum in Vancouver, BC did sell out all 7,000 tickets.

Another factor in the soft ticket sales may have been that Sinatra’s core audience in 1957 got more at home from his famously intimate studio recordings of that era than they could ever expect from a live concert in public. Either way, the concert industry was changing, and everything was about to get all shook up by Elvis Presley (who would famously sell out Sick’s Stadium later that summer), another show that happened to be promoted by Volchok and Engerman.

It’s unknown how many tickets were sold for Sinatra’s 1957 Seattle show, but it would be many years until he played here again. Times had changed drastically by April 1975 when he appeared at the Seattle Center Arena. Sinatra had grown in stature as a performer, had retired briefly, and then become more adept at playing giant lucrative venues and often selling them out.

Sinatra returned again to the Northwest and played the Tacoma Dome in April 1986, and then the Seattle Center Coliseum (now known as KeyArena) along with Sammy Davis and Dean Martin in March 1988. Sinatra’s final appearance in the area was at the Puyallup Fair in September 1993 along with Shirley MacLaine. Sinatra died in 1998.

Ed O’Brien says that, to a certain point, Sinatra got better with age, but that the culture simply moved beyond what he was offering. The Seattle recording, then, offers a rare local glimpse into the heart of a global giant from a much different era.

“A perfect world for Frank would’ve been if he’d been able to maintain a record-buying audience that still loved Rodgers and Hart, and the Gershwins, and Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. He would’ve been a very happy man,” said O’Brien. “But unfortunately that just wasn’t true.”

Those 16,000 screaming Elvis fans at Sick’s Stadium would likely have heartily agreed.

Editors’ note: This piece originally was published on June 8, 2016. It has been updated and republished since then.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

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Chief Sealth, namesake of the city of Seattle, died at home in Suquamish 158 years ago, June 7, 1866.

This is a lightly edited transcript of Forsman’s interview broadcast live from Suquamish Friday morning.

Feliks Banel: It is a gorgeous morning over here on the Kitsap Peninsula on the Port Madison Indian Reservation. St. Peter’s Church is just down the sloping hillside. There (are) all kinds of evergreen trees. We can see the saltwater, we can see Mount Rainier through the trees. And we’re standing at the grave of Seattle’s namesake Chief Sealth, who passed away on this very day, back in 1866, not far from here on the reservation. Joining me is Tribal Chairman of the Suquamish Tribe, Leonard Forsman. I wanted to ask you, it’s kind of a dumb question, but if people are tuned in, maybe they’ve moved to Seattle recently, maybe they don’t know the mythology and stories that all of us were brought up on who grew up in the Northwest, how do you describe who Chief Seattle was?

More from Feliks Banel: The origins of the only photo ever taken of Chief Seattle

Leonard Forsman: We’re here in our tribal cemetery and, of course, (with our) great ancestral chief, Chief Seattle. We how would we describe him? He was a leader who spanned many different historical and cultural phases of our history. And we’re so very proud of the work he did in his life and so proud of his family that still lives here, including myself, here within our tribe on the Port Madison Reservation.

Banel: It’s a gorgeous setting. And I know the grave dates (back) to 1866. I think that taller headstone there was put in in 1890. Then there was some renovation worked done here about 15 years ago. As a member of the Suquamish Tribe, as the chair of the tribe, do you have personal feelings about the fact that Chief Seattle, this important individual, is buried here close by like this?

Forsman: Yes, of course. It’s so important that he’s here with us in his ancestral home. He was born and raised right here near Suquamish, born on Blake Island and then, of course, lived (in) his father’s home, Chief Kitsap’s home, Old Man House, only a mile from here. And he was a young boy when he met George Vancouver of the British Navy, who was one of the first explorers to anchor off of Bainbridge Island. And then he lived his life through many changes, became a war chief, then later became a diplomat between Hudson’s Bay Company, the American settlers, Catholic missionaries. And then of course, with the United States with the signing of the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855. And the day he did pass away there is archival records that referenced the fact that he was taken from Old Man House and walked along the beach, up into the cemetery for a very important ceremony honoring his life.

Images of Chief Seattle include, from left to right, Edward Sammis’ original circa 1865 photo, a colorized variation from sometime later and a version with hand-painted “open” eyes. (Photos at left and center courtesy of the Museum of History & Industry; photo at right courtesy of Wikipedia)

Banel: Now, he is the namesake of Seattle, and his likeness is on our city seal. There are statues of him around, but what do people who maybe don’t pay close attention to history or maybe they don’t understand the role of Indigenous people who have been here since time immemorial before non-natives arrived, are there things that people don’t understand or get wrong about or misunderstand about Chief Seattle 158 years after he passed away?

Treaty of Point Elliott: One of Pacific Northwest’s most important founding documents

Forsman: I just think a lot of people don’t know what challenges he faced with when he was born.  We talk about his life in a way that spans all these different phases of our history. He was born before contact, he had seen evidence of the diseases and then he had transformed and tried to adapt his leadership style to the people that were coming in and facing all these economic, social and cultural challenges to the way we’ve lived here for thousands of years. And the fact that during the treaty, he negotiated with the United States. He kept his warriors out of the Battle of Seattle, which he of course was criticized for some reasons by other tribes. And then was able to provide a reservation for his people that we still live on today as important testimony to his life and the fact that he took full advantage of the time where he was, as difficult as it was for him, he managed to stay remained committed to the future of his people.

Banel: It’s obviously a complex story. David Buerge’s book from a few years ago, “Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name” is a great place to start for people who don’t understand. It gets into a lot of great detail.  Maybe this is (another) dumb question: Is Chief Seattle, is his memory, his legacy, is it still relevant in 2024?

Forsman: Of course it is. We, of course, celebrate his life every year here in Squamish at Chief Seattle Days. And his contributions to United States tribal trust treaty relationship were very important, still are important (and) resonate today when we meet with whether it be the president or Congress or the federal agencies, our interactions with the courts federal court system. His words and his actions still live today are very important to us preserving our way of life, which I think everybody can adapt parts of, or most of, you know, we want to take care of the land and the water the air, we want to take care of our elders and our children. And just like he did a year after the Treaty was signed, he wanted a good education for his people.

MyNorthwest history: Native Americans greeted pioneers to Seattle over 170 years ago

Banel: Tribal Chairman of the Suquamish Tribe Leonard Forsman, thanks for joining us here on this special anniversary at this incredible location. And I assume people are welcome to visit here year-round, right? This is a popular spot for people to come and see the city’s namesake?

Forsman: Yes, this is open to the public during the daytime, and we have Chief Sealth’s memorial that you mentioned, and the artwork that we put here during our cultural resurgence to honor his life that kind of tells his story through art. And then of course, the stone here which unfortunately was damaged in the vandalism around 2000, but was recently reconstructed by the family of people here at Suquamish. So it’s a great place to come and see his resting spot and then also see our beautiful land and water.

For those interested in going

Suquamish Memorial Cemetery is easily accessible from both the Seattle-Bainbridge and Edmonds-Kingston ferries.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

In 2018, Anders, who lived in Anacortes, had been featured in national and international media that marked the 50th anniversary of that famous mission and memorable photograph from December 1968.

Anders dies at 90: Apollo 8 astronaut killed in plane crash off San Juan Islands

Apollo 8, whose mission was to orbit and map the moon in advance of the July 1969 Apollo 11 landing, included astronauts Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, and Anders. The three men appeared in a live broadcast on Christmas Eve, and read Bible passages from Genesis.

Anders was a guest on the Tom & Curley Show a few days before Christmas 2013, talking about Apollo 8 on the 45th anniversary. John Curley and guest host Feliks Banel spoke with the former astronaut about what it was like being that far from home, and how it feels to have been the guy who pressed the button on what’s become one of the most famous photographs in human history.

“On our fourth orbit, we had the space craft changing its position and for the first time, we were able to see the beautiful home planet Earth come up over the stark lunar horizon,” Anders said during that 2013 KIRO Newsradio interview. “I grabbed a camera with a long lens and started clicking away and that became the famous ‘Earthrise’ picture.”

When Banel asked Anders how he felt when he saw Earth from that far away while on Apollo 8 for the first time, Anders began his answer with a simple comparison between Earth and the moon.

‘Well, it certainly was clear that the Earth was a lot prettier than the moon,” Anders said.

Contributing: Feliks Banel, KIRO Newsradio; Steve Coogan, MyNorthwest

Editors’ note: This piece was originally published Dec. 21, 2018. It has been updated and republished multiple times since then.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

In the final spring and summer of Washington’s territorial era, big fires ravaged major sections of downtowns on both sides of the Cascades, from Seattle, to Ellensburg, to Spokane.

Seattle’s fire struck on the breezy, blue-sky afternoon of Thursday, June 6, 1889. It was caused by an accident at a carpenter’s shop at what’s now First and Madison. John Back tried to extinguish a pot of burning animal-based glue by dousing it with water, but the flames spread to the sawdust and other combustibles on the floor of the shop, and then on to much of the rest of Seattle.

It had been a warm and dry spring, and the wooden buildings in the young city had seasoned like cordwood and were highly flammable. Add to this a lack of decent water pressure, and the leader of the volunteer fire department being out of town, and the stage was set for what became a massive blaze.

Fortunately, no one died. However, approximately 112 acres of the business district were destroyed, and an estimated $20 million worth of property was lost. Rebuilding the city would take about two years.

In 1953, the old MOHAI in Montlake dedicated a colorful mural depicting the fire. Several eyewitnesses to the fire were in the audience, and spoke into a microphone provided by old Seattle radio station KXA (direct “ancestor” of KIRO Radio’s sister station KTTH).

Recordings of the eyewitness memories were rediscovered in the MOHAI archives in the early 2000s, and offer a unique glimpse into the long-ago fire.

MRS. ROLLIN SANFORD (aka Kate McGraw, daughter of Washington governor John McGraw):
“Well, Professor Ingraham kept all the children in school. And then we were cautioned to go straight home. And I went straight to the fire and stayed until a policeman found me.”

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN
“There was a big crowd. Half the people in town were down there at the fire. The man who started the fire was a roomer in our house and his name was John Back. He was the one [who] started the fire, and they were going to lynch him if they found him.”

MRS. EARLE JENNER
“I watched the fire from Third and Madison. I don’t know why I wasn’t in school. But I stood there with mama, and we watched it burn in Grampa Bagley’s church, Second and Madison.”

MR. FRANK R. ATKINS
“As usual, whenever the fire bell rang, Number One House, all of us kids would go immediately down there to see what was up. After the bell rang, we all left Mrs. Shorey’s duplex house on Third Avenue right next to Columbia Street. The progress of the fire was very evident by the huge smoke billows around. At that time, I was working in the abstract office of Osborne, Tremper and Company. I realized as the fire was progressing, it had jumped Marion Street in the Colman Block and saw that the fire was going to continue on. The books of the Osborne, Tremper and Company were uppermost in my mind. They had but three lot books and two land books, being the foundation stock of the abstract business. It didn’t take me very long to run up there and tell my brother, my half-brother, Eben Osborne, that we would have to get rid of those books right away. He had just purchased, or the firm had just purchased, a big safe that was warranted fireproof. I said ‘Eben, I am going to take those books up to our house at 4th and Columbia’. Ed Tremper quite agreed with me. So he grabbed two books and I the other. We took them up there, we made another trip down. By that time, Eben had started to put in the safe the lot and the deeds and mortgage records. All the merchants in town there, nearly all of them, were commandeering trucks and express wagons, especially do I remember Chester Clary’s big store in the Sullivan Block. He fortunately had a truck there, and you should have seen him pile that truck with the more valuable goods that were in the store.”

MR. CHARLES A. THORNDIKE
“I was working in a hardware store operated by P. Haines at 1007 Front Street [now First Avenue] which was a block and three or four doors north of where the fire started. We didn’t think the fire was going north we felt for an hour after its start that it was headed south and would not come our way. But soon, we found the smoke coming up through the boards and planks which covered the piles and on which the store building was built. The smoke and the flames began to come up and then we took the moveable stores out of the building and carried them across the street at the northeast corner of First and Madison Street. I had just completed a few weeks of service in that store and had money enough to buy a new suit of clothes and I was very proud of it. But in taking the material out of the store, I took off the coat and vest and put it in a desk and moved the desk across the street with the rest of the stuff. The next morning, the desk was gone and I never got the suit of clothes back.”

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Ellensburg fire

It was less than a month after the disaster in Seattle, and late on the evening of Thursday, July 4, when the Kittitas County seat of Ellensburg caught fire.

The cause of the Ellensburg blaze has never been satisfactorily determined, but the place where it ignited is believed to be a grocery store on Main Street between 4th and 5th Avenue. The fire started around 10:30 pm and wiped out about 10 city blocks. It took about four hours to burn and just four months for the city to rebuild. Damages were estimated at $2 million. Some historians say that the fire wiped out Ellensburg chances of becoming the state capitol, but there were likely other factors that kept this political “plum” in Olympia.

Spokane fire

And it was exactly one month after the Ellensburg fire when much of what was then known as Spokane Falls fell to a fiery onslaught.

