SINCE LAST FRIDAY, I’ve been remembering the far different Seattle of the fall of 1975.
It was a time of gas lines, of stagflation, of post-Watergate cynicism, of post-Vietnam shellshock, of continuing doldrums in the Boeing-centric Seattle economy.
In short, a perfect time for an up-‘n’-coming hardbitten-journalist wannabe such as myself.
Seattle was still a “company town,” and that company was Boeing. (Microsoft was just getting underway, selling software to hobbyist programmers out of New Mexico.) Boeing had just begun to recover from its massive 1970-71 slump when the U.S. pullout from Vietnam brought drastic military plane-buying cuts, thusly plopping the region right back into recession mode.
(At least Boeing, thanks to its head start in the passenger-jet biz, was less dependent on Pentagon contracts than other planemakers were. That’s why it was able in the ’90s to take over McDonnell Douglas and outlast Lockheed.)
A then-united OPEC (a few years before the Iran revolution set off squabbles and wars between Mideast oil nations) was in one of its price-hiking, supply-restricting movements. Radio Shack sold CB radios with ads claiming they’d help you “Find Gas Fast.” Companies like Gulf, Amoco, and Phillips 66, which had boldly moved in on the Northwest gasoline trade just a few years before, either sold or abandoned their area stations. The great muscle cars and land yachts faded from popularity and rusted on used-car lots (many of which were set up at abandoned gas stations).
Politicians tried to allay citizens’ fears by adopting bland feel-good personas. Gerald Ford was marketed as the emotionally stable, ambitions-in-check anti-Nixon. Jimmy Carter, already running to displace Ford in the White House, billed himself as half good-old-boy, half engineering nerd.
Seattle politics was run, then as now, by a downtown Democratic machine that pretended to be a neighborhood progressive movement. (It did a little more pretending of that sort then than now.)
The machine’s figurehead at the time was Wes Uhlmann, a glib, silver-haired gladhander. Uhlmann’s mayoral regime had survived a police-payoffs scandal and took (perhaps too much) credit for starting Metro Transit and saving the Pike Place Market from high-rise development. He’d retire in 1977, leaving a mayoral race between machine functionary Paul Schell and TV-news pretty boy Charles Royer. Royer would win handily, leaving future generations to deal with Schell.
TOMORROW: The sleaze district, and other places that are gone.
ELSEWHERE:
