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.

More from Feliks Banel: Grassroots preservation campaign saves Parkland School

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.

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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.

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.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

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

As some diehard fans still remember, the Pilots were Seattle’s first Major League Baseball team. The city had them for one season back in 1969, when they played home games at the old Sick’s Stadium on Rainier Avenue where Lowe’s Home Improvement now stands.

The team struggled on and off the field and ultimately went bankrupt by early 1970. It’s a complicated story, and many books have been written about the multifaceted shenanigans that contributed to the team’s demise.

In early spring 1970, the Seattle Nine were snatched up by Bud Selig and diverted to Milwaukee. Along with being made famous by beer, that Wisconsin metropolis had infamously lost the beloved Braves to Atlanta a few years earlier, and had lost a team to Saint Louis – the original Milwaukee Brewers – after just one season way back in 1901.

All over the map: Boeing slogan – if it’s not history, it’s a mystery

In case it isn’t yet obvious, the worst-kept secret in professional sports is that hometown fans everywhere have been getting their hearts broken by teams moving away for well over a century, at least since the early days of the Teddy Roosevelt administration.

A certain subset of Seattle fans choose to believe that, just like that basketball team in Oklahoma is really the Sonics in disguise, when the Mariners take the field in Milwaukee against the Brewers, it’s really two Seattle teams duking it out.

This weekend’s series in Milwaukee was just the excuse All Over The Map needed to play some vintage audio from the Pilots’ very first game at the California Angels on April 8, 1969, which was exactly 55 years ago this coming Monday.

While home-team audio is scarce for the Pilots, much of the Los Angeles broadcast of that first game via KMPC still exists, with Dick Enberg making his debut as a Major League play-by-play guy alongside veteran Angels’ broadcaster Don Wells.

In the first inning at Anaheim, the Pilots’ lead-off hitter Tommy Harper got on base with a double, and then Mike Hegan hit a two-run homer. Seattle added two more runs in the top of the first, and then held on to win their inaugural game against the Halos 4-3.

When that first and only season was over, the Pilots had finished with a dismal record of 64 wins and 98 losses. But the off-season was even more painful, as Seattle’s big league dreams turned into nightmares.

More Feliks: When Washington and Oregon used vinyl records to attract tourists

In 1970, at the end of March, when the team buses headed north from spring training, they could’ve turned left and gone to Seattle. Instead, they turned right and went to Milwaukee.

The change-over really was, unbelievably, that last-minute. Thanks to some legal hurdles, the Pilots didn’t officially become the Brewers until April 1, 1970 – April Fools, Seattle baseball fans!!! – and then played their first game in Milwaukee on April 7 in hand-me-down uniforms with the “Seattle Pilots” patches torn off. In their inaugural season, the newly-christened Brewers bettered the Pilots previous campaign by finishing with 65 wins and 97 losses.

The only Major League Baseball action in Seattle from 1970 to 1977 was restricted to federal court, where Washington Attorney General Slade Gorton sued Major League Baseball for letting the Pilots get away in breach of the promises made when King County voters had committed to funding a new stadium (which became . . . wait for it . . . the Kingdome.) Gorton prevailed, and the city was awarded the franchise that became the Mariners, which debuted in 1977.

Apart from 55 years of odd grudges held against Milwaukee, Bud Selig and the Brewers, the other lasting legacy of that 1969 Pilots’ season is the tell-all baseball book penned by Seattle pitcher Jim Bouton. Bouton’s “Ball Four” remains one of the best books about Seattle in the late 1960s, and it also happens to be about professional baseball.

Many local fans – okay, maybe this many years later, it’s just a few local weirdos – still hold out hope that the Seattle vs. Milwaukee grudge can someday be exorcised by a World Series matchup pitting the Mariners against the Brewers. This revenge fantasy became possible only when the Brewers moved from the American League to the National League in 1998.

Before that could happen, of course, the Mariners would have to break whatever curse has kept them as the only Major League team in the history of mankind to have never reached the October Classic.

Play ball!

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

It’s also a slogan that’s been twisted around lately to express a meaning that is the opposite of what its original iteration had proudly proclaimed.

What is this well-known slogan?

“‘If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going!'” John Purvis said in a phone interview with KIRO Newsradio on Thursday. Purvis is retired now, but he worked for Boeing in various product support roles from 1956 to 1998, brilliantly timing his career to match the Golden Age of Jet Travel and Boeing’s Golden Age, as well. He still believes in the company and believes it will find its way again.

Full disclosure, we here at All Over The Map are not Boeing apologists, but we’re also not entirely unbiased about the mostly positive role that Boeing has played in the culture and history of the Pacific Northwest, and especially about the company’s role in designing and building bombers that won World War II – the B-17 and B-29 – and that helped win the Cold War, and that are still on duty in the skies today, like the B-52.

Not to mention the company’s role in perfecting civilian jet travel almost 70 years ago. Of course, the feelings toward Boeing of many local people changed following the merger with McDonnell-Douglas in the late 1990s, and especially with the departure of Boeing headquarters from Seattle more than 20 years ago.

And clearly, Boeing has had a rough go of it lately, with very public problems around what some say is a corporate culture that no longer puts safety ahead of shareholder value. The 737 MAX suffered two deadly crashes that grounded those planes for months, and now, in the wake of the door plug incident with Alaska Airlines, that old slogan has been showing up on social media as “if it IS Boeing, I’m not going.”

For retired 42-year Boeing employee John Purvis, it’s clear why the original slogan was all about Boeing people and Boeing families taking personal pride in Boeing aircraft.

What did those words mean, exactly, to John Purvis?

“Boeing built not only quality products, but reliable and safe,” Purvis said.

To spell it out even more clearly, the slogan is something of a proud boast, essentially saying “if the airplane I’m supposed to fly on was manufactured by some company other than Boeing, I’m taking a different flight.”

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The meaning may be clear, but the specific origins are a little murky.

Mike Lombardi, Boeing’s archivist and historian, has searched for the origins, but has not had much luck.

“The question has come up in the past, and unfortunately we have not been able to find anything definitive,” Lombardi wrote in an email on Thursday.

Lombardi also confirmed that the slogan did not emerge from within the company.

“It was not official branding work, but rather something organic,” Lombardi wrote. “It certainly caught on and there was never any pushback from leadership.”

Even though it wasn’t created by Boeing, the slogan has been embraced by the company, with items such as t-shirts and buttons bearing the slogan currently available for purchase via the official online Boeing Store.

John Purvis and other Boeing retirees questioned for this story date the creation of the slogan to either the 1960s or the 1970s. Basic online searches seemingly point toward 1979 as the specific date when it became part of the public consciousness.

On eBay, vintage bumper stickers bearing the slogan in simple block letters, black ink on white vinyl, include a copyright date of 1979 and the name “Dake.” Whether this name is a first name or surname or the name of a company – perhaps the graphic designer or the printer – is unclear.

An item in a column by longtime local writer and man-about-town Emmett Watson narrows down the date even further. In that August 3, 1979 Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece, Watson asks, “Have you seen the latest local bumper sticker? ‘If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.'”

Why would the slogan emerge and be available to purchase on a bumper sticker in August 1979?

The deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history was American Airlines Flight 191, which crashed on May 25, 1979. A total of 273 people died – 271 aboard the plane, two on the ground – at O’Hare Airport in Chicago when a DC-10, the flagship product of what was then Boeing’s biggest and most serious competitor, McDonnell-Douglas, lost an engine as it was attempting to take off.

It was a horrific crash. Amateur photos of the jumbo jet moments before impact – rolling to one side and just a few hundred feet above the ground – were front-page news around the country. Investigators later determined that improper maintenance procedures had damaged the pylon connecting the engine to the wing when the engine snapped off, the jet was unflyable. All DC-10s were grounded for about six weeks that June and July, and public hearings into the tragedy were held and covered extensively by the media.

In 1979, McDonnell-Douglas was Boeing’s only serious competitor. Airbus was less than a decade old and only had one model of jetliner back then and not much market share. Lockheed had the L-1011, but was not expanding its domestic jetliner offerings.

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Thus, the theory is that pride in the safety of Boeing jets in the wake of the widely publicized DC-10 crash in Chicago inspired some Seattle person – Dake perhaps – to create that first bumper sticker in the late spring or early summer of 1979.

Of course, the slogan could have been created earlier and may have circulated for years – as an unofficial statement of Boeing pride not in specific relation to any kind of accident with a competitor’s product. Whatever the timing of its origin, the fact that the slogan was organic – and not some corporate-created and mandated propaganda – is extraordinary. This fact alone perhaps says more about the role Boeing once played here than just about anything else.

Still, there’s more to be discovered about “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going!”

To this end, officials at the Museum of Flight (who helped connect KIRO Newsradio with John Purvis) and the International Association of Machinists (IAM) District 751 – the labor union for Boeing machinists – will continue to search for more information among their membership and will share what they find.

Meanwhile, if you have information or a theory to share, please reach out via my contact information below or comment on my Facebook page (which includes an image of the 1979 bumper sticker).

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.

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This story, about uniting Washington and Oregon with a common goal, is an appropriate topic since this week marks the 171^st anniversary of the creation of the Washington Territory. What eventually became the Evergreen State (but with very different borders to the east – encompassing all of what’s now Idaho) was carved from Oregon Territory by Congress and signed into law by President Millard Fillmore on March 3, 1853.

Pacific Northwest Bell issues “Tourist Trapper Kit”

Fast-forward to March 1966, and Pacific Northwest Bell, the regional “baby bell” phone company here in those long-ago landline years, issued something called a “Tourist Trapper Kit” with maps and brochures and a 7-inch vinyl record replete with audio enticements for visiting the Northwest.

The idea, as described in old newspapers stories from that time, was that a resident could request a “Tourist Trapper Kit” from the phone company by phone or by mail, and then easily mail it to someone anywhere in the country for a modest amount of postage. Ideally, the recipient would live somewhere other than the Pacific Northwest, and the “Tourist Trapper Kit” would convince them to visit and pump dollars into the local economy.

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It’s not clear how different the maps or printed materials were in the kits, but there was a Washington version of the vinyl record called “Holiday in Washington” and an Oregon version called “Holiday in Oregon.” Each was in a nearly identical cardboard sleeve, with an essay printed on the back by historian Murray Morgan, author (most famously) of the quintessential Seattle history book Skid Road.

Record collectors and regional trivia nuts will recall that a similar effort with just a single, one-sided 7” vinyl record for both states called “Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest” had been launched in 1965; the narration from that record was used cleverly in 1984 by Northwest band the Young Fresh Fellows.

Both states featured local celebrities

The Washington and Oregon 1966 records featured the same narrator (who had also appeared on the 1965 record), but this time, there were special guests for each state; Washington native Bing Crosby appears as a guest star on both versions.

One of the featured Oregon celebrities on the Beaver State version is that “man of a thousand voices” Mel Blanc, who grew up in Portland and who did so much for those old Warner Brothers cartoons with distinctive voices for multiple indelible characters.

On “Holiday In Oregon,” Blanc portrays a French diplomat who sounds suspiciously like Pepé Le Pew, and then answers his own question in voice which sounds like a cross between Speedy Gonzales and Bugs Bunny.

