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THE WORLD’S OLDEST humor mag, Britain’s venerable Punch, is folding. For the second time. Sorta. (i.e., the website will still be replenished with new material, but no more print issues for the foreseeable future.)
DROPPING THE NEEDLE: Even before Barry Ackerley’s radio stations become part of the Clear Channel evil empire, they’re changing for the worse. One of them, which had briefly run a nice nonthreatening ’80s nostalgia format, has suddenly become “Quick 96,” playing only six- to ten-second sound bites from oldies songs, which are given credit only on the station’s web site. (The snippets are separated by an automated voice announcing three-digit numbers, which you must look up on the site.) My initial reaction: I’m reminded of the countdown-roundup snippets on MTV’s TRL, without the pictures of course. My second reaction: Is anybody actually expected to like this enough to listen even past one commercial break? My suspicion: This is likely intended as a short-term filler concept, until the sale to Clear Channel goes final, at which time it’ll adopt one of the chain’s satellite-fed network formats. When an earlier sale doomed an earlier operation on the same frequency, KYYX, the station ended with a week of nothing but an electronic voice counting down the seconds to sign-off–for an entire week.
UPDATE TO THE ABOVE: Sure enough, “Quick 96” turned out to be a publicity stunt. Forty-eight hours after the “innovative new station” debuted, back came the ’60s-’70s oldies library of The Beat’s immediate predecessor format, KJR-FM, played as full-length tunes; this format (conveniently using music tapes already on the station’s premises and requiring no additional new recordings) will presumably stick around until Clear Channel moves in.
…this story, a mega-bank and a mega-bookstore chain are (separately) working to stick it against small book publishers.
See carefully posed images of faceless art-school wooden dolls having sex.
THE BRAND CALLED THEM: According to a recent cover story in The Economist, “The world is falling out of love with celebrity CEOs.”
As if there was anything particularly lovable about such grandstanders in the first place.
The article, if accurate, reflects the inevitable burnout of a phenomenon that exploded during the dot-com mania of the late ’90s. There had, of course, been famous industrialists and financiers since the dawn of corporate America. But the PC/Internet/tech services/website industries honed and refined the phenom beyond the mere Celebrity CEO, into something approaching religious status.
The Cult of the CEO quickly developed its own rules and practices. Among them:
Now, as you all know, dozens of Cult CEOs have been deposed and desanctified by the whims of the marketplace. Thousands of hyper-loyal followers have been shoved out of the organizations that had been their entire lives’ focuses. These men and women need our empathy; but more importantly they need our help.
This is why MISCmedia.com is proud to announce the first of what will, with all luck and fortitude, become a nationwide circuit of CEO-cult deprogramming centers.
The lonely, the forlorn, the purposeless humans left behind by defunct CEO cults (as well as those who were expunged or escaped from still-extant CEO cults) will enter (either on their own volition or upon interventions by loved ones) for resident stays of one to six weeks, depending on the severity of their conditions. They will learn to respond to their own names, to use common kitchen utensils, to wash and clothe themselves, to write complete sentences without the use of emoticons, and eventually to form and express personal opinions without first asking for permission.
This type of treatment is expensive. But think of it as an investment in our society’s future.
Send your donations now to OPERATION IRL (for “In Real Life”), in care of your local 12-step organization or sex-toy shop. And don’t give ’til it hurts; give ’til it feels good.
…in the “Creative Age,” according to one commentator: Singles, gays, ethnic minorities, performance spaces, walkable neighborhoods, and rock bands! What doesn’t work: Subsidized sports arenas.
IT’S PHOTO DAY TODAY, starting with some more examples of American business standing up for our nation (don’t you dare imagine any commercial exploitation of the popular emotions could be involved.)
First, it’s good to know the bowling pins of America refuse to be knocked over by internal divisiveness…
…And almost as good to know that giant balloon eagles are valiantly defending our right to consume mass quantities of imported oil to power our big-ass RVs.
Meanwhile, some folks who had other ideas about America and commerce staged protests across the nation on Saturday. Locally, rallies took place at Westlake Park, the Seattle Central campus, and at Broadway and East Thomas Street (where activists staged a symbolic “Take Back the Streets” exercise in the middle of the intersection.)
Whilst phalanxes of cops protected oil-company assets, peaceful advocated advocated peace. Peace was about the only thing all the protesters seemed to be for (some attendeess also expressed support for the Palestinian cause).
The protests across the country were ostensibly about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Protest leaders have depicted the organizations as loan sharks, ruining the economies of Third World countries for the benefit of big global corporations. But, as often happens in a lefty gathering, topic drift abounded.
So you got bashers of the Bush oil policy, the Bush Mideast policy, the sanctions against (and potential invasion of) Iraq, the war on drugs, SUVs, domestic banks, and capitalism in general.
Later on Saturday, about 100 fans of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley held a quiet vigil at the Seattle Center International Fountain. Staley, 34, was found dead at his University District home late Friday night; probably from an overdose.
In his songs and in interviews, Staley frequently admitted that he’d used heroin and that it had turned his life into a living hell. His lyrical imagery was perfectly matched by the band’s music–heavy metal dirges, often slow and pounding.
By 1993 AIC’s brutal and tragic aesthetic, unrelieved by the pop-punk energy of Mudhoney or the cynical wit of Nirvana, had come to most purely embody what many people (including most rock people in Seattle) claimed they hated about the media’s “Seattle Scene” stereotype. By 1996, Staley had essentially retired from making music. He seldom appeared in public, stopped performing live, and contributed to only a handful of new recorded songs. The few friends who kept in contact with him didn’t talk.
A Stranger gossip item last year said he’d been seen, looking presumably healthy, at a local club. A lot of us wanted to believe it. Instead, it now turns out to have been one of many unsuccessful sobriety attempts.
Staley never glamorized drug use. His songs and interviews spoke plainly of heroin’s momentary joy and lingering sadness. He lived in a private hell; it ultimately didn’t matter that this hell was initially of his own making.
FORTUNE REPORTS on Microsoft’s increasingly-sly Federal lobbying efforts, on behalf of every cause from declawing the Antitrust Division to getting its “Passport” technology used for an official personal ID system, putting all of us in a Federal database MS would theoretically be able to infiltrate…
…while ZDnet claims MS and IBM are conspiring to control all future Internet technologies.
JUST ONE DAY after I read a zine editorial bemoaning the music biz’s continuing demeaning treatment of female musicians, along comes an AP dispatch about companies introducing “feminine” styled guitars for teenage girls. Make of it what you will.
…to the memory of Jack Roberts, who, almost singlehandedly, kept two American traditions alive locally into the ’90s: (1) The locally-owned, independent appliance store; and (2) the wacky-pitchman TV commercial.
ONE OF THE ODD THINGS about the Net is the way news articles might not appear (or no longer appear) on the site of the organization that originated them, but might still be found on sites that buy syndicated content. Thus, this link peculiarly takes you to a site in India discussing a magazine that, to the best of my knowledge, still can’t legally be obtained there.
The magazine in question, Penthouse, is suffering from the publishing/advertising slump worse than most. Thirty-three years after it first launched as Playboy’s most ambitious rival to date (early slogan: “We’re going rabbit hunting”), and three years after bringing true hardcore porn imagery to regular newsstand-distributed magazines, it’s swimming in red ink and can’t borrow any more money. Bossman Bob Guccione (now a 70-year-old widower who’s battled cancer) has put his art collection up for hock and his NYC mansion up for sale. Circulation has fallen, as all the other skin mags (except Playboy and Perfect 10) have quickly moved to match its sleaze quotient, and as hardcore video and pay-per-view have grabbed a bigger share of American self-loving males’ inspiration budgets. Many of the magazine’s advertisers, meanwhile, have fled to the bureaucratically safer (though ultimately just as stupid) nipple-free “tease” magazines of the Maxim/FHM formula. Penthouse has tried to make some bucks in Net porn, but that effort was undercut by the fiscal troubles at its erstwhile online partner, Seattle-based Internet Entertainment Group.
If Penthouse does disappear sometime this or next year, as some financial analysts predict, it would mean the end to one of the odder experiments in magazine entertainment photography–the ongoing attempt to gussy up porn scenes (up to and including actual coitus) with pretentiously “arty” lighting and composition. (Of course, any aesthetic ambitions in the photo-narratives are immediately negated by the models’ kabuki-like copious amounts of bleach, silicone, and heel lengths.)
There’s still money to be made in 2-D representations of 3-D physiques. But the sleaze side of that market is way too overcrowded. The softcore side is almost totally the property of Playboy, which in its current ossified state is a tired (and not very enticing) remnant of its old formula. What this country needs is a good, respectable hetero sex mag. Those who would wish to help me start one can contact the email address below for investment opportunities.
DIDN’T MENTION IT HERE yet, but The Stranger has indeed run a feature-piece by me. It concerns the (slight but extant) possibility of a revival of hipness in Belltown.
A BASTION FALLS: Beginning today, the Wall St. Journal introduces a loud new graphic design featuring bigger headlines, more white space, and color every which where. It’s as much a symbol as anything we’ve seen that the business community (and, by extension, business journalism) doesn’t want to be perceived as having stodginess, solidness, continuity, reliability, trustworthiness, confidence, or understated good taste. Everything’s gotta be NOW-NOW-NOW, POW-POW-POW, all hustle and jive and hard sell.
I’ve long disagreed with almost everything written on the WSJ editorial pages; but I felt I could trust the accuracy of the matter on its news pages. Its front page had always been a form-following-function endeavor–three columns of news briefs (one on a topic that rotated throughout the week), two major news stories, and one well-written light feature. This page-one layout only changed on days when there was real, real big news (Pearl Harbor, 9/11). Now, it’s changed permanently, and will likely change from day to day.
To summarize: The old WSJ was like the reliable, grey-suited neighborhood banker who offered low-key, sensible advice on providing for one’s loved ones. The new WSJ is more like the boiler-room office that spews forth telemarketing cold calls about the latest sure-to-exponentially-rise-to-the-stratosphere tech-company IPO.
UPDATE #1: The two-week-delayed spring print MISC will be out this week. We’re only waiting confirmation of one ad.
UPDATE #2: Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men indeed showed up at a local Borders Books–and on the bestseller shelf. Still no Barnes & Noble sightings.
…new conservative-bashing book Stupid White Men at a big chain bookstore? If you have, let me know. As previously mentioned in this space, HarperCollins (Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house) tried to pull out of its contract to publish the book unless Moore toned down his barbs against George W. After Moore publicized the fracas, HarperCollins backed down and issued the book as scheduled. But you can’t find it (at least in my town) in the chains that heavily depend on promo bucks from the likes of HarperCollins. I’ve heard of record labels burying releases by bands they no longer care to promote; could this be a book-biz equivalent?
Letter From Astoria
from the Winter 2002 print MISCby Matthew Stadler
ASTORIA, OREGON is a city of 10,000, covering most of a hilly peninsula where the Youngs River meets the Columbia and the two empty into the Pacific. The weather is severe, astonishing, and the city itself is very old, first settled in 1811.
It is a city, not a town. Taxicabs navigate the narrow grid of downtown streets, shadowed by a tall art-deco hotel, office blocks, and brick apartment buildings. There are alleyways, canneries along the waterfront, secret tunnels under ground–all the stuff of literature, which Astoria has in fact become. It was a novel (Washington Irving’s eponymous international best-seller of 1836) 15 years before Seattle was even a single roofless cabin.
I moved here last year, to a huge, derelict house I bought for about two-thirds what my one-bedroom apartment in Seattle had cost.