The blaze in the hub of the Inland Empire was accidental. It started in the late afternoon of Sunday, Aug. 4 in a small hotel and restaurant on Railroad Avenue. Shifting winds – and efforts to dynamite buildings before they could burn – created confusion and chaos. The fact that the water superintendent – the only person who knew how to operate the water system – was out of town, added to the ineffectiveness of the response.

When it was all over several hours later, about 30 blocks of downtown Spokane Falls were burned to the ground.

Reporting live from Seattle’s past: More recent stories from Feliks Banel

But much as had happened after the fires in Seattle and Ellensburg, provisions rolled into what was left of Spokane Falls by train from all over, even from recently devastated Seattle. There was so much in the way of relief supplies that many of Spokane Falls’ elected officials were accused of personally stockpiling cured meats in their home basements. This earned the city’s leaders the nickname the “Ham Council.”

Rebuilding 3 Washington cities

In the aftermath of the blazes, all three cities erected tents to house people and businesses until buildings – mostly brick this time – could be built to replace what had been lost in the fires of 1889.

For Seattle, in particular, the fire became a kind of before-its-time “urban renewal,” clearing away much of the pioneer-era settlement, and allowing for construction of a modern urban area with wider streets and more carefully planned utilities. And the city replaced its volunteer fire department with a professional force.

Later that autumn, long after the fires had been extinguished and the sounds of construction had replaced the roar of flames, the territorial era came to an official close on November 11, 1889.

In spite of the tallies of blocks burned and material goods lost in the blazes, there’s never been an accurate count of just how many newly minted Washingtonians welcomed statehood and the bonds of the Union from the discomfort of a canvas tent.

Editors’ note: This story originally was published June 6, 2018. It has been updated and republished multiple times since then.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

A group of preservation activists affiliated with the non-profit group Historic Everett had staged a single event back in February to call attention to the threat faced by the 1921 gazebo by the dog area project, and reached out to local media, including KIRO Newsradio, to share their concerns. Meanwhile, a number of Bayside neighbors were well organized and vocal in their support for the removal of the structure, saying it was attracting illegal and other undesirable activities to Clark Park.

“The neighbors that live closest to Clark Park support the removal of the gazebo,” resident Lisa Phillips said during public comment. “You’ve heard from several of them about the activities that occur inside the gazebo due to the privacy of its location. You’ve heard about drug dealers drug use violence, including a stabbing, and even folks yelling at the high school women’s tennis team.”

“Our neighborhood is willing to sacrifice this beloved structure to another location as a first step in rebuilding the reputation of Clark Park,” Jane McClure, another Bayside resident, said.

Everett resident Christy Anderson disagreed with the Bayside residents.

“The gazebo was not the problem,” Anderson commented. “I like the idea of a dog park, but the gazebo is not what’s causing the problem.”

More coverage: Citizens beg City of Everett to compromise on dog park and gazebo

Blaming a physical structure is nonsensical, Anderson said.

“Last week you had someone that talked about criminal activity in Garfield Park,” Anderson said. “The response from the city was not that we should tear down the dugouts or tear down the covered picnic structures there, it was that we have criminal activity in a park. Somebody else complained about criminal activity at Jackson Park and there wasn’t an immediate reaction, ‘Well, let’s tear down the covered picnic structures in Jackson Park.'”

Preservationists and other community members countered that an off-leash dog area would be a welcome addition to Clark Park, and new activity from dogs and their owners might discourage the unwanted behavior taking place under the gazebo’s inviting roof. A compromise was offered by Patrick Hall, chair of the Everett Historical Commission: build the dog park, keep the gazebo in place, and see if a year or two of this new amenity might negate the need to remove the historic structure. No response to Hall’s offer, formal or otherwise, ever came from the City of Everett, Mayor Cassie Franklin, Planning Director Yorik Stevens-Wajda or Parks and Facilities Director Bob Leonard.

Everett Parks and Facilities Director Leonard gave the staff report on the project. Though the Everett Historical Commission ultimately chose to abstain from officially weighing in on the gazebo’s future, Leonard cited the commission when he described how the gazebo would be commemorated once it was gone.

“With input garnered from the three Historical Commission meetings we went to, we were able to incorporate many, many mitigation design elements into the overall project plan,” Leonard said, listing elements of the dog park fence and gate that will echo the gazebo design.

“A commemorative marker and plaque at the current location of the gazebo, as well as interpretive signage about the history of Clark Park and the gazebo,” Leonard continued, “were also added to the project.”

Though the gazebo’s fate appears to have been sealed with the council funding vote on the dog park, there appear to be hard feelings that remain among members of the Everett Historical Commission for how the City of Everett appeared to sidestep accepted practice for reviewing changes to city landmarks before alterations up to and including demolition are approved by council vote.

Through multiple meetings of the Everett Historical Commission, officials from the City of Everett sparred with commission members over semantics and procedural issues about what, if any, approval was required from the commission for the City of Everett to remove the gazebo. Changes to historic properties typically require a “Certificate of Appropriateness” (COA), while demolition requires a “waiver.” This issue appears to have never really been resolved to the satisfaction of several commission members, despite an opinion from the Everett city attorney.

Patrick Hall, the chair of the Everett Historical Commission, who had earlier offered the compromise that would have preserved the gazebo, also spoke Wednesday night, though he hastened to point out he was speaking as a private individual.

“The difference between them (COA vs. waiver) might seem pedantic, but there’s a key point,” Hall said. “The COA can be overruled by the planning director, he alone decides. The waiver requires a city council vote. So essentially, city staff have decided amongst themselves that they alone can make this decision without going to council.”

“If I were on the council, I would question that,” Hall continued. “This is why the commission got stuck on this for three months before deciding not to participate.”

“The city shouldn’t be allowed to bend the rules,” Hall continued. “It’s true that the city attorney has decided to support the planning director’s interpretation of the code. Although I’m not a lawyer it is clear enough that another attorney could argue a different interpretation.”

There was some council discussion of points made by Patrick Hall, but no formal action was taken regarding the concerns he expressed.

KIRO Newsradio has reached out to the City of Everett for specific timing on the removal of the gazebo and information about where the pieces of the historic structure will be stored.

In an email response early Friday, spokesperson Simone Tarver wrote, “We’re working on the timeline for next steps and will certainly share publicly once that’s known.”

Tarver did not address KIRO Newsradio’s question about where the gazebo will go once it is dismantled.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

June 6 will mark the anniversary of the Allied landings at Normandy to begin the liberation of France and the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany, bringing an end to World War II in Europe.

D-Day, the June 6, 1944 landing on the northern coast of France with tens of thousands of American, British, Canadian and other Allied troops – along with thousands of pieces of equipment and tons of supplies – is justifiably regarded as the greatest military operation in the history of mankind.

Thousands of aircraft and ships were used in the operation, and thousands of soldiers, sailors and Marines were wounded or gave their lives in the long-planned, and long-anticipated, effort to gain a foothold in Nazi-occupied Europe.

More on D-Day: 75 years after D-Day, local WWII veterans earn French Legion of Honor

It’s a story that’s been told in epic movies such as “The Longest Day” and “Saving Private Ryan,” and the anniversary will be commemorated in France, as well as at war memorials and cemeteries in England, Canada and the United States.

In addition to what it meant as a great turning point in world history, D-Day is also unique in how it was broadcast by American radio networks, as CBS, NBC and what would become ABC pooled their reporters, engineers and other resources, and cooperated closely with military officials to present, for the first time, what would now be called “wall-to-wall” coverage of a developing major international news event for American audiences.

It’s something we take for granted now in the age of the internet and cable news, but this kind of media coverage can be traced back to D-Day.

Even more distinctive and worth recalling is how Americans west of the Rockies, in particular, experienced this new kind of radio broadcasting, since, because of the timing and because of time zone differences, most Americans east of the Rockies slept through the initial hours of the event and the ground-breaking radio coverage.

News reports at the time suggested that because the news broke just before 10 p.m. Pacific Time on the evening of Monday, June 5, 1944, a lot of West Coast people stayed up to listen to their radios to find out what would happen next. In Seattle, that meant KIRO for CBS coverage, and KOMO for news from NBC.

On NBC’s West Coast regional feed, a serial drama called Hawthorne House was on the air, live from San Francisco (it had begun at 9:30 p.m. Pacific War Time). KIRO had Lennie Conn’s Orchestra, live from Los Angeles via CBS-owned station KNX.

It’s no exaggeration to say that in June 1944, nearly every American was related to someone or knew someone who was serving in the military in Europe. It’s also no understatement to say that news of D-Day was anticipated for months before it happened, and that when the news finally arrived, it was met with a mixture of welcome and dread.

A CBS promotional pamphlet published after World War II went into detail about the West Coast D-Day radio phenomenon, using a fictitious “Smith family” in the Midwest to illustrate the D-Day homefront experience:

On the East Coast, it was already 12:48 a.m., June 6. In Indiana, it was 11:48 p.m., June 5, and the Smiths had gone to bed. But in the Rockies it was 10:48 p.m. and on the West Coast, a wide-awake 9:48.

Over CBS Ned Calmer cuts in on a program of popular music to say: ‘A bulletin has just been received from the London office of the Associated Press which quotes the German Transocean News Agency as asserting that the invasion of Western Europe has begun. This report—and we stress it is of enemy origin with absolutely no confirmation from Allied sources — said that American landings were made this morning on the shores of Northwestern France . . .’

Instantly the nation (where it is awake) is electrified. And then the vigil begins.

The official announcement that D-Day was, in fact, underway came at 12:32 Pacific Time on the morning of June 6, 1944.

Here’s how CBS described in their promotional pamphlet what happened in the minutes and hours leading up to the big moment.

Nothing new is added for the next two hours and 44 minutes. Every little while another announcer takes the microphone, edges up to the report, points out its unofficial source, and backs away. [Military analyst] Major George Fielding Eliot gnaws the bone awhile; then even he gives up.

In the Mountains, it is now 1:32 a.m., June 6. On the Coast, a yawning 12:32. Five seconds later the real news breaks.

A voice [Colonel R. Ernest Dupuy] from SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force] in London: ‘Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.’

What Colonel Dupuy read, and what radio listeners, particularly those west of the Rockies heard, is known as “Communiqué Number One.” It was so short, Dupuy actually read it twice in a row; it’s almost as if the Gettysburg Address and Paul Revere’s midnight ride were all rolled into one monumental, static-filled moment of American history, world history, and radio broadcasting history.

The West Coast D-Day radio phenomenon has been studied only minimally by scholars, so perhaps it’s fitting that the best summary of what happened more than 75 years ago comes from comedian (and tireless entertainer of generations of troops) Bob Hope, who broadcast a truncated version of his weekly show for NBC on the evening on June 6, 1944, that was heard in Western Washington on KOMO.

More from Feliks Banel: Sumner City Council unanimously rejects Ryan House resolution

Hope was no media scholar, but maybe he should’ve been. The “Thanks for Memory” crooning wisecracker brilliantly summed up the West Coast perspective on D-Day radio exactly as he had lived it only hours earlier, at home in California.

What has happened during these last few hours not one of us will ever forget. How could you forget?

You sat up all night by the radio and heard the bulletins, the flashes, the voices coming across from England, the commentators, the pilots returning from their greatest of all missions . . . newsboys yelling on the street . . . and it seemed that one world was ending and a new world beginning . . . that history was closing one book and opening a new one, and somehow we knew it had to be a better one.

You sat there, and dawn began to sneak in, and you thought of the hundreds of thousands of kids you’d seen in the camps the past two or three years . . . The sun came up and you sat there looking at that huge black headline, that one great black word with the exclamation point, ‘INVASION!’

Thanks for the memory, Bob.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

Resolution 1685 would have, somewhat bizarrely, completely handed off all fundraising responsibility for the city-owned Ryan House to any and all parties who wanted to try to preserve the structure, but without any formal agreement with a single group, and with no coordination from the city whatsoever.

Discussion about the Ryan House ranged widely, but several council members expressed hesitation or concern about what Resolution 1685 might actually accomplish or not accomplish.

“I’m gonna vote no on this resolution at this time, it doesn’t seem to be helping,” Council member Barbara Bitetto said. “I’m hoping that down the road, we can come up with the money, the city’s willing to do their portion. But at this time, (this) doesn’t seem to be helping, and I’m not going to support this resolution at this time.”

“I really have concerns,” Council member Greg Reinke said. “And because of my concerns, as I’ve mentioned, I cannot support this resolution.”

“I feel like there could potentially be a solution,” Council member Andy Elfers said. “I just don’t think this is getting us closer.”

“I, too, will vote ‘no’ to take all of the chaos away,” Council member Carla Bowman said. “I would encourage and be happy to help out in any way when it comes to the fundraising aspect, but I think the intent was not understood as to what we’re trying to do.”

It’s unclear what comes next for the City of Sumner as they wrestle with the upshot of their vote last September to demolish the Ryan House and the subsequent public outcry and legal tangles.

In an email to KIRO Newsradio late Tuesday, Sumner spokesperson Carmen Palmer wrote, “Any change with the Ryan House is on hold through the update of the Comprehensive Plan, which will last through 2024.”

It was Sumner’s Comprehensive Plan which was at the heart of a lawsuit filed by citizens last fall, and which led to a judge invalidating the Ryan House demolition permit which the city of Sumner had issued to itself.

“The City of Sumner does not have the funds required to repair it,” Palmer’s email continued. “The City can still accept donations, but donors should understand that an estimated $2.2 million is needed to likely change the future of the house.”

In the meantime, grassroots preservationists say that they will continue their campaign to raise awareness and funds as part of their ongoing effort to save the historic structure.

UPDATE (June 3, 2024, 1:33 p.m.): The Sumner City Council will meet Monday night and will likely vote on a Ryan House private fundraising resolution. Resolution 1685 was introduced in May and was tabled at the council’s previous meeting on May 20.

As detailed in the earlier story (please see below), Resolution 1685 essentially calls for the City of Sumner to formally step aside from multiple years of work to preserve the historic Ryan House and invites anyone interested to step forward and raise $2.2 million — with no help from the city — by Dec. 1 of this year.

Nick Biermann is a member of Save The Ryan House, the grassroots preservation organized last fall following a surprise move by the city council to vote for the demolition of the 19th-century structure. The Ryan House dates to the mid-19th century; it was donated to the city a century ago and once served as the Sumner library.

Biermann told KIRO Newsradio he expects the previously delayed vote to happen Monday night and that he believes Resolution 1685 has enough votes to pass.

“The two councilmembers still on the council who voted for the Resolution to demolish the Ryan House last September were not present at the last City Council meeting on May 20,” Biermann wrote in an email early Monday. “They are, however, expected to be present tonight when this new private funding resolution (Resolution 1685) comes up for a vote again. Even so, we expect to have enough votes for this new Resolution to pass.”

“Save The Ryan House would still like to see amendments made to the Resolution before it is adopted, and we have been asking in person and in writing over the past couple of weeks to have the key points below recognized,” Biermann continued. “We will also have members of our group in attendance at the meeting to speak during the public comment period tonight.”

The resolution as currently written is problematic, said Biermann. His group will be asking for specific amendments to help make success — that is, preservation of the Ryan House — more likely for the hundreds of concerned citizens who have voiced support for the project since September 2023.

Biermann shared this list of Save The Ryan House’s desired amendments to Resolution 1685:

1. To deduct the $300K slated for demolition from the $2.2 million the city said is needed from private fundraising.

2. To include in the resolution that the city still has access to (roughly) $300K in Heritage Capital Project grant funds for the Ryan House project through June 30, 2025.

3. To allow city staff to work on future grant writing, should any funding opportunities become available up through the December 1, 2024 deadline.

4. To allow for city cooperation with private fundraising and help our group promote any fundraising events.

KIRO Newsradio reached out to the City of Sumner early Monday afternoon regarding how the process might work this evening. Specifically, it’s unclear if Resolution 1685 has the ability to be amended through citizen involvement as Biermann describes. The city’s response will be included if and when it’s received and as this story is updated.

UPDATE (May 21, 2024, 11:46 a.m.): On Monday night, the Sumner City Council postponed a vote on the resolution related to the Ryan House until early next month. Nick Biermann of Save Ryan House wrote in a text to KIRO Newsradio late Monday after the meeting, “The resolution was debated and with some of the issues raised during public comment, the Sumner City Council decided to table a vote on the resolution until June 3.”

In video of the public comment and council discussion about Resolution No. 1685, multiple council members, who joined the council after last September’s council vote to demolish the Ryan House, are heard expressing their desire to delay the vote because two veteran council members who did take part in the demolition vote in September were not in attendance last evening.

ORIGINAL STORY:

At their regularly scheduled meeting Monday night, the Sumner City Council will likely vote on a resolution that could determine the ultimate fate of the Ryan House — a historic structure dating as far back as the 1860s.

The Ryan House in downtown Sumner was recently added to a list of the Evergreen State’s Most Endangered Places by the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation. As KIRO Newsradio reported in September 2023, the house is owned by the City of Sumner and has been for a hundred years. It’s a lot older than that – parts of it date to the 1870s – but the city says it’s more expensive to fix than originally thought, and it needs to be torn down.

A grassroots campaign emerged in Sumner last fall called “Save Ryan House.” Members of the volunteer group have spread the message about the long-term value of historic preservation, marched in parades and spoken at city council meetings and other civic events. They also took part in a legal battle with the city when a lawsuit spearheaded by another local group they work with – Save Our Sumner – successfully invalidated the demolition permit that Sumner had issued to itself.

The in-person meeting Monday night of the Sumner City Council begins at 6 p.m. at Sumner City Hall and it will also be possible to participate remotely. On the agenda is “Resolution No. 1685,” which formally invites private citizens to raise $2.2 million and donate it to the City of Sumner “no later than close of business” on Dec. 1 to fund restoration of the house.

Another Washington project: Grassroots preservation campaign saves Parkland School

Volunteers take issue with Resolution 1685

Nick Biermann of “Save Ryan House” takes issue with several aspects of Resolution 1685. He says the $2.2 million figure is not necessarily accurate, and the Ryan House could be preserved – or at the very least stabilized until it can be fully preserved in the future or as funding permits – for a lot less.

Mainly, Biermann says his group is frustrated that the City of Sumner won’t work in partnership with them on a solution. The resolution being considered tonight, Biermann contends, is needlessly long-winded and unhelpful.

“It basically rehashes the city stance that they will not contribute any more time, any more funds, any more money of any kind to the Ryan House project,” Biermann said Sunday, and “that they’re completely out of options, but that they would accept a check in full for the entire $2.2 million that they believe is needed for the restoration work to continue.”

The resolution is three pages long and does, indeed, go into sometimes granular, subjective and sometimes confusing detail about the struggles over the future of the Sumner landmark over the past eight months. Some examples of specific “recitals” in Resolution 1685 include:

• “WHEREAS, members of the public have blamed lack of private donations on a number of factors including lack of a solid dollar figure and the threat of demolition”
• “WHEREAS, it appears members of the public continue to insist on focusing on intent and desire to keep the building, which has never been in question, as a major distraction from the core need of raising the lacking funding from the private sector.”

As Nick Biermann points out, the resolution also includes language stipulating that the City of Sumner won’t “expend any additional City staff time or resources to apply for or obtain grant funding for the Ryan House.”

What Biermann says that he and the other Sumner citizens of Save Ryan House want is a “spirit of cooperation” and for the city to reach across the table and work with them to get the preservation of Ryan House – which the city was working on for five years until last summer – back on track.

“But this resolution doesn’t do that,” Biermann said. “This resolution reads more as an ultimatum to our group, and essentially says that if Save The Ryan House group wants to come up with the funds to save the Ryan House, we need to do it all by ourselves, we need to come up with full $2.2 million, and that the city will not contribute whatsoever to that effort.”

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‘We’ve spent five years on this, we have other have priorities …’

Carmen Palmer, spokesperson for the City of Sumner, made it clear that the city has no intention of assisting Save Ryan House or Save Our Sumner or any citizen-led effort to raise money in support of preserving the structure.

“We’ve spent five years on this, we have other have priorities like you wouldn’t believe at the city,” Palmer told KIRO Newsradio on Sunday. “So we’re trying to clearly remind people, we gave five years into this. We don’t have more to give, we have to work on other priorities.”

Palmer also rejects the notion of the value of any kind of formal arrangement between the city and any one of the citizen-led groups.

“If other groups feel passionate enough about this to go out and raise that money, wonderful,” Palmer said. “So, here’s all the clarity. We’ve heard that they didn’t understand. We’re trying to respond to all the criticisms we’ve heard and give a very clear indication of what is needed.”

KIRO Newsradio pushed back on what Palmer seems to be saying is the underlying assumption of Resolution 1685: that citizens with no formal affiliation with the City of Sumner (for the specific purpose of raising funds in support of the Ryan House) would have much luck convincing donors to give to something with no clearly defined public-private partnership agreement in place.

Isn’t this a recipe for failure – to tell Nick Biermann and Save Ryan House to essentially get lost, but be sure and come back by Dec. 1 with a check for $2.2 million in hand?

“We’re not saying get lost. We’re saying come back with checks, plural,” Palmer responded. “Why would we say we’re going to work with Group A, but Group B and C, get lost? Why would (we) do that?”

“You’ve got to raise $2.2 million in seven months,” Palmer continued. “Everyone who worries about this should be concerned and participating. This isn’t the time to bless one anointed group over another.

Previous coverage from Feliks Banel: Frustration in Sumner over city’s rush to demolish Ryan House

Unfortunate reality: Funding has been forfeited

For some reason or reasons that remain unclear from afar, when the city of Sumner shifted gears last summer and decided to demolish the Ryan House rather than preserve it, it unleashed a chain of unfortunate events and what appears to be missed opportunities for citizens and government to make peace and then work together effectively to find a solution.

Many unfortunate realities of the past eight months are spelled out in the recitals of Resolution 1685, but one that’s not mentioned is the fact the City of Sumner had already raised – but not spent – about $1.5 million in grant funding to preserve the Ryan House, and that now most of that funding has been forfeited, including $1.15 million from the Pierce County Lodging Tax.

“The $400,000 had to be used by Dec. 31, 2023, so that’s gone,” Carmen Palmer explained. “The $750,000 was to cover the overages on the $400,000 to make the doors actually open and the (Ryan) house actually secure, so absent the $400,000 the $750,000 wouldn’t do what it promised.”

“So that went away, too,” Palmer said.

Nick Biermann is frustrated about the $1.15 million evaporating, and he’s frustrated that so much energy and so many resources are being expended in what feels like a pointless battle with the City of Sumner over a longtime local landmark that visually and historically defines the community.

“Why are we all spending so much money arguing about this?” Biermann said. “Why don’t we just come to an agreement and put the money toward actually funding the work one way or another, even if you don’t agree on the exact amount?”

“Then that should be the challenge to us, as our Save Ryan House group, is ‘you guys come up with the rest,'” Biermann continued. “If it’s a million, if it’s $600,000, if it’s $800,000, whatever that value is, let’s come up with a value that we can raise with cooperation from the city contributing their portion as well.”

Where the process goes from here

What comes next after the city council meeting and likely vote?

For Save Ryan House, it will likely be a fundraiser based on Sumner’s historic connection to rhubarb.

Biermann says the event, set to take place sometime in June with the actual date to be determined, “would celebrate the history of Rhubarb Days in Sumner and looking back at the history of the small town festival.”

“They used to have rhubarb races on the lawn of the Ryan House like those (Pinewood) derby things where you make a small car and set it at the top of a ramp and then run it down,” Biermann explained. But instead of wood, “the car was made from rhubarb.”

What comes next from the City of Sumner’s perspective?

“The next steps are the people who would like to save this house have a steep hill to climb,” said city spokesperson Carmen Palmer. “Actually, a cliff to climb to raise $2.2 million by Dec. 1.”

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

“I can’t think of anywhere else in the city where any other brick street part or portion might still survive,” local historian Neil Anderson told KIRO Newsradio by phone. “It’s the last, and a lot of history walked over those bricks for the last 100 and some years.”

The roadway and bridge, at the west end of Hewitt Avenue just north of the old Everett railroad depot, function as an unintentional frame containing a view of Everett’s working waterfront – in particular, the section of the harbor where a pier called City Dock once stood.

Looking at the events of Nov. 5, 1916

It was on that dock and in the waters just west of it where gunfire erupted between law enforcement on shore and labor activists aboard two steam vessels.

It’s unclear who fired first, but when it was all over, the so-called Everett Massacre of Nov. 5, 1916 had claimed the lives of at least seven men. The event was one of many in the Pacific Northwest from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, when labor and management clashed, often with a deadly result.

In Everett in 1916, the deputies – and anyone else tagging along or otherwise taking part in the public demonstrations that day – had just marched down Hewitt Avenue, their feet drumming on the old bricks which remain in place there today, and the tops of their heads clearing the steel trusses of the old bridge, which also still stands remarkably stands unchanged and in place.

“It became a real wound in Everett,” lifelong Everett resident, local historian and Anderson’s friend Jack O’Donnell said to KIRO Newsradio. The Everett Massacre “was one of those things that people in the city would not speak about for years.”

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“Everett was a real mill town at that time,” O’Donnell continued, as he stood on the old brick road and took in the view to the west, framed by the bridge. “There were so many mills that became highly unionized, and there were a lot of real skilled workers like the shingle weavers, and they were having a strike.”

It was that strike which ultimately led to members of Industrial Workers of the World – known as the “IWW” or “Wobblies” – coming to Everett in 1916 to take part in public speaking events at the corner of Hewitt Avenue and Wetmore Street, about five blocks from the threatened bricks and railroad bridge. Those Wobblies were run out of town during the summer, and it was their threatened return that led to violence on Nov. 5, 1916.

“So when the Verona, the first of the two vessels, came in, they said ‘You can’t disembark here,'” O’Donnell recounted, describing what law enforcement shouted at the Wobblies trying to land at City Dock. “And they said ‘The hell we can’t.’ At some point, a shot was fired because both sides were armed.”

KIRO Newsradio exclusive: New Seattle National Archives to be a ‘very large project’

The owner of the land and the plans for it

The land in question, perhaps other than the street and sidewalk right-of-way running beneath the bridge, belongs to BNSF Railway. Railroad officials would like replace the aging bridge, which dates back to 1910, with an earthen berm. This would mean filling in the area beneath the bridge and eliminating the historic landscape where Everett Massacre participants marched down Hewitt Avenue to meet the boats full of labor activists. Tracks over the current vintage bridge carry BNSF freight trains and Sound Transit commuter trains.

