The Journey of Johsel and Mineko Namkung

I’ve been thinking of the amazing life of Johsel Namkung, one of the Northwest’s true renaissance men, but who is best known before he died, at 94, last  July, as one of the world’s great nature photographers.

Washington state lost many talented citizens in 2013, but Johsel remains top of mind.  He was was born in the Japanese colony of Korea in 1919 and grew up in a world where he and his family were always at risk as war and destruction closed in on them while they navigated Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, and Pyongyang in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

He not only survived those amazing times, he thrived in them.  Among the reasons why is that people could see beyond his modest presentation to where a resilient and seriously talented person existed who pursued his love of music and art even as the world he inhabited was collapsing around him.  He was the Korean proverb:

“If you speak beautiful words, then people will speak beautiful words to you.” 

As a young Korean boy, he grew up in an international culture in Korea, then a Japanese colony.  His father had earned a Doctor of Divinity from Princeton and Johsel grew up in an atmosphere of largely western learning, rare for a Korean boy at the time.  He became interested in German lieder, a form of musical expression that combines classical music from some of the great musicians in the

German culture with top notch German poetry.   His voice turned as a young man into a rich bass and his interpretations of lieder were considered exceptional both in Korea and in Tokyo, where he won a great prize at Tokyo’s top music conservatory and met his Japanese wife, Mineko, an even greater prize, at a Tokyo opera company.

As Japanese nationalism grew more strident in Korea, and as the Japanese invaded Manchuria and set up the colony they called Manchukuo, the Japanese military took several measures to bring their colony closer to heel.  People were forced to adopt Japanese names, teaching Korean was banned, Koreans were drafted into the Japanese Army, Comfort Women were forced into sexual slavery, Christians were forced to worship in the Shinto tradition, the official religion of Japan. 

Though Koreans carried Japanese passports, they were considered racially inferior to the Japanese and were second class at best.  Johsel’s father, Hyuk Namkung, was the patriarch of a large, influential and talented family and one that was not doing as it was being told to do. He resisted, feared that he would go to jail, and in 1939 sold everything and moved his clan to Shanghai, a place where wartime refugees were mostly welcome.  Joshel would join his father in Shanghai after finishing music school in Japan and the Japanese woman he met there, would follow and marry him in June of 1941. It was a marriage that pleased no one.  Her family saw her marrying a forever poor artist.  One of Johsel's aunts was severely tortured by the Japanese. However, they thrived in the great international and cosmopolitan city and would overcome the objections.  They opened a music school, helped revive the Shanghai Symphony, one of the world’s best at the time, even as the Japanese closed in on the city.  Once he got to the US and found a life here, he nearly lost it to the great Red Scare in the mid-fifties, facing deportation and likely execution in South Korea. 

Through it all, he and Mineko grew their family in Shanghai, Seoul and Seattle, became pals with nearly every famous painter and sculptor in the Northwest School of the fifties and sixties.  He developed great technical and poetical skills as the photographer who spurned the heroic images of the great mountains and waters for images that capture a tiny, clear stream, the physics of the stream flow revealed through a slight folding of a strip of scum on top, it all flecked with pollen from the surrounding Douglas Firs.

His art, of course, survives him.  But so do the experiences of his life.  I want to write about what happened before he found his photography and what it was like to live in such dangerous and exhilarating times.  That he emerged from them with the earnest optimism he had, that he developed his considerable talents throughout, is an achievement as inspirational as his pictures. 

Let’s start in Korea.  After years of maneuvering by the Japanese, Korea had become a colony of Japan by 1910 and remained so until the Japanese surrender in 1945.  While a colony, the treatment of Koreans varied, though it was frequently brutal.  By 1920, the Korean royal family had all been assassinated and the Japanese displayed a somewhat lighter hand.  However, as the Japanese military gained greater control of the government and set their country on a war footing, first with the invasion of Manchuria in the fall of 1931, the treatment of Koreans became harsher.