“My government, the people of France, have sent me to America at great expense to discover the real secret of Oregon,” Blanc says in a caricatured French accent. “What shall I tell them? Is there nothing I can say to them?”

After Blanc’s Speedy Gonzales voice answers in a pun based on the Spanish word for “yes,” the narrator – who’s not named anywhere on either disc, but who had to be a voice heard regularly in the Northwest 60 years ago – says, “Yes, come see. You will find plenty of guideposts on this new Oregon Trail.”

Bing Crosby… edited

Bing Crosby, perhaps the most famous performer of the 20^th century to emerge from the Evergreen State, apparently did just a single recording session for the tourism project. However, with some vintage editing that nowadays sounds a bit clumsy – understandably, of course, because it was probably accomplished with a razor blade and splicing glue – Bing’s beckoning was able to be crudely customized for both Washington and Oregon.

“There’s another tonic of outdoor tones to be heard in Washington,” the narrator says on the Washington version. “The shush of a pair of skis . . . [SHUSH!]. The crack of a driver meeting a golf ball . . . [CRACK!]. The flap of a sail . . . [FLAP!]. The rush of an untamed river [RUSH!]. The wind of a reel . . . [WIND!].”

“Now, listen to a victim of all those siren calls,” the narrator continues, “Washington’s own Bing Crosby!”

“I like to remember the Pacific Northwest as a land that can put a song in your heart,” says the state of Washington’s crooniest crooner of all-time. “You know, when I was a kid around Spokane and Tacoma, the song was usually carried in a sort of an off-key whistle . . . or through one of my missing teeth.”

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To make Bing sound less Washington-centric and more palatable for our friends south of the Columbia River, the stone-age audio editor attempted what can only be considered a deft “geographic-ectomy.”

“It takes a man who has kept America singing to hear the real music of the Pacific Northwest country,” the now Beaver State-friendly narrator says. “Let Bing Crosby tell you about it!”

“I like to remember the Pacific Northwest as a land that can put a song in your heart,” says the now generically Pacific Northwest singer, repeating a familiar refrain while shilling for a state other than the one where he was born.

But then, something drastically changes.

“You know,” Crosby continues, “when I was a kid the song was usually carried in a sort of an off-key whistle . . . or through one of my missing teeth.”

Oregon minus Spokane and Tacoma

Spokane, beloved capital of the Inland Empire, and Tacoma, original terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad, are excised, expunged or otherwise audibly redacted in service to the good people of Oregon and to those potential visitors that Pacific Northwest Bell was hoping to attract there.

And, since the 1966 “Tourist Trapper Kit” was an initiative of the phone company, it’s likely that the final moments of each record won’t come as any surprise.

“And here’s one more sound that will help smooth the way to a happy holiday,” the anonymous narrator says, as “Holiday In Oregon” nears its finish.

In 2024, the sound effect that comes next may confuse anyone under age 45. To those youngsters, it probably sounds like a malfunctioning electronic device (that’s the dial tone) followed by someone trying unsuccessfully to pull-start an outboard motor or a chainsaw (actually, the sound of a rotary-dial telephone).

“That’s right,” the narrator assures those aspiring visitors of nearly six decades ago. “Telephone ahead for reservations, or look up ‘Travel Agent’ in the Yellow Pages.”

The Yellow Pages?

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

The World’s Fair held in Seattle in 1962 did so much to alter the course of Seattle’s history, it can be easy for those west of the Cascades to discount how much the City of Spokane was also influenced and changed by the international event a dozen years later.

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Seattle exemplified Space Age at World’s Fair

For the fair in Seattle, the city adopted the theme of “Century 21,” which exemplified the Space Age and looked to a future enhanced and improved by technology. But more than 60 years on, that style of futurism – arguably still best embodied by the Space Needle and the Monorail – sometimes can seem a little antiquated or even hollow (as connected to the city’s image as the Needle has become).

Professor Bill Youngs at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, just west of Spokane, is the premier “Expo Expert.” He authored the definitive history of Expo ’74, a book called “The Fair and the Falls.”

Youngs said Spokane chose environment and ecology as the theme for Expo ’74. Though it emerged during a heady time for environmentalism – a few years after the first Earth Day, not long after the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – this theme seems to have weathered the passage of time a little differently than “Century 21” and perhaps even aged a little better.

And, Youngs said, it’s a theme that served to influence every World’s Fair that came after.

Spokane sparks future environmentalism themes

“Spokane was the first world’s fair with an environmental theme,” Youngs told KIRO Newsradio.

Researchers looking into the history of fairs around the globe, told Youngs, “Every world’s fair since Expo had an environmental theme” and that Spokane is credited as “having started this movement towards environmental themes.”

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“By gosh, you’ve got Spokane,” Youngs said. “A little old small city, isolated, but very much in the forefront of celebrating and inquiring into the topic of environmentalism within a world’s fair.”

So we’re quite proud of that,” Youngs continued.

Another thing Youngs said the community is quite proud of is that a town the size of Spokane – with a population of just 245,000 in 1974, or less than half the size of Seattle in 1962 – could pull off a World’s Fair.

The other city vying to be certified by the Bureau of Expositions at a meeting in Paris around that same time was Philadelphia. That city ultimately backed out of theirs, but King Cole, the executive director of the fair who gets much of the credit for Expo ’74’s success, told the Paris people Spokane was forging ahead.

“It underscores the fact that it was just so improbable that this small town could put it together,” Youngs said.

And, said Youngs, King Cole’s skillful guidance and the community stepping up are “a study in civic leadership and the capacity of just the right persons at the right time to make something happen. Because if you were to look at it 100 years ago, or 80 years ago and say, ‘Will Spokane ever have a World Fair?’ I’m sure they’d say, ‘I don’t even want to think about that.'”

How the World’s Fair transformed Seattle

It’s been generally accepted in Seattle for the past 60 years that the 1962 World’s Fair transformed the city in every possible way (though this civic “given” is fading somewhat as the living memory of the fair and its aftermath recedes with the march of time).

The transformation was economic, cultural, and civic in nature. Its most visible legacy is still the Seattle Center, which led directly to major league sports when the Seattle Supersonics of the NBA debuted in 1967 at the old Coliseum (what’s now Climate Pledge Arena). But years before the first tipoff at center court, the success of the 1962 fair gave civic leaders the confidence and the skills to attempt all kinds of initiatives, including the 1965 launch of the major infrastructure ballot measures called Forward Thrust.

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Bill Youngs said Expo ’74 paid similar civic dividends. He admits the 1974 event didn’t make Spokane a “major league” sports city like Seattle, but it did lead to new infrastructure, which is still paying off in the events Spokane attracts to this day.

“We recently had the indoor collegiate championship of the whole country right here in Spokane,” Youngs said. “And these are the kinds of things that I think probably would never have happened without the kind of boost in confidence and know-how (from Expo ’74).”

The impact of the World’s Fair on Spokane

When it comes to the physical transformation in Seattle versus what happened in Spokane, Youngs says Expo ’74 had a far greater impact. Before the fair created Riverfront Park, most of the Spokane River through downtown was covered by concrete and railroad bridges, and the river had been pretty much hidden away for decades.

The changes wrought by Expo ’74 to that central location, along both banks of the now-daylighted river, have become inseparable from Spokane’s image and, more importantly, from how people inhabit the core of the city on a daily basis.

“Not to take anything away from the location of Century 21,” Youngs said, referring to Seattle Center, “it’s a lovely park, but it’s basically a piece of ground. Whereas, there’s a piece of ground in the case of Expo ’74 but there’s also a magnificent waterfall and rapids that had been almost totally forgotten in the years before. And now it’s arguably the most dramatic urban riverfront anywhere in the country.”

Spokane museum opening exhibit in wake of Expo ’74

To mark the 50th anniversary, the City of Spokane is coordinating a series of special events this spring and summer. One of the first opportunities to celebrate will come in early May with the opening of a major new exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture (the “MAC”) in Spokane.

The MAC’s Johnston-fix Curator of Archives and Special Collections Anna Harbine told KIRO Newsradio the MAC is the official repository for all the archival documents, business papers and the photo collection from the fair.

The exhibit, called “It Happened Here: Expo ’74 Fifty Years Later” will feature a large assortment of pictures and posters from that collection, and three-dimensional artifacts, too – including one of the gondolas from the skyride, as well as plenty of Expo ’74 souvenirs.

Harbine said while Expo ’74 was the first environmentally focused world’s fair with an emphasis on taking care of the earth, water and the sky, that didn’t stop organizers from authorizing the manufacture of several landfills’ worth of tchotchkes to sell to tourists (and locals, too) as souvenirs.

Looking back on World’s Fair memorabilia

“(Expo-themed) ashtrays filled with jellybeans (were sent) to sponsors who had committed to help sponsor the fair and fund the fair,” Harbine said. “And they had lapel pins. You’ll see them everywhere in the thrift stores. They’re kind of a staple.”

If you go thrifting you’ll usually see some sort of commemorative Expo plate or an ashtray. A lot of ashtrays,” Harbine continued.

Many Seattle area residents can likely remember a similar phenomenon well into the 1970s and 1980s when it seemed that nearly every garage sale was required to have at least one partial set of commemorative 1962 Seattle World’s Fair drinking glasses on hand and available for purchase.

Along with the ashtrays and lapel pins – and the civic confidence and know-how – Bill Youngs said one of the most popular legacies from Expo ’74 is the “Garbage Goat,” which is still on duty as a distinctive trash receptacle at Riverfront Park.

“Remember, the theme of the fair is environmentalism,” Youngs said. “And part of that is just doing the right thing with trash.”

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Explaining the ‘Environmental Goat”

“The Environmental Goat,” Youngs said, using an alternate name for the iconic artifact, “is a metal goat that was built in, and it’s still there today. And it had a kind of vacuum, a suction process inside it, where you could hold up, say, a candy wrapper or something (to its mouth), and it would be sucked up and the garbage would be taken care of.”

It was fun watching children, then and now, with their candy wrapper or whatever kind of squeal with delight, as the goat took the candy wrapper but didn’t take their hand,” he continued.

Along with the local legacies, one national historical footnote to Expo ’74 comes courtesy of Dan Evans, who served three terms as Washington’s governor, including during the run of the 1974 fair.

As many people still remember, the spring of 1974 was in the thick of the Watergate scandal, so it was a bit controversial for some that President Richard Nixon was scheduled to speak at the opening ceremonies. Still, the plan went ahead since, Anna Harbine said, some people thought it would be controversial to un-invite Nixon.

Opening Day at Expo ’74 was Saturday, May 4, which happened to be just a few weeks after Congress had subpoenaed the White House for tape recordings of Oval Office meetings and the White House had given only transcripts. There was a legal battle underway to get the actual audio as evidence in the impeachment inquiry – a legal battle that would stretch to early August.

Nixon accidentally terms Gov. Evans ‘Gov. Evidence’

On the morning of May 4, Air Force One landed at Fairchild Air Force Base (AFB) west of Spokane. Gov. Evans and first lady Nancy Evans, who recently died, were together in Fairchild to greet the president and Mrs. Nixon.

In an interview in 2014 for public television, Evans said event organizers had set up a podium and PA system at Fairchild AFB right next to Air Force One.

