TODAY AND TOMORROW, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #1: The 211 Club pool hall abandoned its increasingly costly Belltown space after 16 years (following more than 40 years at its previous site where Benaroya Hall is now). It was something Belltown, and Seattle in general, is rapidly losing–a classy and unpretentious gathering place, a timeless and fadless site for serious playing without noise or capital-A Attitude.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #2: Montgomery Ward is closing its last 299 stores after 106 or so years in business. Most news articles about the closure claimed Wards had lost its market niche to newer chains like Wal-Mart and Target. But the roots of Wards’ decline go back many decades earlier, to its rule by a bullhorn company president named Sewell Avery.
In his prime, Avery brought color photography and modern graphic design to the Wards catalogs; and spearheaded the company’s expansion into retail stores.
But he became both dictatorial and senile. There’s a famous photo of him being forcibly carried out of his office in 1944 by Federal agents, because he’d refused to obey War Production Board quotas regarding the use of scarce materials for consumer goods.
In the postwar years Avery got even odder–he kept the retail stores at a uniform size and building style (two stories plus a basement and half-story mezzanine), small and unresponsive to local market conditions. Then he decided the catalog was too risque, and ordered that all women’s fashions except coats were to be photographed on dress forms, not live models or even mannequins.
By the time Wards’ board of directors finally had enough votes to oust Avery, the chain had become a distant competitor to Sears and Penney’s, and never caught up. It junked its “big book” catalog a decade before Sears did, and retreated from a national retail presence to a few select regions where it could afford to compete.
Even in some of those, such as Portland, it found itself shut out of major mall projects and had to build freestanding stores far from the peak car-traffic zones. Such companies as Mobil Oil and GE invested millions to keep Wards alive, but to no ultimate avail.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #3: Oldsmobile was America’s oldest car brand, but the General Motors top brass, in their infinite ignorance, didn’t know what to do with it. It had long ago become the odd leftover in GM’s grand market-segmentation strategies; it offered few models that weren’t renamed versions of other GM products.
Olds’s final end wasn’t a casualty of imports or SUVs, but an admission that GM couldn’t think of anything to do with it anymore.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #4: When KOMO-TV put up its grandiose new building, I was unaware the station was going to promptly demolish its old building. It was a beautiful work of postwar, post-Deco architecture.
At a garage sale once, I managed to obtain the big color brochure commemorating the building’s opening in ’46. That was still in the so-called Golden Age of Radio; but KOMO was already planning to expand into TV, and built its new broadcasting palace with that in mind. But the Truman Administration froze new TV licenses soon after KING-TV got on the air.
KOMO-TV had to wait until ’54 to start up. It got the local NBC affiliation, and within two years had the region’s first color cameras (one of which is now on display in the Lincoln-Mercury showroom up on Aurora). But then KING snatched the NBC franchise in ’59, leaving KOMO with ABC (whose market position then was comparable to UPN’s today).
All that history, and four decades’ worth more, were in the old building at Fourth and Denny. Boomerang, the local kiddie show hosted by former Hollywood voice-over singer Marni Nixon. Assorted Town Meetings and AM NWs and Northwest Afternoons. Keith Jackson’s first sportscasts. That still-harrowing film footage from a news photographer who got caught in the Mt. St. Helens ash storm.
All that’s left of the building are the memories, whatever tapes the station’s kept, and a small pile of rubble (which, admittedly, gave folks standing on Denny a better view of the Space Needle fireworks on 1/1).
TOMORROW: A few more sad tales of this type.
ELSEWHERE:
