I haven't been to the top of the Space Needle since the 1962 Worlds Fair.
Until last week, I hadn't eaten inside the waterfront Ivar's since May 1958 when I was 8. My family had just seen my Seattle Times-employed father off for a business trip to the Twin Cities. He went by train.
I'll further admit that I've just gotten around to reading the best book ever written about Seattle. Even after the urging of friends, it's taken this long.
That book would be Murray Morgan's "Skid Road," in print since 1951. Edited by the estimable Malcolm Cowley for Viking Press, Morgan's one man's history became a regional bestseller. Frederick and Nelson bookstore once had to airfreight thousands of copies from Back East to keep up with the demand.
Morgan's prose is lively, funny, packed with detail and color. He raised the curtain on Seattle's burlesque history, and gave us the waterfront grittiness, the Victorian seediness of Pioneer Square, the weather, the (disappearing) forests, and most of all the people, from the saintly inebriate Doc Maynard to hard-driving labor leader Dave Beck.
Hiram Gill, elected mayor in 1910, took a back seat to no one on the local color scale.
"I don't pretend to be a good man," he declared after his swearing-in, "but I know the law and will enforce it."
Gill once characterized a political opponent as not having "the brains of an underfed microbe."
The new mayor appointed one Charles W. Wappenstein chief of police. According to a P-I reporter at the time, Wappenstein looked "like a somewhat disreputable walrus."
And so the good times--brothels and betting--began. Once upon a time this was one wide-open town.
Anna Louisa Strong is in the book, along with James J. Hill, Judge Burke, Colonel Alden Blethen, who wasn't a bona fide colonel but loved the title, the Mercer Girls, the Great Fire, the Wobblies, Alex Pantages, the Chinese expulsion (painful reading), the arrival of the steamer Portland with its legendary ton of gold, the unbelievably flaky Lieutenant Governor Vic Meyers and the wispy, indistinct figure of Chief Seattle.
There are surprises: One of the lawyers who tried, but failed, to keep Chief Leschi from the gallows was Bing Crosby's grandfather.
There are miscues: Morgan has the Seattle ferries leaving for the Olympic, rather than Kitsap, Peninsula. He puts Tacoma 20 miles south of Seattle instead of the official 32. He goes with "Harry" instead of Henry for Doc Smith.
Surprisingly, the University of Washington Press hasn't corrected these mistakes in subsequent editions.
But these are, in the end, forgivable in the face of Morgan's tactile prose.
Here he is on the Seattle waterfront, circa 1950: "To know Seattle is to know its waterfront...a good, honest, working waterfront with big gray warehouses and trim fishing boats and docks that smell of creosote, and sea gulls and tugs and seafood restaurants and beer joints and fish stores...The trucks and trains rattle past behind you, but there are sea sounds, too, the cries of the gulls, the creak of the lines as the moored ships gently move, the slap-slap of small waves against the sea walls, the splash of leaping salmon."
Despite the modern veneer, you can still find these things.
Seattle wasn't always a national media darling or "livable" or hip. Looking down on the shining, vertical city from Jefferson Park, it's stunning how recent it all is. You may have to focus to locate the Smith Tower.
When Morgan published his book, Seattle was the good, gray little city in the far corner. Poet Richard Hugo, who came of age in White Center in the 1930s and '40s and fished the Duwamish, remembered a "town not growing up/across the bay." Up on the Skagit Flats, La Conner was a place you could get away from it all decades before the flood of Getaway People.
As Morgan's book makes clear, all the old essentials, the elements that inspired the painters and writers, are still here: the harbor and snow cold mountains immune to the flux; the neighborhoods defined by hills and water; the city of new beginnings, last chances and still the swinging door to and from Alaska (try the Athenian bar in the Market at 8 a.m.); the winter sunsets burning down in the harbor windows.
Artists like Mark Tobey and Morris Graves didn't create here because others had done so before them. They were still operating from an original relationship with the raw materials of the place.
Almost overnight, it seemed, somewhere in the mid-1970s, Seattle entered a self-conscious phase, like the modern American in Paris who pulls out a pencil and notebook at the Duex Magots.
When Paul Schell opened the high-end Alexis Hotel in the early 1980s, he paid the First Avenue porn shops in the vicinity to spruce up their facades. The new Seattle, the gloss and talk of world class, was well under way.
Morgan's book reminds us Seattle wasn't always like this and that pockets of the old can still be found.