“And President Nixon got up on the podium and I introduced him with, you know, the simple statement, ‘The President of the United States,’ Evans said. “And he turned to me in a very clear voice and said, ‘Thank you, Governor Evidence.’ Then he said, ‘I mean Evans.'”

“And of course, the (national) press corps there, they could hardly contain themselves,” Evans continued, chuckling gently at the memory.

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The formal hearings in the impeachment inquiry began the following Thursday, May 9. President Nixon resigned in August. Thus, when Expo ’74 closed in November of that year, President Gerald Ford was heard – on tape – at the closing ceremonies.

It’s believed to be the only time in American history when one president helped open a fair and another helped close it down.

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

So far, it’s hard to tell whether March 2024 came in like a lamb or a lion, but just a few days ago, late February was here with a pretty darn lion-y windstorm. The gusts and gales created the perfect occasion to tune in to NOAA Weather Radio. The commercial-free, government weather radio channel is heard on specially dedicated radios or special bands on some kinds of AM/FM radios. In the Seattle area, that station is known officially as KHB-60 and is found at 162.55 MHz on the radio dial, or channel 7 on dedicated weather radios.

History of NOAA Weather Radio

Back in the 1970s, when NOAA Weather Radio was becoming a national system of antennas and transmitters, broadcasting local forecasts and updates on current conditions, the voices heard on-air were actual humans. Local staffers at many National Weather Service offices would record a forecast along with a list of recent temperatures and windspeeds, for a total of maybe three or four minutes worth of material. That tape would then play on a loop and be sent out over a nearby antenna until a new one was recorded (either on a regular schedule or when changing conditions warranted).

To streamline the operation and reduce costs back in the 1990s, those local stations began switching over to computer-generated voices that could convert a written script into an audio file with no live and local weather forecaster required to spend time in front of a microphone or tape recorder.

While costs may have been reduced, one price to be paid was the local forecasts lost some of their humanity and simple charm, as those local voices, of often untrained broadcasters, were literally silenced. What those human voices were replaced by was software that generated a voice – known as “Paul” – which was not unlike the voice adapted for use by the late physicist Stephen Hawking.

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Fast forward to 2016, and NOAA cycled through successors to Paul (named Donna, Craig, Tom and Javier), a new and updated “Paul” came on the job, sounding much different than the original automated voice, if not quite yet fully human.

For anyone listening during Wednesday’s windstorm, the new and improved Paul would, every few minutes or so, give the current windspeed for five locations around the shores of the Puget Sound. In between, were updates on watches and warnings and updated forecasts about what was ahead.

“Inland water wind reports in knots,” the new Paul intoned.

“Smith Island, south 24. Point Wilson, south 8. Point No Point, wind calm. West Point, south 34. Point Robinson, south 24,” he continued, only rarely pausing for a digital breath.

Why does NOAA use those five specific locations?

The not-so-casual listener might wonder, “Why those five specific locations?” And then, that same listener might think, “Wait, wind calm at Point No Point? How could that be?”

That second question? Nobody knows. But it turns out the first question is easy to answer because those places all have something in common.

As explained by KIRO Newsradio Meteorologist Ted Buehner, those places are all long-time locations of federal government lighthouses. And all now have automated weather stations that report data back to the central forecast office. Even Smith Island, which lost its lighthouse back in the 1950s, is now part of something called the Coastal Marine Automated Network (CMAN) and has a set of instruments mounted on a tower.

In hopes of creating a mystique around the Puget Sound’s “Inland Water Wind Reports,” that might someday match the fervor surrounding the BBC Shipping Forecast, here’s a little background and mostly non-Indigenous place-name history on each of the five sites mentioned in Paul’s reports.

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Background of the locations

Smith Island is west of Whidbey Island at the east end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and, with adjacent Minor Island, has been declared a State Aquatic Reserve off limits to the public. It’s believed to have been named for a Hudson’s Bay Company staffer named Smith, perhaps in the 1840s or 1850s. In 1841, U.S. Naval Commander Charles Wilkes, of the Wilkes Expedition, had called it Blunt’s Island for Midshipman Simon F. Blunt – but that didn’t stick. A lighthouse was first established there in 1858 and was shut down in the 1950s before eventually crumbling into the sea.

Point Wilson is at Fort Worden State Park near Port Townsend. It was named in 1792 by Captain Vancouver for his friend Captain George Wilson of the Royal Navy, who fought against our great allies the French during the American Revolutionary War.

“The Clallam Indian name for the point was Kam-kun, the Chimacum name was Kam-kam-ho,” wrote Robert Hitchman, author of “Places Names of Washington.”

The lighthouse was first built in 1879 and was rebuilt in 1913.

Point No Point is near the northern tip of the Kitsap Peninsula and is west across the water from the southern tip of Whidbey Island. It was named in 1841 by US Naval Commander Charles Wilkes, perhaps after one of ten other locations called “Point No Point,” and listed by the US Board of Geographic Names around the United States. The name here in the Northwest is said to come from the distance, the point can look more prominent than it actually is once you get closer to it.

“The Indian name was Hahd-skus, meaning long nose,” wrote Robert Hitchman.

The lighthouse at Point No Point was built in 1879.

West Point was named because it’s a point, and it’s a point that points west. See my point?

West Point is in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood, at the far northwest part of Discovery Park, and functions as something of a northern entrance to Elliott Bay. West Point was named in 1841, once again, by US Naval Commander Charles Wilkes because it’s a point, and it’s a point that points west. See my point? Aerial photographs, as well as nautical charts, confirm it is a very pointy point.

“The Duwamish Indian name was Oka-dz-elt-cu, meaning ‘thrust far out,'” writes Robert Hitchman. The much-photographed lighthouse was built at West Point in 1881.

More history on Washington: The thousand-year-old origins of the name ‘Washington’

Point Robinson (aka “Robinson Point” for place-name purists) is on Maury Island, which is functionally part of Vashon Island and is not far from the SeattleSports 710 transmitter and original 1941 KIRO Radio transmitter building. This spot is right across the water from Des Moines. It was named by, you guessed it, good old U.S. Naval Commander Charles Wilkes in 1841 for R.P. Robinson, purser’s steward on the USS Vincennes, the lead ship of the Wilkes Expedition. The lighthouse was built in 1885 and rebuilt in 1915.

For more information about these and other Washington place names, there are a handful of useful books, including Robert Hitchman’s “Place Names of Washington,” “Maritime Place Names: Inland Washington Waters” by Richard Blumenthal and for Indigenous place names, “sdaʔdaʔ gʷəł dibəł ləšucid ʔaciłtalbixʷ Puget Sound Geography Original Manuscript from T. T. Waterman,” prepared by Vi Hilbert and others.

And, while those non-human weather broadcasts are all fun to listen to and talk about, let’s hope a certain pair of weekly history radio segments are many years away from becoming even partially automated.

Stay in your lane, Paul.

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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It has become something of a local radio tradition to talk about George Washington on Seattle’s Morning News every February. This year, we present a refresher on how our state came to be called “Washington,” as well as a deeper dive into the actual meaning of that most famous of American surnames.

From Columbia to Washington

Washington Territory was carved from Oregon Territory when American residents north of the Columbia River who had recently displaced Indigenous communities and driven out the British influence of the Hudson’s Bay Company wanted more control over their political destiny. The territory was officially created in March 1853 when lame duck Whig Party President Millard Fillmore signed the bill into law a few days before he left office – back when Inauguration Day took place on March 4 rather than Jan. 20.

Fillmore had served as vice president under President Zachary Taylor, but Taylor died in office in 1850. At the Whig Convention in 1852, Fillmore sought to be nominated again to seek another term, but Gen. Winfield Scott was chosen instead, and then lost the election to Franklin Pierce. Between the convention and Pierce’s inauguration, Fillmore was a lame duck for eight months.

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The new territory was supposed to be called “Columbia” after the river – which had been named by American merchant Robert Gray after his ship in 1792. Over the decades, “Columbia” had also become one of the names for the region drained by the mighty river – which is why the Canadian province (and former British colony) mostly north of the 49th parallel is called British Columbia.

The name switcheroo for Columbia Territory came at the last moment when a helpful member of Congress from Kentucky suggested honoring the first president by calling the new territory “Washington” – regardless of the fact that the nation’s capital already had been called a similar name.

U.S. Rep. Richard H. Stanton was that helpful lawmaker from the Bluegrass State whose reputation is somewhat tarnished. Just eight years later, during the Civil War, Stanton was accused of assisting rebel recruits who wanted to sneak out of Kentucky and join the Confederate Army and then come back and attack. Stanton was eventually arrested and sent to prison, but was released fairly quickly after he swore a loyalty oath to the United States.

As for the reputation of our territory’s (and then state’s) namesake, it’s no secret that George Washington kept enslaved people at Mount Vernon, his Virginia estate. This fact, and so many realities and unresolved legacies of 18th and 19th century United States history, have not aged well. However, some historians believe Washington evolved and changed his views on slavery, and we know he did free those enslaved persons when he died.

The name Washington dates back hundreds of years

And as for the name “Washington,” it appears to have been first attached to a community in northeast England about a thousand years ago. This Washington is about 275 miles north of London, and about 110 miles south of Edinburgh. It was traditionally a coal mining area in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but became industrialized decades ago and attracted new manufacturing, including a big Nissan auto plant.

The town of Washington is where George Washington’s English ancestors are from, and part of an estate the Washington family lived in until about 600 years ago is still standing. It’s been restored, and is now owned by the National Trust – the government agency that manages historic properties – and is open to the public.

Ged Parker is chair of the Washington History Society. Parker told KIRO Newsradio that the building associated with George Washington’s ancestors is a very old and very modest stone structure known as “Washington Old Hall.”

“The Old Hall is a relatively small manor house,” Parker said. “If you were to visit here, you’re done and dusted within the hour. We’re not talking about a grand property with lots of rooms and lots of things to see. But it’s like a little gem.”

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Washington Old Hall has hosted many dignitaries from the United States, including President Jimmy Carter in 1977.

“And of course, we get lots of American visitors who, when they’re in the U.K., and if they’re following the National Trust properties, they’ll spot this reference to George Washington, and do a little diversion to go have a look,” Parker said.

The first ancestor of George Washington to come to North America was his great-grandfather John Washington, who arrived in 1656. Back in England, Ged Parker says the Washington family had actually moved out of Washington Old Hall much earlier than that.

“The Washington family itself left it by the end of the 1300s,” Parker said. “And so it’s a couple hundred years later that the Bishop of Durham purchases it for his for his grandson. And in essence, it gets remodeled then.”

“So although it’s got some elements that go back to the Norman times or maybe earlier, the majority of it was put together in the 17th century,” Parker continued. So, when they visit “we tell our American friends that most of it is fake,” he said, chuckling.

Beyond the historic structure of Washington Old Hall, the most fascinating part of this story is the fact that George Washington’s surname – and, thus, the official name of the Evergreen State – both come from that community.

The notion and form of surnames were solidifying around 800 years ago, says Ged Parker, which is around the same time that one of George Washington’s ancestors settled there, purchased an estate, and adopted the existing name of that estate as his surname, becoming Sir William de Wessyngton (which is, of course, a variation of “Washington”).

Ged Parker says it’s possible to analyze the syllables and come up with a meaning for one of the most famous names in American and, since 1853, Pacific Northwest history.