Plans for altering the historic landscape are a joint effort of BNSF Railway and the City of Everett. In an email, city of Everett spokesperson Simone Tarver shared some of the project details.

The park is “being paid for and built by BNSF,” Tarver wrote.” Parks (officially, Everett Parks and Facilities) has been working closely with BNSF on the design.”

It’s unclear from Tarver’s email if the historic significance of the hardscape of the bricks where participants marched and of the so-called “viewscape” which retains its 1916 look (and which frames the view of the site where the Everett Massacre took place) were taken into consideration at any point so far in public or private discussions related to the design of the berm. This possible significance is likely to come up when the project and any necessary permits are reviewed for the State Environmental Policy Act or “SEPA” process.

While a recently installed boulder with a plaque commemorating the Everett Massacre will be temporarily removed for construction, Tarver said it will be returned once construction is over.

The bricks, however, won’t be so lucky.

“The current design calls for the brick pavers to be removed on the east side of the BNSF mainline,” Tarver wrote. “Due to their condition, the salvageable quantity, and other factors, we won’t be able to reuse them in this project, but we are still exploring options for what we could do with the brick remnants.”

More from Everett: Citizens beg city to compromise on dog park and gazebo

If you care about history, this is the time to speak up

It’s difficult to gauge how much interest there might be from BNSF Railway as far as altering the design of the park to retain the brick hardscape and bridge; their goal seems to be replacing the aging bridge (and its need for ongoing maintenance and possible repair) with a much cheaper and easier to maintain berm.

Still, it seems like there might be some opportunity for those who care about history to speak up on behalf of this final remaining piece of one of the most significant events ever to take place in Everett and, arguably, in the Pacific Northwest.

In a follow-up email, Tarver’s city of Everett colleague Nick Shekeryk indicated that nothing has been finalized when it comes to most of the details of the project.

“Planning and permitting for this matter have yet to be determined, so we do not have an official timeline at the moment,” Shekeryk wrote. “A budget is yet to be determined at this time, but more information may become available in the coming months.”

And in those coming months, maybe a group of concerned Everett citizens can organize and come up with a plan, and then work with BNSF and the City of Everett to prevent the permanent loss of one of the city’s most significant public areas. And then, those same citizens might create an interpretive plan to harness and better share this unique story of Everett’s past – and do so in the distinctive and highly-visible place best suited to ensure that the Everett Massacre is never forgotten.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

Earlier this month, KIRO Newsradio spoke to a pair of federal officials directly involved for a preview of what’s to come in what will be a long process to develop and build the new facility. All of this new activity with an eye to the future is a radical departure from the roller-coaster ride for the National Archives in Seattle which stretched from January 2020 to April 2021, and which ultimately ended when the Office of Management and Budget formally withdrew plans to close the current Seattle facility and sell the real estate.

The $9 million in funding is for planning and design of a structure to replace the aging warehouse near Sand Point which NARA currently calls home for its collection of materials related to Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. The building, which NARA has occupied since the early 1960s, dates back to World War II when it was created as a warehouse for the nearby U.S. Navy base at what’s now Magnuson Park in Seattle.

‘A very large project’

The current building needs some major repairs in order to protect the important and often priceless U.S. government documents, photos and maps dating as far back to the 19th century; a small portion of the $9 million will be used for the most urgent repairs at Sand Point.

It has not yet been determined what the total budget for the new NARA facility will be, but those funds will be significant, and will require separate Congressional approval. Also not determined yet is the timeline for when the new facility will open, but officials told KIRO Newsradio that a 7-to-10-year range is a good estimate.

A decade is a long time, even in the world of history and archives. However, because the threatened closure of the current Seattle facility in 2020 was so contentious and came completely out of the blue – courtesy of the obscure federal agency called the Public Buildings Reform Board – KIRO Newsradio reached out to the federal agencies directly involved to hear sooner rather than later about how plans will unfold, and how the public will be engaged in the process.

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The agencies involved include NARA, the federal administrators and archivists who run the current Seattle facility as well as a network of similar facilities around the United States, and major operations in Washington, D.C., and in nearby College Park, Maryland. Also taking part were officials from the General Services Administration (GSA) the federal agency that manages real estate, and builds and owns offices, warehouses, lighthouses, etc., for the U.S. government.

One way to look at the Seattle project is to think of GSA as the developer and future landlord, and the National Archives as the client and future tenant.

Deputy Archivist of the United States Jay Bosanko is one of the officials who sat down with KIRO Newsradio.

“This complete replacement is a very large project,” Bosanko said. “And yes, this is probably the largest and most visible project that we’re working with GSA on at this time.”

Bosanko didn’t say it in so many words, but likely because of what happened in Seattle a few years ago, NARA is already in discussion with stakeholders for the current and future facility, particularly the Indigenous tribes who were blindsided by the threatened closure.

“As you can imagine, there was a great deal of public interest and interest with all of our stakeholders that came out of all of the discussions previously about the condition of the building and its possible sale,” Bosanko said. “So, we’ve actually been receiving input for some time. And then, of course, we’ve been engaging with some tribal nations. I’ve met with representatives of tribal nations just within the last month, and that effort will only continue and grow as we move closer through this process.”

And “this process” also includes the General Services Administration (GSA), whose staff and contractors are responsible for property acquisition, and for design and construction of the new facility.

For the current Seattle NARA facility, Ryan Kennedy, the GSA’s regional chief architect, says the priority is fixing the leaky the roof.

“We do have a project in place,” Kennedy told KIRO Newsradio. “It is geared up to start this year. Specifically, we need to do repairs at the roof so that we can make sure that the building stays nice and dry.”

“So, that’s our highest priority at the moment,” Kennedy said, “to protect the existing facility.”

For creating the future facility, Kennedy says GSA has a process for “design excellence” which includes a focus on engaging stakeholders.

“So, really early on, we’re collecting from everybody ‘Who do we really want to hear from?,’ and it’s not going to be a closed circle, it’s going to be very open, because we know that this will be potentially a prominent legacy building here in the Seattle area,” Ryan Kennedy told KIRO Newsradio. “And we’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on that, so we’ll be developing that stakeholder analysis, and then an engagement plan.”

“And through the early phases of this work, once we’ve collected enough information to share,” Kennedy said, “presentations, potentially open houses, websites and other public-facing forums will come about that will give people information and also collect their input.”

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Key fact: New facility’s location has not yet been determined

One very important fact Kennedy shared: the location of this new facility has not yet been determined, and it won’t necessarily be located within Seattle city limits. This also means that the future of the Sand Point real estate where the current facility stands is also to be determined. There is sure to be an interesting formal process to figure out what will ultimately happen with that land, and plenty of informal interest from the city of Seattle and other interested parties. That, as they say, is a topic for another day.

Wherever the new facility is built, many have been wondering if it can be designed and built as something more like a “destination” – with an auditorium, special event spaces, exhibit areas – not unlike a museum which would attract visitors beyond those who wanted to do research or comb through the documents, photos and maps.

Is this approach a little too wacky for NARA?

“No, not wacky at all,” Bosanko said.

“We are very interested in being a vibrant and engaged part of the communities where our facilities are located,” Bosanko continued. “And we will be working with GSA to identify all the requirements, and obviously, that starts with the storage of the records.”

Along with a traditional research room where materials would be available to study, Bosanko says, “We want to have space where we can conduct public programs, where we can do outreach, and where we can emphasize the role we can play with educators, and especially in the K-12 space.”

“We are absolutely interested in being this active participant in the broader community,” Bosanko said.

One issue that came up in early 2020 when the materials held in Seattle were being threatened with removal to California and Missouri was the need to digitize more documents, photos and maps to, at that point, at least partially compensate for them leaving the region – that is, providing online access would make up for the materials no longer being held in Seattle. Then, just months later, the value of digitizing materials became even more obvious during the pandemic, when most archives were closed to in-person visits.

Material digitization is a priority

Regardless of what happened four years ago and regardless of how long it might take, digitization of materials is clearly a priority for NARA.

“Digitization is neither fast nor easy to do, it’s expensive,” Bosanko acknowledges. “And there are a lot of questions about how do we, given our massive volumes, increase our ability to do digitization.”

Bosanko calls digitization a “force multiplier” to extend the reach of the National Archives beyond each of their brick and mortar locations. He adds that an initiative already underway at their main branch in Maryland will inform design of the Seattle facility, and will, ideally, create what he hopes will be unique ways to engage the public, and to get the public’s help.

“We have just opened a brand new, state of the art digitization center at our facility in College Park, Maryland,” Bosanko said. “So there’s some opportunities for lessons learned there that we can then bring to all of our field sites,” he continued, by creating similar spaces where NARA could, for example, invite “a group of people in that have an interest in a particular body of records, and (work) with them to digitize those records.”

“That kind of flexible space is absolutely going to be important to us,” Bosanko said.

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What about the building’s exterior?

The inner workings of an archival facility are the heart and soul of the operation – the shelving, HVAC, fire suppression and other systems which protect the valuable contents. But what about the exterior? Must the new Seattle facility look like a big sterile suburban warehouse?

Or, is there potential for this new facility to be a visual landmark, perhaps some kind of inspiring structure that has elements of distinctive design, too?

“With all of my effort, it’s going to be a ‘yes’ to that” last question, Ryan Kennedy said.

In her role as regional chief architect for the Northwest/Arctic Region of GSA, Kennedy again cites the GSA concept of “design excellence.” This includes, Kennedy explains, a series of questions that get at the root of the many factors which influence those working to create a physical structure that represents and serves the needs of the client – in this case, the National Archives and Records Administration.

“What does a federal government building look like? How does it represent the community? How does it showcase innovation?” Kennedy said, reeling off some of the key questions. “How does it really look at future generations and its need?” she continued.

“A goal that we have is to make this building not only functional but resilient, and also just exemplify what NARA is,” Kennedy said. “We want to make sure that that is represented physically in the building as well as functionally in the building.”

And how soon might the public be invited to get involved in answering those questions and shaping the design of the project and, by extension, the future of the once-threatened Seattle branch of the National Archives?

“I’m probably going to over commit, but since I’m working with the project team, our goal is really to get something this year out there, whether it’s just a notification that things are happening,” Ryan Kennedy of GSA said. “But we are being aggressive with our work, we want to get started.”

“NARA has been interested for a long time,” Kennedy said. “And we want to support that.”

The same might be said of the Indigenous tribes, historians, museums, local archivists and amateur history researchers who are eager to be part of what comes next, and who want to do all they can to make sure the National Archives always have a home in the Pacific Northwest.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

College fight songs get most of the love and attention and airplay around here, and most people can recognize “Bow Down To Washington” or whatever they call that song from that school over by Pullman. Even high school fight songs get a fair amount of love and attention, while those from junior highs and middle schools seem to languish in obscurity. Either way, the songs sung by sometimes cracking voices from 6th grade to 9th grade are worth shining some light on now as the school year winds down, and worth assembling something of an online archive around.

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Thanks to fellow Rose Hill Royal, Bill Wixey of FOX 13 Seattle, for joining me in a sample video to sing the fight song for Rose Hill Junior High, which is now called Rose Hill Middle School. It didn’t hurt my feelings that my old friend Bill called me “Alex” by mistake, and that he didn’t know all the words to the song.

Bill Wixey was, is and always will be a Rose Hill Royal. And look at that hair! (Photo: 1981 Rose Hill Junior High yearbook courtesy of Feliks Banel, KIRO Newsradio)

To join in the fight song challenge fun, just film yourself alone or with a group of alums or family members or friends singing the fight song from your Puget Sound area junior high or middle school. Share the video via my Facebook page, or share on some other video site and then share the link. (You could also send your song to my email below.) There are no prizes to be had other than pride of accomplishment, and pride in your alma mater, of course. The deadline is sometime in early June so that we can share on the radio before the end of the school year.

Special thanks to Rose Hill Middle School Band Director Angie Laulainen for making a new recording of the Rose Hill fight song so Bill and “Alex” had something to sing along to.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

The Fellows predate that whole “grunge” rise by nearly 10 years, and through popularity on college radio stations – the most powerful outside-the-mainstream musical tastemakers of the pre-Internet era – they became beloved around the United States and in other parts of the world, including Spain, for instance.

The band and their albums, original songs, and live shows don’t quite fit into any other niche, though the choice covers they play and the friendships they forged with other musicians over the decades elevate the Young Fresh Fellows to a plane (or section of the record bin) that might also include the Velvet Underground, NRBQ and Mott The Hoople.

This week’s historic celebration kicks off with the first date of a cross-country tour: a sold-out show Friday night at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. Then, it’s on to Portland for a show Saturday night. Next month, the tour continues to Chicago; Madison, Wisconsin; Cleveland; New York and Massachusetts.

Four decades after their vinyl debut, several spots around Seattle already qualify as historic places where important moments in Young Fresh Fellows (YFF) history took place, like the Mural Amphitheatre where they played multiple landmark shows, the former location of Cellophane Square in Seattle’s U. District where YFF singer/songwriter/guitarist Scott McCaughey was manager in the 1980s, and the former home of Egg Studios in the city’s Ravenna/View Ridge area, where many of the band’s albums were recorded.

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‘Fine. But there’s at least one more location we wanted you to hear about.’

But first, a little more history: The earliest incarnation of the Young Fresh Fellows dates to 1981. That’s when Scott McCaughey and Chuck Carroll – two friends from California’s Bay Area who had moved to Seattle in 1979 to launch a music magazine, but found someone had already beat them to it with The Rocket – recorded an early cassette-only version of “Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest.” The name of the cassette, and the narrator excerpts between the songs, came from a promotional record issued by Pacific Northwest Bell in 1965.

“We think sounds are about the best way of communicating there is,” that narrator says at the beginning of the 1965 phone company disc and years later, repurposed for the original YFF recording. “So, we’ve assembled a collection of typical sounds of the Pacific Northwest. Now, sit back and listen.”

In 1983, McCaughey and Carroll’s friend Conrad Uno offered to produce and record an album-length version of the material in his studio and release it on Popllama, the record label Uno was in the process of launching. Headquarters for Popllama and for the studio was Conrad Uno’s house on a side street in North Seattle.

But this wasn’t the famous Egg Studios in the Ravenna/View Ridge area. That location, which Uno shuttered when he retired in 2017, hosted hundreds of bands over the decades, and is probably best known for being the place where The Presidents of the United States of America recorded their debut LP. That record ultimately was certified Triple Platinum.

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Where was the original, mostly-forgotten Egg Studios located?

‘Here, in a setting as green as England’s turf, thousands of visitors come to listen to words that will never die.’

“The funny thing is, Conrad couldn’t even remember the address,” said Scott McCaughey, standing in front of the modest, post-war Seattle home on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. “We had to go on the Google satellite and look. He kept throwing out addresses and none of them were right. And then finally, something clicked in his brain and we found this.

“Oh, yeah, that’s it,” McCaughey said, recreating the aha-moment when he and Conrad Uno tracked down the right house. “’That’s it, that’s totally it.”

McCaughey lives in Portland these days. He flew to Seattle Tuesday afternoon in advance of Friday night’s show to get in a few practice sessions with the rest of the band, including bass player Jim Sangster and guitarist Kurt Bloch. With drummer John Perrin in tow, McCaughey came straight from the airport to meet and reminisce about the recording of “Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest” and do it just a few muddy steps away from where the tape – yes, analog tape – actually rolled.

“Conrad Uno lived here,” McCaughey said. “And that was the basement,” he continued, pointing at garage door on the lower level of the house. “The garage was the control room, and the recording room was straight back in the basement, I think.”

“That’s how I remember it,” McCaughey said. “It’s been, like, 40 years since I’ve been here.”

Depending on what happens within its soundproofed walls, recording studios can become something like supporting characters in the often irresistible narratives around a band’s early days, or about the entire musical community of a particular place and time. Even casual music fans can see names like Muscle Shoals, Abbey Road and Electric Ladyland and not feel a need to consult Wikipedia.

Egg Studios – even the original, nearly-forgotten one, which was only Egg Studios for a few years – has seemingly earned a similar place in the recording venue pantheon.

‘And when the last bronc is busted by those good guys of the West, you can drive from cattle country to the big mountain slopes, where timber communities hold their own competition … in the Logger’s Carnival.’

The first YFF album included Scott McCaughey singing and playing bass; Chuck Carroll singing and playing guitar; and Chuck’s cousin Tad Hutchinson on drums. The YFF got help from other musician friends with additional vocals, and both McCaughey and Carroll also played keyboard.

“We fancied ourselves being Mott the Hoople, or The Who, or The Kinks, and when you listen back to it doesn’t really sound like that,” McCaughey said. “It sounds like we might have wanted it to sound like that, but it’s kind of great because it became its own thing. It’s a very original sound, you know.”

Listening back to “Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest” on original vinyl is a bit like time travel to a simpler era before MP3s and laptops. The recording technology is all analog, and the sound is pretty raw. But above all, McCaughey’s songwriting – with an eclectic mix of punk, folk and rock opera – stands the test of time and mostly defies easy categorization.

The same could be said of Scott McCaughey himself. He has masterminded or has been integral parts of countless bands and musical projects, and is probably best known internationally for touring as a guitarist with R.E.M.

However, the Young Fresh Fellows is clearly his flagship band, and Egg Studios – brainchild of Conrad Uno, who recorded most of their albums and built a record label around the YFF – is the protozoic humdrum spot on the map, tucked away on a quiet street in North Seattle, where it all began.

‘There’s a drum full of other colorful sounds, too.’

“Wow, this is brings it all back,” McCaughey said, surveying the front yard, driveway and porch of the mostly non-descript residence. “If we go inside, Uno said to check and see if there’s any egg cartons on the wall” in the basement, “because that’s why we called it Egg Studios, because that was the thing back then, that was the high-tech soundproofing.”

“I don’t think it does anything, honestly,” McCaughey explained, dismissing the value of the egg carton material which was once ubiquitous on the walls of lo-fi studios everywhere.

“But yeah, everybody did it,” McCaughey said.

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Like the reliance on those overvalued egg cartons, one of the secrets of “Fabulous Sounds” was a certain naiveté or maybe even innocence pervading the entire process.

McCaughey says Conrad Uno’s offer to record the album for free and to release it on his label was a no-brainer.

“So, we’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds awesome,'” McCaughey said. “We didn’t know that he didn’t really know what he was doing, but we didn’t know what we were doing either. So it worked out really good. It worked out great.”

“And he actually got really great sounds,” McCaughey continued. “I mean, I just remixed the record, which is right here.”

McCaughey had with him a vinyl copy of the new remix of “Fabulous Sounds” which is due for official release in June. The front cover features slightly updated artwork of the original release and includes more photos of the band members; the back is a photo taken inside the original Egg.

“That’s in there,” McCaughey said, holding up the new LP and pointing down the driveway. “That’s Uno right there (in the photo), and this is the room right inside the garage there, it’s right on the other side of the garage door.”

“And (there are) pictures of us in the tracking room, too,” McCaughey explained. Then, pointing at the photo on the back of the LP again, he continued, “But later these shelves were completely covered with tequila bottles, mostly Arandas Tequila, which is the cheapest tequila we could buy. We went through so many bottles of tequila, he just had them lined up all over this entire studio. It was amazing.”

Unfortunately, nobody was home at the old Egg Studios house on Tuesday – or, at least nobody answered a knock on the door – so we were not able to get inside and check for egg cartons. Chances are pretty good that the current occupants probably have no idea of the history that took place on the lower level of their home, alongside their trusty furnace and water heater.

‘What’s that, not enough action you say? Listen.’

Still, even being outside jogged Scott McCaughey’s memory of indelible occasions there. He pointed to a retaining wall forming one side of the driveway, below the walkway to the front porch, with maybe a five-or-six-foot drop from walkway level to driveway level. Forty years ago, McCaughey said, they always entered the house through the front door because the driveway always had Conrad Uno’s old truck parked there. Uno’s day job meant the bed of the truck was filled mowers, trimmers, edgers and other lawn care gear.

McCaughey said Conrad Uno and the band threw a big party there sometime in November 1983 to celebrate the record being finished. Early in the evening, Scott says he was already passed out in the front yard.

‘Well, now you know the score here in the Pacific Northwest.’

“At some point, I woke up in the bushes and the party was raging inside,” McCaughey said. “And I dragged myself up and I just staggered and I fell over backwards off this precipice, and landed in the in the back of Uno’s truck full of lawn mowing equipment.”

“I think I’m lucky I didn’t die,” McCaughey continued, explaining how he did end up pretty bruised from the fall. “I think if (Uno’s truck) hadn’t been there, I might have been even worse.”

“But yeah,” McCaughey said, chuckling 40 years later at the memory, “this is a really proud moment for me.”

‘Uh-oh. Here’s one we missed.’

Though they had played in bands together in the Bay Area, Scott McCaughey and Chuck Carroll hadn’t considered making music a career. McCaughey says it was Conrad Uno offering to record that first album for free and then launching a record label and mailing copies of “Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest” to college stations around the country that changed all that.

Word of the band’s growing popularity spread slowly in those days, at the speed of the U.S. Postal Service, with mailers arriving from faraway and exotic locales.

“We got one from this place in Bloomington, Indiana, the college university station there and we were No. 1,” McCaughey explained. “We’re No. 1? We can’t even figure it out, you know, we’re like what the hell? It’s such a weird record, too. It’s a funny little record. But I mean, at the time we thought it sounded like (The Who’s) ‘Quadrophenia.'”

Over the years, the lineup of the YFF has changed, and McCaughey has taken on many other projects with a head-spinning eclectic range of artists and subjects. He also bounced back from a health scare a few years ago.

“I never, never planned on it being a career or anything like that. I just never thought it would be possible,” McCaughey said, taking another look at the standard-issue Seattle house, the rain coming down and the late-spring grass looking well watered and a bit overgrown.

“So it’s kind of amazing that I actually did, or do, have a career, and it kind of really started right here,” he said.

‘Those are just a few of the sounds of this big country.’

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

As reported by KING 5 News, Totem Bowl in Kirkland — which very few people ever called by its updated name of “Tech City” — closed for good Saturday night after more than 65 years. In April 2022 when news of the bowling alley’s impending closure first surfaced, KIRO Newsradio did this in-depth look at its history.

Original story: Published April 13, 2022

After more than six decades in business on the Eastside, Tech City Bowl on Rose Hill will shut down permanently later this year. The family that’s owned and operated the business since the 1950s is in the process of selling the property to a developer. Final pins will fall on Sunday, Oct. 2.

Tech City Bowl opened in the late 1950s roughly midway between Kirkland and Redmond on Northeast 70th Street, which is also known as the Old Redmond Road, in what was then unincorporated King County. The area is part of Kirkland now, and is best known these days as the Bridle Trails neighborhood, for the nearby state park.

For the first 40 years or so, the business was known as Totem Bowl, and the exterior and interior were decorated with mid-century Native American caricatures, and the lounge was named after “Kaw-Liga” the cigar store fixture in the old song popularized by Hank Williams.

But the original name and all that now likely to be considered politically-incorrect décor went away 25 years ago in a brilliant update and rebranding to reflect the presence of Microsoft and other tech companies on the Eastside. But times and the bowling business have continued to change, and the real estate – 3.2 acres of prime commercial land in the middle of fast-growing community – is now more valuable than the 32 lanes of Tech City Bowl.

Totem Bowl was built in 1958 by a couple named Jim and Freda Gaines. Jim passed away in the 1990s and then Freda and one of their daughters ran the business. About 15 years ago, the next generation took over.

The pin setting and ball return gear at Tech City Bowl – aka “Totem Bowl” – in Kirkland dates to the 1970s when the alley expanded to 32 lanes.

It all goes away later this year. More at MyNorthwest. pic.twitter.com/NH9feSQsXT

— Feliks Banel (@FeliksBanel) April 13, 2022

Michele Danner, the secretary of the board, and her brother Don Wells, the president and managing partner of the corporation, are in their 50s. They are sister and brother, and are the children of Michael Wells; Michael’s dad Jim Gaines was their grandfather.

“The eventuality, unfortunately, is that our last weekend will be the 2nd of October,” Wells told KIRO Newsradio. “We’re going to operate and continue to take care of our customers in the neighborhood, and just have a really, really good six months of fun and memories and enjoy the place.”

Wells and Danner and a number of other cousins comprise the board of the family business, and each says it was a tough decision to shut down a place that meant a lot to their grandparents, and which also evokes strong memories of their late father. Michael Wells died at age 39 in 1980.

The family has been considering redevelopment of the property for many years, and recently worked with the City of Kirkland to change the zoning. Earlier plans may have included building a new bowling alley at the site, along with residential and retail spaces, but the Don Wells says the pandemic was costly, and took its toll on the family’s appetite to develop the property themselves.

“Hopefully, we’re going to find a buyer for the equipment that will be able to move it to a center nearby or create a new center out of it,” Wells said. “And so once that all happens then, unfortunately, this place will be gone and there will be new retail and housing here. But we’ll see what it becomes.”

Though Don Wells and the other family members are in the process of selling the property to a developer for an undisclosed amount, Tech City Bowl will remain open until Sunday, Oct. 2.

The original Totem Bowl opened with 16 lanes in 1958. Before that, Jim and Freda Gaines ran the old bowling alley in downtown Kirkland. Before that, Freda’s parents immigrated from Germany and settled in Central Washington.

“[In] Grand Coulee, they opened the Grand View Hotel,” Wells said. “They had two lanes of bowling and a German club with a secret door to get through to that so they can serve beer during Prohibition.”

Later, Wells says, Freda’s family sold the hotel in Grand Coulee and came west of the mountains, where they ran bowling alleys in Snohomish and Everett.

“So we’re talking about almost 100 years of family history involved with the game of bowling,” Wells said.

They’ve already told Tech City Bowl employees – roughly 40 to 50 people, not all full-time – who will lose their jobs come October. Customers will learn of the upcoming closure as the news spreads this week.

