Like anything to do with history, this blog has a bit of a back story.
Earlier this year, I started volunteering for the Museum of History and Industry's Pub Trivia night. Basically, I would write up ten questions about local history each week and provide my friend Barry with the prizes to give away at one of his weekly trivia nights.
It was great - an excuse to both be pedantic about local history and nicely round out my personal local history library for good trivia material. It also got me more interested in what MOHAI was all about and it reinvigorated my own love for this area and its history, especially the less savory, less publicized parts. I mean, how many people knew about the sordid story of William Meredith until I wrote a question about it that they got wrong?
I had been toying with the idea of writing some sort of a book or travel guide based on Seattle and regional history, but like most projects, the first step was always the hardest. But while I was writing weekly trivia and mulling over projects that would incorporate my interest in lesser known regional history, I started talking to my mother about some of her recollections of growing up in Seattle.
As it turned out, my mom hung out with Barack Obama's mother one summer in middle school on Mercer Island. She had some great stories about Stanley Ann (as she was known then) and she'll show you the letter she got from the President thanking her for sending her recollections to him. I knew she had a bunch of other tales about Seattle, including seeing the Beatles fish from the Edgewater and living as a child with a single mother who managed a hotel on First Hill.
"Damn," I thought. "Someone should record this stuff. It's really interesting and shouldn't be forgotten."
That's when things started to come together. My wife and I took a trip back home to Eastern Washington for my mother's birthday and I sat down with my mom and recorded an hour of a few of her stories. And there it was - history happening at my parents' dinner table. I had always thought history lived in places like the Reading Room at Suzzallo library - musty books, stained glass windows, scholarly nooks. But it was, in fact, all over the place. And I knew a bunch of those places already!
Not long after the recording session, the missus and I took a trip to Centralia for our anniversary (super romantic, I know). She was in to the antiques and just getting out of town for a weekend together and I was really interested in seeing where the famous Centralia Massacre happened. We were both pretty stoked to stay at the Olympic Club hotel, which has a helluva history of its own (which they celebrate - even the ugly bits).
In Centralia, I saw the way local history was still a real and divisive issue in a small town. Some of the locals were supporters or (mostly spiritual) descendants of the Wobblies who protected their union hall and saw one of their own shot and hung from a city bridge without trial. Some were related to the American Legion veterans who marched on that Armistice Day in 1919 and saw their comrades and their leader shot down in the streets. If you pieced together the pieces of the story, you could figure out exactly where the march happened, where (according to some versions of the story) the first shots were fired, and where the Wobbly who ran away tried to ford the river and where he was later lynched.
For some reason, after seeing the exact locations those things happened and how much the consequences still hung over the town almost 100 years later, I couldn't help but see history everywhere around me in my adopted home town.
So here's how it all comes together. I decided to share some of the more interesting places I see history with everyone else. I hope my passion for keeping local history alive makes these things as interesting to the reader as it does to me. Some of the places, people, and events I come across aren't the big tourist draws or listed on those free fold up maps you see people with all over downtown in the summer. Some have just been forgotten or remembered by people no one pays much attention to.
I hope my view of local history is interesting, entertaining, or educational to the reader. Hell, I'll take one of the three. And I'm counting on you to keep me honest - check my facts, disagree with me, and keep the conversation going.
Next entry: The GAR Cemetery Park. Did you know such a place existed on Capitol Hill? I'll be there for Memorial Day and we'll talk about the Civil War and Seattle. See you next week!
