LAST FRIDAY AND ALL THIS WEEK, I’ve been reminiscing about Seattle during the fall of 1975.
I’d arrived in town in September of that year after a childhood spent in Olympia and Marysville, WA and Corvallis, OR. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, except cease living with my parents and stay the heck out of the military.
Within two days I’d found what would now be called a “mother-in-law” apartment in Wallingford (in a home run by a devout Catholic couple with a Mary shrine in the front yard; within a year, they got a brand-new Betamax VCR equipped with “Swedish Erotica” tapes.) Days later, I got a graveyard-shift job at the U District Herfy’s (a once locally-prominent burger chain; that particular branch is now a Burger King).
I hadn’t many career expectations at the time. Writing was something I seemed to be good at, but I also could see myself in acting, local TV, music, retail, graphic design, even bike-messengering (which I wound up doing for a while).
Some of my initial memories:
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Metro Transit. I’d grown up with school buses, but hadn’t lived in a jurisdiction with municipal bus service. How convenient! You just stand in one spot for as long as half an hour and you’ll get anywhere you want to go (except some really obscure places or places out in the ‘burbs).
- My first neighborhood. I’d known Wallingford only as a hillside by the freeway. I soon discovered a perfect little neighborhood with an independent supermarket (the Fabulous Food Giant), two indie drug stores, an indie hardware store (Tweedy & Popp, still there), an art-house movie theater, the original Dick’s Drive-In, and block after block of handsome old bungalows. At the time, it was still a working-stiffs’ area. Before long, it would be taken over by professors and lawyers; by now even they can’t afford it.
- Pioneer Square. Corny as it now seems, I remember eating a cinnamon roll on a late-summer afternoon outside the old Grand Central Bakery on Occidental Park and thinking this was the perfect time and place to be at.
- Daytime TV. Game shows and entertainment-talk shows I knew; but this new night job left me sedate enough at midmorning to finally begin to appreciate the slow-grinding emotionality of the soaps.
- Late-night TV. Johnny Carson had been around almost as long as the Space Needle. I’d seen his show very rarely as a teen. Now I got to see it any night I wasn’t working. Either I’d just gotten old enough to realize he wasn’t that tremendously funny, or his move from NY to LA had killed his creative spark. Today, I’m more apt to believe the latter.
That fall, a weekly Carson rerun would be replaced by a new show, initially titled NBC’s Saturday Night. The contrast only made Carson’s shtick seem even dumber (but in an endearing sorta way).
- The movies. Marysville’s only theater at the time was a drive-in (which for a while showed “hard R” films in full view from I-5). Corvallis had a few indoor cinemas, showing mostly mainstream Hollywood product. But in Seattle I got to see the whole cinematic gamut; especially with that newly-minted Seattle International Film Festival, and with Randy Finley’s almost-as-new chain of art houses (the first of which is now the Grand Illusion).
- Hippies and ex-hippies. Until I started meeting a number of them in person, I had no idea how docile and mumbly-voiced they could be, or how much of a superior species they thought they were, just because they’d been to a couple of protest marches five years before.
(My teenage encounters with the fundamentalist-Christian universe had already taught me to beware those who claimed they were the only ones going to Heaven on the basis of picayune doctrinal trivia.)
- Minorities. I’d known native Americans and a few Asian Americans, but African Americans were a new in-person experience. They mostly turned out to be almost nothing like the media images of them at the time, even the “positive” media images.
- Chronic depression. Despite having lived a squeaky-clean life to that point, I was still barely awake toward the 4 a.m. end of my work shifts at the burger joint, and was fired quite promptly. To be cast out from supposedly one of the world’s easiest jobs sent me into what I now realize was a blue funk of prescribable-for proportions.
All in all, it was a time of diminished expectations, of a big city that still, mistakenly, thought it was a helpless little cowtown.
Despite everything that’s happenned for the better around here since then, and there’s been a lot, I miss something of that funky humility.
MONDAY: Back to the future with the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever written.
ELSEWHERE:
