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.

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

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

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

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

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

More from Feliks Banel: Remembering how Boeing helped bring The Beatles to America for their first-ever visit

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

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

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

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

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

All Over The Map: Few clues in mysterious disappearance of ‘Wheeler & Murdoch’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Uh-oh. Here’s one we missed.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

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

ORIGINAL STORY:

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

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

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

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

Another Washington project: Grassroots preservation campaign saves Parkland School

Volunteers take issue with Resolution 1685

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunate reality: Funding has been forfeited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the process goes from here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

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

Original story: Published April 13, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Feliks Banel (@FeliksBanel) April 13, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

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

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

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

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

More from Feliks Banel: The game-changing Boeing 707 jet debuted 70 years ago

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

Planning a trip north

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johnston didn’t think that was a good idea.

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

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

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

‘It was black’

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

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

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

Still, they kept driving.

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

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

‘Vancouver. Vancouver. This is it!’

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

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

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

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

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

‘What we thought was stable was not at all’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the gladly accepted donations from the Kirkland cemetery will go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More fundraising to be done

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parkland Denny’s runs donation promotion

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

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

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

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

Security? Check.

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

Roofing? Check.

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

Floor coverings? Check.

Next steps for Parkland School

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

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

Possible tenants? Check.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Vancouver’s burial spot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is the captain buried in Petersham?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yearly Captain Vancouver event is happening soon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian city honors its namesake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former neighbor shares origin of mystery cottage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirkland once neighbored a city called Houghton

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future of the mystery cottage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a developing story, check back for updates

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

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

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

Box The Space Needle Came In

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

Darth Vader Building

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

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

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

Sinking Ship

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

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

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

 Ban Roll-On Building

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

Twin Toasters or just The Toasters

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

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

Washer and Dryer

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

Seattle Municipal Tower and Rainier Tower

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

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

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

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

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“Lakes of Washington” is a two-volume set of books published by the State of Washington through an agency that no longer exists called the Department of Conservation. There’s one volume for west of the Cascades, first published in 1961, and one for the east, originally issued in 1964. There are multiple editions issued in later years with revisions and changes to basic cover art. The book has gone through multiple bindings, including hardback and paperback.

At least one example, the 1961 first edition of Volume I for lakes west of the mountains, was issued in a green leatherette cover featuring gold-embossed lettering and matching state seal.

Inside all editions of “Lakes of Washington” are a ton of beautiful aerial photographs, rare maps and exhaustive vital statistics for thousands of Washington lakes – listing things like location, acreage and general descriptions.

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Author and local legend Ernest Wolcott

“Lakes of Washington” is not an uncommon sight on the shelves of used bookstores in the northwest for years, but little, apparently, has ever been published about its origins. Some digging in newspaper archives revealed author Ernest E. Wolcott spent about 40 years as a civilian gathering information about Washington lakes because he loved to fish before he was hired by the State of Washington in the 1950s to translate all he’d compiled into an accessible format. Wolcott donated to the effort all the research materials he had assembled as an angler going back to the 1920s.

Along with competing in and winning a number of fishing derbies, by all accounts, Ernest Wolcott led an action-packed life throughout much of the first three-quarters of the 20th century.

Ernest E. Wolcott was born in Kansas in the 1890s and came to Washington as a teenager. As a young man, he became a maritime radio operator and was reportedly working in that capacity aboard a passenger liner called the SS Governor when it sank off Port Townsend in 1921. After joining the U.S. Navy sometime in the 1920s, Wolcott organized civilian emergency preparedness in the 1930s in Seattle by recruiting and managing a network of hams — amateur radio operators. He later had his own radio shop in Seattle, and served in the Navy during World War II, retiring as a captain from the Naval Reserves in 1954. Ernest Wolcott died, reportedly on San Juan Island, in early 1977 at age 78.

KIRO Newsradio reached out to multiple state agencies to see if the “Lakes of Washington” books were still remembered by anyone with a hand in water quality, fisheries or conservation. With help from the patient and indulgent communications staff, an employee of the Department of Fish and Wildlife was located who had bought copies of both volumes on eBay years ago. At the Department of Ecology, a senior environmental scientist named Will Hobbs reported that he had “inherited” multiple copies of “Lakes of Washington” when he moved into a particular office a decade ago, where he found the books on a shelf.

Legacy of  the ‘Lakes of Washington’ books

“They’re pretty pristine, like they’ve sat on shelves for quite a while,” Hobbs told KIRO Newsradio earlier this week as he pulled one of the volumes from the shelf and examined it closely. “But there’s definitely some wear on the spine, (and) there’s usually a name crossed out, somebody else’s name.”

Hobbs continued, reading off two names of previous owners written inside the front cover.

“So it’s passed through at least three people’s hands,” Hobbs continued.

While Hobbs said he doesn’t consult “Lakes of Washington” on a regular basis, he does thumb through the dusty volumes on occasion. And he said the content within is still relevant, particularly the specialized maps that help scientists like him figure out where to collect core samples – from the deepest point – to understand the history of a particular lake.

“The material that’s contained within them, you know, it’s certainly still in use within our agency and within other agencies, too,” Hobbs said. “And in particular, the maps that are compiled – the bathymetric maps, the depth profiles of the lakes – are particularly useful.”

Bathymetric maps, Hobbs said, provided a distinctive understanding of the contours that are hidden below the waves of any body of water.

“It’s like an upside down topographic map right tells you tells you where the deep parts of the lake are and where the shallow parts are,” Hobbs said. “And in the old maps that are contained in these books, it’s all usually in 10-foot contours, so it gives you a great sense of the shape of the basin underlying the water surface.”

Sure enough, turning to page 170 of Volume I revealed a bathymetric map of Langlois Lake near Carnation in the Snoqualmie Valley, where many locals have fished, and where a Department of Fish and Wildlife boat launch and access point has been open to the public for decades. The map in Wolcott’s old book shows what many might find surprising: at its deepest point, the bottom of Langlois Lake is nearly 100 feet below the surface.

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Hobbs said that many of the surveys required to produce the bathymetric maps in “Lakes of Washington” date to the 1940s, an era when gathering the required data was laborious and time intensive – likely using a small boat, and a weighted line which had to be dropped to the bottom in hundreds of spots to create a contoured profile of the lake bottom.

“They would have done transects, recorded them all and then drawn out the contour map,” Hobbs said, explaining that “a transect is a path from A to B. So it’s paddling across the lake, and then going a little farther and then paddling back across the lake, so they would have put as many lines across the lake as they could in the time that they had, recorded them, and then drawn it out.

“Of course, now we have all kinds of fancy equipment that we can send down autonomously, in some cases,” Hobbs said. “We zoom back and forth with a sound meter and get depth [data], and then we can map out the lake.”

Will Hobbs is a scientist focused on the microscopic world within the water and the core samples of Washington lakes, but he also clearly appreciates the scope and scale of what author Ernest Wolcott accomplished with these now nearly forgotten books.