“We believe that the name ‘Washington’ dates back to Anglo-Saxon times,” Parker said, or more than a thousand years ago. “And if you pick it apart, it’s in sort of three parts: ‘Wassa,’ the start of it, which is seen to be the possible name of a Saxon or possibly a Saxon leader or chief. And “inga,” (which means) very simply ‘the family of.’ And then, as is very common in lots of place names, ‘ton’ (or) ‘town.'”

“Putting the three together,” Parker continued, “you’d say ‘the land or the area, the farm or so on, of the Wassa family.’”

There are other theories about the origins of the name, but Ged Parker of the Washington History Society says the interpretation he shared is the one to which most people subscribe.

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Celebrating Washington’s birthday and another unique US holiday in England

Parker also says there are no plans to mark George Washington’s birthday this year, but there will likely be a big event in 2032 for the tricentennial. It’s easy to assume the same will be true in the Evergreen State to mark its namesake’s 300^th birthday, as well as the 100^th birthday of the not-so-eponymous bridge that carries SR-99 traffic over Lake Union and Fremont.

Washington Old Hall does hold one celebration every year that calls to mind the corny joke that involves asking an unsuspecting American “Is there a 4th of July in England?”

At Washington Old Hall, the answer to that would be an emphatic “yes.”

“We always have a July the Fourth ceremony that’s been running since 1956,” Parker said. “And it’s actually quite a big deal in terms of getting local schools along and local dignitaries. And if there’s any American that’s within sniffing distance, they are lassoed and brought here and have to say something.”

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

First, the good news.

KIRO Newsradio reported last month that the Auto-Vue Drive-In and the Alpine Theatre in Colville were for sale as a package deal. It was learned Thursday that a purchase offer has been accepted, and the sale is scheduled to close late next month.

Michel Pitts, real estate agent for the seller, said they are holding off on identifying the buyer or revealing much in the way of specifics until the sale closes, perhaps as soon as March 25.

In the meantime, Pitts wrote in an email, “I know the current owners are looking forward to retirement and to the fact [that] the buyer will be continuing to operate the properties as a walk-in theatre and [drive-in].”

And now, the bad news.

A few miles north of Lynden in Whatcom County, just across the Aldergrove border crossing in the Vancouver exurb of Langley, British Columbia, it’s not looking good for the Twilight Drive-In.

The Twilight Drive-In is unusual because it opened just 19 years ago in 2005. Reports are that the Twilight will close later this year, sometime after the peak summer season. KIRO Newsradio emailed and called drive-in management, but we have not yet heard back.

More NW History: Young aviator’s rediscovered photo albums are full of history, mystery

When it was built, the Twilight was a replacement for The Hillcrest Drive-In, which had operated in nearby Surrey, B.C. from 1953 to 2003. In the relatively short time it’s been open, the Twilight has become the last remaining outdoor movie screen in the Lower Mainland of BC, and it’s become something of a popular destination for Vancouverites. It was also featured in an episode of the “Archie” reboot TV series “Riverdale.”

News for British Columbian drive-in fans might not be all bad. Some recent coverage in Vancouver, BC media suggests that while the Twilight may be doomed, the family who owns the business may be searching for a new location to open a successor to the Twilight.

Meanwhile, unlike four of the five drive-ins still in business in the Evergreen State, the Twilight Drive-In operates for at least a portion of the winter months. And, while most Washington drive-ins won’t open until March or even later in the spring when night-time temperatures are a bit more mild, the Twilight’s season begins tonight – Friday, February 16.

While winter at the drive-in means cold temperatures outside, it also means earlier start times for movies. As anyone who’s attended a drive-in theatre in the summertime can attest, the first feature often doesn’t start until 10:00 p.m., and the second feature might run until long after 2:00 a.m.

For tonight’s season opener at the Twilight, the first feature begins at 6:45 p.m., and the second one begins at 9:00 p.m. – which means the evening’s entertainment concludes very reasonably long before midnight.

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The double-bill tonight at the Twilight, “Madame Web” followed by “Anyone But You,” is also something of an inadvertent tribute to one of Hollywood’s emerging stars who also has direct connections to the Pacific Northwest: each film features Spokane-born and raised Sydney Sweeney.

So, while it may be the final opening night at the Twilight Drive-In in Langley, BC, it might also be considered the first night of the First Annual Sydney Sweeney Film Festival.

And, if Canada is too far away – about a two-and-a-half hour drive from Seattle, with no traffic, and not counting border wait times – the beloved Blue Fox Drive-In on Whidbey Island operates year-round and is offering the same double-bill this weekend – “Madame Web” and “Anyone But You” – for their own closer-to-home edition of the Sydney Sweeney Film Festival.

Other historic drive-in theatres in Washington which are scheduled to open later this year include:

The Skyline Drive-In in Shelton

The Wheel-In Drive-In in Port Townsend

The Rodeo Drive-In in Bremerton

The Auto-Vue Drive-In in Colville

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

KIRO Newsradio got a peek at some of the images and dug into some of the history – and mysteries – they contain.

Many of us have old family photo albums stashed away somewhere and the pictures inside are probably pretty interesting to us and our relatives. These albums are a little different. Carol Mandel posted some of the old photos on Facebook late last week and KIRO Newsradio reached out to her right away.

Learning about Ludwig Schreuder

Mandel told KIRO Newsradio the photos were taken by her great uncle – a man named Ludwig Schreuder who was her grandmother’s brother.

“He grew up in Seattle. His father emigrated from Norway to Chicago as a child (at) about 11 years old, and eventually found his way from Chicago, after he got his medical degree, to North Dakota for a while, because that’s where my grandmother was born,” Mandel said. “And then in (around) 1904, they moved to Seattle.”

Schreuder was born in Seattle in 1904 and graduated from Lincoln High School in the Wallingford neighborhood and then from the University of Washington. By 1929, he was in the U.S. Navy and flying from what was then the relatively new Naval Air Station at Sand Point, now Magnuson Park.

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Lt. Schreuder was also an amateur photographer who, it appears, to have brought his camera along on many of his Navy adventures – which is why so many of the photos in the old albums are taken in midair, out on the runway or the water. Newspaper photos from that time generally aren’t taken as close to the action as many of these photos were.

Mandel said specific details about her great uncle’s career are a little unclear, but Lt. Schreuder continued to serve as an aviator in the Naval Reserve into the early 1930s. He was flying a Navy plane near Long Beach, California, in 1934 when it ran out of fuel and crashed in the ocean. He died in the accident. Ludwig Schreuder was just 30 years old.

Mandel says that her grandparents and her parents never really talked about Uncle Ludwig. She didn’t really think about him very much herself until she recently returned to Seattle and moved into her late parents’ old house.

“For a long time, I didn’t even know what he looked like,” Mandel said. “And then my mother had these photo albums stashed away in a drawer when we discovered them. The first thing my daughter, who is also a pilot, said to me was, ‘I want those. Don’t give them to anybody.'”

Mandel explained her daughter is an airline pilot – meaning she’s the fourth generation pilot in the family. In addition to her Great Uncle Ludwig, Carol’s father was a blimp pilot during World War II, and Carol married a Navy pilot. Aviation is in this family’s blood, apparently.

Mandel says that she and her daughter are actively embracing the challenge of researching and learning more about Ludwig Schreuder, and they’re not yet ready to donate the photo albums to a museum or archive. However, they recognize the historic value of the materials and they may be open to pursuing that option sometime in the future.

Sharing the old black and white photos

In the meantime, they shared several of the images with KIRO Newsradio and MyNorthwest.

The old photos are black and white, of course, and many have a sepia tone. In the images, many of which are quite tiny, we see planes with wheels on the grass runway at Sand Point, float planes in Lake Washington, planes in midair and even the results of a few plane crashes. Most of the images appear to have been created by Ludwig Schreuder, though at least one is a formal portrait of a number of aircraft and men at Sand Point, posed on or near the grass runway, and taken by well-known photographer Asahel Curtis.

Schreuder’s stint at Sand Point came during a pivotal era in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This is the time from after World War I through World War II when people on the Pacific Coast depended on men in flying machines for defense. And unlike the modern era, the men and machines were all based here in the middle of the community, and they could be seen every day going about their training and other duties to protect the U.S. from an enemy attack.

It was also an era when military and commercial aviation was rapidly evolving and maturing – the world famous Charles Lindbergh had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and visited Sand Point in September of that year – and public interest in aircraft and aviators was perhaps at its highest point ever.

The bottom line is even a cursory look at the photos in Lt. Schreuder’s albums shows what appears to be some great history that previously hasn’t been seen this way. Aviation historian and researcher Lee Corbin has already identified several of the aircraft pictured and will be sharing his research with Mandel and her family.

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One photo sticks out

There’s one image in particular that already stands out for Mandel.

In describing the old photo, Mandel says she sees a person “in a full flight suit (who) looks like it could be a woman . . . and there’s a guy in jodhpurs, and then there’s a businessman standing there holding his overcoat. And I thought ‘Oh, Amelia Earhart,'” Mandel said. “Well, it turns out she did visit Seattle, but she did not fly in and out of Sand Point – she took a train.”

Obviously, that one is going to require more research to fully determine who’s depicted and what’s going on. As Lee Corbin pointed out in an email after the radio version of this story aired, the image “looks like an aviator son, with his parents, getting ready to take his mom for her first airplane ride while dad stays on the ground.”

KIRO Newsradio also shared a few of the images with aviation and maritime historian and maritime explorer Matt McCauley of the Northwest Shipwreck Alliance, who has explored wrecked aircraft off Sand Point and recovered a few which are now being restored.

“They give us a snapshot into a period of time in the very beginnings of what became a Naval Air Station Seattle at Sand Point that we have never seen,” McCauley said Tuesday. “It’s amazing how few photos are in circulation from that era. From the local angle, obviously it’s hugely significant, but it’s also an important part of the national story of the origins of naval aviation, because that’s when things are really kind of getting up and going.”

The ANT-4: A large Soviet plane

Along with naval aviation activities, Lt. Schreuder also captured images of other aircraft that visited Sand Point during the bustling year or so that he was there.

One of those was a giant Soviet airplane that came to Sand Point in October 1929, the twin-engine ANT-4. The ANT-4 was on a flight from Moscow to New York, and came down to Seattle via Alaska and British Columbia on floats. At Sand Point, the plane had its floats changed out for wheels so it could then land on airstrips (rather than water) as it flew cross-country.

Know-it-all aviation history types will note that this is the opposite of what the Around-the-World Flight Douglas World Cruisers did at Sand Point in 1924.

The ANT-4 was one of the first all-metal aircraft to also be covered with metal skin – not wood or metal covered in fabric. In the images Lt. Schreuder took, the ANT-4 looks fairly crude and very “Soviet,” if that can be used as an adjective. The aluminum skin was corrugated, not smooth, and the plane had an open cockpit atop the fuselage. Either way, the ANT-4 was huge. The photos still have visual impact 95 years later, and the visit of the plane and the Soviet flyers is still recalled by historians as big news in Seattle when it happened.

Schreuder’s photos of the ANT-4 also serve as a reminder to some aviation history buffs of some controversy that emerged decades after the 1929 visit.

