tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54301453234363401022020-04-28T19:30:16.432-07:00The Cascadia CourierApplying history to present day events and ideasBob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.comBlogger104125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-85638947595608112272016-07-06T16:19:00.000-07:002016-07-20T10:39:44.621-07:00Saving Henry Moore: Art Dealer Linda Farris and a Great Victory For Seattle Public Art
The day the
Henry Moore sculpture “Vertebrae” was installed in the plaza of the Seattle
First National Bank Building, January 24, 1971, Linda Farris was busily
preparing her Pioneer Square gallery for its opening exhibition, scheduled that
May. She had decided to move her original gallery out of an attic in suburban Bellevue she had optimistically called “Gallery
East” and now had a Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-54811283321808869122016-01-19T10:27:00.000-08:002016-03-15T16:02:06.066-07:00Scott Calhoun's Hotel
Washington Hotel in 1903
UW Collections
Near the end of April, 1903, Scott Calhoun, a young son of a
pioneer physician, stood on the corner of what would someday become, in his judgment, the
corner of Second Avenue and Virginia Street. He was teasing out of his imagination what the new corner would look like and, for that matter, how the entrance to his new hotel would fit on the new cornerBob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com140tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-46708564769049417002016-01-04T15:07:00.000-08:002018-05-22T11:50:45.814-07:00A Little Strychnine
I went to
Colorado last year to look into the murder, in 1929, of my
grandmother’s brother. I heard about it 86 years after the fact when
someone working on a college writing project posted a message on the Ancestry
website seeking relatives of Elmer Stephenson.
The student was working on a story about her grandmother, a pioneer
woman from Colorado whose stepfather was Stephenson. He had Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-52812510005021744572015-06-11T13:22:00.000-07:002015-06-15T11:21:44.975-07:00Saying Goodbye to Brown: The Birth of UPS in Seattle and a Pioneer Driver Parks the Truck
The dividing line between good
society and bad society in old Seattle was Yesler Street, the road that
originally led down a steep hill to Seattle’s only industry, Henry Yesler’s
steam driven sawmill. Ox teams pulled
the forest that resided on that hill down to the mill, giving the street the
name Skid Road. Other logs bobbed about
in the water by the mill at high tide and sunk Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-52130480756916784182015-06-01T12:48:00.000-07:002015-06-01T12:48:40.112-07:00From horses to cars in Seattle
The
restoration of an older brick building on Western Avenue has me thinking about
the transition from horse transportation to automobile transportation in
Seattle. The building, five stories high,
originally opened in 1910 as a stable for horses, three hundred of them, in
fact, the biggest, most modern stable in town.
Better than anything else West of the Mississippi, the owners, V.
D. Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com59tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-90714938455501727262015-02-08T19:18:00.001-08:002018-03-08T13:08:00.548-08:00Fighting World War I in the woods of the Pacific Northwest
World War I in the Pacific Northwest saw the discovery of a new strategic war material, the Sitka Spruce, that supported a rapidly growing new war technology, the combat aircraft. Getting the spruce out of the forests while a rapidly growing and aggressive labor movement began to take charge of the woods was a major challenge. Added to a volatile labor issue was a fundamental change in how theBob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-50342675374667406372014-07-30T15:53:00.000-07:002014-07-30T15:53:04.421-07:00The arrival of the Great White Fleet in Seattle and a big party at the New Washington Hotel
Museum of History and Industry
The Washington Hotel began rising from its top of the hill location in 1890 and was originally known as the Denny Hotel, after one of the Seattle founders, Arthur Denny. Squabbling among the partners kept the hotel closed for its first three years and the Panic of 1893 did the rest, closing it for another decade. Finally, it was sold to James A. Moore whose Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-31744397005052503172014-07-30T15:52:00.004-07:002014-09-08T11:35:29.908-07:00Seafair's older uncle, Potlatch
When I lived in the Leschi neighborhood of Seattle, a hillside overlooking the middle part of Lake Washington, I would watch the boat traffic streaming away from the southern part of the lake following the Seafair hydroplane races, the crowning event of Seattle’s 72 year old summer festival. Though I knew there would be lots more good weather in front of us, actually the very best Northwest Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-67672880615050185672014-06-23T11:48:00.002-07:002014-06-24T17:34:16.154-07:00Washington Hall and the beginning of Seattle's melting pot
The Squire
Park neighborhood has one of those names you’d think was given by a savvy
developer hoping to communicate open space and the good life. In fact, however, it
was named after Watson C. Squire, a respected Territorial Governor of Washington
and a United States Senator after statehood.