THE UNIONTOWN Steam Bath, just below the porn shop, opened in 1928 and is still in business. I go there on Thursdays, sometimes Fridays and Saturdays too. On Saturday there’s a beer party in the “men’s public sauna”–a cooler full of Hamm’s, plus foam collars for the beers so the steam doesn’t warm them.
The talk is animated and coarse, sometimes clever: A call to bomb Berkeley for its rumored stance against the American war in Afghanistan is shouted down by bikers who point out that neighboring Oakland is world headquarters for the Hell’s Angels. Partisans take sides. New clearcutting on state forest land is both attacked and applauded. Bush is differentiated from Cheney, Cheney from Ashcroft, and each is allotted subtly calibrated degrees of contempt or admiration.
This steam bath is the kind of civil society I recall from Holland, the last place I lived where people conducted public discourse in the nude. Like Holland, Astoria enjoys a robust libertarianism that seems driven primarily by the capitalist instinct for free exchange, unhindered by morals.
I tell friends Astoria is just like San Francisco, if San Francisco had collapsed after the gold rush. The operative word is collapse.
Astoria has been failing for longer than most of the urban Northwest has existed. It is a comfortable, even attractive, place to fail. No city has done it longer.
IT WAS FOUNDED by a New York fur trader and venture capitalist named John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world at the time (described in his obituary as a “self-invented money-making machine”). Astor financed an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia to build a city that would monopolize the nascent Pacific fur trade. It was America’s first infusion of capital into the region; the rest, as they say, is history.
I like to call the whole Northwest “Greater Astoria,” as a reminder that its operative ecology has been shaped as much by the circulation of capital as by the circulation of water, an assertion made by the detestable name “Cascadia.” “Cascadia” is this region’s last nature poem; I prefer Greater Astoria’s tale of heedless capital and urbanization.
If anything marks us, it is that capital–with all of its hunger for motion and speed–arrived here, free from the burden of institutions that in every other place had slowed its movement: Family, church, even rudimentary humanist values like decency, self-determination or respect, were, in effect, absent here as capital made its giant sucking sound and mobilized every dormant resource (from trees to fish to minerals to men) with impunity.
This unbridled behemoth also brought a rich harvest of delayed, reactionary initiatives: The defense of human rights through organized labor; utopian experiments proposing economies free of money; an abiding ecological sensibility. Greater Astoria’s marriage of great exploitation and reactionary retrenchments is simply what unhindered capital looks like.
Astor failed here (though his name stuck), fur dwindled, and fisheries, canning, and logging rose to replace it. These three collapsed and returned, variously, from the mid-19th to the late-20th centuries, while inland vacationers arrived to pursue their seasonal entertainments. Then people like me began to settle, modems in hand.
MIRACULOUSLY–and uniquely among this region’s many failed emporia–Astoria today belongs to no one faction. It is a heterogenous city where no single industry nor social stratum dominates.
Stray tourists endure the stink of fish processing to watch sea lions scarf guts off the pier. Out-of-work loggers swim laps with seniors at the new city pool. An ex-Marine peddles his lefty newspaper (in its 26th year) from the used bookstore where he clerks on Saturdays. Job Corps kids from Tongue Point gather in knots by the movie theater. Idle salmon fishermen strategize over cocktails at the Feed Lot. A German software genius learns carving from a guy in Warrenton who’s now part-time at the mill. In Astoria everyone stays “afloat” because the water level has dropped so low.
Everything’s cheap here, and there’s a lot of it. I live in a towering 100-year-old house built by a riverboat captain on his retirement. I had thought I was very lucky to find it; but it turns out Astoria has hundreds of such houses (and mine is an especially run-down example). The city has never had enough money for urban renewal; so everything stays as it was, most of it in poor repair.
Victorian and craftsman houses dominate, the legacy of 19th century maritime and logging wealth, while downtown there’s a lot of art deco. (A fire wiped out downtown’s center in 1922; the next year it was rebuilt in brick and terra cotta.)
Amidst the older stuff there are surpassing examples of post-WW II design, from a ’60s four-story apartment complex (in a fabulous double-winged “V”) perched near the hill’s crest, to a neatly modulated necklace of woodsy ’70s apartments stair-stepping down the slope, to an astonishingly brutal Soviet-style apartment block straight out of Zagreb, pitched up out of the river on concrete pillars.
The result is a kind of encyclopedic mini-museum of architecture, small enough to wander in. Late at night, while most of the city sleeps and only the restless taxis drift through the empty streets, I go out to observe these treasures (most of which are, for better or worse, for sale).
OH, THERE ARE PROBLEMS. Astoria has no decent wine store. (You should start one.) Local sheriffs nearly killed a tree-sitter by driving him batty with lights and loud music, then cutting all the branches off his tree. Those Job Corps kids hang out at the movie theater because there’s no place else to go except a Christian-only youth center. Live music is generally lousy.
Fishermen can’t make a profit, no matter how big the runs get. Poverty drives a lot of lives here. In Astoria it’s all pretty visible, but at least there’s no higher station toward which to claw.
As a result, the bars are friendly. Denizens of the High Climber Room don’t turn their hickory-shirted backs to book-toting wine-drinkers like me. In Forks, WA, by contrast, I never dared ask about wine. The cocktail slinger at the Voodoo lounge takes food stamps (don’t rat on him), while in Port Townsend bars courting tourists treat local poverty as the mark of the devil (unless it’s that cultivated brand of poverty self-righteously called “voluntary simplicity”). Meanwhile, down on Astoria’s waterfront, hippies dance with fishermen at the Wet Dog.
THERE ARE BATTLES here, but what is there to win?
Astoria’s future pivots on a handful of questions: Will the community college be allowed to move onto a downtown site that could revitalize year-around pedestrian business in the city? Will environmental concerns curtail logging of old growth and other rare forests in the surrounding county? Will the planning board relax long-standing laws against larger chain stores and allow them inside the city limits? Will opposition to the deepening of the Columbia River channel succeed and make Astoria a much busier port by preventing upriver traffic? How will fishermen survive the reductions in bottom fish quotas and populations?
AFTER THE STEAM bath I drink at the Elks Lodge, sitting by the bandstand of an art-deco ballroom looking out on downtown.
Delinquents loiter by the courthouse. Taxis speed past, on their way to pick up drunks in Uniontown, where bars cluster in the shadow of the bridge. Noise from the cannery echoes up the hill, running all night to handle this year’s freakish sardine run, the biggest in 95 years. Container ships taller than downtown slip past the docks and block out the sky.
I can’t think of a better place to spend hard times.
The Age of Uniforms
from the Winter 2002 print MISCby Matt Briggs
MOM FIRST WORKED for Boeing in the late ’60s, in a long building with dirty windows overlooking the Duwamish River. She worked as a production illustrator, producing diagrams and signs. She didn’t keep the job for long, but she said this was her favorite job.
She wore blue jeans and black boots and an oxford shirt, or sometimes she wore a dark blue skirt and a sweater. Graphite always filled the space under her fingernails.
Always a boom and bust town, Seattle busted in the beginning of the ’70s. Boeing’s layoffs resulted in a company town without much of a company left. Mom found work waiting tables and wearing other people’s clothes. Washington State law stated at the time that if your employer required you to wear clothing of a particular color or style, he or she had to provide it.
SCOTTY WATTS OWNED the Copper Kitchen Restaurant, where Mom first met my father while she waited on tables. Scotty also owned the Peppermill and the Dutch Oven. Scotty Watts’s waitresses wore mustard colored dresses and mustard colored hats that looked like mushrooms. Because the top-heavy hats fell into people’s soup, none of the waitresses wore them.
“We girls rolled up our dresses because they came down over our knees,” Mom said. “The waist had an elastic strip and we folded the dresses and tucked them in and tied the apron string to keep everything up. The style then was to wear your skirt cut just below your crotch.”
After she married my father, Scotty moved Mom to the Peppermill. She wore the same uniform. Mom said the shoes were the most important article of clothing with a waitress uniform. She bought nurse shoes that only came in white and she shoe polished them brown to match her uniform. The heavy rubber soles looked like gigantic translucent erasers.
In the spring of that year, when Mom became pregnant, my father insisted that they get married. He had already been in enough trouble that they’d suspended his driver’s license; but he still drove his dented blue Buick. He’d sworn off alcohol. In the months she’d known him, my father seemed sober and even a little nerdy and not at all like a drunk. Mom said, “You don’t know about someone’s history until it becomes your own past.” That summer, she miscarried and spent three days in the University of Washington Medical Center.
In the beginning of September, Mom began work at the Alpine Cafeteria. The waitresses left the brown dresses with muttonchop sleeves at the restaurant. They wore white aprons and wedgies. They were supposed to wear hair nets. The hair nets would slip off into people’s food, so they took them off and kept their hair in ponytails, which fit the theme of the restaurant anyway.
Labor Day fell on her second or third day and, because she was new, she didn’t know to worry when the other waitresses didn’t come in. Few restaurants were open, so crowds of people sat in the restaurant. The food kept on coming. Mom didn’t know where the plates were supposed to go, so order after order piled up on the hot counter. Angry customers pointed out their food.
The busboy was a 35-year-old mute. He’d lost his voice from screaming in Alaska. He’d been in two airplane crashes working the salmon. The older waitresses treated him like shit. He wore blue jeans and a T-shirt. Mom and he formed a little team because she would give him tips and treat him well and so he’d bus her tables quickly; so she had a better turn-around on her tables and was able to make more money per table than the older waitress.
Many of the waitresses at the Alpine Cafeteria had worked there for years. Each had her own regular customers. They were stunted, hard women with gray legs and dyed black hair and faces like stale doughnuts. They took their time and nothing stopped them or sped them up. “It was a horrible job. I only lasted for four months there.”
Two weeks after she started at the Alpine Cafeteria, Scotty came and said my father was in the King County Jail. He’d been pulled over and put in jail because of his suspended license.
Finally, she went back to the Peppermill. The cooks wore black and white checkered slacks and double-breasted blouses. Scotty didn’t allow the waitresses to take their uniforms home. She worked there until she was pregnant with me.
After a couple of months off, she went to work at the Denny’s on Aurora Avenue North and worked there until she was pregnant with my brother. She had to buy an orange and brown uniform and had to wear it to work and home because there wasn’t any place to change. They wanted to upgrade the image of waitresses, to make them more like stewardesses. They wore very heavy A-line dresses (costing $12 to $15) and black turtlenecks. She didn’t like to wear the dress home on the bus, because the brown fabric smelled like the kitchen and the food and cigarette smoke.
She worked there until she was five months pregnant. She made her own dress using matching fabric because their dresses wouldn’t accommodate a pregnant figure. Finally the manager fired Mom for her pregnancy. “You can’t even wear the uniform,” he said. “My customers are complaining that you are working too hard for a pregnant woman.”
She didn’t work for nine months or so. In that time, she had my brother and the family moved to Fall City in the Snoqualmie Valley.
At the Gateway Cafe in North Bend, a roadhouse on Sunset Highway and then the original interstate, Mom wore a black skirt and white shirt. They supplied the apron. She kept a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of the special in the other.
The lumberjacks wore corkboots and blue jeans cut just above the boots. Red suspenders held up their loose pants. They came in directly from the logging camp where they weren’t allowed to drink. They came in covered in mud and sawdust.
“Just like an old time saloon, at first they would accidentally brush up against your breasts or you’d feel a cold hand on the back of your thigh; and as the night wore on, they moved into the Moriritz Room where they’d all try to grab you and you’d have to dance and squirm past them.”
Only women bartenders worked at the Gateway. They called the owner, Edna, “The One Armed Bandit.” She lost the arm in a washing machine as a little girl. It was one of those old-fashioned ones with belts. She was a very good-looking woman. She ran the place like a drill sergeant. She encouraged the girls to make the men happy. Her husband was named Bear and he kept to the back room doing accounting. In the summer, the girls wore halter tops and brief shorts. At the end of the night, they served the lumberjacks breakfast and coffee.