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Boeing’s ‘Monomail’

A few years after the Soviet ANT-4 visited Seattle, Boeing introduced its first airliner – the Model 247, which was also all metal construction, and which also had two engines. Much later during the Cold War, the Soviets began to make claims that Boeing engineers had spied on the ANT-4 while it was parked at Sand Point in 1929. From there, Boeing stole the technology and then used what they learned to develop the Model 247.

To get to the bottom of all this, KIRO Newsradio contacted Boeing Corporate Archivist and historian Mike Lombardi.

Lombardi knows more about Northwest aviation history than just about anybody. He says the timing just doesn’t back up the Cold War Soviet claims. The Soviet ANT-4 visited Sand Point in October 1929, Lombardi says, and then about six months later, Boeing rolled out a new plane called the “Monomail.”

“What Boeing introduced was an all-metal, low-wing monoplane with retractable landing gear, smooth-skin construction,” Lombardi told KIRO Newsradio. It was “very aerodynamic, and was arguably several years ahead of what that ANT was.”

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Lombardi says the timeline – and the advanced design of the Monomail – pretty much debunks the Soviet claims, and that there’s no connection between the ANT-4 and the Model 247. Lombardi further points out that the ANT-4 was based on a design by German firm Junkers which the Soviets had licensed.

“So, you know, looking at it, putting on your thinking cap, putting on your historian hat and really doing some investigative work,” Lombardi said, “there probably wasn’t any influence on Boeing, or what Boeing was designing.”

If photos from Schreuder’s photo albums whet your appetite for more Sand Point aviation history, the timing is good, since 2024 is the centennial of the Around-the-World Flight which began and ended there. Many activities are planned for later this year, and the first event on the calendar is Mike Lombardi’s history talk on the 1924 feat, which will be held at the Museum of Flight in Tukwila on Saturday, April 6 at 2 p.m.

In the meantime, Mandel continues enthusiastically scanning photos from the albums along with other documents related to her great uncle’s aviation career. After sending one fairly large batch of scans to a radio historian late one evening earlier this week, Mandel wrote in an email, “Are you totally overwhelmed now? I am!”

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, email Feliks.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

“We have officially included the Ryan House in our ‘Most Endangered Places list,” Washington Trust executive director Chris Moore told KIRO Newsradio earlier this week. “That ‘Most Endangered’ program is one of the foundational programs of the organization, and for years, we’ve been using the ‘Most Endangered’ list to help raise awareness around historic resources and cultural resources that face one form of threat or another.”

As KIRO Newsradio reported in September 2023, parts of the Ryan House date back to the 1860s, prior to Washington becoming a state. The home was donated to the city in the 1920s and served as the town’s library for decades. More recently, it has been home to the Sumner Historical Society.

The City of Sumner had been working for the past few years and had successfully raised a significant amount of money to restore the Ryan House, and the historic structure in the middle of town figured prominently in their long-range planning as the nexus between the past, present and future of Sumner. The iconic structure’s role as a prominent public landmark is fully embraced in multiple city planning documents published over the past several years.

However, at some point last summer, City of Sumner officials received updated estimates on the cost to do the restoration – costs had gone up because of some additional structural issues discovered within the old house – and they abruptly shifted gears. Without much public process, the city council then voted to demolish the Ryan House instead.

More “All Over the Map:” Forgotten original ‘Unity’ name still inspires Ilwaco

The demolition vote gave Sumner residents – many of whom had happily followed from afar the fundraising activities and other updates on the Ryan House project – a sort of civic whiplash. What had been years of work and successful fundraising toward restoration suddenly, and without warning, became the exact opposite.

In the wake of last September’s decision to demolish, a grassroots effort to save the Ryan House sprung up. Members of the group go to city council meetings and hand out flyers at parades, and maintain an active Facebook page. But the city doesn’t seem interested in hearing about what those Sumner residents want, so the grassroots campaign also includes a legal challenge to the process by which the demolition permit was granted.

KIRO Newsradio reached out to City of Sumner spokesperson Carmen Palmer for an official reaction to the “Most Endangered” listing, but she declined an interview request.

In an email, Palmer wrote “We thought that we were fairly clear in September that it was endangered, so this listing seems a bit belated.”

Palmer appears to miss the point about what this week’s action by the Washington Trust actually means: the biggest threat to the Ryan House is not the structural issues common in any wood-frame home dating to the 1860s. The danger that makes the Ryan House qualify for the list is coming from the City of Sumner and their hasty plans to demolish it.

Chris Moore of the Washington Trust points out that rising costs on a preservation project is not uncommon. Architects and engineers more often than not tend to discover critical and expensive issues only as the work to restore a structure gets underway.

The sudden shift by the City of Sumner, which they blame on these unforeseen cost increases, is a bit of a head-scratcher for most of the historic preservation community.

“We really applaud the city for the stewardship they’ve done for nearly 100 years” to maintain the Ryan House, Moore said, “and for the efforts to fundraise to get it rehabilitated.”

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“And I guess the question is,” Moore continued, “with such a long track record, why was it so sudden to just move to demolition?”

Some kind of disconnect means that critical messages about the Ryan House that could lead to solutions and a more unified community aren’t being shared by those on what’s become opposite sides of a debate.

“We appreciate the support of the Washington Trust, but funding remains the missing ingredient,” Carmen Palmer of the City of Sumner also wrote in her email. “As far as we can tell, being added to this list unfortunately doesn’t help with that.”

By declining to be interviewed, KIRO Newsradio was not able to pushback on Palmer’s interpretation of what being added to “Most Endangered Places” list can mean for a community effort to find a solution that works for everyone – including helping to raise the additional funds to complete the work necessary to restore the Ryan House.

Maybe Palmer’s unwillingness – as city spokesperson – to have a conversation with a journalist is indicative of what’s also missing in the bigger picture of the controversy and anger swirling around the Ryan House these past several month: dialog between City of Sumner officials and concerned citizens who feel like they weren’t consulted before the decision to demolition, and who feel like they’re not being heard now.

One school of thought suggests that elected officials in Sumner (or any community, for that matter) would applaud a group of residents and business people who were devoting hours of volunteer time to do something positive for their community. Working together to raise money and create a plan for a renovated publicly owned landmark would have much higher likelihood to succeed than battling it out via social media or the judicial system.

That’s where Chris Moore of the Washington Trust sees the real potential in this project: if there can be meaningful dialog and a true partnership between the City of Sumner and the citizens who are clearly willing to roll up their sleeves.

“Part of the discussion is to work with the city and with the community just to say, ‘Hey, there’s a combination, there’s a hybrid outcome of sorts that might work here,’” Moore said. “That certainly keeps this building as a legacy building for the city, but also finds other ways to use it and have it be a real civic asset.”

Meanwhile, the community group’s legal challenge to, among other things, the process by which the City of Sumner issued themselves a demolition permit for the Ryan House, will be heard next month in Pierce County Superior Court.

However, before that phase of the legal battle gets underway, a much more appetizing event will take place when supporters of the Ryan House invite the public to take part in a spaghetti dinner fundraiser at Purdy’s Public House in Sumner on Sunday, February 25.

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

A look into the history in this week’s edition of All Over The Map reveals that Ilwaco isn’t the original name of the town, and that this isn’t the first time its residents have faced adversity after a big fire.

Ilwaco is in Southwest Washington on Baker Bay near the mouth of the Columbia River on the backside of Cape Disappointment. The best place to learn about Ilwaco’s history is the town’s Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum, a non-profit organization founded in 1983.

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Madeline Matson is the museum’s executive director. She told KIRO Newsradio that the origins of the name Ilwaco are Indigenous, but there has been confusion about whether the namesake was a Chinook woman who lived nearby, or the man she married.

“Actually, what we have figured out is that Chief Comcomly, one of his daughters was named ‘Elowahka,’ and her husband was named ‘Elowahka Jim,'” Matson said. “And Elowahka Jim is who Ilwaco was named after, obviously (with) changed spelling and pronunciation over time.”

Though the community has been known as Ilwaco since 1876, that’s not the original name of the town.

“It was originally called Unity in celebration of the conclusion of the Civil War,” Matson said.

When what’s now called Ilwaco was settled in 1868, the Civil War had concluded just three years earlier. Pro-Union sentiments praising the successful preservation of the U.S. inspired the name Unity, Matson said.

Early settlers in the area around include Captain James Johnson and Isaac Whealdon, but credit as “founder” of Unity is usually attributed to J.D. Holman, who platted the town and became the first postmaster. Holman and the others had originally claimed land to the west for a community called Pacific City, but the federal government took over the real estate to establish Fort Canby, which forced residents to relocate to what’s now Ilwaco.

Matson said that Unity had the most southwesterly post office in Washington Territory, and Ilwaco now has the most southwesterly post office in the Evergreen State.

“It was always a community, and a community also based in commerce,” Matson said. “And it definitely has been that, especially at specific times through history. In the early 1900s, it was definitely the location on the peninsula that was the center of commerce, and so this is where the banks were located, and this is where people came to do business.

“That’s changed a little bit over time and I would say it’s maybe less the commercial hub that it was in the early 1900s,” Matson continued. “But it is definitely still a very important part of the region, and a very interesting and lovely community.”

Much of the documented history of Ilwaco is featured in a book by historian Lucille McDonald and published by Binfords & Mort in Portland in 1966. The book, “Coast Country: A History of Southwest Washington,” is still in print and available for purchase in the museum’s shop.

“We still say that it is actually a very good early resource for local history,” Matson said. “It’s definitely aged, but all histories age over time, and so that is a good place to start. You do have to take some things with a grain of salt, but it is a wonderful book and a good overview of the region.”

Among the more colorful stories told in the book is about what was nicknamed the “Clamshell Railroad,” a narrow-gauge line for which Ilwaco was the original terminus and which operated from 1888 to 1930. Ultimately, the line stretched from the former ferry terminal at Megler, Washington (where the bridge to Astoria, Oregon now crosses the Columbia River) roughly 25 miles north to Nahcotta in Pacific County. Also included in McDonald’s book is the drama for which Ilwaco residents were mostly just audience members: The time in 1893 when South Bend wrestled the county seat away from Oysterville.

As for the town’s more recent and much closer-to-home drama, Madeline Matson said Ilwaco is a “very hardscrabble community” that has seen plenty of disasters — hard times economically, but other big fires, too, including when Ilwaco High School was destroyed in a blaze in 1936.

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And though the town has been called Ilwaco for almost 150 years, Matson says the spirit of its original name – Unity – still inspires the people who live and work there to come together.

“This is the most recent tragedy for the community and something that we will continue to rise out of and recover from,” Matson said. “I think that the showing of the community support towards the crabbers and crabbing families has been wonderful, and continues to kind of get back at that ‘Unity Spirit’ of the original founding of Ilwaco, and all of us being in it together.”

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

Here at “All Over The Map,” we obsess over official names for places, and even more over the unofficial nicknames that, for some reason or another, stick – or don’t stick – to particular places. That’s why we’ve talked about Cap Hill, Sodo and Uptown, and even what we hear some people calling Ess-Eee-Ay airport (whatever that is).

Along First Avenue near Madison Street are metal signs announcing the “West Edge” neighborhood, mounted high up on lampposts on both sides of the street. Photos of those signs posted on social media earlier this month drew dozens and dozens and comments.