Squire bought the land from the original Carson Boren land claim and
filed a plat in 1890, Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-26201315165163648472014-04-27T17:28:00.000-07:002017-04-18T10:16:33.483-07:00My friend and a friend of his named Irma. World War Two Medicine and the Hollywood crowd in Palm Springs.
Pharmacist Mate Patch
It started with a lunch conversation about World War II with an old friend, then got more complicated with a trip down to Palm Springs to duck out of the rain. While there, a martini and steak at a place from the twenties called Melvyn’s, led to thinking about early golf courses in the desert and that turned into golf at a place that could be a museum. That's why the Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-5382732658971396702014-03-16T15:37:00.000-07:002015-07-08T10:17:35.465-07:00A tough luck building comes back in Pioneer Square
The cool thing about historic preservation is that the act
of renovating buildings releases all the stories closed up in them. As people start tearing away the exterior and
interior layers covering all the supposed blemishes, the spirits of the buildings rise from the now uncovered
spaces, finding their way to permitting counters, historic preservation bureaucrats, tax
lawyers, the real Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-38889420965688134642014-02-06T18:29:00.001-08:002017-08-15T10:41:44.286-07:00You bet it was a hard trip. The Hampson family goes to Velasco, Texas from Colorado.
In 1894, my great grandfather read about a big federal project planned for
Thomas Jefferson Hampson
at about 40 years
Velasco, Texas, a dredging and construction project that called out loudly to him. He decided to get out of the mining business high up in the Rocky Mountains where he had barely made a living and into the tugboat captain business in the Gulf of Mexico where he made some Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-80278384906858738022014-01-21T10:24:00.000-08:002015-02-02T09:36:50.360-08:00The Journey of Johsel and Mineko Namkung
I’ve been thinking
of the amazing life of Johsel Namkung, one of the Northwest’s true renaissance
men, but who is best known before he died, at 94, last July, as one of the world’s great nature
photographers.
Washington
state lost many talented citizens in 2013, but Johsel remains top of mind. He was was born in the Japanese colony of Korea
in 1919 and grew up in a world where he and Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-23301836024534153092013-12-10T16:28:00.003-08:002016-04-14T09:59:43.567-07:00The Inventions of Spokane and Springfield and Vachel Lindsay's Dilemma
Most of us have a poet or two we start reading aloud after a few drinks with friends on a
holiday weekend while the wind is flexing the windows and the rain is
pounding.
On the
table in front of us are the paperback anthologies from college like Modern
Poets of the Twentieth Century with its round glass bottom imprints on the cover and inside pages, just below the words “carpe diem!!” Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-35913784604512086112013-11-20T23:09:00.000-08:002016-12-07T15:03:54.884-08:00Why We Can Drink California Wine on Sunday and the Northwest Wine Academy
My wife has been taking courses at the South Seattle Community College at the school's wine program, the Northwest Wine Academy. We both love wine and sometimes have fantasies about becoming part of the wine life. Naturally, I require a debrief after each class and sometimes I go along with her when she has a class project or volunteers at the school.
That’s where we are now, at the wine Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-6292838293403265052013-10-20T11:35:00.000-07:002014-03-31T17:53:14.859-07:00Vanport City and the flood that washed it away
It seemed
like everything was moving in America between 1940 and 1945. Nearly a third of its 1940 population was
headed somewhere else. The military
would recruit, train and position 15 million people, 11.5 million overseas. Back in the USA, another 15 million civilians made a major
move to other counties and states. In those five years, the populations of
California, Oregon and Washington Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-90208724573123913142013-09-26T17:12:00.002-07:002017-08-17T12:18:15.778-07:00The Ku Klux Klan and My Grandmother's House in Vernonia
My grandmother’s house was located at the beginning of a plateau in the Coast Range, about 1500 feet above sea
level along a gravel road. To one side
of the house was a fine strawberry field, perhaps 50 yards long and forty yards
wide. To the other side was a somewhat
larger field, about half of which contained potatoes and the rest corn and a
variety of other vegetables. Behind and to Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-7451447787902265852013-08-18T17:05:00.000-07:002013-08-20T11:07:17.378-07:00Incarceration, Education and Home
My daughter,
Chloe, is interning at one of the new Seattle Housing Authority housing complexes,
New Holly, while she is working toward her Masters Degree in Social Work at the
University of Washington. She thought
I’d be interested in attending a discussion among her colleagues at New Holly and a group
of non-profit housing providers talking about their policies
toward admitting people into Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com57tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-34252392752228597692013-07-25T09:02:00.000-07:002013-08-01T11:31:21.945-07:00Looking for Millennials in Santa Barbara Wine Country
We had
rented a place in Santa Barbara in the Mesa neighborhood on the other side of Highway
101 from the downtown. We’d never visited
there so we had some anxiety about the VRBO house we had rented for the long
weekend. Everyone in the car was saying it was going to be a loser which would mean we’d spend half the weekend
going over the missed clues in the website description and blaming me, Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-2673478242362814732013-07-07T17:47:00.000-07:002017-11-15T10:55:37.599-08:00When Deng Xiaoping Came to Seattle
Richard
Nixon and Henry Kissinger get nearly all the credit for the opening to China that
culminated with the iconic Nixon-Mao handshake in February, 1972. But while Nixon may have turned the door
knob, the man who swung the door wide open was Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping,
seven years later.
President
Obama’s visit with Premier Xi Jingping earlier last month got me thinking,
reading and Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-48259429779060423332013-06-06T09:18:00.000-07:002014-10-06T10:46:44.901-07:00The Next Seattle Mayor and Why He Needs A Ground Game
I had lunch with a politically-minded friend of mine earlier
this year and got an earful of his experiences driving to Cleveland and
doorbelling for the Obama re-election in October of 2012.
Bill is a retired lobbyist who helped run political
campaigns in Alaska and so is not an easy mark for the glitter in a political
campaign but he was knocked senseless by his experiences with the Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-12371092935372260592013-05-15T08:30:00.000-07:002017-04-12T15:24:42.036-07:00Portlandia, 1954
Vaughn Street on Opening Day, 1953. Note fans inside
the fences.
If the
picture existed, it would show me standing just below the circle of dirt
describing the pitcher’s mound at Portland’s Vaughn Street Park. My red t-shirt proclaims ILWU, International
Longshore and Warehouse Union. I’ve forgotten the number that was on the
back of the shirt, but arching over the number, holding Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-25281779909263708032013-04-29T09:54:00.002-07:002014-04-04T17:47:22.271-07:00Horse Racing in Puget Sound and How Ole Hanson Made All the Horses Go Away
This is a
story about the beginnings of horse racing in Puget Sound and how ‘reform’
legislators and the advent of the automobile racing killed horse racing in
Washington state and in many other states during the first decade of the 20th
century.
The story has
to start with a fatal auto accident involving a 1907 White Steamer at mid-day
on Saturday, September 14, 1907. The car
was Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-22770029783316027592013-04-16T09:38:00.001-07:002014-01-24T23:15:33.997-08:00Knee Replacement and the Baby Boomers
Personal note. Three weeks ago I had my left knee replaced.
It is something I’ve thought of doing for many years but finally acted
on and I wanted to share with my readers what I’ve learned and experienced about the procedure. I also want to share some issues about knee replacement, a procedure that may soon become America's most popular surgery. This peaceful Sunday morning I am cocooned Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430145323436340102.post-45313459450601181182013-03-11T23:56:00.000-07:002013-10-09T16:22:00.054-07:00A prophecy, a great building and one hell of a parade!
Alden J. Blethen
Wiki Commons
In 1903, the
publisher of the Seattle Daily Times, Alden J. Blethen, was looking out the
window of his new office at 2nd and Union and clearly knew, for the
first time in many years, that things were finally going to be alright.
His outlook
had improved nearly every year since he bought an ailing Seattle paper in 1896
and settled into its Bob Royerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04758801541706518756noreply@blogger.com8