Crime, Punishment & Vocabulary

 

I attended Montlake Elementary School in Seattle from 1957 - 1961.  It is a classic mid-1920’s Floyd Narramore design that, back then, served the children from the middle-class neighborhood. 

Third and fourth grade at Montlake were years marked by good classroom behavior on my part.  Being new to the neighborhood and the school I was focused on fitting in and my classmates helped me with that.  My third grade teacher, Mrs. Parsons, doted on me so I was very comfortable and really well behaved in class.  My report cards testified to that fact with notes such as: “Jon is a good citizen in class”.

Fourth grade introduced me to Miss Wolcott who was former WAC or some other branch of the military and she didn’t suffer fools gladly.  “Fear” would best describe my memories of her. She was severe and when someone acted up in class the whole classroom would have to go out on the playground and march military-style.  Girls learned to “dress-right-dress” along with the boys and nobody wanted to be the one whose horsing around caused the whole class to march in the rain. I behaved and while I never fit in to Scouting, I could sure look sharp standing at attention and marching on orders.

Duncan Comes to the Paper Shack

 

As a kid in Wichita it was a treat when the impeccably-dressed Duncan Top guy came to school to announce an upcoming contest and show us his tricks.  There was a concrete pad next to the school that faced out onto the dirt playground and this was where we all gathered to throw our tops.  He would just show up at recess and go through his tricks which were so far beyond what any of us could do.  Whoever could do the neatest trick would get his name engraved on the crown of his top.  The Duncan Guy would pull out his pocketknife and quickly carve the owner’s name in some exotic script.  He would tell us where to meet for the contest after school and it was always either outside of Tompkin’s Drug Store or Yost’s Grocery.  For the last trick he always did a version of “Walk the Tightrope” where the finale was flipping the top high into the air, opening one side of his coat and catching it in his inside pocket.  Sound familiar?   

As my top skills fell somewhere below the middle of the pack, I never got beyond doing more than three tricks without bleeding so I always attended the contests as a spectator.  The winners would get new tops that retailed for $0.25, the runners-up got their names engraved on the crowns of their theirs and Tompkins or Yost’s would make a few bucks selling new units, strings and 5 cent Marshmallow Root-beers.  Tops were available in any drug or grocery store in Wichita.  Nobody sold Yo-yo’s.  I had heard of them but had never seen one in my life.

The Job Interview

 

 

Say what you will about Chris………and if it is outrageous it’s probably true.  When she was hired from outside the company to fill the position of Action Sports Manager folks were wondering WTAF?  What has she got and what is she going to be like to work for?  That was some fairly scary shit right there. 

 

Maybe it was because she was so carefully watched that we picked up some behaviors that were way outside of REI norms.  Even back then there was a modicum of REI-nice that she didn’t get the memo on, but it was clear that she knew her hardgoods and was a promotor, the likes of which, REI had never seen before.  Her mind and mouth moved faster than any internal filters that she may have possessed so they had no shot at moderating her message.  Mind to mouth at the speed of light was how things went and she always spoke at least 25 decibels louder than everyone else so things that she said often raised some eyebrows.  She bent and broke rules, too, but they were always the rules that had stifling, unintended and negative consequences on our Co-op and Member’s wellbeing so everyone learned to go along whenever possible.  She always acted in her team’s best interests which must have pissed off a few people above her pay grade.  Life around Chris was always an adventure.

 

Folly of Youth

 

Sometimes, it’s hard to explain my choices.  Especially some of the bad ones I made when I was young.  I suppose that I can write them off as the folly of youth but I have to wonder why it was important to me to commit such folly in the first place. 

For instance, once when I was in junior high school, I chose to walk through the Battery Street Tunnel.  The same tunnel, relatively new at the time, that was constructed to serve all of the north-south highway traffic through Seattle and it offered no provision for foot traffic.  For some reason it seemed like a good thing to do. 

At the time I sat third-chair French Horn for the semi-talented All City Orchestra which was mostly composed of young nerds who were accepting of their social limitations and resulting societal roles.  Homey didn’t play that, though, and I struggled to ignore my own limitations and chafed against the norms assigned by my relationship with that Horn in F.  I wanted to be cool and be identified as such so I rationalize that some of my poor choices were the result of trying to set myself apart from reality in the eyes of my very critical peers.

Memories From The Mint

 

1968 - Seattle Municipal Archives - 191827

It’s possible that “The Corner Market” building at 1^st Ave and Pike Street has been photographed more than most Seattle landmarks and while it is a respectable place now that wasn’t always the case.  Built in 1912 it featured open storefronts along the 1^st floor perimeter while the interior featured other food specialty businesses including the Pacific Poultry Company on the 2^nd floor.  At that time it was an altogether decent place to conduct business, do your shopping and to see and be seen.  

The Corner Market went into a steep decline during the ‘60’s just as I was coming into the labor market with only 20% of the space was being utilized.  Heck, all of 1^st Ave was pretty seedy and quite sporty then and I chose the Corner Market for my first job that didn’t involve newspapers or lawnmowers.  The open storefronts along 1^st Ave had been closed in to house the “Modern Barber College” (nationally accredited), “The Taco House” (specializing in fish and chips) and “The Mint Restaurant and Dollar Room” where I first started my long climb to retirement. 

Robert Lewis Stevenson ~ Nazi Wolfpacks & the Montlake Cut

 

1934 - SMA - 9239 

On October 17, 1934 an Engineering Department photographer captured this image of the Puget Sound tug boat Equator towing the oil tanker Geo. H. Jones through the Montlake Cut and into Lake Washington.   At 429 feet in length and 59 feet wide the G.H. Jones filled The Cut on its way to the Lake Washington Shipyards for repairs and refitting.  The bustling shipyards at Houghton ensured that large oceangoing ships were not an uncommon sight in the Montlake neighborhood.  Both the Equator and the Geo. H. Jones had interesting histories and met, equally, interesting ends.  Not present that day in The Cut but part of the story was the Nazi submarine U-455 that would put one of them on the bottom of the ocean.

Jumping From the Montlake Bridge

 

1975 – SMA – 179771

Sometime around the 3^rd or 4^th grade I made one of my life’s ambitions to jump off the Montlake Bridge.  I would walk out to the middle of the span and pull myself up on the railing far enough so that I could look straight down and revel in the butterflies that rose in my stomach, the patterns on the water, the toy boats passing below, the sound of the car tires rolling over the metal deck grating.  It seemed impossibly high but doable.  I may have been dumb and reckless, but I knew that swimming would be involved and since that was something I didn’t know how to do I got signed up to take lessons at the YMCA in downtown Seattle.