One comment was from King County Executive Dow Constantine who listed several obsolete local place names he still uses – like “Lower Queen Anne” for what many people now call “Uptown,” “the Counterbalance,” for the steep hill on the south side of Queen Anne Avenue, and “the Dump” for the parking area along Montlake, south of University Village and east of the UW campus.

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KIRO Newsradio reached Executive Constantine by phone and asked him what he remembered about the origins of West Edge.

“You know, I heard about it along with everyone else,” Executive Constantine said. “It was in the paper and I think they hung up signs down at First Avenue. And you know, it didn’t necessarily seem any stranger than any of the other nouveau names they’ve tried to hang on neighborhoods.

“But it doesn’t seem to have ever caught on,” Executive Constantine added.

Digging into online archives of Seattle newspapers via Seattle Public Library, multiple stories reveal that the naming of West Edge was announced at a special event on September 8, 2001, just a few days before 9/11. The naming effort was led by the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), with a public process managed by consultants, and participation from local merchants, residents and property owners.

In 2024, DSA uses names for six downtown neighborhoods in what’s called the “Metropolitan Improvement District” (MID). That’s an area where business and property owners contribute financially to support marketing efforts, maintenance of public areas and other improvements. Before 2001, DSA referred to the area in question as “the 1st/2nd Avenues Neighborhood” – so perhaps it’s easy to why they wanted to find something catchier.

For the record, the boundaries for this narrow north-south strip of land are Cherry Street on the south, Lenora Street on the north, Western Avenue on the west, and Second Avenue on the east.

Downtown Seattle Association’s (DSA) map shows West Edge and five other neighborhoods where DSA’s Metropolitan Improvement District (MID) conducts marketing and other improvement efforts. (Photo courtesy of DSA)

DSA worked with a firm called Tip Top Creative. Debbie Campbell, now retired, was the owner and operator of Tip Top.

After being contacted by KIRO Newsradio, Campbell checked with former colleagues and then gathered and shared much of the history of naming West Edge.

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In a long phone conversation, Campbell described multiple focus groups, and the work her team did to come up with several names along concepts for logos. Through the multi-month process, the ultimate choice was  “West Edge” – for being in the west part of downtown, and for being edgy and hip. For example, Campbell said the Seattle Art Museum, the Harbor Steps and Benaroya Hall are all located in West Edge.

Some of the other names that were also under consideration were:

“The Blocks” – since there are 26 square blocks in that area.

“The Steppes” – a distinctive spelling and a nod to the Harbor Steps and seven other public staircases in the neighborhood.

“Chenora” – pronounced ‘chuh-NOR-uh,’ for the Cherry Street and Lenora Street boundaries (though it does have a certain movie monster feel to it – maybe because it sounds too much like “Gamera”).

More than two decades later, while West Edge never really caught on, it also has simply not gone away.

It’s still used by DSA as the name of one of their MID areas, and “West Edge” is also present in the names of multiple residential buildings and at least one parking garage within those “Chenora” boundaries. Also for those who appreciate these kinds of details, those other DSA MID names include Belltown, Denny Triangle, Pioneer Square, Retail Core and Waterfront.

Debbie Campbell of Tip Top Creative is rightfully proud of the work she and her colleagues did on the naming project, and she’s philosophical about “West Edge” having not exactly becoming a household name.

“I think we did a good job,” Campbell said. “I really think the name was appropriate for the neighborhood. I liked the logo, and people responded to it. I think it died for lack of traction.”

KIRO Newsradio asked Dow Constantine if he isn’t at least partly to blame for West Edge not catching on. Isn’t part of his job to lead the way and embrace these new names for neighborhoods and communities in King County so that residents will follow?

“No, I refuse,” Executive Constantine said, chuckling. “I mean, some of them make perfect sense, and that’s fine, and things are gonna change with the times.”

“Some people are going to call things what they want to, but I’m going to call them what I think they ought to be called,” he continued. “And if people think I’m being old-fashioned, that’s fine by me.”

One school of thought is that the act of naming that area West Edge (or naming it anything, for that matter) may simply have been ahead of its time. For new neighborhood nicknames to stick, it might require a certain density, or a certain critical mass of people who need that name to differentiate where they live and work.

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

In the 2000 U.S. census, a little more than 50,000 people lived in downtown Seattle 24 years ago. The most recent data from DSA said that number has more than doubled, and there are now more than 106,000 residents downtown.

That new number suggests that it might not be too late for West Edge to still catch on, because of the density, of course, but also maybe with a little bit of “retro traction” thrown in. Isn’t something that happened 23 years ago – and which is now somewhat esoteric – finally ripe for being discovered, adopted and then exploited by hipsters, influencers and others who mine the recent past for cultural inspiration?

Failing all of that, one commenter suggested bringing back the name “Magic Carpet Area.” That evocative moniker was King County METRO’s brilliant 1973 name for what eventually became the now long-gone “Ride Free Zone” on downtown buses, and which encompasses much of what almost became – and might still become – West Edge.

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

A flurry of Facebook posts on what appear to be bogus Indigenous history pages have recently shared images misidentified as Chief Seattle. These posts inspired a deep dive into the backstory of that single photograph, and an effort to learn more about what it means to one of the chief’s descendants..

Nearly anyone who has spent time in the Pacific Northwest has come into contact with the one and only photograph of Chief Seattle. The image was created in 1865 by photographer Edward A. Sammis at his studio in Seattle. That studio was upstairs from a drugstore on Yesler Way, just east of what’s now First Avenue. That much, at least, is agreed upon by most Northwest historians.

How the photo came to be is sometimes a little more murky.

The first published account was in a book published in Seattle in 1895 by author Joseph Costello. The book title uses a derogatory term for Indigenous people: “The Siwash: Their Life, Legends and Tales.” It’s hard to pinpoint why, exactly, but the narrative within its pages reads as if it has been embellished or otherwise augmented in order to make a better story. Costello writes that the photo came about only after a protracted negotiation and failed attempts to trade, with Chief Seattle refusing again and again and finally having to be essentially tricked into having his picture taken by Sammis.

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Carolyn Marr is a historian, author and former Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) librarian and photo curator. She conducted extensive research about the Chief Seattle photo back in the 1980s and wrote about it for an issue of the history journal Pacific Northwest Quarterly in 1989. Part of Marr’s research involved examining an original edition of Costello’s book held by UW Special Collections.

It turns out that that a Seattle author and historian of the 19th and 20th century also likely had that same copy of Costello’s book in his possession at some point in the past.

We know this, because Marr made a pretty amazing and enlightening discovery.

“Clarence Bagley left a note inside of that copy of ‘The Siwash’ in which he discounts that whole story,” Marr told KIRO Newsradio.

Bagley died in his late seventies back in 1932, so the note from Bagley is now close to at least 100 years old.

“He says that (Chief) Seattle agreed to be photographed when Sammis invited him,” Marr continued. “So, it is controversial. We don’t know in which context the photograph was taken, but we do know that there was only ever one photograph taken of him.”

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)

More on the one and only photo

In that one and only photograph, Chief Seattle is seated in Sammis’ studio, in a simple setting with a studio backdrop that was probably used for dozens if not hundreds of portraits of other less well-known people. From his posture and look, Chief Seattle appears to be very old, and it’s believed he was close to 80 when the photo was taken.

“I think that what he’s wearing pretty much looks like what he would wear every day,” Marr said. “And he has a hat, a cedar woven hat. He’s holding it.”

Marr says that Edward Sammis wasn’t necessarily trying to document history by taking the photo of Chief Seattle. Photos of Indigenous people were marketable back east in those years, so Sammis – likely assisted by Clarence Bagley – printed 100 copies that he shipped off to sell in New York.

“He figured that they were going to sell, and it seems like they probably did,” Marr said.

More from Feliks Banel: Seeking clues to the mystery cottage at Kirkland’s newest park

While only one original photo was created by Edward Sammis, Marr says other photographers took that image, created their own new negatives from it, and then manipulated and changed it using techniques that can only be described as crude or even “pre-Photoshop.”

“Photographers could change things by just painting on top of the negatives and doing all these things,” Marr explained. “Opening the eyes was probably the most the most startling thing” done to the Chief Seattle image, Marr said.

At least a few of these “alternate versions” of the Chief Seattle image exist, where the elderly man’s eyes, which in the original are nearly closed, appear to be wide open.

“Maybe more than one photographer opened (Chief Seattle’s) eyes,” Marr said, including many whose names we’ll likely never learn, but also at least one well-known photographer did it, too. “I know that Asahel Curtis, there’s one signed by him where his eyes are opened,” Marr said.

“I also remember a colored postcard where he’s wearing different clothes and his hat has colored designs painted on it”, Marr explained. “And then there’s one other one that’s really strange. It looks like a photographer took the head from the Sammis’ picture and then put a different body underneath, and it looks like he’s outdoors.”

“So it’s totally fake,” Marr said.

While the origins and authors of most of those fakes remain a mystery, thanks to Paul Dorpat and an installment of his Seattle Times’ feature “Now & Then” from 1992, we do know where the original photograph was taken: on the second floor of a wooden building that once stood on the south side of Yesler Way just east of what’s now First Avenue.

That wooden building is long gone. In its place is a brick building dating to 1889. Merchants Café and Saloon is housed there now, and has been since at least 1890.

Chief Seattle relative Ken Workman speaks out

In was at this location where KIRO Newsradio recently met up with Ken Workman, a member of the Duwamish Tribe.

Workman is in his late 60s and is retired from a long career with Boeing. Many Seattleites might remember seeing Workman at both Macklemore concerts held in late December at Climate Pledge Arena, where he delivered his own unique twist on those “land acknowledgements” that have become commonplace at the start of public events.

“Land acknowledgement,” Workman intoned, accompanied by a single Indigenous drummer standing next to him on the massive stage. “How am I supposed to acknowledge my own land?”

After introducing himself in Lushootsheed, he repeated a translation, “I am Workman, of the Duwamish Tribe.”

The sellout hometown crowd went wild.

Outside Merchant’s in the January rain, Workman was wearing a woven cedar hat. It was the same one he had at Climate Pledge Arena in December, and it’s just like the one his great-great-great-great grandfather Chief Seattle is holding in the old photo.

“This is a working hat,” Workman explained. “See how you can see through it? In the summertime, the wind blows through there. So when I’m sweating profusely, like in a canoe journey, it’s like a refrigerator.”

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“And in the wintertime like this, the woods swells up, and it becomes waterproof,” Workman continued. “And if you think of this as a living thing, because it’s a tree, then the DNA of the people are in the tree. So in a sense, I’m carrying around all of my ancestors. And what are they doing? Keeping my head dry.”

Even without the hat, Ken Workman bears a striking resemblance to his famous ancestor.

Duwamish DNA in Seattle

But what’s even more important to him than the photo is the “DNA” that he was talking about.

Workman says the DNA of the Duwamish is everywhere in what’s now downtown Seattle. He says the timber used in those Pioneer Square buildings from the 1890s was harvested from trees that were probably 200 hundred years old when they were cut down, meaning they date back to the time before any Europeans arrived in the late 18th century.

“So when I’m talking about DNA in the trees, I am talking about in these buildings, and the buildings that are here today, are the ancient DNA of the people,” Workman said. “At a technical level, the DNA of the Duwamish people exists right here in downtown Seattle.”