Don Wells and his sister Michele Danner and their siblings and cousins grew up at Totem Bowl around their grandparents Jim and Freda. As infants, they were placed in the basement daycare back in the 1970s when moms would take part in weekday bowling leagues. As adolescents and young adults, they would be put to do work doing things like scraping gum off the undersides of chairs and tables.

And while it sounds like Jim and Freda Gaines lived and breathed the bowling alley while they were alive and running the place, those feelings are different for the generation currently in charge, and the fourth generation of siblings and cousins means there are more people involved in decision making.

Don Wells says they had a great manager for years who ran Tech City Bowl. He and his siblings and cousins had other careers, and what he says is a different kind of passion for the place than their grandparents – to keep it running, but not have to be there every day.

“We made an expectation realistic in that, nobody had to be here 24/7, and that we could do this because we all had our own jobs,” Wells said. “We all had different careers, just the different things that we did that we built our own lives around, because it was our grandparents who built this, and we’re going to make sure it’s there.”

“But none of us expected that that’s going to be us” taking on that daily role, Wells said. “And none of us did.”

Wells and Danner say they’ll likely be offering nostalgic promotions in the months ahead, including 1958 prices and even bringing back the once-popular Totem Burger.

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks here.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

For this year’s observance, KIRO Newsradio caught up with a retired longtime employee of the Cascades Volcano Observatory who shared her memories of the event, the impact it had on her life and career, as well as some thoughts about being prepared for future eruptions of Washington and Oregon’s iconic peaks.

Carolyn Driedger is Scientist Emerita of the United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington. She retired in 2023 after serving as the outreach coordinator from the time that position was created in the 1990s.

Driedger grew up in Pennsylvania and went to work as a young scientist for the USGS studying glaciers in 1978. By March 1980 when a minor eruption signaled that Mount St. Helens was wide awake after more than a century of slumber, it was clear that most USGS staff in this area were going to be involved with the volcano in one way or another.

A friend and colleague named Mindy Brugman was studying Shoestring Glacier, which was located on the east side of Mount St. Helens. Brugman invited Driedger to make a trip to Mount St. Helens one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1980. They left Tacoma in a government car around noon and drove toward the mountain. They successfully got past the checkpoints keeping most people out of the area immediately around the volcano, and then headed to a place north of the peak called Timberline parking lot.

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Timberline was near there where the USGS had set up equipment to measure the rapidly growing bulge on the north side of Mount St. Helens, where pressure from within the earth was literally changing the contours of the landscape by the hour.

Planning a trip north

The date of Driedger and Brugman’s field trip? It was Saturday, May 17, 1980.

“It was pretty intimidating to be at the Timberline parking lot the afternoon on May 17,” Driedger told KIRO Newsradio, “and (be) thinking, ‘Gosh, if that slid, it would probably come down right on top of us. Okay, that’s interesting, in a very intellectual sense.'”

Driedger says that though she and Brugman were actually having those thoughts there in the Timberline parking lot, it wasn’t enough to make the two scientists turn around and immediately leave.

“There is strength in numbers, somehow,” Driedger explained. “And if you see other people there – you know, you see other people taking risks – then you are more apt to take (risks) yourself.”

The USGS scientist on duty near Timberline keeping watch over the growth of the bulge was Harry Glicken. He had been there for a few weeks, and was about to be relieved by another USGS scientist named David Johnston.

For those who know their Mount St. Helens history or if people remember 44 years ago, you already know the name David Johnston. He was a young scientist – just 30 years old – and a beloved colleague to many. Johnston became the human face and voice of the USGS in those seven weeks between the first visible volcanic activity in late March 1980 and the massive eruption of May 18.

Driedger says that she and Brugman had planned to camp near the mountain that night, and then do field work at Shoestring Glacier the next day.

Johnston didn’t think that was a good idea.

“David was very clear that he thought that we were all at risk,” Driedger said. “And he said, ‘Let’s have as few people here as possible.’ And he said that several times over a couple of hours. He was he was very congenial, calm, and yet pretty serious when he made those statements.”

“And so reluctantly in early evening,” Driedger continued, “Mindy and Harry Glicken and I put our things back in our cars and we proceeded down the mountain, pretty crestfallen. It was a beautiful evening, you know, one of those where you want to just camp next to the volcano and just check on it at night and check on the stars shining on it.”

Northwest history: Visiting Captain Vancouver’s grave in a tiny village near London

‘It was black’

The next morning, Driedger and Brugman planned to return to the mountain and to try and get a helicopter to take them over to Shoestring Glacier. First order of business was a 7 a.m. meeting at the USGS office in Vancouver, and then they headed toward the mountain via Interstate 5 (I-5).

As they drove north, the sky up ahead began to look very odd.

“Instead of it being a little spurt of ash and steam in the sky, it was black,” Driedger recalled. “And it curiously was on the north side of the summit, and it was a kind of like a flat black line that extended to the north, which was really odd.”

Still, they kept driving.

“I think Mindy was the first one who mouthed that, ‘Oh, my gosh, maybe this is what’s actually happening, and what David had told us maybe is actually happening right now,'” Driedger said.

What Johnston had said was if a slide occurred on the north side of the mountain – if the bulge gave way – then the ensuing eruption could reach the observation post (known as Coldwater2) where Driedger and Brugman had been speaking with him just hours before.

‘Vancouver. Vancouver. This is it!’

Of course, Johnston was absolutely right. They didn’t know right away what had happened to their colleague, but Driedger confirms that Johnston did make that haunting final radio transmission back the USGS office as the eruption was getting underway: “Vancouver. Vancouver. This is it!”

“Oh, that is true, he was on the radio,” Driedger said. “And that would be David, and I know he was very excited that there would be activity here at Mount St. Helens.”

Driedger also says Johnston was not naturally someone you would think of as a spokesperson, but that in those weeks before the eruption, he rose to the occasion because he believed the information he was sharing was critically important for people to know and understand.

“There’s a lesson here in that,” Driedger said, “because although he was very shy, when he saw that people could be in trouble, that people could be hurt, he found the words, and he spoke out, and he spoke his piece.”

David Johnston’s body was never found, and it’s presumed that he died in the eruption there at what’s now called, in his memory, Johnston Ridge. The Forest Service observatory/visitor center at Johnston Ridge is usually a must-see, but the facility is currently closed and inaccessible due to a landslide that has been blocking Highway 504 for months.

‘What we thought was stable was not at all’

Meanwhile, on that drive north 44 years ago, Driedger and Brugman pulled off the freeway at Woodland. They called the office in Vancouver, and then turned around to head back there to help out as the USGS kicked into full response mode. Driedger was there for the rest of the day and into the night, taking calls from people asking questions, but also collecting reports from people describing what they saw.

A few days later, Driedger got a firsthand look at the devastation, flying over the eruption area Tuesday evening in a fixed-wing aircraft and peering down through night-vision goggles.

“It was extraordinary to see the amount of change, you could not believe the amount of change that happened in just a few minutes time,” Driedger said. “And I think that was the biggest ‘wow,’ to me, was that so much change could happen so quickly at this volcano, and that we really lived on an impermanent earth.”

“What we thought was stable was not at all,” Driedger said. “And I think that really shook everybody.”

“Mount St. Helens really brought home disaster in unexpected way,” Driedger continued. “Everybody wanted an eruption that would make the tourists happy. You remember that before May 18 there were people hawking T-shirts? It felt a little bit like (we were all) tempting the volcano. But we got a real gut punch from it instead.”

The devastation of the landscape and the loss of life took time to process, and Carolyn Driedger eventually had to get away.

“I never saw Mount St. Helens as a place to go play again for probably a couple of decades,” Driedger said. “And when my time was finished at Mount St. Helens, I did some studies looking at different aspects of glaciers on volcanoes and volcanic ash and snow melt, I went back to glaciology and went to up to Alaska, where I worked for four years.”

Reporting live from Washington’s past: History only deepens community love for Kirkland’s ‘mystery cottage’

Driedger once ‘couldn’t imagine going back,’ but she did

“It was a real relief to be away from volcanoes,” Driedger said. “And I just couldn’t imagine going back.”

But she did go back. First, Driedger worked on a project at Mount Rainier concerning glacial generated debris flows, which led to an invitation to join the staff at the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory. In 1995, she was tapped by the USGS for a new position to lead outreach efforts for Cascades Volcano Observatory. Her job was to work with communities on updating hazard assessments, to create curriculum for educators, to provide up-to-date information for interpretive guides at the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, and to share information with the media. The goal was to use data and communications to save lives.

Carolyn says that ultimately, the biggest lesson from Mount St. Helens in 1980 was that there was more that scientists could do to help communities prepare for the next eruption – since Rainier, Baker and Glacier Peak and other Cascade volcanoes are right here in our backyard, and because it’s just a matter of time before one of them erupts again.

Holly F. Weiss-Racine is the current outreach coordinator at Cascades Volcano Observatory. She’s keenly aware of the Carolyn’s Driedger role in establishing the position nearly 30 years ago.

“I met Carolyn in her role almost 20 years ago during the 2004-2008 lava dome building eruption of Mount St. Helens when I was a Park Ranger at the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument,” Weiss-Racine wrote in an email. Weiss-Racine describes Driedger’s legacy as “all she has done to keep our communities educated and connected to our beautiful, but dangerous, Cascade Volcanoes.”

The way Carolyn Driedger describes her work as outreach coordinator, and her continued role as a volunteer for Cascades Volcano Observatory, it’s a kind of healing from what she witnessed firsthand 44 years ago.

“I think that was very cathartic for me to be able to do something positive,” Driedger explained. “Yes, I had seen the situation where 57 people died. But here, I was able to do something about it, and so I spent the rest of my career doing that.”

Editors’ note: This story originally was published on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. It has been updated and republished since then.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X, formerly known as Twitter.

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The bustling Eastside city’s mostly hidden origin story will come up a lot during this year’s annual history tour of Kirkland Cemetery, presented by the non-profit Kirkland Heritage Society. It takes place Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon. Kirkland Cemetery is located in the Rose Hill neighborhood at 12036 NE 80th St., just off the NE 85th Street exit from Interstate 405, and across the street from Lake Washington High School.

Tour leader Matt McCauley joined “Seattle’s Morning News” live from Kirkland Cemetery Friday to preview the tour. He has been researching and writing about Kirkland history for most of his life, and began leading annual cemetery tours more than a decade ago.

“It is probably the oldest park in the city of Kirkland,” McCauley told KIRO Newsradio. “It was platted with the original town plat in 1888, and interment started around 1890. So it has been kind of at the heart of Kirkland since the very beginning” when Peter Kirk and other investors were in the early phases of their ultimately failed plan to manufacture steel rails in Kirkland.

More from Feliks Banel: History only deepens community love for Kirkland’s ‘mystery cottage’

With more than 130 years of history among the graves and grave markers, McCauley says he can’t cover everything in a single tour.

“But what we’ve done is sort of boiled it down to some of the earlier residents that either played an important role in the founding and creation of Kirkland, or have just kind of an interesting story associated with their life,” McCauley said. “And every year, we sort of mix it up a little bit and bring in some folks we haven’t talked about before, just to sort of give it a little bit of variety so people have a reason to come every year.”

Where the gladly accepted donations from the Kirkland cemetery will go

No advance registration is required, and the tour is free. But McCauley says that Kirkland Heritage Society gladly accepts donations, which are put to good use right there in Kirkland Cemetery.

“We use the donations exclusively to buy markers for unmarked graves here in the cemetery,” McCauley said. “There were periods of time, like during the Great Depression, where people didn’t have very much money, and often they would own the burial plot, but they didn’t have enough for a stone, or there’s a lot of reasons this happened,” he explained.

“But we’ve just kind of methodically tried to go through and place simple marker stone markers on the unmarked graves,” McCauley continued. He says that the City of Kirkland “donates the labor to actually place them here, so we really appreciate that.”

One insider tip: there’s no parking in the cemetery, but there is street parking on 120th Avenue NE and 122nd Avenue NE, plus Lake Washington High School is right across the street and likely a good bet for finding a spot on Saturday morning.

‘We got a real gut punch from it:’ Scientist recalls deadly Mount St. Helens eruption

Once the two-hour tour ends, McCauley says he’ll stay behind to answer specific questions or help track down specific graves.

“I hang around afterwards to answer questions,” McCauley explained. “A lot of times, people may have relatives who are interred here, but they’re not exactly sure maybe where they are or things like that. So I usually do another hour or so after that just talking one on one with people.”

Special thanks to Jason Filan and Derek Paschich of Kirkland Parks and Community Services for providing early access to Kirkland Cemetery for our live broadcast.

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X, formerly known as Twitter.

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“The big news is as of 5 p.m. yesterday,” Phil Edlund of the group said, “both Pacific Lutheran University and Parkland Community Association signed papers to close on the purchase and sale of the building to the Parkland Community Association.”

And as of this afternoon, the final funds will be wired into escrow,” Edlund continued. “And with the help of Pacific Lutheran University, this building is now Parkland Community Association’s to become a community center.”

As Edlund shared the breaking news live on the air to KIRO Newsradio listeners, he stood near the original front entrance of the 1908 structure. Nearby, a group of a dozen or so supporters of the grassroots campaign to save the school cheered as Edlund made the announcement.

