The Hard, Hard Life of George A. Lowe

The Hard, Hard Life

of George A. Lowe

George Lowe

Copyright © 2008 by George Lowe.

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Contents

1

SEATTLE DOG

2

1829 NORTH FIFTY-FIFTH

3

JOHN LOWE

4

THE DEPRESSION

5

LIFE WAS NICE AT 1829

6

COUNTRY MOUSE

7

SWEET LITTLE KID BECOMES PIMPLY PAIN

8

THE FIRST FLICKERING SIGNS OF SOMETHING THAT MIGHT CONCEIVABLY CALLED MATURITY

9

ONWARD, SLIGHTLY UP

10

AH, THE SUMMER OF ’52

11

LET’S GET SERIOUS

12

DE LAND OB COTTON

13

THE ACTUAL ARMY

14

LOOK HOMEWARD, MEATHEAD

15

THE #%@%*&?+# ADVERTISING BUSINESS

16

OPEN UP THAT GOLDEN GATE… .

17

FOLLOW THOSE GEESE!

18

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE OFFICE

19

PLAYGROUND SEATTLE

20

FIGHTING THE PROBLEM

21

BAINBRIDGE

22

KRAFT, SMITH AND LOWE?

23

LIFE ITS OWNSELF

24

FINDING THE PERFECT BOSS

25

STARK REALITY

26

STILL GROWING UP

(Another helping of autobiographical compost.)

27

MAGNOLIA

28

BALWEGIANS

Appendix

I have had a wonderful life. I only wish I realized it sooner. Collette

Although I earned my living writing advertising for forty-five years and have written four small books about matters that interest me, I come to the age of 74 with no literary pretensions. Some people are surprised that I wrote as well as I do. Others seem surprised that my writing isn’t worse.

But I was born here in Seattle. I’ve experienced this city up one side and down the other for 74-by-God years with time out for the Army (Tidewater Virginia and South Korea) and work in California (a few years in ’50’s San Francisco.) Because of the Depression, my family moved often as my unsinkable and venturesome father strove to put food on the table. As a result I attended nine different public schools as far away as Seal Beach, California before graduating from Edmonds High School in 1948. (My brother, eight years older claimed he went to twenty three.)

But mainly it’s Seattle. Eighteen years ago my wife and I were at Swedish Hospital where our daughter, Marianne, was giving birth to her son, Max. Tired of the tenseness of the waiting room, we went out to sit in a quiet stairwell. It was an old stairwell, in the central core of what was the original Swedish hospital structure and we came to realize that we were sitting within about a hundred feet of where we both had been born. Me in 1930, she sixteen months later. So we’re Seattle. And that’s what I want to write about. Me and Seattle. Seattle and us.

1

SEATTLE DOG

It is impossible for one person to know a city entirely, even a relatively small and peripheral specimen like Seattle, even for a person bred and born here, who has lived in and around the city—with a few necessary interruptions—all his life. But what I know of the city, what I’ve seen and experienced of it, represents a slice of actuality, observation and knowing that is mine alone. Some may well have a wider, keener or more fragrant perspective. But only mine is mine, and as I drive and walk and look at the city, my mind’s eye goes back to what it has seen.

So, I’ll tell you what I know about Seattle, and some about life. And if I seem prolix it’s because I like to imagine that I’m getting paid five bucks a word.

So let’s start with climate. Seattle is moist all right. If Chicago is the city of broad shoulders, Seattle is the city of wet feet. Cupped between two coastal mountain ranges, this is a city of rain and clouds, sounds, bays and lakes, rivers and ponds, mud puddles and tide flats. And on the horizons to the east and west, those two mountain ranges covered with snow just waiting to melt.

It has been said that Seattle people keep themselves warm by complaining about the weather. While not severe, it can be oppressively gray and there’s often a bit of damp chill making it seem colder than the actual temperature. One winter when I was in college, I worked a J.C. Penney loading dock downtown with a sturdy young fellow from North Dakota who told me that no matter how many clothes he wore, he still couldn’t get warm. They say the Eskimos have twenty words to describe snow. Seattleites have at least that many for rain—or at least the weather people do. It doesn’t just rain. It sprinkles. It showers. It mists. It drizzles. It pours. It is intermittent, occasional and heavy. And there is almost always a possibility of rainfall of some kind. A friend who I’ve known since the seventh grade in Richmond Beach took each raindrop as a personal insult. He could have lived anywhere, but he grumpily stuck it out in Seattle for over seventy years before finally moving to California. We are also connoisseurs of gray. Ranging in shade from nearly black to almost white. In tone from frosty cold to a warm near yellow. Clouds, of course, are another specialty of ours. Except for the tornado, we have them all in their season. Among my favorites are the oncoming high clouds that presage heavy precip. Curiously round-bottomed, they look like rain bags. At other times clouds begin to remind one of lint. Or dust bunnies. At that point, it may be time to get out of the Northwest for a while.

Call me perverse, but I actually like our climate and I enjoy the constant change. Even on the worst days, usually in the early morning or just before dark, we get inspirational glimpses of sun and sky. There does come a time… April or May or June… when it does seem our turn to have three clear days in a row, and the thermometer above 60 degrees. At that point, I admit that I become impatient with the weather.

I have a crackpot theory about Seattle people and our climate that arose from my experiences writing ads for Pacific Northwest Bell back in the 1960’s. At that time PNB had the smallest percentage of home extension phones of any of the 22 Bell operating companies in America—a measly 13% penetration. And this was true despite the fact that PNB’s monthly extension phone fee—a buck and a quarter—was among the very lowest in the entire system. By comparison, in Philadelphia 65% of the homes had extension phones although the fee was twice as high. PNB’s big shots were taking a ribbing from their peers at the other 21 companies, so despite the fact that the company actually lost money on every extension, our ad agency was told to advertise extension phones in a big way.

We tried. And tried. And tried. But no matter how we advertised or what appeal we used, the needle didn’t jump, we got nowhere. Some joked that perhaps we were failing because Seattle had so many Norwegians. (Two Norwegians are sitting in a bar. Their drinks come. Ole raises his glass and says Skoal. Sven says, Did we come here to drink or talk.) So why? If it wasn’t the money, was it the Norwegians? I concluded that it was our climate. I think our gray weather makes all of us slightly Norwegian. We’re friendly and polite, but a tad cool and private. We didn’t come here to talk.

In this regard, it’s interesting to consider the character of the Native American tribes that lived in and around the peaceful inlets of the Puget Sound country. Compared to the warlike bands to the north, our Indians were notably tranquil. Chief Seattle’s bunch lived off the north end of Bainbridge Island at present-day Suquamish in one of the largest long houses under one roof in the world. (Deliberately burned to the ground by white settlers in the early 20th century who deemed it a fire hazard and thought they might as well get it over with.) In the summer, each local native family would leave the communal dwelling and repair to a nearby beach or sand spit to live a healthy and salubrious existence fishing and clamming during the long summer days and warm summer nights. They called no tribe enemy. In fact, Port Madison, the little inlet at the north end of Bainbridge Island was considered a sort of free port—basically all tribes were welcome provided they leave spears, harpoons and war clubs at the door. Live and let live, don’t make waves. Go your own way. Don’t bother me.

Which brings my thesis back to Seattlites. Mild climate, comparatively easy way of life. Live and let live. Find yourself a summer place on the beach. Look at the mountains. Watch the sunsets. Have a clam. We didn’t come here to talk.

So who came? And why?

Given our forests and water-girded geography, it’s only natural that Seattle and the Puget Sound country would appeal to Scandinavians. They came, saw, settled. They fished, they logged, they farmed a bit and they generally prospered. But contrary to popular notion, Scandinavians were never a majority in the area. Even in darkest Ballard, Seattle’s Scandinavian neighborhood, immigrant Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes never totaled more than a third of the population.

The rest of us were from all over. Northern Europeans mostly. English, Scotch, Germans. But a few Italians, some Greeks and Sephardic Jews. But by the time they got to Seattle most incoming citizens were actually second, third or fourth-generation Americans. My mother’s mother’s family, the Wares, arrived in Massachusetts soon after the Pilgrims. Her father’s people, the McDermotts, came from County Tyrone to Canada in the 1850’s. Dad’s father, Adolph Lowenthal, was the draft-dodging son of a Leipzig rabbi and hit Ellis Island in 1880. Dad’s mother’s family, the Scotch-Irish Barneses, had settled in western Kentucky in the late 1700’s.) By the time I went to grade school, the parentage of the majority of my classmates was similarly mixed. Only sons and daughters of recent immigrants were of pure nationality. (I remember a fourth grade classmate named Solveig Stoppenbrink, but whether she was Dutch, Swiss or Norwegian I never knew.)

One way or another, most Seattleites ended up out here seeking employment. If they found work or opportunity and could stand the insidiously moist climate, they stayed. If they couldn’t make a living, they kept going to Alaska or went back home. A great many newcomers found a lot less opportunity than they hoped. Except for fishing and lumbering, there was scant industrial or commercial base. And the Alaska Gold Rush was about the only external event that juiced the economy significantly. Since then, one way or another, the majority of Seattlites eked out a living by taking in each other’s washing. Not a good way to get rich.

Physically, the city sprawled. Land was plentiful and lumber was cheap, so the city grew outward as a town of modest frame houses on small city lots. Hilly terrain meant many of those homesites enjoyed beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and waters. Building lots that had a view were generally more expensive and thus were graced with somewhat fancier homes. To this day, Seattle voting patterns are easily determined by a simple contour map. With few exceptions, neighborhoods up on the hill trend Republican. Down in the hollow—Democrat.

2

1829 NORTH FIFTY-FIFTH

Born in 1863, my grandmother, Jennie Linette Ware, was short, devout and determined. As a nine-year-old child on a hardscrabble Vermont farm, her assigned contribution to the family’s survival was to knit a wool stocking every day. Her father had died, an older brother was off with the Union Army, her younger brother helped run the farm—all under the stingy sufferance of a paternal uncle who spared them very little. No wonder Jennie went off at the age of 15 to become a teacher and later, moved out to Ohio to live with cousins. Grandpa John McDermott’s large Irish-Catholic family had settled in Montreal in the ’50’s. He met Jennie at a Chatauqua meeting in Ohio. Despite their religious differences—her people were granite-jawed Congregationalists—love conquered prejudice and marriage promptly ensued. They settled in Minneapolis where John prospered as a contractor until he broke his pick—literally and figuratively—on a contract to build barracks at Fort Snelling. Digging the foundations, he struck rock where he hoped to find soft dirt and lost his shirt on the contract. On to Montana.

Great Falls and then Missoula were subsequent venues of which my mother and aunts had wonderful memories. An amateur cornettist, Papa McDermott insisted that each of his beautiful daughters learn to play an instrument. (Son Henry was on piano.) Their home was lively and musical. They had a big dog. The girls had boyfriends. Their father vetted each new suitor by pretending to be a babbling idiot. If the prospective swain was too dim see through the ruse, he was ruled off the course. This drastic strategy was finally outflanked when the eldest, Ruby, ran off and married Sam Driscoll, a bibulous Irish trumpet player from a touring vaudeville group.

On to Seattle just before World War I.

In Seattle, John McDermott continued as a small builder and his enduring monument was the family home at 1829 North Fifty Fifth Street about a quarter mile south of Green Lake in Seattle’s Wallingford District.

Eighteen-Twenty-Nine was a modified Dutch Colonial with lots of bedrooms. Unpretentious but functional. The year was 1922 and they hadn’t got much more than nicely moved in when my Grandpa up and died of kidney failure. He was visited by a Catholic priest on his deathbed but refused final rites. I’ll die the way I’ve lived is how his words came down to me. His marrying a Protestant had been a bitter, bitter pill for his mother who put a light in the window every Christmas, praying that her son would leave that Protestant Jezebel and come home. Various Catholic priests looked him up at every stop on the way west urging him to leave his bastard brood. and return to the one true religion at home.

So there was Jenny L. McDermott—and Margie and Genevieve and Mabel and Ruth and Henry and baby Patricia—high and dry at 1829. (Ruby was off with Sam Driscoll and while the family was still in Missoula, Mary had wed Bob Sanborne, a handsome All-American football player from Ohio.)

The older girls were able to get jobs and eventually husbands. Henry (Hank or Mannie) McDermott drove a laundry truck. (He knew Dave Beck from the very start.) With help from Ohio cousins, the Coveys, who also had ended up in Seattle, the McDermotts managed to get by.

In 1921, my mother, Genevieve met and duly married Bob Roberts, a likely young fellow from Dixon, Illinois. They had a son (born in the main floor bedroom at 1829) but soon moved back east. Bob Roberts invested in a marvelously special gray horse—a guideless pacer—named Earl Junior which won acclaim at county fairs by dashing around a racetrack in near record time in harness but without a rider or buggy and without breaking pacing stride. (A pacing horse is basically a trotter, except both legs on each side move forward together.) Earl Junior was a marvel and a modestly decent meal ticket to the young Roberts family. But while exhibiting the horse downstate, Bob Roberts came down with appendicitis and the local doctor botched the operation—leaving a sponge inside was the story I always heard—and Roberts died of blood poisoning.

This left widow Genevieve and three-year-old son, John Richard, high and dry in Dixon, Illinois, two thousand miles from home. Her in-laws were caring, but Genevieve soon loaded up the Model T and headed west on roads that were largely unpaved. In eastern Montana they finally fetched up mired in mud miles from nowhere when a cowboy on horseback came along and pulled them out and took them to the home ranch and put them up for the night. Next day the rancher and his wife sent them back on the road with a big baked ham and Johnny remembered eating ham sandwiches the rest of the way to Seattle.

Room was made for them at 1829 and Genevieve soon managed to find work as a stenographer at a real estate office in Madison Park. A year or so later, love came piping over the hill in the rangy form of John Hobart Lowe, who was selling real estate in the area at the time.

They soon married and I appeared in 1930.

3

JOHN LOWE

My old man was a piece of work.

He was born 1898 in Cape Giradeau, Missouri a little town on the banks of the Mississippi, down the river from Hannibal. A bit of pungent Missouri twang always clung to his voice and a considerable portion of pungent Missouri wit lodged in his brain. His father, Adolph, had been unwilling to fight for the Kaiser in the Franco-Prussian War, so he fled to America where he found work with a seed company in New York. This job took him west and he met and married my Grandma Barnes in Western Kentucky. Soon they started west themselves, dropping children at various spots along the way—Cape Giradeau, Tulsa, and Bakersfield, California. Four boys in all, plus one son who tragically had to be institutionalized in California. Adolph Lowenthal was asthmatic and the family came north to Seattle in 1907 in hopes that the mild, wet climate would improve his health. He worked for the Lilly Miller Seed company, was responsible for creating their first catalog. Unfortunately his health didn’t improve and he died in 1912, leaving my father—fourteen years old—as the responsible eldest male in the family. He had been attending Franklin High School, (the old Franklin, Dad always said ), but dropped out to work full time at a sawmill north of Seattle at Lake Ballinger east of the town of Edmonds.

He was a smart, hard-working boy and later found a position as a timber-cruiser for Weyerhauser up in Snoqualmie. Working in the woods, estimating lumber, fly fishing for trout in the near-virgin streams, sending money home. Great stuff. On his way. Then World War I.

Dad volunteered for the U.S. Army in Seattle’s Company L which ended up deeply involved in the Battle of the Argonne. A company clerk, he was detached to Paris to handle the paperwork on the casualty lists as the battle turned into a long bloody struggle. Billeted somewhere near the Paris Opera, Private John H. Lowe apparently had a pretty good war. At least he and his brothers-in-law seemed to have a lot to giggle over when he told them war stories at family gatherings years later. (I was never allowed to listen.) And Dad cherished a large framed map of Paris which Mom always sniffily referred to as that damned map.

He made one great friend in the Army, a Major Chalmers, who took a real shine to Dad and wanted him to come to work for him in Ohio at Allis Chalmers, the agricultural implement factory. But Seattle and family beckoned, and he returned with enough poker winnings to buy a taxicab with his younger brother Karl and go into business. He got to know Seattle inside and out, up and down, high and low. One of the best cab stands was the railroad station where loggers would arrive from the woods spoiling for whiskey and women. Ay vant to go to Howell Street. That’s what they wanted and Dad knew how to get there.

But the money wasn’t all that great, and John H. Lowe soon gravitated to real estate. And a couple of years later, that led to Madison Park and Mom and what do you know, me.

4

THE DEPRESSION

The late 20’s were prosperous for Dad. He became the exclusive sales agent for a waterfront subdivision surrounding Horsehead Bay, a beautiful little harbor near Tacoma. Lot sales were going great, the place was hot, and then bingo, Black Thursday and the lights went out on the real estate business. Vacation property sales went flatter than a stamped clam.

What savings they had melted quickly, especially after doing the best he could to help his brothers and mother out of their financial straits. So the Lowes, like just about everyone else were on their uppers, Dad was still trying desperately to figure out a way to make it selling real estate. My very first human memory is of a place called Waterford Woods, a subdivision in Wisconsin of all places. (An old army buddy had lured him back there with promises of riches.) The memory? I was a little twirp of two or three and I have a recollection of hiding behind a couch where my Dad finally found me and blew big raspberries on my belly.

Waterford Woods was a dry hole, so it wasn’t long before we found refuge back at 1829, the rock on which we all clambered to save ourselves from the flood. Aunt Pat and Grandma were in the upstairs front bedrooms, Uncle Hank, Aunt Martha, stepson Bruce and daughter Mary Noel in the upstairs back rooms with a hot plate and an icebox. (Hank had become a plumber by then and was good at fixing things up.) Dad and Mom were in the downstairs back bedroom, Johnny in the little sewing room off the front parlor. I was in the back corner sunroom. It was a little crowded, but I thought it was fine. One vivid memory is of the time when Uncle Hank and teenage Bruce were wrestling upstairs and thumped around so uproariously that they knocked plaster off the kitchen ceiling which fell into a pan of pork chops Mom had on the stove. She went up the stairs with blood in her eye. (Hank had been drinking, of course, and that was a sore spot too.)

About that time I was embarrassing everybody by continuing to suck my three-year-old thumb. They tried persuasion, they tried admonition, they tried Tabasco on the thumb. (The right thumb only, I never sucked the left.) Nothing worked, so Johnny split up an apple crate and fashioned a splint so I couldn’t bend my arm to get my thumb in my mouth. I very distinctly remember lying on the parking strip grass and bawling my eyes out with Johnny and a couple of neighborhood toughs of his age laughing until tears came to their eyes. (One of those fiends was a guy named Paul Pishue who later ended up as the noted bartender at Victor’s 610. My personal bartender, I might add.) I quit sucking my thumb immediately.

Dad was trying to make it buying gold. That’s after President Roosevelt took America off the gold standard and tried to get everybody to sell their gold back to the government. Dad would go out in the country and knock on farmers’ doors and offer to buy their old gold—coins and jewelry—and pay spot cash for whatever they had and wanted to sell back to Uncle Sam. Dad was allowed to keep a commission. Many years later, he allowed as how it really was a bit of a racket. But it put cash in the farmer’s pocket and some in Dad’s too.

This was a pretty spotty enterprise, but for a while it kept food on the table and pork chops in the frying pan. Quiet down up there, Hank!

I have a memory of taking the Meridian street car to visit Aunt Mabel and Uncle Horace in West Seattle. It rattled on down Meridian to 45th, over to Stoneway, down to Fremont, over the trestle and along Westlake to downtown where we transferred. Then down along the waterfront and across Harbor Island on an amazingly high and teetery wooden trestle and somehow or other out to their place behind the bluff near the Admiral district. I can remember my cousin James taking me down to the Plunge at Duwamish Head where we swam in the icy indoor salt water pool.

Now the memories become a little more focused.

Dad had always loved the country around Snoqualmie where he had worked in the woods, so he bought a little beer parlor in the nearby town of Meadowbrook. He liked people, he liked beer, he was a good host. I can remember him sitting me up on the bar in front of a