Namkung’s father was the leader of the most prominent Christian community in Korea and they lived in a compound with people from all over the world.  Johsel thrived in that bubble.  An older brother was a role model who seemed to do anything he chose with ease – painting, poetry, music, languages, science.  He followed his lead, worked hard to make things seem easy.  His aptitude for science paled when compared to his vocal skills and it disappointed him considerably.  He heard records on 78 rpm record players of the day and fell in love with the scratchy German lieder he heard on them sung by the great German singers. He focused on art and music and he became exposed to many different kinds of musical expression though his love of German music was by far the most robust.  The family moved to Pyongyang when his father was appointed to a professorship at the Christian college there.

A teenager, he competed in Korea’s national music contest in Pyongyang and emerged the winner.  It was enough to convince his father that he would be a better candidate as a music student than as a minister.  At 17, he traveled to Japan and entered the premier music school in Tokyo.  On his second try, he won the national voice competition in Japan.  He was later invited to join one of Japan’s opera companies and continue his studies there.  He met his Japanese wife, Mineko, at this opera company in 1938.

The result of 1839-1842 Opium Wars between China and the British Empire was that the British and later the Americans and French, among others, received Chinese land for use as trading stations.  While the land was China’s, its use was conceded to the foreign countries and these outposts were under nearly the total control of the governments who had them.  

As the concessions grew in size and influence, they took on the look and feel of the western countries operating there.  A county-like government, the Shanghai Municipal Council, provided governance for the British and American sectors while the French, sector governed alone.  

The nightlife of Shanghai was famously sinful. The gambling life was equally rich.  They even combined the two.  The Canidrome Ballroom was both a hot night club and a greyhound dog track, combining the words canine and racetrack.  Some nightclubs, like the three story art deco Paramount, survive today.

The International Concession also had one of the great orchestras of the world, beginning its musical life in 1879 as the Shanghai Municipal Public Band. For many years, the orchestra did not allow Chinese to hear its performances, but a sensualist Italian gambler/musician, Mario Paci, came on the scene in 1919 and soon was exhibiting a world class sound.  He made sure that Chinese could not only enjoy the orchestra but play in it and this attracted some great Chinese musicians. 

Mario Paci

Paci loved the mayhem that was Shanghai.  He loved the available women and the rush of the gambling.  And he loved the music he played and the remarkable audiences who came to listen and the remarkable players who came from across the world to play with such an orchestra in such a place.  For Paci, Shanghai became a refuge, the place he was meant to live in.  It was also a refuge for others, but mostly because they needed Shanghai to survive.  The concessions became home to White Russian refugees fleeing the Russian Revolution.  After, Russian Jews found their way to Shanghai and Jews from Baghdad.  Koreans like Johsel’s father and later Johsel found a safe haven from the Japanese in Korea, so did political dissidents and intellectuals from Manchukuo. 

Wolfgang Fraenkel
German Composer

In 1937, German Jews began arriving in Shanghai, initially with the complicity of the Nazi government, whose pre-extermination policy was forced emigration.  By 1940, 40,000 Jews were packed into Shanghai, many in the concessions.  Some of them filtered into the orchestra, adding to its quality.  Johsel immediately found his way to the orchestra.  His language skills – Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, German – soon meant he was writing the liner notes and providing musical criticism around the orchestra.  Paci was just ending his tenure at the orchestra when Johsel arrived in 1940 and Johsel would have known him. 

The setting was fluid.  Japanese influence around Shanghai grew over the thirties as the Japanese fought with the Chinese and grew its presence beyond Manchukuo.  A German policy of recognizing Nationalist China changed to a policy of support for Japan.  China and Japan went to war in the late summer of 1937 over Shanghai and Japanese bombs fell throughout the city, though most of the concessions were spared.   

Shanghai Train Station, 1937
Associated Press
H.S. Wong

The concessions always seemed in some kind of crisis, upping the adrenal level of living there.  In 1940, control of the French concession transferred to the collaborationist Vichy Government of France.  Assassinations of Japanese and Chinese were common, the shooters running into the grand hotels and out the back.  At 4:00 AM on the morning of December 8, a Japanese destroyer in the river harbor sunk HMS Peteral, a gunboat anchored in the Yangtze River and captured the USS Wake, tied up ashore.  The troops entered the concession and the great Japanese invasions of Pearl Harbor, Manila, Maylasia and Hong Kong were underway.  Johsel and Mineko remembered the shelling and the clatter of boots in the street below their apartment.  Many residents, including 18,000 stateless Germans Jews, Russians and Russian Jews and others were sent to a part of the city called Hongkew, sealing them off in a Japanese Ghetto. 

The invasion caused a great deal of trouble for the orchestra, but a Japanese intelligence officer with an interest in German music soon put together a group to reopen the orchestra as well as a Russian Ballet Company.  Johsel took over programming for the performances and even learned to conduct.  They continued to run the music school they had set up when they arrived. 

By 1944, the Namkungs had a baby girl, Irene, and it was becoming clear that Shanghai would be chaos when the Japanese left and especially dangerous for a Japanese woman and her young daughter.  In November, they caught what likely was the last Japanese passenger vessel leaving Shanghai for Japan.  Just before leaving, a woman who helped Johsel with his conversational German gave the couple a large packet of Cream of Wheat, just in case there were problems with their journey, then just an overnight trip. 

Kobe in 1945

It turned out the sea was full of allied submarines and warships and the boat was the target of torpedoes, though with no result.  Hugging the shore they went south and west along Korea’s coastline, then dashed across international waters to Kobe, a great city now nearly flattened.  The overnight journey took more than a week and the baby Irene survived on the Cream of Wheat.

They made their way to Nara, a cultural heritage site not on the allied bombing list, but could not find housing.  As the constant bombing closed in on them, they found a boat going to Korea and bought tickets, even though there was a risk for a Japanese woman in post-occupation Korea.  The end of World War II found them in Seoul living with Johsel’s sister, a pianist, and his parents.

The country had been divided into a Russian sector in the north, above the 38^th Parallel, with its administrative capital in Pyongyang and the American Sector in the South.

His music, voice and language skills propelled him along.  He soon found his way to the church choir and stood out as special.  He was asked to be a personal interpreter by an American Major from Seattle who had gone to Seattle Pacific University.  A former Army Chaplain in Korea had been appointed the President of the University of Seoul immediately after the war.  Before the war, he was the Dean of the Commerce Department at Seattle Pacific University.  After hearing Johsel sing at church one day, he and the Major knew that Johsel needed to study music at Seattle Pacific and the sooner the better.  

Assured of a scholarships in Seattle, Johsel and Maneko each received student visas and enrolled at Seattle Pacific.  They found the music department well-below the quality they were used to in Japan, Shanghai and Korea. 

In Seattle, Johsel quickly began performing and drew the attention of the University of Washington music department as well as its language department, then in need of someone with Japanese conversation skills. 

After he joined the University of Washington faculty, he was in a position to change his immigration status which would allow him to bring his two children – another had been born in Seoul after they had left Shanghai – to America.  Before leaving, a Korean Methodist Minister Namkung knew asked him to deliver a letter ‘as a friend.’  The letter was to Kim Il Song, the leader of North Korea and Johsel was supposed to give it to a physician in the South Korean Public Health Service.

Namkung knew the minister was a North Korean sympathizer and took the risk because, at the time, conventional wisdom had it that the North was better prepared militarily and would dominate the South if it came to war.  He hoped carrying the letter would position him to help his father, the most prominent Christian in South Korea, in the event the North prevailed.

He traveled to Seoul a few months before the war broke out, picking up his children, receiving a different visa, delivering the note and spending time with his father.  He returned with his kids in the Fall of 1948.  Certainly he and his father talked about personal safety and the fear of war on the peninsula.  His father was poorly positioned in Seoul.  Not only was he at risk from the North, but in the South.  He was a political enemy of the dictator Syngman Rhee, the autocratic leader who emerged as the postwar leader in the South.

South Korean Refugees Fleeing in 1950

And war did come.  And the conventional wisdom was correct.  The North Koreans were pushing the South Koreans into the sea and capturing Seoul in September of 1950.  Only the invasion of US forces at Inchon, well-behind the North Korean front, turned the day – for the moment.  Now the South Koreans and Americans troops were carrying the fight into North Korea, first capturing Pyongyang, then continuing north into the northern territories.  On October 28, 1950  the Chinese crossed the border, crushing South Korean troops and encircling the Americans fighting with them.  By January of 1951. the Chinese and North Koreans had retaken Seoul.

And Johsel’s fears about his father were also accurate.  He and the husband of his sister were detained by the North Koreans in the Fall of 1950 after they had captured Seoul.  They disappeared into the violent history of Korea, likely taken North, tortured and killed with other religious leaders. 

The message Johsel delivered also came back to threaten him and his family.  The US and South Koreans sifted through North Korean papers when they occupied Pyongyang in 1951.  There, they found the letter sent to Kim Il Sung by the minister in Seattle with Johsel’s name identified as the courier.  The letter is a relatively clueless view of American politics, but sufficient for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to issue a deportation order for Johsel on a Tuesday effective the following Friday.

He found a great attorney, Ken MacDonald, who represented him for seven years as he appealed the deportation.  McDonald made the point that it was a death sentence for Namkung to return to South Korea.  Two of his brothers had become communists in the twenties, though he and two other brothers had not.  People who were not compliant under the Rhee government did not fare well.  Recent disclosures from a South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission show that Rhee’s government had murdered thousands of people suspected as being opponents to his government, communists, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  A private bill, sponsored by the state congressional delegation, ended Johsel’s seven year nightmare in 1961.

Johsel decided he could not be a professional singer because singing at his level required constant practice and he had a family to support.  There was precious little money singing German lieder in America.  

So, he began to drift into his photography as his creative outlet and worked as a photographic printer, improving his eye for color.  He also found work as electron microscope photographer at the University of Washington Medical School.  A Japanese businessman sent him $500 out of the blue, asking him to buy the camera gear he needed.  He and his wife opened a gallery and were soon friends with other young artists in Seattle who would later become famous.  

From left to right, Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa,
gallery owner Zoe Dussane, John Matsudairia and Kenjiro
Nomura
Elmer Ogawa Photo

All the while, he roamed the Northwest and Alaska, finding his unique scenes and waiting for the perfect light.  His prints began to sell.  He was asked to illustrate a book about the Olympic Rain Forest and it sold well.  He was on his way.

He and Mineko, also called Helen, created a unique space in the world of Seattle Art in the late 1950s and early sixties.  Through Tsutakawa, a professor at the UW School of Art, he met many artists in and out of the university.  Soon, Mineko and Johsel were having dinners and parties at their house with Mark Toby, Paul Horiuchi, Guy Anderson, Ken Callahan -- icons of Northwest School today, then just becoming known.

Mark Tobey
Robert Bruce Inverarity

Tobey, who was also an excellent musician, would sometimes play the piano and Johsel would sing his German songs, the others sketching away and laughing. There was a camping trip to Shi Shi Beach on the Olympic Peninsula that ended with an art show attended by no one but these artists -- sticks, rocks, seagrasses, driftwood, bits of broken glass rubbed cloudy by the Pacific Ocean -- arranged on the beach, surviving at most a day or two.

Reading through the list of people and institutions who own Namkung's work, I came across the words "Japanese Royal Household" and suddenly remembered a woman in a bright yellow dress, glowing with a Seattle Spring day in a large suite at the Westin, Mineko bowing, me giving my welcoming remarks on behalf of the city and Johsel unwrapping the gift of one of his pictures.  I can't remember the name of the royal personage, just that she sure looked royal.  Nor can I remember the picture Johsel gave her, just the glow of the dress in the big room.

After, at a nice lunch, we talked about a couple of things I've described above, but mostly about how glorious it was to meet a real princess wearing such a lovely yellow dress, a color not found in nature.



Namkung's Photography

Smithsonian Institution Oral History

Wolfgang Fraenkel's Journey to Shanghai

Portlandia, 1954

Vaughn Street on Opening Day, 1953.  Note fans inside
the fences.  

If the picture existed, it would show me standing just below the circle of dirt describing the pitcher’s mound at Portland’s Vaughn Street Park.  My red t-shirt proclaims ILWU, International Longshore and Warehouse  Union.  I’ve forgotten the number that was on the back of the shirt, but arching over the number, holding up my skinny and slumping shoulders, is the word “Tigers.”  Standing beside me is the Mayor of Portland, a man I now know as Fred Peterson, holding a brand new baseball.

My parents were infrequent photographers and probably never thought to bring a camera, as if they owned one, to the 1954 Little League Jamboree.  In their defense, it was also a confusing year, one where there was not much joyful documentation.  We had moved to the southeast Portland bungalow of my Dad’s half brother, Walt, and it was crowded and inconvenient and not really talked about except for the part that said ‘because that’s what we’re going to do.’  The fact was that we were at Walt’s house and that’s where we were going to be for a while.  So, one Saturday, I went down to a nearby park, found Little League baseball tryouts underway and I became, in a handful of moments, an ILWU Tiger.

A few days before the picture that wasn’t and isn’t, or perhaps it was just after, my brother was crawling around Walt’s upstairs, likely looking for contraband he had stored there in a corner, cigarettes maybe, or perhaps a magazine.  Accompanied by surprised shouts from below, one of his legs blew through the lathe and plaster ceiling of the living room, splattering debris everywhere and taking down a chandelier as well.  Not long after, as soon as school was over, we moved to my grandmother’s house in a little cedar shingle mill town called Vernonia, 40 miles away and a couple of thousand feet up in the Coast Range.  I may have played a couple of games for the Tigers, but I finished the season in Vernonia where it was more peaceful.

Blackburn, left, and Truitt recreating a game in the
KWJJ newsroom

We were familiar with the old Vaughn Street Park and the Beavers were frequently on the radio at our earlier homes in Oregon and always on at my grandma’s.  We once went out to Jantzen Beach and watched the two announcers, Rollie Truitt, a thin, older man, consumptive even, and the young, slightly pudgy Bob Blackburn, perform a baseball game re-creation. Sitting in a gazebo located among several folding chairs in one of the few quiet areas of the amusement park, the announcers would receive simple information about a Beaver away game – “ball one” – and embellish it with sound effects and their own imaginations for the live broadcast:

“Thump.”  “Way inside!  Wow, get back!”  

Vaughn Street was a creature of the industrial past of Portland.  The right field fence was the wall of a steel foundry, Esco, and just 315 feet down the line, ideal for Joe Brovia, a left handed slugger who had four seasons in Portland.  Pitchers were careful around Brovia.  In 1952 he walked 109 times.  When Brovia put one out of the park to right, Truitt would offer a low, excited wheeze “…and it’s ... onto the foundry roof!” 

Brovia is part of a ghostly parade of players who somehow crowd into the photograph every time I think of it.  Eddie Basinski, is one, a second baseman with coke bottle eyeglasses.  He was a wartime player whose bad eyesight kept him out of World War II but somehow he had enough vision to play second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1944 and 45 and hit .286 his last year in the major leagues.  He was part of a flashy double play combo for the Beavers with

shortstop Frankie Austin, probably the team’s most accomplished player.  Austin was a great negro league player from Panama and was purchased by the Beavers from the Newark Bears in 1949 along with his black teammate Louis Marquez.  Blacks moved to other teams in twos then, so as not to screw up living arrangements on the road. 

As more and more Pacific Coast League players crowd into the frame, I realize that they are crowding out Mayor Peterson who, in fact, is the star of this version of the photograph’s story.  After my one inning of baseball at magical Vaughn Street and after our move to Vernonia, I never gave another thought to Mayor Peterson.  But recently he came across my mind and I decided to get to know him better and it led me to the fantastic scandal he played a role in, a scandal that consumed both my former town and my present one.

Portland writer Meryl Lipman describes Fred Peterson’s post war Portland as a hard edged town with no excuses, nothing like the Portlandia of today with its debates about leash law ethics and the proper business model for selling kale chips.  