More here: Parkland School catalyzes neighbors to support South Sound community

Parkland School was threatened with demolition in 2022 when Pacific Lutheran University (PLU), whose main campus is nearby, moved to sell the property — where Parkland School stands along State Route 7 — to developers. PLU had bought the old school from Franklin-Pierce School District in the 1980s, used it for a number of purposes, and leased it to other users.

Parkland residents organized an effective grassroots campaign, allied with the Parkland Community Association, spread their message through broadcast and social media and ultimately persuaded PLU to work with the community to find an alternate solution: to create a community center for Parkland at what is, essentially, the center of the community.

More fundraising to be done

Securing ownership is an incredible feat worthy of celebrating but there remains some serious work to do to raise more than $2 million and to ready the building for a variety of community purposes.

“While we’ve raised over $750,000, it can’t be overstated how much Pacific Lutheran University has been a partner with us in this,” Phil Edlund told KIRO Newsradio listeners Friday morning. “They have put up $2.1 million as an interest-free two-year promissory note, and we will need to make $1,050,000 payments twice over the next two years to pay this off.”

Edlund is not deterred by the work ahead and remains focused on the strengths of the Parkland Community Association’s agreement with PLU.

“It is an interest-free loan, and they are helping us,” Edlund said. “And so it’s up to us in the community to continue to help raise the funds to make this fully a reality.”

Wendy Freeman, another leader of the grassroots campaign and board member of the Parkland Community Association invited supporters and anyone interested to contribute to the effort. Freeman also invited the general public to take part in a celebration and fundraiser in Parkland on Friday afternoon.

“The school has been saved to serve the community, and we’re having a wonderful community event this evening,” Freeman told KIRO Newsradio listeners. “Please come and join us from 3 p.m. until 10 p.m. We’re having a celebration at the Parkland Denny’s and 15% of everything that comes in the door is going to be donated to the community center at Parkland School.”

Parkland Denny’s runs donation promotion

Freeman said that the Parkland Denny’s will run the same charitable promotion every Friday in May, through Friday, May 31, 2024.

More from Feliks Banel: Visiting Captain Vancouver’s grave in a tiny village near London

Phil Edlund is clearly thrilled that Parkland School has been saved. However, he won’t have much time for partying today.

“At 10 a.m., I am meeting with the fire sprinkler (and) fire alarm security alarm people to get a quote on getting the building monitored, because there are systems in the building that need to be changed over,” Edlund said.

Security? Check.

“We’ve already changed over all the utilities to our name as of today,” he continued. “And then at 1 p.m., we meet with a roofer to get a quote on getting the roof replaced. The local roofer is actually going for a grant to get at least all the materials donated.”

Roofing? Check.

“We have a local floor covering store down the street that will donate all the floor coverings for when we get to that stage,” he said.

Floor coverings? Check.

Next steps for Parkland School

However, Phil Edlund wasn’t quite finished with sharing his calendar just yet.

“And actually, today I meet with a prospective tenant that would like to rent space and move in here to be able to occupy office space and relocate their offices,” Edlund added. “And we have another tenant that (may) take the entire first floor that we’ll be meeting with later this week as well to firm that up.”

Possible tenants? Check.

But before all that, Edlund did make time to excuse himself for one brief moment of celebration at Parkland School: posing for a group photo with the neighbors who saved it, standing in the brilliant sunshine on the front steps for just a few moments, on the first morning of the first full day they can call Parkland School theirs.

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, read more from him here, follow him on X here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks here.

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You can’t go very far around here without tripping over geographic features – Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, Puget Sound – that were named by Captain Vancouver when he explored the Northwest back in 1792. Vancouver was very young when he led an expedition to the Northwest Coast of North America – just 34 years old – that changed the course of history in the Pacific Northwest, and that irrevocably altered the Indigenous civilization that had called this region home since time immemorial.

In April 1792, Captain Vancouver sailed right past the mouth of that big river south of here – infamously failing to enter and explore what became known as the Columbia River, and lost out on that prize to an American named Robert Gray who explored and named the river just a few weeks later. Vancouver’s oversight had long-lasting political ramifications that some say led the United States to eventually take possession of what’s now Washington, Oregon and California.

However, Vancouver did sail HMS DISCOVERY through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and then became the first non-Indigenous person to explore what he named Puget’s Sound. Vancouver and his crew spent most of May 1792 surveying these waters and placing names we still use today, though there are moves afoot to restore Indigenous names to places such as Mount Rainier.

At the end of his years-long voyage, Vancouver returned to England to work on creating nautical charts from the surveys he had led, and writing the narrative of the expedition (based on journals he kept during the expedition). Unfortunately, that work had to be completed by his brother John because George Vancouver died in the spring of 1798 at age 40.

Captain Vancouver’s burial spot

Captain Vancouver is buried at St. Peter’s Church in Petersham. It’s a lovely spot west of London, readily accessible by mass transit, on the outskirts of the town of Richmond and not far from the Thames River.

Jean Allsopp is church historian for St. Peter’s. It’s an understatement to say that she has a bounty of material to work with.

“The churchyard goes all the way back for many, many centuries,” Allsopp told KIRO Newsradio. “The earliest graves that we have on record, those date to the 1700s.”

“But we have three layers of burial there” – that is, unrecorded burials going back much, much further – “so it’s very, very old,” Allsopp said.

While not a major tourist attraction, the churchyard and the quiet village of Petersham are worth the effort to visit.

“I think the initial impact that most people get, is that of peace and it’s just so tranquil,” Allsopp said.

The spot where Captain Vancouver is buried is near a high wall and takes a few minutes to find. Trees grow around edge of the churchyard and in several places within; the grass is dense, and many of the headstones are small and faded and difficult to read, while others are large and monumental. Vancouver’s headstone is on the more modest side, and the actual stone is a relatively recent creation, made to replace an earlier version.

“A lot of people choose to go and just sit on some of the benches and just enjoy the peace and quiet, really,” Allsopp said.

Why is the captain buried in Petersham?

A question that naturally comes to mind is why Captain Vancouver would be buried in Petersham, which is a place not generally associated with seafaring explorers or with the Royal Navy.

Jean Allsopp says that when Captain Vancouver returned to England in September 1795, he was terminally ill. What he was suffering from is a bit of a mystery – but it may have been tuberculosis.

As for why he’s buried in Petersham, the Royal Navy apparently “billeted” him – that is, assigned him living quarters – in the nearby town of Richmond at a famous pub on Richmond Hill called The Star and Garter. This billeting was so that Vancouver could have a dedicated place to finish the editing and other work required before the manuscript about his exploration of the Northwest coast could be published.

“At some point, he moved from there down into Petersham Village,” Allsopp said, perhaps because his health had taken a turn for the worse. “He was a very ill man and his two brothers, Charles and John Vancouver, were staying with him and looking after him.”

“He died there, really,” Allsopp said, “and that’s why he’s in our parish church.”

As removed as it is from the sea, Petersham is also nowhere near where George Vancouver was born and raised. Home for the family was a place call King’s Lynn, which is in Norfolk about 120 miles away.

Jean Allsopp says Vancouver’s family was connected to the sea throughout the 18th century, but they were relative newcomers to England. George Vancouver’s grandfather – his father’s father – had emigrated from Holland.

“His father was the customs collector in King’s Lynn, which was a big seaport,” Allsopp said. “And in the case of the Vancouver family, they were all engineers, and they came over to help drain the (wetlands) which were very, very swampy, and to make them good, arable farming land.”

Yearly Captain Vancouver event is happening soon

The annual event commemorating Captain Vancouver will take place Sunday. Allsopp says it’s usually held on or near the anniversary of Vancouver’s burial at Petersham, which took place on May 10, 1798. Sunday’s event traces its origins back to the aftermath of World War II, when the commemoration was first held as a thank-you to Canada for financial support to repair war damage suffered by St. Peter’s Church.

Jean Allsopp says that more than 100 people typically turn out to honor Captain Vancouver, including parishioners, history enthusiasts, Sea Scouts, and some very special VIPs.

In American terms, it sounds like the annual event is a “big deal” at St. Peter’s Church in tiny Petersham.

“It is for a little parish church,” Allsopp agreed, chuckling. “We’re not St. Paul’s Cathedral, but for a parish church like ours, yes, it is.”

“We will have the local mayor attending with the counselors,” Allsopp added, meaning from the nearby town of Richmond. “We have some of the descendants of Captain Vancouver’s brother (John) attending from Holland, they come every year. And we have lots of people with just sea connections.”

The link between Canada – home of Vancouver, British Columbia, of course – and Petersham, resting place of the city’s namesake, remains strong more than two centuries after Captain Vancouver visited what’s now Washington and British Columbia.

“The Naval Attaché for the Canadian High Commission always attends,” Allsopp said. “And he will be laying a wreath on the grave on behalf of Canada.”

Canadian city honors its namesake

As it turns out, the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, has long shown its respect for Captain Vancouver’s final resting place. Volunteers from the Canadian province provided financial support for restoration of the headstone nearly 100 years ago, and the municipal government has contributed to more recent restoration efforts, and to general upkeep.

Johann Chang, a spokesperson for the City of Vancouver wrote in an email that the city “is still providing an annual contribution to the maintenance of Captain George Vancouver’s grave.”

Chang also shared a memo prepared in November 2002 for the Vancouver City Council when they were asked to vote on a measure to support a trust fund for the grave that was first established more than 50 years ago.

“Close ties exist between St. Peter’s Church, Petersham, England, and the City of Vancouver, due largely to the fact that Captain George Vancouver is buried on this Church site,” the memo reads. “Many Canadians visit this site annually as they discover the fascinating life story of Captain Vancouver.”

“Vancouver has traditionally assisted in the maintenance of his grave,” the memo continues. “In 1970, with Council’s approval, a $1,000 Trust Fund was set up, the amount invested in a bond, and the yearly interest generated was sent to St. Peter’s Church to help maintain the grave.”

“The last amount disbursed was $175 (in Canadian dollars), which was sent in 1994 to a Boy Scout troop in Petersham, who at that time were maintaining the grave,” the 2002 memo continues. However, contact has been lost with the group, and consequently, no payments have been made from the Fund since that time. St. Peter’s Church has been maintaining the gravesite since 1994 without financial support from the British Columbia city.

The 2002 measure was approved, and the Vancouver City Council added $15,000 Canadian Dollars to the trust fund. This new funding, and the renewed connection to St. Peter’s Church, meant the city resumed its annual contributions which have continued ever since.

“The 2024 contribution was paid on April 15, 2024,” Johann Chang wrote in an email. “The amount was £265.00, which is equivalent to $519.40 Canadian dollars (or about $378 in the U.S.).

With this annual support and especially with the enthusiasm and dedication of volunteers like church historian Jean Allsopp, St. Peters is to be commended for taking seriously their stewardship role for Captain Vancouver’s grave, and in welcoming visitors there year-round.

“It’s a complete accident that we got him,” Allsopp said. “But we’re very proud of him.”

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

Previous story: Seeking clues to the mystery cottage at Kirkland’s newest park

A former neighbor shared some of its additional history and backstory earlier this week.

Fisk Family Park is on 6^th Street South in Kirkland, just north of the Google campus, and right alongside where the railroad tracks once were. The route of those tracks — the old Northern Pacific Belt Line — is now part of the Eastrail, the pedestrian and bike path between Renton and Woodinville.

As reported in January, the City of Kirkland was in the process of converting private property they had recently purchased into a park. The outstanding features of this somewhat wooded tract are tiny Everest Creek which runs down the middle and a little red “mystery cottage” that stands atop a gentle rise just south of the creek.

Map from 1953 shows (in oval area) where 6th Street South was a dead-end on both sides and did not cross the railroad tracks; yellow X shows approximate location of the “mystery cottage” at Fisk Family Park. (Image courtesy of Loita Hawkinson, Kirkland Heritage Society with notations by Feliks Banel)

Speculation has surrounded the “mystery cottage” for decades; the setting and the little cottage itself are just so picturesque, so different compared to all the surrounding houses and nearby strip malls and offices, the spot seems to inspire an intensity of speculation that even borders on mythologizing.

Help to understand the history of the cottage — and to understand the long history of interest in the history of the cottage — came from Loita Hawkinson of the Kirkland Heritage Society. KIRO Newsradio also made the call-out for anyone who had more information to share.

Former neighbor shares origin of mystery cottage

That call came a few days ago from Shelley Winfrey, who grew up across the street from the mystery cottage, and whose family first lived in that spot more than 100 years ago.

Winfrey told KIRO Newsradio that she was good friends with the late Jim Fisk. Fisk is the man who passed away in 2022 and previously owned the property. His parents lived in a home there (abutting the “mystery cottage” tract to the north) for much of the 20^th century.

Some of the facts shared by Shelley Winfrey had already been researched and shared by Loita Hawkinson. But Winfrey, with help from her mom, succinctly described to KIRO Newsradio the key points of the mystery cottage’s history.

“That was built by Jim’s dad, who worked at Boeing,” Winfrey said. “And he would bring home scrap wood in his pickup, mom said,” describing what was once a common method by which the Boeing Company unwittingly contributed to construction projects around the region.

