Road Trip III

After stopping to gawk at the Grand Canyon, we finished the last leg of Route 66. Then there was a detour south to Tijuana, where my parents spent most of a day looking for souvenirs. One of the souvenirs they got was this tourist shot of me posing on a burro painted to look like a zebra. We also got one of my Father on the burro wearing one of the other hats, but I've lost that one. My Mother was in a foul mood most of the time we were in Tijuana, complaining about how dirty it was, and how all the souvenirs were junk, but she cheered up during the taking of these pictures, because we looked so silly.

The planned ride up the coast was skipped in favor of a faster inland route. We were getting behind schedule. So I had to see the coastal highway another time. The highways we took eventually brought us to the Eastside and we approached Seattle by way of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge.

I'd been to Seattle before, over two years earlier, but I couldn't make much of it, because all I had to compare it with was my little neighborhood in Schofield Barracks, and the comparison was too distant to put anything in perspective.

But this time, I'd been across the country, passing through 15 states and hundreds of cities and towns, all fresh in my mind. There were a couple of things about Seattle now that stood out and struck me as pretty special.

For one, it is way cool that a nearly 4000 mile journey can end with a drive on a road on a lake that takes you into a tunnel which then spills you out into the guts of the city, to see the downtown skyline suddenly, as you emerge. That's a hell of a cool entrance.

For the other: At that time in history Seattle didn't look like any of the other cities and towns I'd recently been in. I couldn't place the difference at first. There was something about the overall impression that was unique, but it took a day or two to figure it out.

The houses were unalike! Every other town and city I'd been through had a more or less uniform look to it, at least neighborhood by neighborhood. There'd be block after block of nearly identical houses with nearly identical color schemes and architecture. In places in Seattle you might have four or five similar houses in a row, but there'd never be that degree of sameness throughout a neighborhood.

When I realized that was the difference I felt a great sense of relief. At least architecturally, Seattle was an escape from the culture of conformity that was the United States in the 1950s.

It was another couple of years before I noticed it, but Seattle was also pretty special in its sense of humor. Back then, before Century 21 and the '62 World's Fair, Seattleites didn't think of the idea of Seattle being "New York By and By" as a goal to grow by. It was just an in-joke. Nobody took the aspirations to greatness seriously. Or almost nobody.

The sense of humor even extended to its oppression. Today motorcycle cops in Seattle run you off the road and pin you to a wall before giving you a jaywalking ticket. In the 50s they enforced the jaywalking law with the same 50s sense of humor that got us Seafair Pirates.

One day when my parents had taken me downtown to do some shopping, it was either '55 or '58, we were standing at the southeast corner of 3rd & Pine waiting for the light to change, when a man next to us stepped off the curb prematurely. There was immediately a booming voice saying, "You in the blue and green flannel shirt! Yes, you! Step back on the curb, please! Don't make me send my buddies over to talk with you!" My Father pointed up in front of us. It was a policeman with a bullhorn cheerfully directing us pedestrians from a vantage point above the awning of the Bon Marché. All you had to do was listen to the happy policeman, and you didn't get a ticket. There was none of the gotcha games that the city is into now. They were after compliance, not collecting fines.

Another example of the great old-time spirit of Seattle turned up when I was finding this image of the Bon (4th & Pine corner) over at Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article tells how Josephine Brennan, cofounder of the Bon with her husband Edward Nordhoff, learned Chinook to better serve her Native American customers.

It was definitely in '55 when my Father drove us downtown for the first time in my memory. When going downtown we always followed the same route that the bus from Beacon Hill took in those days, north into the city on 4th Avenue. So we passed under the 4th & Yesler overpass and drove by the City Hall Park. The Park was then just like it is now except the trees were smaller. There were the same number of poor people lying on the grass. My Father pointed to them with pride. He said that in other cities, they wouldn't let their poor people lie down like that, but Seattleites were proud of the fact that they didn't punish people for being poor.

Whenever we passed poor people downtown, Dad would say, there goes some local color. "That's what makes Seattle great," he'd say, "anyone can be at home here." He wasn't the only one who had that attitude. Many strangers that I met on buses and in diners over the next ten years expressed the same feelings.

Of course, in the 50s, a lot of Seattleites were proud that, while Olympia was the official capital of the state, Seattle was the real de facto capital of the Soviet of Washington.

[Left: James Farley, Postmaster General for FDR, who is credited with coining the phrase, "There are forty-seven states in the Union, and the soviet of Washington." The same year, 1936, he also came up with the gem, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont."]