Does perusing “Lakes of Washington” give Hobbs any sense of what “Ernie” (as Wolcott was known to his friends, and how he signed at least one copy of volume one) was like as a person?

“My first impression was that Ernie was a particularly meticulous personality,” Hobbs said. “I mean, you don’t compile something like this unless you’re really interested in the details of a lot of things, [so] that would be my first impression.

“To keep it going, too,” Hobbs continued. “I would think that he’s probably a stubborn person.”

Stubborn in a good way?

“Maybe I should change that,” Hobbs reconsidered. “We’ll call it dedication, dedication to the work.”

Ernest Wolcott’s descendants

Tracking down the family members of Ernest Wolcott was tricky. While Wolcott did have at least one son, he does not appear at this time to have any living direct descendants. Thanks to help from aviation and military historian Lee Corbin, KIRO Newsradio was able to connect with a woman from Hillsboro, Oregon named Shannon Walcott Cluphf whose grandfather was Ernest Wolcott’s brother (and who changed the spelling of his surname from “Wolcott” to “Walcott”).

“He was my father’s uncle,” Cluphf told KIRO Newsradio, referring to Ernest Wolcott. “I don’t know much, but what I do know is that he and my grandfather, who was Wallace Walcott, used to fish together within the Puget Sound and actually logged as well.”

As for changing the surname spelling from “Wolcott” to “Walcott,” Cluphf said she was told by her father that his father (her grandfather), “never liked the sound of ‘Wolcott,’ so he wanted ‘Walcott.'”

Cluphf also said her grandfather and her grandfather’s brother – again, that’s author Ernest Wolcott – had a falling out in the distant past.

“I think that there was a separation at some point, and my dad didn’t know much about it or what happened,” Cluphf said. “I remember him telling me that there was there was a separation. The cousins stayed close, but the uncles, his dad and his uncle, didn’t really stay close.”

Ernest Wolcott died before Shannon Walcott Cluphf was born, and her grandfather Wallace Wolcott also died decades ago. So when Shannon’s father died in 2016, it stirred up some deep emotions.

“When my dad died, I kind of had that moment of being like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m the last of the lineage and you know, what is there to really show for it?” Cluphf said. “I’m proud of my dad, I’m proud of my grandfather, but like, who’s going to know us?”

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So, when a radio station from Seattle called to tell her about “Lakes of Washington” and to ask her questions about Ernest Wolcott, it came as news to Shannon Walcott Cluphf. It also made her feel pretty good to learn more about her Great Uncle Ernie and about his previously unknown-to-her legacy.

“I’ve heard of Uncle Ernie before, I just didn’t realize that he did all this amazing stuff and wrote books,” Cluphf said. “And I mean, that’s incredible to hear. And, if my dad were around, he would just be tickled pink. He would just be so happy to hear this.”

KIRO Newsradio will be sharing with Shannon Walcott Cluphf copies of the documents and newspaper clippings that were found as part of the research for this story.

And though Ernest Wolcott is not Will Hobbs’ “Great Uncle Ernie,” it said something about Wolcott’s long-ago masterpiece that a modern-day scientist can also appreciate “Lakes of Washington,” too.

Hobbs said that the federal Environmental Protection Administration conducted a national survey of lakes every five years, but he said it’s rare to have as grand and comprehensive an effort as what Ernest Wolcott did over decades of essentially volunteer work more than 60 years ago.

When it comes to monitoring and studying the natural environment, is this “Spirit of Ernie” – the meticulousness, the stubbornness, the dedication to the work – something worth resurrecting in 2024?

“I think so, yeah,” Hobbs said. “We all need to harness our ‘Inner Wolcott.'”

If you can’t find a hard copy of either volume of “Lakes of Washington,” Will Hobbs provided an update on Thursday to say that the entire contents are available online, with separate links for Volume I and for Volume II, as well as an additional link to an online database of other bathymetric maps of Washington lakes.

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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There’s some good-natured historical debate about the specific moment when the last passenger train rolled through what’s now an assortment of urban areas and dense suburbs, but a handful of local rail historians consulted by KIRO Newsradio agree it was sometime on or around July 19, 1922.

Rail service in those years came via a Northern Pacific steam train that went from King Street Station in Seattle to North Bend in the Cascade foothills. From downtown Seattle, the route went south to Black River Junction, or roughly where Interstate 405 (I-405) and Interstate 5 (I-5) now intersect. From there, the route went north on the east side of Lake Washington through Renton, Wilburton, Kirkland and Woodinville.

The stretch of tracks from Black River Junction to Woodinville was completed in 1905 and was called the Lake Washington Belt Line. The line was in use for freight until 2008, and the old “Spirit of Washington Dinner Train” traveled regularly from Renton to the winery in Woodinville between 1992 and 2007. Much of that route is now (or will eventually become part of) the bike and pedestrian path known as EasTrail.

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Eastside-based historians Kent Sullivan and Matthew McCauley have been researching the old Belt Line for years, and have published much of their writings on the website Kirkland History.

Sullivan told KIRO Newsradio that the passenger trains on the Belt Line consisted of a single steam locomotive with only a handful of passenger coaches, with perhaps a baggage or a combined baggage and mail car.

Sullivan said there were formal passenger depots where passenger trains would stop at Renton, at Wilburton – which would have been just north of the giant trestle across from what’s now downtown Bellevue – and at Kirkland and Woodinville.

“And then there’s a type of stop that they call a ‘flag stop,'” Sullivan said. “Meaning there might be a little platform or maybe not, but at least there’d be a little station sign, and you literally could wave [with your hands], or if you had a flag, you could wave a flag, and they would stop for you.”

“Things were very quaint in those days, you know,” Sullivan said.

Rail historian David Sprau went to work for the Northern Pacific in 1960. He’s retired and lives in Oregon now, but he remains one of the most knowledgeable Northwest rail historians who also happens to have decades of on-the-job Northwest railroad experience.

By looking at old Northern Pacific employee timetables, Sprau calculated that it took about one hour and 10 minutes to get from King Street Station to Woodinville. The ticket price, Sprau estimated, might have been as little as 25 cents when service ended in 1922.

Kent Sullivan said that the cancellation of the passenger service likely came about as a result of a number of societal and economic factors. One major factor is that by 1922, automobiles had become affordable for much of the middle class, and were becoming essential in rural and agricultural areas like much of the Eastside was in the early 20th century.

And in 1905, rail service from Seattle to North Bend had, essentially, penciled out business-wise for the Northern Pacific. But that had changed by 1922.

“I think it was a pretty good value early on, but then the equation kind of flipped,” Sullivan said.

Other factors include the prevalence of regular car ferry service across Lake Washington, and the fact that the Lake Washington Ship Canal and Ballard locks had connected freshwater Lake Washington to saltwater Puget Sound by 1917.

However, the main reason that it all ground to a halt in July 1922, according to David Sprau, was a strike by maintenance shop workers against the railroads that forced major cutbacks in staffing, which led to the suspension of several passenger routes.

“That put a dent in railroad operations all over the country,” Sprau told KIRO Newsradio. “And one of the things that, consequent to the strike, was [the strikers] didn’t shut the railroads down like they were trying to do, but they did make operations real difficult.”

“And the railroads both retaliated and, to some extent, had no choice except to cut back service because they just didn’t have the personnel to provide the kind of service that they had been providing before,” Sprau continued.

“There were just too many people not showing up for work because they were on strike,” Sprau said.

Kent Sullivan says that while July 1922 may have marked the end of regular passenger service on the Eastside, those tracks old Lake Washington Belt Line tracks did carry passenger trains on several isolated occasions in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

In 1947 and 1948, Sullivan stated special excursion trains ran between the old Kirkland depot and what’s now the Washington State Fair in Puyallup.

“Kirkland was the [only] open depot (on the Belt Line),” Sullivan said, so “people have memories of getting on and off the train there.” That depot was located east of the tracks at Kirkland Avenue where it intersects with Railroad Avenue.

“We’d love more info” about those fair trains, Sullivan said, particularly if people have memories or photos to share.

In the 1950s and 1960s, special excursion trains using vintage equipment such as steam locomotives and old passenger coaches, were often offered on Saturdays and Sundays from Seattle to North Bend via the Belt Line, Sullivan says. Those trains, often known generically as “Casey Jones” excursions, were no longer offered once Burlington Northern was created – and Northern Pacific went away – as part of a major corporate merger in 1970.

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On a much darker note, Loita Hawkinson of the Kirkland Heritage Society told KIRO Newsradio that the depot in Kirkland was used on a single occasion to embark passengers on May 20, 1942.

It was that day when Japanese-Americans living on the east side of Lake Washington were ordered by the U.S. government to report to the Kirkland depot to be forced onto passenger cars and taken to an “assembly center” called Pinedale, which is near Fresno, California. From there, these U.S. citizens were taken to incarceration camps located in inland areas throughout the West and held there throughout World War II.

“Most came from Bellevue, [but] Kirkland had one large family,” Hawkinson wrote in an email Thursday. “They left from Kirkland [and] there is a historic marker at the site of the Kirkland station” along what’s now the trail (known in Kirkland as the Cross Kirkland Corridor), Hawkinson wrote.

Frank Abe, one of the foremost historians of Japanese-American incarceration, shared a copy of a U.S. government document from May 15, 1942, which ordered Japanese-Americans to gather in Kirkland.

“Civilian Exclusion Order 80 that shows the assembly point for those on the Eastside was 122 Kirkland Avenue,” Abe wrote in an email. Japanese-Americans “from Western Washington outside Seattle were removed to Pinedale, California and then Tule Lake, California, before it was a segregation center,” Abe wrote.

Loita Hawkinson shared an old newspaper clipping from a Kirkland paper, apparently from not long after May 15, 1942, which noted that the depot in Kirkland hadn’t been used for passengers for nearly 20 years.

And back in 1922, David Sprau said that getting rid of passenger service between Woodinville and North Bend via Redmond, Issaquah and Snoqualmie, turned out to be a problem for a subset of Northern Pacific customers.

“People in the woods and logging trades at that time had no alternate means of getting to and from work sites,” Sprau wrote in an email. “Northern Pacific dealt with this by immediately issuing instructions that their daily local freight trains running between North Bend and Woodinville were permitted to carry ‘Adult Male Passengers.’ This was accomplished by either allowing seating in the caboose or when traffic was heavy, by assigning a coach to the train.”

“This arrangement continued until January 1928 when presumably enough jitney roads had been completed to permit automobile travel in this area,” Sprau continued.

Sprau also said that passenger service from Seattle did continue through Kenmore, Bothell and Woodinville for many years beyond 1922 by way of a train that traveled regularly between Seattle and Bellingham.

“Going north, it left Seattle in the morning, passed through Kenmore, stopped at Bothell and continued via Woodinville and Snohomish,” Sprau wrote. “Going south, it passed through Snohomish, made a stop at Bothell, and arrived at Seattle.”

“This service was not interrupted by the strike of ’22, and lasted longest of all Northern Pacific passenger trains in this area,” Sprau wrote. “Not being discontinued until summer of 1940.”

More on the Pacific Northwest Railroad Archive: Priceless archive keeps the history of Pacific Northwest trains running

When those Sound Transit trains start up on Saturday, April 27, they won’t be running on the old tracks of the Belt Line, but they will be riding the rails of more than a century of mostly-forgotten railroad history on the Eastside.

Special thanks for their enthusiastic and invaluable assistance to Frank Abe, Kurt Einar Armbruster, Gary Tarbox of the Pacific Northwest Railroad Archive, Loita Hawkinson, Matthew McCauley, David Sprau and Kent Sullivan.

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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This new book is “Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide” by writer and artist Taha Ebrahimi. It was officially released earlier this week by Sasquatch Books.

“Street trees” are trees that stand in the public right-of-way, mainly the parking strip between the street and the sidewalk. A street tree could also stand in someone’s private yard if the branches extend over the sidewalk or street—that makes it officially considered a “street tree,” too. Essentially, the trees in Ebrahimi’s book aren’t hidden away; they are very accessible for everyone to see, and often to do so from right up close on the sidewalk.

Ebrahimi’s approach to street trees is something we’ve run across before in these stories about local history: a passionate person compiles and interprets data to create order and communicate a sense of place. “Street Trees of Seattle” fits right in with the salesman who wrote histories of every single post office that ever existed in Washington, the artist who walks Seattle’s sidewalks searching out the esoteric and arcane, and the family in Oregon now in its third generation of compiling the origins of place names in that state.

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Best of all, the books and pamphlets that result from this approach aren’t just data; they tell a story and give you a guide to search out and see things and learn things for yourself. With Ebrahimi’s book, you’ll encounter settlement patterns of Seattle neighborhoods, trends in landscaping from eras past, and the innumerable ways individuals have personalized their homes and gardens over the years.

For example, said Ebrahimi, standing in a parking strip in northeast Seattle a few days ago, there’s something about Seattle trees that most people don’t know.

“Most of Seattle was clear cut” in the 19^th century,” Ebrahimi said. “And only 5% of our street trees are native to this region. So most of what you see everywhere is planted and brought from somewhere else, so many layers of history are behind the trees here.”

Ebrahimi, who works full-time for a data visualization company, was inspired to create her book by her lifelong love of trees and the discovery of what she describes as a “data set” created by the City of Seattle and dating back to the 1950s.

“When I found the publicly available data set from the city,” Ebrahimi said, describing information systematically compiled about Seattle’s trees by city staff and volunteers over the past 70-plus years, “it was fun finding out which ones were the widest trees and things like that.”

From the data, Ebrahimi could identify the locations of hundreds of interesting trees, including rare species, unusual species and exceptional examples of rare and common trees, such as the tallest or the widest.

“Tallest” is easy to understand, of course. But the notion of “widest,” said Ebrahimi, needs a little explaining.

“Anytime I meet a tree person, the first thing they ask me is, ‘What do you mean by widest?’” Ebrahimi explained. “Some people measure a tree by the drip line, like the ends of each branch. Some people measure a tree by the circumference of its trunk, but the standard way, apparently, is to measure the diameter.”

“So you get the circumference, you calculate the diameter, and you have to do it from 4.5 feet up from the ground, and that is called ‘Diameter at Breast Height,’” Ebrahimi continued. “And 4.5 feet is the standard breast height, and there’s even an acronym: DBH.”

More NW History: Historical commission hits pause on razing Everett’s Clark Park gazebo

Standing near the giant Wedgwood Rock on 28^th Avenue Northeast – which is a giant glacial erratic as big as a cottage – Ebrahimi pointed out what she describes as the “second widest Atlas Cedar in Council District Four.” One of the quirks of the data set is that they are organized by council district – which is perhaps yet another reason to be sentimental about the good old “at large” city council years.

“You can tell the Atlas Cedar by these short needles, and they’re in bushels along the branch,” Ebrahimi said, looking closely at the likely half-century or older tree. “You see that? Instead of coming out of the branch. And I see some male cones here, but they usually have these upright kinds of round cones. And I don’t see any in this tree right now.”

“Street Trees of Seattle” isn’t a catalog or a dry database printed out on paper. Ebrahimi has tracked down the backstories of a veritable forest of trees, and she’s drawn sketches of many of them. The book could be read from cover to cover, or it could be used to take a particular walking tour of a particular area, or it could just be dipped into to read about one particular tree.

On a whirlwind driving tour of northeast Seattle, Ebrahimi showed off the Atlas Cedar, and then a Monkey Puzzle Tree, and then a giant Oak Tree that overhangs an entire intersection. Down a little side street, Ebrahimi went in search of a Giant Sequoia she hadn’t yet seen in person.

To her surprise and delight, it turned out to be a Weeping Giant Sequoia.

“Oh my God, it’s so weird looking,” Ebrahimi exclaimed as she pulled her car into a parking spot. “It’s right here,” she continued, pointing. “Oh my God, it’s so cool. It looks like a Muppet!”

It’s no exaggeration to say that anticipation of Ebrahimi’s book has been building in recent weeks with many radio, TV and print/web stories. “Street Trees of Seattle” seems to have arrived at just the right moment.

It’s also no exaggeration to say that trees have been in the news a lot lately around here. The confusing Seattle City Council tree ordinance, people protesting to protect trees from construction projects, and the unfortunate removal of the old cherry trees at Pike Place Market last year are just a few of the recent stories. Stories about threatened trees clearly touch a nerve for many people around Seattle.

All Over the Map: Boeing slogan – if it’s not history, it’s a mystery

Ebrahimi says that from all that she can tell, people absolutely love trees in Seattle.

However, she also says we’re not really seeing the big picture – maybe not seeing the “forest” of important issues related directly to trees and not focusing as much as we should on taking care of trees in Seattle.

Why? Because they take care of us.

“The mental health well-being benefits that they found are really, really amazing,” Ebrahimi said. They say that being within 320 feet of a tree gives you a better life expectancy and a lower chance of being prescribed antidepressants. And there are just so many studies about it; it’s overwhelming.”

Trees take decades to mature and provide maximum benefits, such as the canopy of leaves that can help reduce air temperature in summer by as much as 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit, says Ebrahimi. Replacing one mature tree with several young trees doesn’t provide the same benefit for years and years.

“So if you imagine all these benefits, we’re not calculating the cost of those benefits,” Ebrahimi continued. “When we’re thinking about trees, we’re thinking of them as these things that are easily replaceable.”

This is why even the “second widest Atlas Cedar in Council District Four” is worth getting to know and fully appreciate.

The debut of “Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide” will be celebrated with an author event on Wednesday, April 17 at 7:00 p.m. at Elliott Bay Book Company, and a series of additional events featuring Ebrahimi that will take place over the next several months.

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

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

As KIRO Newsradio first reported earlier this week, Seattle Parks and Recreation in March removed a rare old Cold War air raid siren from Northacres Park near the Northgate neighborhood, and it ended up at a private business called Binford Metals in Kent.

Seattle Parks told KIRO Newsradio they had offered the siren to two museums who both declined. As it turned out, those offers were made roughly five years ago, and one of the two museums – the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle – told KIRO Newsradio earlier this week that they never got their questions about the siren answered, and thus never said “no” to the offer of the siren.

On Wednesday, KIRO Newsradio learned that the other museum Seattle Parks contacted roughly five years ago is the Veteran’s Memorial Museum in Chehalis. Director Chip Duncan says he was told by Seattle Parks the museum would have to pay all removal costs, which is why Duncan’s museum did officially say “no” to Seattle Parks’ offer.

Earlier coverage: City of Seattle sends Cold War artifact to the dump

In an email to Seattle Parks’ media relations team Wednesday, KIRO Newsradio asked how much they paid contractor Ascendant Demolition to remove the siren and tower. As of Friday morning, that email remains unanswered.

The amount Seattle Parks paid is an important point. According to Duncan, if Seattle Parks had paid for the removal, that might have meant the Veterans Museum saying “yes” to the siren donation.

As reported Wednesday, a Seattle high school student named Nathan Veress was hoping that Dave Binford, owner Binford Metals, would be willing to donate the siren to a nonprofit museum.

Veress, a junior at Seattle’s Bishop Blanchet High School, says he would happily pound the pavement to find a museum to officially take possession, and he would gladly raise the money required to perform a museum-quality full restoration to bring the siren back to its original appearance, and to make it fully operational. Veress did exactly this in 2023 with a smaller World War II siren from Seattle City Light.

Late Thursday, the 17-year-old reached Dave Binford by phone. Veress was hoping to arrange a visit this weekend to see the siren in person, and to discuss his hopes of finding a museum partner.

“I just pretty much asked him, ‘Hey, are you, like, interested in possibly donating it to a museum?'” Veress told KIRO Newsradio Thursday evening as he described his conversation with Dave Binford. “He was pretty much just like, ‘Not really … We have an extra, like, exact Hemi engine sitting around.’ They’re gonna throw that in and I think they think it’s gonna work after that.”

“And then they’re gonna use it at their, like, car events,” Veress said, sounding somewhat resigned.

More from Feliks Banel: Local TV legend ‘Brakeman Bill’ McLain dies at age 96

How did this brief conversation with Dave Binford make the Blanchet 11th grader feel?

“I was just a little disappointed, you know,” Veress admitted. “I had some hope that it would have ended up in in a museum or something, you know. It’s just kind of how the how the cookie crumbles, I guess.”

KIRO Newsradio also spoke with Dave Binford late Thursday evening. He confirmed he is hanging onto the siren and that he doesn’t want it to go to a museum. Binford says he’ll restore it himself and will use it there for the events and car shows they hold at what they call Binford Metals’ “Field of Dreams.”

It’s hard to blame Dave Binford for hanging on to a priceless treasure. He was given a very cool artifact for free – courtesy of Ascendant Demolition – that as recently as a month ago belonged to the people of the City of Seattle. And there appears to be nothing legally compelling him to hand it over to anyone.

If any entity is to blame for this valuable artifact slipping out of public ownership and ending up at a private business, it’s Seattle Parks. They appear to have not done an appropriate level of due diligence by not following through to find a public home for it at MOHAI or some other nonprofit cultural institution. With Veress’ expert guidance and a nonprofit partner, the siren could have been restored and eventually displayed somewhere along with other artifacts to interpret Seattle’s rich Cold War history.

MyNorthwest history: When Washington and Oregon used vinyl records to attract tourists

Earlier this week, KIRO Newsradio spoke with Rachel Schulkin, spokesperson for Seattle Parks & Recreation. When asked if they would be willing to try to help get the siren back from Binford Metals and get it donated somewhere instead, Schulkin said, essentially, the siren and tower were a safety hazard because of structural concerns and lead paint, and now that it has been removed from Northacres Park, it’s no longer any concern of Seattle Parks & Recreation.

Meanwhile, Veress says he hasn’t completely given up. Where would he rate how he feels on a scale of zero to 10, with zero being “hopeless” and 10 being “very optimistic?”

“I’m feeling like a solid four or five, you know,” Veress said. “I think (there are still) options to work with them. At the same time, I understand if they want to, you know, do their thing.”

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

For some kids – not to mention any names – summer vacation used to mean sitting around and watching a lot of TV. And one of the things that kids around here used to watch – again, not to mention any names – was The Brakeman Bill Show on Channel 11.

With unfounded rumors swirling on social media earlier this week, KIRO Radio caught up with the Brakeman, who’s still chuggin’ along well into his nineties.

Bill McLain lives in University Place near Tacoma. He’ll be turning 94 in a few weeks and he’s still married to Jean, his high school sweetheart from their time together at Tacoma’s Lincoln High School in the early 1940s.

McLain is better known as Brakeman Bill, host of The Brakeman Bill Show on Channel 11 – which was originally known as KTNT (for The News Tribune, the newspaper also owned by the Baker family) and became KSTW — for 20 years, from 1955 to 1975. On the daily live afternoon program, he showed cartoons, drew funny sketches, and engaged in witty repartee with a sock puppet named Crazy Donkey. This hosiery Equus asinus supplied the show with a kind of kinetic kookiness, courtesy of the man whose hand was in the sock and who did the ad lib voicing: the energetic and imaginative Warren Reid.

Brakeman Bill wore socks, too, of course, but he was better known for his train-inspired wardrobe of overalls and striped railroad hat. Wearing this uniform on the Tacoma set of the show, Bill operated a model train called the Cartoon Special.

Nearly 50 years after the Cartoon Special tooted its whistle for the last time and the show left the air, Bill McLain still has trainloads of devoted fans. Even in his street clothes, he’d often get recognized, beginning back in the 1950s.

“I still do,” McLain told KIRO Radio. “Every once in a while, I’ll get a double take or a triple take. [They’ll say], ‘He looks familiar.’ Once in a great while, someone will say, ‘Aren’t you Brakeman Bill?’ And I say, ‘Yes.’”

Appearing live on TV every afternoon, especially from the 1950s to the 1970s, created a special relationship between Brakeman Bill and many of his young viewers.

“My audience, a great deal of them, were latchkey kids,” McLain said. “They came home from school, and there was nobody there. So, they went and turned the TV on and there I was. I had the afternoon show, JP [Patches] had the morning show.”

“I was their surrogate parent,” he added.

This “surrogate parent” effect was something that the late Chris Wedes – who played JP Patches on KIRO TV from 1958 to 1981 – also experienced, and often got choked up about when discussing the effect with pesky local historians. It’s not an overstatement or an exaggeration to say that in the years before syndicated cartoons and other national programming displaced guys like Brakeman Bill and JP Patches, there was something special for many kids watching local hosts on local TV and then being able to meet those hosts in real life, too.

Whatever the reason, the effect was real and it was strong, and it had staying power. It’s translated into a lot of love between local hosts and local fans that’s still manifesting for both parties decades and decades after the shows went off the air.

“I was at the barber shop and one gal came up to me and started crying,” McLain said. “And she said, ‘You don’t realize how much you meant to me and other kids like me. We were so alone and all we had was you.’”

“When I went to pay for it, … she’d bought my haircut,” he said, clearly moved by the gesture.

“And that was not unusual,” McLain continued. “A lot of times, people give me big hugs and all. One of my fan clubs was a bunch of loggers up in Morton. Figure that one out,” McLain said, chuckling.

“Frat houses at the universities had Brakeman Bill fan clubs,” he said. “Different era.”

Much of Bill McLain’s life and career has unfolded in “different eras” – from growing up with modest means on McKinley Hill in Tacoma during the Great Depression to serving in the Navy in the Pacific in the final months of World War II, and then working in morning radio and sportscasting in Ellensburg and Yakima in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to coming home to Tacoma in his late twenties to work for KTNT – as a camera operator for the TV station and sports director for the radio station.

Camera operator McLain became Brakeman Bill only after the program’s original host – a character known as Engineer Walt, played by future media historian and Puget Sounds author Dave Richardson – came down with a debilitating case of polio.

The Tacoma show, with its railroad theme and model train set, was based on a similar program in Los Angeles that had quickly become a moneymaker. With the first wave of baby boomers in full bloom of their Eisenhower-era childhoods, there was money to be had selling live ads for stuff like Bosco chocolate syrup and Tree Top apple juice.

And then there was the wardrobe. Unlike JP Patches or even Gertrude (played by the late Bob Newman), Brakeman Bill didn’t have to put on clown makeup. His identity was that of working railroad guy, and McLain still has at least one pair of overalls and one striped hat, though it’s been a while since he’s worn them out anywhere.

“I couldn’t remember, even,” McLain said. “It’s been so many years. I think the last time was when they dedicated a locomotive out in Fife — the last hurrah.”

The last hurrah for the TV show was even further in the past – way back on April 1, 1975 – or more than 46 years ago. And Brakeman Bill blames the show’s demise, at least partially, on, of all people, the beloved, beatific late public TV kids’ show host Fred Rogers.

“Well, I hate to say this, but I thought Mister Rogers was a wimp,” McLain said. “He just came across so soft. Not to knock him, but he was one of the guys that took me off the air. The PBS people decided that live entertainers like me, live hosts of kids’ shows who were selling bicycles on the air to kids that couldn’t afford a bike, and selling breakfast cereals that rot their teeth out, and toy commercials that poor kids couldn’t afford” had undue influence over those kids.

The belief was that guys like Brakeman Bill and JP Patches had too much influence over young minds. That is, when that “surrogate parent” promoted some toy or food product on his show, the kids in the audience took it as a command from their TV friend to buy, or to tell mom or dad to buy it for them.

That was “a bunch of hooey,” says Bill McLain. But, the private trade group for radio and TV, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), came under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission to do something about it on their own, or face new federal regulations.

“So the NAB passed a rule [Article X] [for] the broadcasters, and I could no longer do live commercials,” McLain said. “That was the end of my show.”

When those commercials went away because of changes to the NAB Code in 1973 – a change that people like Fred Rogers and others, such as the group Action for Children’s Television, had called for –  so did the revenue. That train, and that cash – and, this Brakeman – left the station.

After the show went off the air, Bill McLain transitioned to management, spending the next two decades or so as head of promotions for KSTW. But he continued making personal appearances as Brakeman Bill, including school fundraisers where he’d split ticket revenue with the particular PTSA, and several editions of the “Northwest TV Holiday Reunion” at MOHAI in the early 2000s.

Along with the PTSA fundraisers – and a fairly serious second career as an oil painter – Bill and wife Jean had at least one more surprising side hustle.

“A lot of people don’t know what I did for my vacations,” McLain said. “I taught dancing on cruise ships. I had an agent in Miami, Florida, and I liked to go for long [cruises], like 45 days, from San Francisco to Australia.”

His best step? The cha-cha, Bill McLain says (and his wife agrees).

Another more brilliant step was McLain’s savvy move to copyright the character of Brakeman Bill for himself – since the TV station owners had neglected to – which gave him more control over the TV program, and things like revenue from public appearances and vacation scheduling, than his contemporaries such as JP Patches and Gertrude had.

“Because I owned the copyright for the show,” McLain said, “I could turn it over to Crazy Donkey and Warren would do the show while I was gone.”

That is, Crazy Donkey – a puppet – would serve as fill-in host without Brakeman Bill or any other human help. Warren Reid, the voice and arm of Crazy Donkey, passed away in 1986.

There are at least two known authentic Crazy Donkey puppets. On the left is one that was donated to MOHAI by Warren Reid’s family; puppet shown in center and right belongs to private collector Tim Brown, and was acquired from the Reid family. (Photos courtesy MOHAI and Tim Brown)

At 93, Brakeman Bill still has a lot of control over many aspects of his life. But his wife Jean McLain did let KIRO Radio in on a little secret.

“You’re lucky that you called him [this afternoon],” Jean said, chuckling. “Because I had him out in the yard working and he hates yard work. All this time [he was talking with you], I had to do the yard work, and he got away with not doing it.”

Back in the 1990s, before he freed up his schedule for avoiding yard work, and when he was still promotions director at Channel 11, McLain was involved in the most recent attempt to produce a local kids’ program.

The show was called Ranger Charlie and Rosco, and it featured a raccoon puppet created and performed by Winslow Barger. The program lasted a few years and went through a few iterations. The final co-host, when the program had morphed into Rosco and Ronnie, was played by M.J. McDermott, who nowadays is a meteorologist for Q13.

Even if there was someone qualified to don the sock puppet, it’s not likely that local kids’ TV shows will ever be a “thing” again in the Puget Sound area or anywhere; the economics don’t really pencil out, and the audience has moved on to other more portable platforms. Latchkey kids everywhere are, so far in this century, tuning into apps that readily serve up millions of hours of on-demand content.

However, should those latchkey kids one day want to show their gratitude for the entertainment and for being kept company, they might have a hard time finding anyone connected to that on-demand content whose haircut they can pay for.

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

Follow @https://twitter.com/feliksbanel

Like many recent stories in Seattle area history revolving around large rusted artifacts, this is a twisted tale. There’s some bad news and then some good news, and then perhaps a chance for some better news in the near future.

KIRO Newsradio received a Facebook message on Monday from a history fan named Doug Pratt who lives in Elma but who grew up in the Houghton neighborhood of Kirkland. Pratt said that he had stumbled across a Reddit page that showed recent pictures of a giant Cold War-era air raid siren and tower being taken down and likely hauled away.

Sirens standing at the ready

Sirens like this were all over populated areas beginning in the early 1950s and were tested regularly – as often as once a week. They were standing at the ready in case the Soviet Union sent bombers to attack with nuclear weapons.

At first, Pratt believed the photos he found were of the air raid siren atop a tower on Phinney Ridge, adjacent to the Phinney Neighborhood Association in Seattle. That building – and the siren and tower – are well-known and beloved landmarks just north of the Woodland Park Zoo.

Then, Pratt figured out that the siren in the photos – incidentally, the same model and vintage as the siren still standing at Phinney Ridge – was actually at a place called Northacres Park. Northacres Park is owned by Seattle Parks & Recreation and is located at 130th and I-5, just north of Northgate. The tower and siren had stood there for more than 70 years, dating back to when the land was the property of Seattle Public Schools.

“I’m wondering what happened to it,” Pratt said in a phone interview on Monday, “because those things are worth money.”

The most valuable part of the siren, Pratt says, is the Chrysler V-8 “Hemi” engine that powers the compressor to pump air through the siren’s horns and create the distinctive and eerie sound that can carry for miles. Those engines have applications far beyond only air raid sirens, Pratt says.

“I’m wondering, too, did the City of Seattle, you know, were they able to sell it?” Pratt continued. “Or did they just haul it off to the scrap yard?”

“What happened to it?” Pratt said.

Priceless historical value

Pratt says that beyond the value of the “Hemi,” the air raid siren also has priceless historical value for its role in the Cold War. He remembers hearing a similar siren at Houghton City Hall – then a separate jurisdiction but nowadays part of Kirkland – that sounded regularly to alert volunteer firefighters and for air raid drills back in the 1950s.

Pratt was there, as a child, for the darkest days of the Cold War.

“I lived through it,” Pratt said. “I was there. I was one of them kids, ‘If the siren goes off, get underneath your desk, kiss your ass good bye'” – though that’s not exactly the words his elementary school teacher used, Pratt admits.

“It was back in them days back in the 50s, you know, and that was it,” Pratt said.

KIRO Newsradio reached out to Seattle Parks and Recreation on Monday morning. They wouldn’t agree to a phone interview, but through a series of emails, spokesperson Rachel Schulkin shared information about the fate of the siren and the tower.

Siren tower no longer safe

“The tower was removed starting on March 18 because it contained lead paint and [it was] not safe to be in the park (especially since it was aging and may soon become a fall hazard),” Schulkin wrote.

“Seattle Parks and Recreation reached out to several historic organizations to see if they wanted it, but they all declined,” Schulkin continued. “The motor is being restored by Binford Metals in Kent. Let me know if you have any other questions.”

We did have other questions, but we didn’t get substantive answers from Seattle Parks & Recreation for another 24 hours.

In the meantime, KIRO Newsradio called Binford Metals on Monday afternoon. Nobody we spoke to there had any idea about the siren or the tower.

More from Feliks Banel: Parkland School catalyzes neighbors to support South Sound community

As for the “several historic organizations” who were asked if they wanted the siren – Seattle Parks later said it was just two groups who were contacted, one of which was Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI).

So KIRO Newsradio checked with MOHAI.

A member of the collections staff there said MOHAI received an email offering them the siren about five years ago. At the time, MOHAI asked some clarifying questions (about the siren’s condition, and what it would take to move it) in an email back to Seattle Parks, but they say that Seattle Parks never responded to those questions. In fact, MOHAI says they are still interested in learning more about the siren.

As of late Tuesday, Rachel Schulkin is sticking by her claims that MOHAI was contacted about the siren and that they said they did not want it. At the very least, it appears that some kind of miscommunication may have taken place. The other organization Seattle Parks says they contacted about the siren is the Lewis County Historical Museum in Chehalis; on Wednesday morning, Jason Mattson, executive director there, said his group was not contacted, either.

Another organization not contacted by Seattle Parks is the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, which maintains an expansive collection that includes many large objects. Spokesperson Derek Nguyen there wrote in an email on Monday to KIRO Newsradio that the museum’s collections team “is open and receptive to speaking with them if they were to reach out.”

Zeroing in on the siren’s location

On Tuesday afternoon, Binford Metals, the salvage company in Kent, responded to KIRO Newsradio’s inquiries.

In a phone conversation, the employee, who didn’t want to give his name, told KIRO Newsradio that Rick Estes, owner of a company called Ascendent Demolition – who Seattle Parks reportedly hired to remove the siren and tower from Northacres Park – gave the siren (the motor and horns) free of charge to Dave Binford, owner of Binford Metals.

It appears that the remains of the tower itself – the legs and platform for the siren – were scrapped. This has not been confirmed, but the Binford Metals employee surmises that this is likely what happened.

However, that Chrysler V-8, with the siren horns still attached, is now reportedly on Binford Metals property in an area they called the “Field of Dreams” – which is their nickname for an outdoor collection of rusting trucks, farm implements and other items that might someday be restored, but that form a kind of organic display of oxidized metals.

MyNorthwest History: Historical commission hits pause on razing Everett’s Clark Park gazebo

The obvious hope now is that Dave Binford will find it in his heart to donate the siren and motor to MOHAI or some other local museum willing to accept it.

If a museum does now step forward, and if the siren does make its way from the “Field of Dreams to a historical exhibit on the Cold War, chances are 17-year old Nathan Veress will have had something to do with it.

KIRO Newsradio listeners might remember Veress, the Seattle high school student profiled in 2023 who’s an expert on these esoteric things.

As reported last year, Seattle City Light gave Veress a smaller World War II siren, which he then restored and donated to the Flying Heritage Museum at Paine Field.

KIRO Newsradio reached Nathan Veress late Tuesday. He was disappointed to learn that the siren from Northacres Park had been sent to the scrapyard because he’s had his eye on it for years and had hoped to one day lead an effort to restore it.

“I do believe this one at Northacres is probably in better condition” than the siren at Phinney Ridge because they haven’t removed the driveshaft or anything like that, so it’s still all there,” Veress said.

Efforts are beginning to restore the siren

Clearly, Veress hasn’t given up on his dream. He even says he’s willing to lead the charge now to restore this rare Cold War artifact and find a good home for it at a museum where it can be displayed and interpreted, provided Dave Binford is willing to let that happen.

“This siren itself is very rare and unique, so I feel there would be options where we could, just thinking ahead a little bit, where we can get funding and stuff for it,” Veress said excitedly. “I think we can find a museum to work with and create a good partnership that should help restore it and get it all good.”

Before speaking with Veress, KIRO Newsradio had asked the unnamed Binford Metals employee if Dave Binford would be amenable to some kind of arrangement.

During the conversation Tuesday, the employee was not able to make any promises but did not reject the possibility out of hand.

KIRO Newsradio also reached out late Tuesday to Seattle Parks & Recreation’s Rachel Schulkin and to the staff of Seattle City Council members Joy Hollingsworth and Sara Nelson (chair and co-chairs, respectively, of the Parks, Public Utilities and Technology Committee, which oversees the Parks & Recreation Department) to see if they would be willing to help facilitate a solution involving Nathan Veress.

One thing is very clear. There aren’t many 17-year-old World War II and Cold War air raid siren experts in the world, but it seems we’re lucky enough to have one right here in our own backyard with a track record of success.

“You don’t ever come across these sirens, ever. Not for sale, (not) available,” Veress said. “They’re either rusting or, like, in a museum, so you know when you’ve got a chance like this, you can’t really let it slip through your hands.”

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

The broadcast production honored with a nomination this year is a short feature is all about the beloved video store that has long been a fixture in Seattle. Located on Roosevelt Way in the University District, Scarecrow Video was founded as a for-profit business but instead became a non-profit organization a decade ago. Scarecrow has developed a national and international reputation for its massive collection, and become a hub for cinemaphiles around the Pacific Northwest.

“Seattle’s Legendary Scarecrow Video,” a short documentary, was written and produced for the Seattle Channel by Banel, KIRO Newsradio’s resident historian, with videography and editing by Chris Barnes. The Seattle Channel is a public TV station focused on culture, history, art and civic affairs in Seattle. Banel has been producing one or two pieces a year for the station for about the past decade, typically highlighting some aspect of Seattle history or pop culture.

More from Feliks: Parkland School catalyzes neighbors to support South Sound community

Banel was awarded an Emmy in 2023 for a short feature about the search for a long-missing military aircraft in the Cascades. The aircraft, with two U.S. Navy aviators aboard, took off from Sand Point Naval Air Station (now Magnuson Park), and disappeared. The mother of one of the aviators traveled to the Northwest from Tennessee each summer to look for her son for nearly 20 years.

Awards will be presented on June 1, 2024 at NATAS Northwest’s annual event.

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.

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.

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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.

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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

This grassroots group – the official name of the non-profit organization is Parkland Community Association – has secured about $700,000 in grants and other commitments toward a $2.8 million purchase price. By April 30, they need to raise $230,000 in cash as part of their purchase agreement with Pacific Lutheran University (PLU), current owner of Parkland School.

Parkland is in unincorporated Pierce County along State Route 7 (SR 7) on the way to Mount Rainier. Parkland School was built in 1908, with some significant later additions. It’s probably the oldest building in existence by a matter of decades that has the word “PARKLAND” built into its structure. The letters are right there in the concrete over the front door where it says “PARKLAND SCHOOL.”

It was a public school until about 40 years ago, when PLU purchased it from Franklin Pierce School District and then used it as a satellite of their campus, which is a block or so away. PLU and the community of Parkland were founded at essentially the same time in 1890.

As KIRO Newsradio reported nearly two years ago, PLU had been renting the building to other tenants in the past decade or so, but had crafted plans to demolish the school and sell the land to developers. But word got out, and the community coalesced around trying to save the school instead. A grassroots campaign came together, led by a few dozen people who live in Parkland, but who didn’t yet know each other.

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‘Total strangers’ try to save the Parkland School

Standing outside Parkland School in the sunshine on Tuesday, Gunnar Johnson, David Nelson and Wendy Freeman looked to be the spitting image of what you might find if you looked up “grassroots historic preservation group” in the dictionary.

“We are the roots of the grass, we are the sod beneath the roots,” Freeman joked. “We came together, 24 people sitting in the church foyer lobby. The first time we got together, we’d never met each other before – we were total strangers. We were all getting organized and figuring out what to do.”

That first meeting Freeman described was held across the street from Parkland School at Trinity Lutheran Church, and from which it was clear there was a shared passion.

“We’ve got to save the school and, holy cow, I would say that we’re probably the single most diverse group of people I’ve ever met in my life,” Freeman said, describing the similarities and difference within the group. “I don’t think we agree about anything. I mean, we don’t even agree about recipes.”

There is one key thing they all agree about, however.

“You know, we don’t agree about anything,” Freeman emphasized. “But we agree about the school.”

And what they agree about for Parkland School is that the historic structure could and should become exactly the community center that Parkland needs to house a variety of groups and services – and to give Parkland the “center of gravity” which everyone agrees it currently lacks.

David Nelson, who attended Parkland School more than 60 years ago and who recently moved back to Parkland, is sentimental about the building. But his feelings go far beyond mere sentimentality.

“It just brought the community together,” Nelson said. “Everybody knew each other back in the day in Parkland, and I think if they make it a community center now, it’ll bring it back to what it once was for everybody.”

“Now it’s kind of like strangers, everybody kind of hides in their house and everything,” Nelson continued. “Well, if you get a community center, get seniors in there, get youth in there, get in people from the community and (they’ll) become more friends than just acquaintances or strangers.”

This group of Parkland neighbors has accomplished so much in the past two years, including securing numerous grants and pledges of support, it’s easy to forget that one of the first things they did after battling with PLU over their development plans for Parkland School was to meet with PLU President Allan Belton. That ultimately led to negotiations and a deal whereby PLU agreed to withdraw their development plans and sell the building to the community group.

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One of the members at that key meeting with President Belton was 20-something PLU graduate Gunnar Johnson, who was there on the steps in the sunshine Tuesday.

Johnson says that working with PLU has been notably non-adversarial.

“From that first meeting, I could tell there was a willingness to cooperate,” Johnson said. “But maybe just not as clear a path forward, at least from PLU’s standpoint. But I’m really glad that we’ve come this far, even to the extension of the deadline.”

As Johnson points out, PLU has extended the deadline for the Parkland School boosters to come up with the $230,000 down payment, with the current deadline of April 30 now just a few weeks away.

“I think that speaks a lot to the agreeable nature of what we want and what PLU wants,” Johnson continues. “PLU wants to make sure this building goes to a group that’s going to use it and we want to be that group.”

A business plan for the creation of a community center

In addition to securing grants and pledges, the Parkland group has also been working on a business plan for creating a community center at Parkland School. This includes getting commitments from potential partners and tenants as they map out a future that serves Parkland. For any doubters who make think this preservation and development effort is about sentimentality, it’s clearly about more than just saving an old school that many people happen to still love.

As she spoke with KIRO Newsradio on Tuesday, Wendy Freeman named several community groups who’ve already agreed to take space in Parkland School, and local contractors willing to donate labor and materials to do necessary repairs such as re-roofing the building.

“These are people that are saying ‘Yeah, we want to be in the building we want to work,'” Freeman said.

And, Freeman says, demand for a place for Parkland residents to gather and to take part in year-round activities that improve quality of life is off the charts.

“When we talked to the community, the community was really concerned about health and wellness,” Freeman said. “They were very interested in recreation, we have the gym (inside the school). So if we have it open, it can be a recreation area for the kids.”

“They’re also very interested in youth and senior programs, they’ve said that a lot,” Freeman said. “So we’re trying to be respectful and have what the community is asking for.”

The key to that, Freeman says, are those educational and service groups, and public agencies, that have pledged to become tenants just as soon as Parkland School can reopen.

“Those are our partners,” Freeman said. “And those are people that are really interested in being tenants, so they would take a part of the building. This is 36,000 usable square feet.”

One challenge which anyone trying to create a new public amenity in Parkland must overcome at some point is the fact that Parkland is not a city, it’s unincorporated Pierce County. There’s no mayor or city council or community council – and thus no existing publicly-funded agency who could tap into revenue from taxes on Parkland businesses and residents in support of a community center.

Jani Hitchen is a Pierce County Council member whose district includes Parkland. She’s a PLU grad who took classes in Parkland School. She has been a big supporter of the efforts of the Parkland Community Association, and she has devoted a lot of time and attention to the project.

Council member Hitchen says Pierce County has pledged nearly $32,000 to the effort through a historic preservation grant, which she acknowledges is a drop in the bucket toward the $2.8 million total purchase price.

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What you can do to help save the Parkland School

Hitchen says she and her staff have beat the bushes for other funding sources.

“I truly I applaud the group that is doing this, and have stood on the street corner with them, showing up at rallies, (and) I’m going to El Toro with them,” Hitchen said, that last item a reference to a fundraiser coming up on Monday at El Toro Mexican Restaurant and Cantina’s Parkland location.

“It’s because I’ve walked that campus, I took classes in that in that school, worked with kids there and it really is a beautiful building,” Councilmember Hitchen continued. “It’s just one of those things where we haven’t been able to find the money available without strings attached or rules attached or timelines attached that work with where we are.”

To raise $230,000 by April 30, Parkland Community Association is inviting anyone willing to support their effort to make cash contributions of any amount via their website saveparklandschool.org.

Supporters are also invited to dine at El Toro Monday when a portion of all proceeds will be donated toward the $230,000 goal.

We know Hitchen will be there. Same goes for Freeman.

“The carne asada is to die for — it’s my favorite, I love it to death,” Freeman said. “And their green salsa? Yummy! I’m telling you right now, so good. And my husband loves the bacon-wrapped shrimp. It’s kind of an appetizer, but it’s got sauce, cheesy sauce, on it. Oh, he loves that so much.”

During an era when it feels like the people and initiatives that divide us get all the oxygen and all the donations, the people of Parkland Community Association are to be commended for having already accomplished so much. When many of us simply sit back and lament the divide, these diehards are working tirelessly every day to build bridges connecting neighbors and groups around a shared vision of place that everyone in Parkland can get behind.

If you care about grassroots historic preservation and building up our communities, consider making a donation at saveparklandschool.org or at least by placing an order of carne asada.

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