It was back in the 1940s when the elder Fisk “built this barn that started out as a chicken coop, and then I think Jim had pigeons,” Winfrey said. “And then it just kind of became this little red barn. And then Jim was an antique collector, and so he opened up a little antique store there called The Red Barn Antiques.”

The era of “Red Barn Antiques” was in the early 1970s. Shelley Winfrey said that it was more hobby than business for her friend Jim Fisk and not really a full-time job.

“It was just small,” Winfrey said. “And he just had furniture and trinkets, and probably lights and things that you would find in an antique store.”

Those ornate posts holding up the front of the red barn? Winfrey said those were probably Jim Fisk’s handiwork.

“He was very good with wood,” Winfrey said. “He had a lathe (and) he would make things.”

Winfrey said she and her siblings and other neighborhood kids would hang out at the little red barn and went on to describe an idyllic childhood in an earlier version of Kirkland nearly 60 years ago.

On Winfrey’s side of the road, she lived with her parents, and her grandparents lived next door, on the other side of Everest Creek.

There was “a couple of (foot) bridges,” built by her grandfather to get across the creek. “There was a fish pond,” Winfrey continued. “We used to have water rights to the creek, actually my grandfather did for irrigation.”

Along with the creek, the former railroad tracks added another romantic element to the place where Winfrey grew up, and where her mother did before her.

This meant what were then called “hoboes” living behind where the little red barn now stands, farther along the tracks toward the site of the old Kirkland depot.

“When my mother was a girl, they would come to my grandmother’s house and ask if there was any jobs that they could do in trade for food,” Winfrey said. “You know, chop wood, anything, they would do anything. Mom says they were just people that were riding the trains and out of work during the Depression.”

Winfrey’s grandparents were active gardeners, which eventually led to her grandmother going into business in a way not too different from what Jim Fisk had done across the street.

“We spent so much time landscaping and maintaining all of that land,” Winfrey said. “It was a park, between my mom’s yard and my grandmother’s.”

“My grandmother used to sell flowers,” Winfrey said. “She was known as the Kirkland Flower Lady of 6^th Street South.”

The Kirkland Flower Lady reigned from the late 1970s until sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, Winfrey said.

“She had like a card table out by where the creek would be in between the two houses,” Winfrey described. “And people would come. She’d have bouquets and they would come take them and then they would put money under a rock, I think, on the picnic table. And then that evolved into she had an old fishing basket, I think, that she hung by the back door. And I think people used to come up to the porch and put money in there.”

Winfrey said the flower business generated a steady stream of $1 bills that her grandmother would roll tightly and secure firmly with a rubber band.

“When you took the rubber band off (the dollar bills), I mean they never did straighten out,” Winfrey recalled, chuckling at the memory.

Along with specific details about the little red barn, Winfrey also shared some bigger-picture history of the Eastside that many people probably have no idea about, or perhaps have forgotten.

Winfrey said that 6^th Street South – again, that’s the busy road where Google now stands and that goes right past Fisk Family Park – was a dead-end on either side of the railroad tracks until sometime in the 1960s. The road didn’t go through until a major construction project to upgrade the roadbed, build an expanded culvert for Everest Creek and create a grade-crossing over the Belt Line.

Kirkland once neighbored a city called Houghton

In those days, where Winfrey lived north of the tracks was within Kirkland city limits, but the other side of the tracks was Houghton. Houghton was its city – with its own city hall, police department and other services – until Kirkland annexed it more than 50 years ago.

That dividing line loomed especially large for kids because it meant attending different elementary schools.

“Houghton was another city to us because our world ended at the railroad tracks,” Winfrey said. “So we went to Central, and everybody on the south side of the tracks went to Lakeview,” she continued.

Central School once stood on the hill above downtown Kirkland at the site of what’s now Kirkland City Hall; Lakeview Elementary still stands but is a modern replacement for a school originally built in the 1950s.

The City of Kirkland has put up signage and a fence at Fisk Family Park, and they’re still deciding what’s going to happen to the little red barn (aka “the mystery cottage”).

John Lloyd is deputy director of Kirkland Parks and Community Services. In an email Thursday, he outlined what may lie ahead for the rich and storied structure.

Future of the mystery cottage

“We are still evaluating our options for the park, which is more complicated than it may seem due to the buffer/setback requirements associated with the creek running through the property,” Lloyd wrote. “Additionally, the mystery cottage is not in great shape. While it looks nice from afar, it is actually in a very rough shape. Staff are currently evaluating options for the structure and the overall park.”

Asked to clarify what those options being evaluated are, Lloyd responded, “We are evaluating our options within the city’s zoning code as well as evaluating what could be done to save the structure itself that would be allowable within the buffer.”

“The structure was not built on a foundation – it is just sitting on dirt, which further exacerbates the problem,” Lloyd continued. “Adding a foundation to the building is not considered maintenance, rather this is considered construction, and therefore does not appear to be allowable under the code.”

The popularity of the cottage – er, little red barn – seems to be growing as Loita Hawkinson (and KIRO Newsradio listeners) have helped uncover more of its distinctive Kirkland and Northwest history, and filled in some of the blanks in the bigger mythology of the structure and the setting.

More from Feliks Banel: Vatican decides in favor of Tacoma’s Holy Rosary Church

Speculation about its backstory, now that it’s a public park, has understandably inspired many to imagine what role the little red barn could play at Fisk Family Park in the future, to serve the growing numbers of Eastrail users passing by just a few yards away, and preserve a distinctive piece of Kirkland’s past.

Loita Hawkinson from Kirkland Heritage Society told KIRO Newsradio that she has been invited to tour the cottage on Tuesday and get a close look at its interior. She said those construction materials – vintage plywood pilfered from Boeing 80 years ago – have actually aged quite well, and the size of the structure is such that preservation and restoration would not require significant funding.

Hawkinson has been digging deep to research more of the little red barn’s history and to make sure that the City of Kirkland and Kirkland residents understand its historic significance.

As Hawkinson said in January, the mystery cottage/little red barn probably generates more questions to the Kirkland Heritage Society than any other place in town, and so the group would love to be part of an effort to preserve it and tell its many stories to people who drive past on 6^th Street South, and to all those hikers and bikers passing by just yards away on the new trail.

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, read more from him here, follow him on X here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks here.

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Neighbors and longtime parishioners have been battling for five years to stop the church’s demolition and restore it so that the 1920 building can once again serve the community where it has stood for more than a century. In spring 2023, the group – known as Save Tacoma’s Landmark Church – formally appealed to the Vatican’s Dicastery of the Clergy seeking reversal of a decree issued by the Seattle Archdiocese.

More on the Tacoma Holy Rosary Church: Battle for Holy Rosary Church’s survival stretches from Tacoma to the Vatican

Jon Carp, a board member of Save Tacoma’s Landmark Church, got the news yesterday via the group’s attorney in Rome. Carp joined Seattle’s Morning News Wednesday with an update and a look ahead to the next steps.

“It’s very preliminary, but we received word from our Canon lawyer in Rome yesterday afternoon that our appeal had been accepted,” Carp said. “In Canonical law terms, ‘recourse’ had been granted and the ‘decree’ to demolish Holy Rosary had been rendered null and void.”

Additional details will be forthcoming from the Vatican, Carp said, and his group is hoping to move forward by working with the Seattle Archdiocese to secure Holy Rosary’s future as an asset for the community.

“We are hopeful that the Archdiocese will see this as we see it as an opportunity to step back and reassess the approach to Holy Rosary and to look for ways to preserve it,” Carp said. “You know, this is a great day for Tacoma. It’s a great day for Tacoma Catholics. It’s a great day for the whole city of Tacoma.

“We’re very hopeful that the Archdiocese is looking forward to finding ways to preserve this church,” Carp added.

More from Feliks Banel: Darth Vader, Ban Roll-On, Sinking Ship and other Seattle building nicknames

Reached late Tuesday, spokesperson Helen McClenahan told KIRO Newsradio in an email that the Seattle Archdiocese had not yet received any word on the Tacoma church.

“We have received no update on the Holy Rosary recourse with the Dicastery for the Clergy, which is the office at the Vatican that handles recourses,” McClenahan wrote, using Catholic Canon Law nomenclature to describe the process. “There isn’t a clear timeline when we work with the Dicastery.”

This is a developing story, check back for updates

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks here.

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The best nicknames for buildings are “organic” – no focus groups or marketing people were involved in their creation, and no one sought to publicize them. Instead, some wise-guy or wise-gal came up with a clever, free-range name, and it caught on and stuck, and then somehow spread. You could blame social media for that viral spread nowadays, but these best-known examples happen to pre-date the Internet by many years.

And, without exception, these classic Seattle building nicknames are based on how each particular building looks – it’s not about its function or owner or tenant.

Box The Space Needle Came In

When the old Sea-First Bank Tower was under construction at Fourth Avenue and Spring Street in 1968, this name for the giant box-like structure seemingly came out of nowhere to grab ahold of the public consciousness. As previously reported  by KIRO Newsradio, the origins are murky, but this particular building nickname might also be considered one of Seattle’s oldest locally grown “dad jokes.” However, as Dave Ross pointedly asked at the time, how could the box for the Space Needle come along six years after the Space Needle was built? To Dave, that doesn’t make any sense. Official name for this place nowadays is, yawn, “Safeco Plaza.”

Darth Vader Building

This edition of All Over The Map was inspired by a Paul Roberts story in the Seattle Times earlier this month reporting  that a loan is coming due on developer Martin Selig’s portfolio of downtown Seattle properties. That portfolio includes the Fourth & Blanchard Building. In Roberts’ piece, he notes that the structure, with its dark glass cladding and steeply raked upper floors and roof, is known by many as the “Darth Vader Building.”

More All Over the Map: The thousand-year-old origins of the name ‘Washington’

The original Stars Wars film, in which the villainous Vader first appears, was released in 1977; the Fourth & Blanchard Building was completed in 1979. The first mention of the “Darth Vader Building” nickname we could find in print was from the Seattle Times in February 1981.

Sinking Ship

The steeply sloped parking garage on Second Avenue across the street from the Smith Tower is triangular and pointed at its western end, giving it the appearance of, well, a sinking ship. It was built in 1961 on the site of the old Seattle Hotel. That earlier structure was severely damaged 75 years ago this month in the April 13, 1949 earthquake.

More MyNorthwest History: History hidden within NOAA’s ‘Inland Water Wind Reports’

The first in-print use of “sinking ship garage” we could find was in the old Seattle P-I newspaper in June 1974, but it seems this nautical nickname came along much earlier. It’s also unclear what the garage was called when it debuted in 1961, but Diamond Parking nowadays officially refers to it as “Sinking Ship Garage.”

 Ban Roll-On Building

The ho-hummly named “Second and Seneca Building” was completed in 1991, and the “Ban Roll-On” nickname came into use and in print almost immediately, appearing in the Seattle Times in July 1991. The building’s top, which looks uncannily like the ball within the dispenser area of a container of circa 1991 deodorant, inspired the nickname. While this could not be confirmed, it may be that the best view of the top of the building came from the now long-gone Alaskan Way Viaduct. If that’s the case, this nickname’s days may be numbered.

Twin Toasters or just The Toasters

The Metropolitan Park Towers, East and West, were built in the 1980s right alongside I-5 at Howell and Minor. Nowadays, they have been rebranded as “Met Park East” and “Met Park West.” From a certain angle, perhaps from the east side of I-5 on Capitol Hill or from one of the overpasses, the two buildings do resemble a pair of old-school kitchen counter toasters.

The Toasters were apparently built about eight years apart – in 1980 and 1988 – and the first use in-print of the nickname that we could find was April 1993 in a Jean Godden column in the Seattle Times. Godden deserves a lot of credit for that column, which listed many of these nicknames and preserved them for posterity.

Washer and Dryer

This one is a little more esoteric, and the buildings are no longer standing. “The Washer and Dryer” was a nickname that emerged in the mid 1970s for the old KOMO TV and radio buildings at 4^th and Denny near the Space Needle. The first building dated to the late 1940s, the second was completed in late 1974 or early 1975. Together, they reportedly looked like a pair of laundry appliances. The first mention of the nickname in print was an Emmett Watson column in the Seattle P-I in October 1974.

Seattle Municipal Tower and Rainier Tower

The building now known as Seattle Municipal Tower was built more than 30 years ago and was originally called the AT&T Tower. Almost from the time that construction was completed, the tower inspired comparisons to male anatomy, most of which we can’t repeat here. In the Seattle Times, Jean Godden called it the “Circumcision Tower.”

When the Rainier Tower was under construction in the mid 1970s, its narrow base proved a compelling sight for pedestrians and drivers, and a frequent topic for newspaper writers. While some Seattleites recall nicknames such as “Sharpened Pencil” or “Pencil Building,” an Emmett Watson column in the Seattle P-I in July 1978 credited two local school children with a nickname based on the Rainier Tower’s similarity in appearance to a tree about to felled by a woodland creature: “Beaver Building.”

If we got any of these wrong or if we missed any other building nicknames, please let us know via my contact information below. And, if you like “organic” names, please check out earlier stories about nicknames  for Northwest companies, and geographic insults.

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks here.

 Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel