It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
illo from the 1962 world's fair guide book
Many of the people out on the streets this week are usually invisible. They are part of an underclass, an underworld, where the rules are different and you have to take what you can to get through the day. Given the chance, many would in fact make something better out of their lives – but they don’t get the chance. What little equilibrium existed even a year ago has now vanished, and they are raging. Because they have no hope, no future, nowhere to go and nothing to do.
nalley's display at the puyallup fair (1948); from the tacoma public library
It’s the end of the (canning) line in Nalley Valley.
The 93-year-old south Tacoma food processing giant became a regional (and in some product lines, international) hit in potato chips and dips, pickles, pancake syrup, chili, mayonnaise, salad dressings, and countless other packaged-food products.
But the company was sold back in the ’60s, and resold several times since. Various managements sold or closed Nalley’s product lines over the years.
Finally, the New York equity group that now owns the brand has shut the last part of the plant, which made chili and canned soups.
The equity group, and its trademark licensees, promise to keep the Nalley’s brand alive, in the same way that there’s still a beer called Rainier (made at the Miller plant in L.A.).
But that’s not the same thing as actually being here, employing local workers, sourcing from local farmers.
(In the comments that follow the hereby-linked Seattle Times story, one commenter notes the current owner of the Nalley’s pickle line touts it as “The Taste of the Northwest,” even though the stuff’s now made in Iowa from cukes grown in India.)
All fans of kitsch architecture, great dive bars, giant teapots, and Tacoma—Unite! Save the Java Jive alive!
The biggest remaining locally-based financial company couldn’t resist the offer of really cheap office space at what, for three years, had been the home of the previous biggest locally-based financial company, Washington Mutual.
For one Seattle woman I know, who’s been working for Russell after being laid off from WaMu, it means she’ll be back in her former building.
For Seattle civic boosters, it means a modest stemming of the downtown office glut and several hundred more customers for local lunch spots.
For Tacoma civic boosters, it means the loss of the town’s biggest private employer, the anchor of its downtown revival hopes, the great white-collar hope that T-Town could rise beyond its economic tripod of shipping, manufacturing, and the military.
For Russell’s out-of-state owners, it means nothing more than an everyday cost cut, a paean to the Almighty Stock Price.
…today to Bob Bogle, Ventures founding guitarist and NW rock legend. His band got into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame just last year. His distinctively crisp, cool instrumental sound is eternal.
Tacoma’s own Ventures, kings of instro surf-pop lo all these years, have got their totally deserved berth in the Rock n’ Roll Hall O’ Fame.
I, along with some 20,000 other locals, found my way to the Tacoma Dome’s north parking lot bright n’ early last Saturday morning.
We were all off to hear John Kerry give a major swing-state campaign speech.
I’d arrived at 10:30 a.m., an hour after the gates had first opened. It took another hour to wind up the line and get into the outer standing area. An hour after that, those of us without pre-attained tickets were fed through the metal detectors into the inner audience zone.
Almost everyone held an optimistic, celebratory mood. There was a clear air of possibility in the crowd. People felt they really could take this country back, or rather, take it forward, beyond the cynical politics of greed and prejudice.
The conservative counter-protestors were few and brusque. One yelled epithets against “liberal scum,” as if he could persuade people to his side by insulting them.
Most of the homemade buttons and badges were anti-Bush in nature. But the rally’s organizers made sure plenty of professionally made pro-Kerry signs filled the space.
Following the usual round of warm-up speeches by local politicos, “folksy” radio veteran Garrison Keillor led the crowd in a somber a capella rendition of “America the Beautiful.” He then told an anecdote about escorting Kerry to the Minnesota State Fair, where the radio host bought the candidate a corn dog and the candidate had to remind the radio host to put ketchup on it.
A good 45 minutes elapsed between the end of Keillor’s address and the arrival of the candidate’s motorcade. When he finally appeared, he brought two more warm-up speakers. Kerry’s ex-primary opponent Gen. Wesley Clark (below) decried Bush as “an incompetent commander in chief.”
After the general, Kerry’s army buddy Jim Rassmann slammed the TV attack ads questioning Kerry’s Vietnam service.