“They’re still around,” he said.

Ken Workman has known of his Indigenous ancestry for most of his life, but he only learned of his direct descent from Chief Seattle roughly 15 years ago. It happened when he began researching his family history and got help from a co-worker who happened to be an expert genealogist, and who occupied a nearby cubicle.

Workmans friend, he says “is a devout Mormon, he does not swear, he does not drink, he does not take aspirin.” At work one day, this friend “made a sound that was unusual – I don’t remember what the sound was, but it was definitely not the kind you make in a cubicle.”

“He says, ‘Ken, you better look at this,'” Workman continued. “And so he was the one that discovered my family’s relationship to Chief Seattle.”

“I was kind of shocked,” Workman said.

After that, the Chief Seattle photo took on new personal significance.

“The picture means a lot to me, in that I’ve seen it for quite a while,” Workman said. “And I never really paid attention to it with the exception of 15 years ago, the same timeframe when I started doing this research, and realized I was related to Chief Seattle.”

Workman has studied the photo intently over the past several years, using software to carefully examine it and to make comparisons alongside images of his own face.

“I matched my eyes, the width of my eyes,” Workman said, explaining how the photo software allowed blending of images. “And I said, ‘OK, as I slide the lever off to one side and the other, my face becomes prevalent, and his doesn’t, I wonder where the cheeks are? I wonder where the chin? And the forehead?”

“And so really, what I’ve got is, I have this photograph with eyes – my eyes and they open, they aren’t painted,” Workman said, referencing the modified images Marr had described.
“It’s a DNA connection.”

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As Workman was speaking, two women came out of Merchant’s Café to find out what was going on. One was Darcy Hanson, who operates the restaurant and manages the old apartments upstairs which are now available as short-term rentals.

Hanson knows all about the photo of Chief Seattle and its connection to the spot where Merchant’s now stands. She invited Ken Workman upstairs to see the second floor to try and maybe get a sense of what Edward Sammis’ photo studio might have felt like, one floor up above the street (in that earlier, now long-gone building).

As Ken Workman looked around, Darcy Hanson pointed out some of the old and likely original 1889 fixtures still in place on the second floor of the building.

“I’m looking at this building and I’m going, ‘Oh yeah, tall ceilings, so these had to be oil lamps or lanterns,’ so you know the building’s old enough for those,” Workman said.

“A lot of stuff in here is original,” Hanson said, pointing to dull brass hardware attached to the side of the door frame and which still opens and closes the transom window above the door. “It’s original, a lot of this in all these apartments.”

“A lot of ghosts,” Workman said, laughing heartily.

Duwamish beliefs detail the sacrifice Chief Seattle made

The notion of “ghosts” – or even less fanciful notions of studying history or of simply understanding the past – is where the story of that image of Chief Seattle takes its most interesting or even paradoxical turn, where Indigenous culture and tradition collides with culture and traditions brought here from elsewhere.

Ken Workman says Duwamish beliefs were that after you die, your soul goes into an underworld where it remains until your living descendants have completely forgotten about you. Only at that point, generations later, can you be reborn.

Thus, naming a city to honor Chief Seattle, taking even just one photograph – not to mention building statues, creating a city seal, talking about him on a radio show which includes his name in its title – is all very European, very ‘Western School of Thought’ in its inspiration and intent.

And especially in its impact.

“But in this culture, it’s the opposite,” Ken Workman said about Chief Seattle and the Duwamish people. “You’re trying to forget that person as fast as you can to reenable them to come back in a descendent.”

“So, by Seattle saying that, ‘Yes, you can do all this,’ his name would have perpetuated forever and ever and he would never had the chance to come back,” Workman continued.

“That is the sacrifice that he made,” Workman said.

Editors’ note: For additional information about Chief Seattle, David M. Buerge’s 2017 book, “Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name” is one of the most ambitious and informative Pacific Northwest history titles published in recent memory. In addition, the Duwamish Tribe’s website has more information, including the latest on efforts to regain federal recognition.

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.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

The little cottage is on 6th Street South in Kirkland, just north of the Google campus, on a triangle-shaped piece of land right alongside the old railroad tracks, which are now a trail called the Cross Kirkland Corridor or EasTrail. The structure is red with white trim, and measures about 14 feet by 18 feet. It has a peaked roof, with a small extended area in the back and a porch in front. Everest Creek runs through the property north of the cottage and down a gentle slope. The property feels rural and remote and it is unlike just about any other on the Eastside.

Kirkland residents and many others who have driven past the cottage know this location well and have wondered about the history or backstory of if for as long as some can remember. On a visit to the site earlier this week, the cottage was boarded up, and a City of Kirkland land use sign from 2020 was flat on the ground.

KIRO Newsradio reached out to Loita Hawkinson at the Kirkland Heritage Society to try and learn the history.

Hawkinson knew exactly which little house the station was calling about.

‘The most iconic thing’

“It is probably the most iconic thing,” Hawkinson said. “We get requests a lot. Kirkland Heritage gets phone messages and emails about one property or another, and this is probably the property that we hear the most about.”

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People always ask, Hawkinson said, “‘What is that little house? What is the story?’ So I’ve been looking at that house and looking it up and trying to find out more about it for decades.”

What Hawkinson has learned is that the little cottage is nearly 80 years old. It was built by the Fisk family in 1945, who lived in a full-sized residence just north of the cottage beginning a few years before that. Hawkinson says the Fisks are related by marriage to the Berto family, which is an old name in Kirkland. Two Fisk children grew up there, one of whom, James G. Fisk, passed away in late 2022. He had sold the residence in 2006, but had retained the property with the cottage.

Hawkinson also wrote on Facebook, commenting on photos shared by KIRO Newsradio:

The Fisk family arrived from Wisconsin in 1914 and settled on Rose Hill on Sheffield Street which is now 116th Avenue NE in the Highland Neighborhood. The family was Walter Marshall Fisk and Grace Berto Fisk and their three children Harry, Raymond, Helen. All went to Kirkland Central School and Kirkland Junior High and Kirkland High School graduating from 1926 – 1930. The Rose Hill Fisk middle child, Raymond Davis Fisk, married Janet Doris Smith in 1938. They built their home (on 6th Street South, north of where the cottage stands) in 1941 and had their children: James Gregory Fisk, Lake Washington High School (LWHS) class of 1964 and Joyce Fisk Rainier, LWHS class of 1960.

What nobody seems to know is if the little cottage was an actual separate residence, or just some kind of barn or shed. Since KIRO Newsradio first posted photos of the cottage on Facebook, theories have come up on social media over the past few days about railroad workers living in it, and about Mr. Fisk keeping his pigeons there. One person said they almost rented it as a living space decades ago, another said it was always only used for storage.

What most people agree on is that the look of the cottage – with its peaked roof and little porch with ornate “turned” posts, vintage single-pane mullioned windows, and the setting along the creek and the historic old Belt Line railroad route – well, that just seems to invite wild speculation or even what might be considered a kind of mythologizing.

City of Kirkland got the property at a discount

While elements of the specific history of the cottage so far remain elusive, the good news is that when some Fisk relatives who live out of state put the property on the market last year, several Kirkland citizens reached out to the city to suggest that the site be purchased for a park, mainly because it’s right next to the popular new trail.

“I think when the property became available for sale, it wasn’t on our radar, to be honest,” said John Lloyd, deputy director of Kirkland Parks and Community Services. “It was several community members who reached out to the city expressing interest in seeing if we could preserve it and add to the park system.”

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Lloyd says the city did just that. They bought the property for $800,000, which was discounted from the near-million-dollar asking price in exchange for calling it “Fisk Family Park.” Representatives of the Fisk family and the Fisk family members themselves were not able to reached for comment.

Lloyd told KIRO Newsradio Thursday the official park signs have not yet been installed, but they will be coming sometime in the next month or two. The city will also install some benches and garbage cans, Lloyd said.

Longtime Kirkland resident Toby Nixon was, until recently, a member of the Kirkland City Council. He was very much in favor of purchasing the land to create the park alongside the trail, and also because that neighborhood is getting more and more dense.

But, Nixon says he’s also a little worried about the future of the cottage.

“I would hate to see it torn down, just because it’s kind of a historical thing,” Nixon told KIRO Newsradio earlier this week. “And especially if (Hawkinson) can document something of historical significance that that happened on that property, then it would be easier for the city to make the decision to try to preserve it, as opposed to clearing it off and building a picnic shelter or something like that.”

John Lloyd of Kirkland Parks and Community Services is pleased that the public came forward to suggest buying the park, and that the sale came together at lightning speed – in only a matter of weeks or months. For funding, the city essentially borrowed money from itself to make the purchase, and will look to the Kirkland Parks & Community Foundation to ultimately help cover some of the cost.

Lloyd doesn’t know how the cottage was used by the Fisk family and says it’s completely empty now. There’s also no obvious evidence of a kitchen or a bath, but there is electrical and some kind of plumbing. Overall, Lloyd says the structure is not in great condition.

Trails & Rails: ‘National park on wheels’ seeks volunteers

What may be in store for the little cottage

However, Lloyd says the City of Kirkland knows that many people care about the little cottage and are paying attention to Fisk Family Park. Lloyd says a decision about the structure’s future – to demolish or to preserve it – has not yet been made.

“We don’t want it to rip it down without having engaged the community or at least explain why we’re doing what we’re doing because it’s a recognizable structure,” Lloyd said. “So we want to take a little time and care to engage the community on that.”

“The timeline” of this community engagement, Lloyd continued, is “probably a little bit later this spring as we start getting a little more active at that site.”

Meanwhile, as Hawkinson continues to research the cottage, the timing is perfect for Kirkland residents to share what they might know about its history and usage over the decades.

And, as the City of Kirkland gets ready to formally introduce Fisk Family Park, the timing is also ideal for city residents and other interested parties to let the city know how they feel about preserving the little cottage.

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.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

Trails & Rails is about creating a “National Park on Wheels,” with a two-person team of knowledgeable guides based in the lounge car, narrating a historical tour as the train makes its way down the tracks.

KIRO Newsradio recently sat down with two Trails & Rails volunteers at the Klondike Gold Rush National Park in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. The local program is getting ready to host an informational event there for new volunteers on the afternoon of Saturday, Feb. 10.

Rob Carr loves Northwest history, and he’s an articulate and affable guy who did outside sales for decades before he retired. When Carr gives a tour aboard the Coast Starlight, he isn’t mumbling dull paragraphs into a bad PA system. He’s usually up and on his feet and doing what he calls “working the train.”

“The first thing I do when I’m on the train is set the speakers up, and I go introduce myself to the people on the train, ‘Where are you heading today?’ It begins the conversation,” Carr explained.

“So when we talk about … Mount Rainier,” Carr continued, “it usually starts with (me saying) ‘Some folks down there from Iowa, you’ve probably never seen a volcano, have you?’ ‘We haven’t?'”

“The beauty of what we’re doing with a lot of the stuff is interacting with customers on the train,” Carr said. “And people ask (me) what do you like about it the most. (I say) I’ve met people from all over the world.”

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Guides consider the entire audience

For some, trains are merely transportation, of course, and sometimes a passenger might not be interested right at the moment in learning about the founding of Fort Vancouver, about the mystery of the Mima Mounds or about the origins of the giant Winlock Egg.

With thoughtful customer service in mind, Carr says he and the other guides are sensitive to the entire audience. They don’t force anyone to participate, and they focus not on lecturing but instead on engaging the willing passengers.

“Sometimes you look at the people, and they’re on their laptops, and they’re not really paying attention, so we leave them alone,” Carr said. “What’s up to us is to engage them, go and say, ‘You might be interested in learning about the Columbia River. Are you a fisherman?'”

“The style has to be very conversational,” Carr explained. “Therefore, volunteers coming in can find it a much easier thing than having to learn this thing (by) rote.”

Jim Eagan began volunteering for Trails & Rails in 2011, and he’s now one of three coordinators who manage the program in Seattle, which sends volunteers to Portland and back on the Coast Starlight and to Glacier National Park and back on the Empire Builder.

Eagan says new volunteers get two days of classroom training and go on six training trips with other seasoned guides who serve as trainers and coaches. Once fully trained, expectations are that volunteers will do 8-10 trips a year between April and October. Volunteers do get issued a green shirt and badge but have to provide their own khaki pants.

The Seattle team has assembled a well-written and organized “Route Guide” as a baseline for the tour, but Eagan says narrating a successful tour is not about memorizing lines or mastering the information about the entire trip, especially for new volunteers.

“We don’t expect you to know that whole route guide; we expect you to know some basic ‘points of interest’ – ‘POI’ – that you need to be versed in,” Eagan explained. “And we also like people to do their own research, and a lot of people come with some personal stories, which are great.”

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“That even makes it come more alive (if) your ancestor farmed out here” or took part in some other activity, Eagan said.

The “lots and lots of stories” about the route and about the people living and working along the way – going back thousands of years – are what make for an especially good tour on the Coast Starlight, Eagan said.

Additional research encouraged

As Eagan mentioned, guides are encouraged to do their own supplemental research. Rob Carr does that by reading history books, researching online and always looking for new material. He also actively solicits questions from passengers, which often leads to new information being added to his tour and deep connections with the passengers.

Carr recalled an anecdote about a passenger named George who asked where the name for the healthcare organization “Kaiser Permanente” came from – since Rob was talking about Vanport, Oregon, and the old Kaiser Shipyards near Vancouver, Washington, where hundreds of Liberty Ships were built during World War II. Rob didn’t know the answer, but he told George he’d find out. So, while his Trails & Rails tour partner took over narration duties, Rob did some Googling.

The wife of industrialist Henry J. Kaiser “lived near Permanente Creek down in California, and said, ‘That’s a beautiful name,'” Carr explained. And so, Carr continued, she suggested to her husband, “‘Why don’t we add that so people are not confusing the medical service with the steel company and the aluminum thing.'”

“So that’s where the name came from,” Carr said.

“The point of the story is, I went back and I said to George, ‘And so now we know the rest of the story, and we wouldn’t have known that if George hadn’t asked me the question. So thank you, George, for asking that question,'” Carr said. “And then George lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Many guides bring their own props along, including historical photos and large fold-out maps. Rob Carr’s personal tour kit also includes a can of Nalley’s Chili, in a nod to the area of Tacoma beneath Highway 16, which many people still call “Nalley Valley” for the locally-founded company once located there and which is now owned by Conagra Brands.

Carr also hands out Almond Roca samples (since the Tacoma factory is visible from the train), and all guides are usually ready with variations on trivia games about national parks or other topics should they be sidetracked to allow a freight train to pass or face other delays along the route.

Amtrak loves Trails & Rails

Sierra Prochna is a marketing executive with Amtrak based in Washington, D.C. She says Amtrak loves this program, loves the volunteers, and wants to see Trails & Rails expanded throughout the system.

“We are great fans of our Trails & Rails program and our partnership,” Prochna told KIRO Newsradio Tuesday. “And it’s a beautiful marriage of railroads and national parks, which actually goes back a very long time back to the 1800s, and we’re just continuing on that tradition” of the years when American railroads built lodges at places like Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park and provided transportation there.

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“The engagement with our volunteers is fantastic,” Prochna continued. “They love what they do; they love the areas that they’re in, teaching customers about the history of those areas and rail there.”

Prochna says the concept of Trails & Rails began in 2000 with Amtrak’s Sunset Limited, which runs between New Orleans and Los Angeles. From the start, and as the program expanded to some 20 routes in different parts of the United States, volunteers have been the driving force.

“If we look at aggregate numbers since 2000, we know that we’ve had over 10,000 volunteers from the National Park Service, and they’ve given us more than 650,000 volunteer service hours,” Prochna said.

Eagan says prospective volunteers need not worry that those 650,000 hours must be completely filled with endless narration. Seasoned guides, Eagan says, come to learn that contemplative silence is a key part of any Trails & Rails tour, too.

“Even if you’re the most dynamic, interesting person on the train that day, people aren’t going to listen beyond a couple of minutes or so,” Eagan explained. So it’s important, he says, to “give people a chance to absorb maybe what you’ve said, or maybe to enjoy what’s going on out there” beyond the glass of the train windows.

“We discourage the ‘Energizer Bunny’ approach that you wind yourself up here at King Street Station and don’t stop talking till the trains rolling into Portland,” Eagan continued.

“If that does happen, you’ll see most people have left the car or gone back to their laptops or fallen asleep,” he said.

If you want to volunteer:

Trails & Rails Volunteer Information Session

Saturday, Feb. 10 at 1 p.m.

Klondike Gold Rush National Park in Pioneer Square, at 319 2nd Ave. South.

No pre-registration is required. For more information, send email to info@seattleguides.org.

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, please email Feliks.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

The story of Seattle’s “soft power,” or how the city and region is perceived from afar, and how its image influences distant people through pop culture like film, literature, music and TV, is an unfinished history whose compiling and telling is woefully incomplete. It’s also a part of the city and region’s narrative which is still in progress, and likely to be so for years to come.

Late last year when the “Frasier” reboot began, we examined “The Night Strangler,” a spooky TV movie that was filmed in Seattle and still has a long tail of influence.

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In researching that story, some newspaper clippings turned up about a more standard kind of hard-boiled and campy detective show for which a pilot episode was filmed in Seattle in November 1971. The one-hour TV movie aired on KOMO via the ABC network on March 27, 1972, but it was never made into a regular series. One of those old newspaper clippings said that Chicago was the original choice of the filmmakers, but somehow or other the Windy City shoot got scrapped, and so Seattle became a handy second choice.

The pilot was called “Wheeler & Murdoch.” It starred Jack Warden, who appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows over the years, including “Shampoo” with Warren Beatty and “Brian’s Song” as Chicago Bears’ Coach George Halas. Warden’s co-star was Christopher Stone, a lesser-known actor who eventually married Dee Wallace (who portrayed the mom in “E.T.”). Warden was the grizzled older private eye, while Stone was the young handsome one. Guest stars included Golden Age of Hollywood stalwarts Van Johnson and Jane Powell.

One likely reason that the pilot never became a regular series was because the pilot got really bad reviews from multiple TV critics, some of whom savaged its overall cheesiness or singled out its bad dialog. The TV critic for the Buffalo Evening News wrote that “Wheeler & Murdoch” was “[c]rammed with outdoor action and nightclub scenes as phony as a $3 bill” and the show “noisy, nasty and overblown.”

After it premiered in March 1972, a search of newspaper archives reveals just a handful of rebroadcasts in the 1970s and early 1980s and no other appearances since. No evidence of “Wheeler & Murdoch” can be found on YouTube, and Seattle’s iconic Scarecrow Video doesn’t have it, either (not even on VHS).

That’s a shame because, as theatrical-released movies such as “Cinderella Liberty” demonstrate, there’s nothing that quite compares to how Seattle looks on 35 mm motion picture film, especially during the gritty years of the early 1970s.

A check with the Seattle Municipal Archives shows they have no copies of any filming permits or other official paperwork that would have been associated with the local part of the production.

Meanwhile, the two stars Jack Warden and Christopher Stone have both since passed away.

Reached by email, Stone’s widow Dee Wallace Stone, whom he married in 1980, wrote, “I so wish I could help, but I do not recall him ever speaking about that project! Maybe it was pre-Dee.”

Fortunately, KIRO Newsradio discovered that the actor who played one of the main supporting characters in “Wheeler & Murdoch” is retired and living in California with his wife.

Veteran actor Charles Cioffi, who that same Buffalo TV critic called the “one redeeming quality” of “Wheeler & Murdoch,” shared his recollections of briefly working on the pilot in Seattle more than 52 years ago.

“I enjoyed the views more than anything,” Cioffi said. “Looking across the lake and looking at that big hunk of mountain. That’s something I’ve never seen before, something that big. And downtown at the fish market, the Pike’s Market.”

“The thing that I remember the most about it was going out and having a good time with Jack Warden,” Cioffi continued. “He was such great company.”

Christopher Stone, Cioffi said, enjoyed visiting Seattle nightspots.

“Chris like to do that in the evening, because he was an attractive young man,” Cioffi said. “So the girls really liked him.”

As for the production itself, Charles Cioffi said most of what was shot in Seattle took place outside, or the “exteriors,” as they might say in the biz.

“I think they got some kind of a deal shooting there because Seattle didn’t have filming studios, so we had to shoot more or less almost all outdoors,” Cioffi said. “I think maybe we might have come back to shoot some indoor stuff at the Paramount Studios in California.”

When asked if the “Wheeler & Murdoch” storyline had specific ties to Seattle or if it was more generic and could have taken place anywhere, Cioffi said that in his recollection, it was more on the generic side. Cioffi can’t remember the plot and said he did not keep a copy of the script.

Upon hearing the full quote of what that Buffalo TV critic said about him, that “Wheeler & Murdoch” had “one redeeming quality, the classy work of Charles Cioffi as a hard-working Seattle police lieutenant,” Cioffi was clearly impressed.

“I never heard that before,” Cioffi said. “I like that.”

Charles Cioffi’s career was many decades long, and he appeared in several well-known films, such as “Shaft” and “Klute,” but he’s most proud of the serious stage acting he took part in, including a production of “Hamlet” with Sam Waterston at Lincoln Center in New York.

With those other more notable roles, where does the Seattle detective show “Wheeler & Murdoch” fit into the arc of Charles Cioffi’s career?

“It was at the very beginning of my film career, my television career,” Cioffi said. “I don’t think about it very much because it was just one of those jobs that I had to do, that’s all.”

Cioffi’s wife Anne was part of the conversation, and she reminded her husband about one additional distinctive part of Seattle that he enjoyed visiting during the production of “Wheeler & Murdoch.”

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“Didn’t you buy something at Eddie Bauer’s?” Anne Cioffi asked. “A brown jacket?”

“Eddie Bauer’s wasn’t in Seattle, was it?” Charles Cioffi asked.

When told that yes, Eddie Bauer was indeed founded in Seattle, Cioffi fondly recalled shopping there back in November 1971.

“Yeah, ok. Well, Yeah, I bought a lot of stuff at Eddie Bauer,” Cioffi recalled. “Camping stuff for me and my two sons.”

If you have any personal insights or first-hand memories about “Wheeler & Murdoch,” please email me via my contact info below.

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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