At the Summit House at Snoqualmie Pass, an ancient structure of raw logs with plywood and drywall and insulation tacked to the interior, Mom wore black skirts and a white blouse and red paisley vests with pockets. The homeless bartender slept in the storeroom. He let a cigarette go and it burned the place down. With no running water at the Pass, there wasn’t enough water to put out the fire.
The next place, Ken’s Truck Town, required her to wear a white polyester nurse-style uniform. They supplied these; but the waitresses had to change into them in the break room. Mom caught pneumonia from the walk-in freezer and was sick for a long time. The customers started to complain. Her boss told her, “Tomorrow you come back well.” She went to the doctor, took penicillin, and started to look for another job.
“I had interviewed with Scott Adams before. I went down looking for a job. I remembered the interview from before being really long and like he was grilling a potential chief financial officer of a bank. I told him I could wait a rush with 250 customers on the floor, and I was looking for a job. He told me I must be a real crackerjack waitress. He hired me right on the spot.”
He owned the Denny’s on 4th Avenue South, in the franchise’s original diamond-shaped building. Mom had to buy another single piece orange and brown uniform with black stockings and dark shoes, the same uniform she hadn’t been able to wear four years before.
He eventually fired her for being too volatile. Mom says it was because she was getting a ride to work sometimes from Harold Johnson, a black guy. Everyone thought she was sleeping with him. Specifically, Scott Adams fired her because she refused to take a personal check. Mom obeyed the policy that Denny’s would not accept personal checks. A guy came in and Mom didn’t accept his check even though he was a regular. She was fired a couple of days later.
When she went back to pick up her last paycheck from Scott Adams, he hunched down to ask me how I was holding up. I asked him, “Why did you fire my mom?” He wore a blue suit and kept his two individual clumps of hair on either side of his head neatly stacked and the clean bald expanse of skin between them oiled like a highly polished linoleum floor. He had an expansive black mustache and slightly damp, red lips. He held my arms and started to cry. “Tiger, your Mom will always have a job here.”
“It became clear to me I would be one of those old nasty Seattle waitresses. Clear to me I wouldn’t be able to stay married to your father. The job I had that made me the happiest was when I had been a production assistant at Boeing.”
MOM WORE POLYESTER slacks and shirts when she went to Bellevue Community College to study drafting. After her second year at BCC, she found a job at the Ambrose Co. at an Overlake office park. She wore slacks and shirts.
Ambrose created a line of machines designed to fill paint containers. Mom did manual drafting on boards. Mom produced complicated blueprints for the company; her mechanical drafting block letters filled the margins. In the front office, the company paid for the women’s hair to be done. “They were dressed to the nines,” Mom said. “But I was in the back office and just kept my hair short.”
The summer she finished college she bought two suits, a wool herringbone jacket and skirt and a gabardine jacket and skirt. Before she left my father and moved to Renton, she walked hurriedly through the house wearing thin high heels and her work uniform. On the soft wood floors she left a trail of heel impressions like someone pressing the tip of a pencil into a sheet of clay.
SHE FOUND A JOB right away at Boeing where she became a tech-aid, a drafter, on the 737-200. When she came home late after driving along the stop and go traffic on 405 and then the long drive from Eastlake to North Bend on I-90, she still wore her Boeing Security badge over one pocket. When someone got a job at Boeing, they always said, “I got on at Boeing’s.”
Every fourth person in the area had a job making airplanes. The other seventy-five percent of the population called Boeing “the Lazy B;” when they asked someone to explain their job there, they couldn’t make sense of the explanation.
For seven years, Mom wore professional clothes. In 1987, casual Fridays started. “On Friday you wore whatever you wanted to wear,” Mom said. “The guys wore polo shirts and jeans. After a while it was like that every day. Now, I don’t wear uniforms anymore.”