Finally, the candidate himself took to the mike. He spoke for almost an hour, drawing plenty of whoops and applause along the way.
He made the usual points—reform health care, kick-start the economy, rebuild international alliances, stop tax windfalls for the rich, get folks working again (at living wages), rebuild public education, help real families instead of hiding behind “family values” platitudes.
He said little or nothing about abortion rights, gay rights, ending the Iraq war, ending the drug war, repealing the Patriot Act, getting the FCC off its censorship kick, breaking up the media conglomerates, or bringing a just peace to the West Bank.
Still, Kerry did say what I wanted to hear about the issues he chose to discuss. And he gave the most impassioned, most robust speech of the three of his I’ve seen in person.
John Kerry’s found his proverbial mojo. Whether that’s enough to put him over the top remains to be seen. But at least the Saturday crowd seemed to think it was probable.
IT’S THE LAST CHAPTER of our recent jaunt to Tacoma. Today: Just a few of the magnificently restored stoic downtown buildings.
Tacoma, as you who’ve read regional history might recall, was originally developed as a Northern Pacific Railway company town. Like all the western land-grant railroads, the NP tried to control all commerce in the territories it settled. By siting its western terminus at its own town, the NP hoped for a stranglehold on the Northwest economy and on north-Pacific ocean shipping as well.
But Seattle offered a more wide-open, less regulated form of capitalism. This, along with the help of the rival Great Northern Railway (now merged, with the NP, into the BNSF), the siting of the University of Washington, and the success of a former furniture maker named Bill Boeing, secured Seattle’s dominance. Seattle became the region’s financial and cultural capital; Tacoma became an industrial and military city.
When I-5 came through town in 1965, coinciding with the opening of Tacoma Mall, downtown Tacoma was left to rot.
It took more than three decades and a series of public projects (including museums, live theaters, and a UW branch campus) to bring downtown Tacoma back.
It still doesn’t have a mainstream movie theater, or any retailer bigger than the University Book Store. But it’s got galleries, funky boutiques, antique shops, restaurants, bars, cafes, high-offices, and (most importantly) a spirit of possibility.
I’ll forever remember this Tully’s as Tracey Ullman’s pizza place in the film classic I Love You to Death.
At this “graffiti garage,” young spray-paint artists are permitted to create, then cover-up and replace, their expressions of urban individuality.
Our thanks to John Poetzel and “T.Y.D.” for recommending, and escorting me to, some of the sites shown in this series.
WE’LL HAVE ONE MORE set of Tacoma pix following today’s installment, which focuses on quaint signs and on the city’s seaport.
As far as I know, no late-night Showtime comedy series have ever been filmed on this street.
Unlike the unified port districts of New York/New Jersey and Los Angeles/Long Beach, Puget Sound’s seaports operate separately and competitively. This cuts costs for shippers, but raises costs for taxpayers. The Port of Tacoma’s public history kiosk, at the base of the viewing platform where the above shot was made, still boasts of having snagged Totem Ocean Trailer Express (an Alaska container-cargo operation) away from the Port of Seattle back in the mid-’80s.
(via Kerrick Mainrender):
“Thanks for pix of the 11th St. Bridge, which I think was named after Murray Morgan [not sure]; it is the waterway that’s named after Foss. It is a neat bridge, whose fate has been in question for some time, and so now I have one more thing to worry about. Do you have any links to the people who want to save it? [I know, I’ll search on my own, too.] Not that there’s much I could do, my own condition being about the same as its. [No, no birds, or I’d eat them–maybe just call it a falcon sanctuary?] Way back when, the paper asked people for names for it, and my own favorite is ‘Great 11th.’ Not really any of my business since I don’t live in Tacoma, but still. You have a neat site, BTW.”
“Thanks for pix of the 11th St. Bridge, which I think was named after Murray Morgan [not sure]; it is the waterway that’s named after Foss. It is a neat bridge, whose fate has been in question for some time, and so now I have one more thing to worry about.
Do you have any links to the people who want to save it? [I know, I’ll search on my own, too.] Not that there’s much I could do, my own condition being about the same as its. [No, no birds, or I’d eat them–maybe just call it a falcon sanctuary?] Way back when, the paper asked people for names for it, and my own favorite is ‘Great 11th.’
Not really any of my business since I don’t live in Tacoma, but still.
You have a neat site, BTW.”
The once-forlorn downtown of T-Town’s undergone some magnificent renewal in recent years. Still down-n’-out, though, is the once-stoic 1906 Elks club building.
The Elks themselves want nothing to do with their former palace. The landlord wants to raze it for condos. The civic-preservation clique wants it restored. Rebellious kids climb into it through broken windows for squat parties.
And a local guerilla-art group, Beautiful Angle, posts flyers on its boarded-up doors. This flyer depicts the nearby Thea Foss Bridge, also threatened with razing.
The fine print reads: “I am the fishbone stuck in the craw of a great jazz singer, who wishes it were gone and then wonders afterwards why the songs don’t sound as sweet.”
The couple who escorted me down the bridge called it “the Bridge of Death.” A large bird apparently lives in the upper rafters and attacks smaller birds, whose carcasses litter the roadway beneath.
At least one more batch of T-Town pix is still to come.
IT’S DAY TWO of our photo-jaunt up and down the length of that famed street of independent retail, South Tacoma Way.
Oldsmobile may be gone, but an Olds used-car sign remains at Russ Dunmire. One of the last 100 or so Olds-only dealers that remained, it now sells Mazdas.
Incidentally, the great rock combo Ruston Mire is partly named for this dealership, and for the dealership’s once-ubiquitous TV jingle. The band name’s other, more direct source: The Superfund cleanup site at the Tacoma suburb of Ruston, where an ASARCO copper smelter once manufactured arsenic.
Jack Roberts may be dead, but he’ll still take a pie in the face to give you a deal on a new fridge. And he’s given up a big white wall for one of those murals by at-risk youth.
Ponder the potential meanings of a used-car lot called “Bag Lady:”
1. She sells cars so cheaply, she can’t afford one herself. Let alone a domicile.2. At a bank Dumpster somewhere, there’s a pile of loan contracts she can collect into a grocery cart, which are still legally valid. 3. From her appearance, she’s potentially willing to do more to make a deal than Jack Roberts ever would.
1. She sells cars so cheaply, she can’t afford one herself. Let alone a domicile.2. At a bank Dumpster somewhere, there’s a pile of loan contracts she can collect into a grocery cart, which are still legally valid.
3. From her appearance, she’s potentially willing to do more to make a deal than Jack Roberts ever would.
This no-name restaurant sign now points down to a Subway franchise.
This neon, I’m told, still works at night, sort of.
After a long afternoon of exploring, there’s only one place to go—the taco wagon!
Over the next several days, I’ll show off some pix I took on a recent jaunt to our neighbors to the south.
First off, the signs and other sights of that great street immortalized by Neko Case, South Tacoma Way.
The Starlite Drive-In is, like most un-razed drive-ins, now an all-week swap meet.
Come in to the PI Bank for today’s special interest rate, 3.14159 percent.
The magnificent Java Jive survives, while many other nightspots and merchants have not.
Also surviving, sort of: The B&I Shopping Center. Once a thriving indie discount store, amusement arcade, and private zoo, it’s now a mini-mall at which various scrappy mom-n’-pop merchants hawk telephone cards, T-shirts, religious trinkets, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and Mexican soda pop. Ivan the gorilla, who lived at the store for years until economics and politics sent him off to a regular zoo, still oversees the place in caricature form.
In the ’70s and ’80s the Tacoma Mall, and its adjacent strip-mall spaces, absorbed most of the City of Destiny’s retail trade. City-planner types moped about the decimation of Tacoma’s downtown, which has only recently begun to rebound. Few such official concerns were raised over the fate of South Tacoma Way (the in-city stretch of U.S. 99).
America’s great retail chains either moved out of South Tacoma Way or never moved in. Today, the only corporate names you’ll see on that street are those on franchised car dealers and gas stations. South Tacoma Way is a haven for independent retailers of all types—at least for those who can stay in business in today’s Bush-decimated economy.
More of these to come.