“Portland in 1947 was a dirty town.  A port city crawling with gambling halls, strip joints, seedy bars and brothels, the City of Roses offered every addiction known to man.  Bookies set up shop on 4^th and Morrison.  Dealers sold opiates in Chinatown.  On SW 3^rd, the legendary Tart’s Row, a romp with a prostitute cost $10.  A sweet-faced, redheaded madame called Little Rusty entertained local cops and Supreme Court justices.  Mafia–controlled abortion rackets brought women streaming in from Seattle and California.  Violence and venereal disease ran so high that sea captains refused sailors liberty time to carouse in Portland.”

In a 1948 report, The Portland City Club found other reasons why vice was so persistent in Portland: 

“Gambling and bootlegging establishments, houses of prostitution and other vice operations have been carried on not only with the knowledge and acquiescence of Portland police but also under a system of police protection.  This protection is provided in consideration of a substantial “pay-off” to some police officers and public officials, the gross amount of which varies from time to time but aggregates, according to witnesses having personal knowledge and experience, to approximately $60,000/month.”

People could look around and see what they considered the normal Portland, the place with all the roses, but its mobsters, prostitutes, strong armed goons and crooked public officials were just below the surface.  Some people didn’t think that Jim Elkins’ morphine habit was the reason he wanted to move to Portland after he got out of prison in Arizona for shooting a dirty cop he was splitting money with.  They thought he was just moving in with his brother to straighten out after prison.  Some people thought that historic preservation was really what motivated stripper Tempest Storm to purchase the Capitol Theater on Morrison Street and fix it up.  Some people thought that Teamster leader Dave Beck’s Western Conference of Teamsters was truly concerned about working conditions in the punch board, pull tab, slot machine, pinball and prostitution industries that caused the Teamsters to muscle in on the mobster Elkins and try to control those assets in Portland.  Some people thought that Mayor Earl Riley kept a safe at city hall for important papers critical to the city's zoning laws.

Mayor Lee

The City Club report created demand for reform and its members sought to find just the right honest man to lead a reform platform.  After a fruitless search, they reached out to an honest woman, a 14 year state legislator from Portland, founder of the city’s first woman law firm and a rookie Portland City Commissioner, Dorothy McCullough Lee.  Lee served with Fred Peterson on the Portland City Commission and they both shared a dislike for the current Mayor, Earl Riley who, it is alleged, kept much of the monthly pay-off receipts in the city hall safe near his office. 

Lee’s platform was simple – enforce the law. After successfully becoming the first woman mayor of Portland, putting away Earl Riley by 85,000 to 22,000 votes, she did.  Sure enough, gambling and other vices in Portland began drying up.  Private clubs like the Multnomah Athletic Club and the Portland Press Club lost their slot machines and a considerable monthly income said to be about $5,000/month each.  The Press Club went broke without the slots.  Vice was drying up.  With nothing to protect, payoffs were down.  Her reform agenda was working, but her zeal for reform was ignoring an economy in transition.  The booming Portland shipyards weren’t on a war footing any more.  And, there was a growing realization that vice helped pay the rent.  One other factor was that she was a woman and easily marginalized.  “Do-Good Dottie” the woman wearing the funny hat, soon faced

1953 Rose Parade with Mayor Peterson on
the left. Truman was grand Marshall.

a recall, survived it, but came up against Fred Peterson and a united front of men who wanted business – not reform -- put back on top of the Portland agenda. Two years before the mayor and I met up at the Vaughn Street pitcher’s mound, Lee was swept from office and replaced by the pharmacist from North East Portland.

The old normal replaced the new normal in Portland and the change came at a time when the old normal was in a position to step up the pace.  One reason was that the Teamsters Union was following the dictum of its leadership  -- organize everything.  And, also, the dictum went, if you made a buck at it, that’s fine too. 

On the heels of Lee’s defeat, two Teamster thugs from Seattle rode into town and set up for action.  One was Joseph McLaughlin, a bookmaker and Teamster hanger-on who had plenty of friends at the Denny Way Teamster headquarters in Seattle.  A second was Thomas Maloney, a heavyset ex-convict who worked at a gambling joint in Seattle run by McLaughlin who had been assigned political work for the Teamsters in Oregon and who, coincidentally, had just handled the successful Multnomah County Prosecuting Attorney campaign of Bill Langley, providing some last minute cash and an endorsement by the union.

The boys from Portland claimed to be extremely close to Frank Brewster, one of the top Teamster officials in the country and president of the Western Conference of Teamsters, an organizational tool that brought many small, relatively independent Teamster unions throughout the west coast into line.  Brewster wanted to succeed his boss, Dave Beck, who had figured out the western conference idea and who everyone knew would soon be gone because of the flood of his enormous legal and tax problems.    

Clyde C. Crosby, yet another ex-con, was the top International Teamster Union official in Oregon and wore several hats.  He was a commissioner of the Exposition and Recreation Commission, the city appointed group that was developing what is now Memorial Stadium and associated convention activities.  Crosby had purchased a lot of property around the site he liked best and was pushing for a decision that would work best for him.  Second, he was close to Fred Peterson and believed that the mayor would fire the police chief James Purcell if Crosby asked him to.  While Purcell was no angel and not much of an impediment to the plotters, they wanted their own cop in the top job. 

James Butler Elkins

The two guys from Seattle and Crosby then approached Jim Elkins, who they met when he sought them out to put pinballs in the Teamster Union Hall.  He controlled most of the vice in Portland though Elkins took great pains to exclude prostitution from his portfolio, something he said he found offensive, though he worked for his brother’s prostitution operation after moving to Portland in the thirties. They told Elkins that Seattle had a bigger idea and said, in essence, that they wanted to help him out by consolidating all the vice under their leadership and “set up the town” and make some real money, as they liked to put it.

Elkins had learned in prison to be a good listener and began cooperating, though he soon just pretended to go along since he had done all the calculations necessary to be fairly confident that he was likely to be the first member of the enterprise to be listed as missing and never found.  So, he started recording their conversations on a small tape recorder at the King Tower Apartments in Portland’s West Hills the boys from Seattle had rented for their use while in town.  Elkins also kept recording even when the District Attorney, William Langley, attended meetings there with Elkins and Maloney.  Apparently, nobody noticed that Elkins never took his suit jacket off.

He also placed listening devices in the apartment that picked up Prosecuting Attorney Langley saying that they had to get rid of Elkins because he was a liar and playing them along as patsies:

"You've got to knock him out of the box," Langley said into the secret microphones.  "It's what I've said all along that you were never going to do any good being with him.  You decide what you want to do.  If you want to keep on doing business with him, that's all right.  Or put him out.  That's all right."

As an ex-con and a criminal since his early teens, Elkins tended to take statements like that literally, especially when they came from a top law enforcement official.

Lambert with the phone, Turner looking over
his shoulder.

Elkins felt he needed to make a dramatic move and he decided to give the tapes to an Oregonian reporter, Wallace Turner, who was contacting Elkins in another matter, also related to vice.  In mid-April of 1956, Turner and his reporting partner Bill Lambert broke a series of stories using the tapes and Elkins’ account that would win a Pulitzer Prize for the paper, lead to 116 indictments against 28 people and result in William Langley’s removal from office and produce a singular embarrassment in the Rose City.

The tapes figured prominently in the indictments and not just for the juicy sound bites.  First, Elkins and an employee, Raymond Clark, were charged and tried for wiretapping for having made the tapes in the first place.  But then Langley and an Oregon Journal reporter were indicted for illegally conspiring with Multnomah County Sheriff Terry Schrunk to put together an illegal raid to acquire and copy the tapes which were stored at Clark’s house. Langley had convinced the Oregon Journal, the morning Oregonian’s afternoon competition, that the tapes were phony, that Elkins doctored them with false statements in an attempt to blackmail Langley.  He said that Elkins had, in fact, visited Langley’s house, pointed a gun at him and demanded money. 

Bill Langley at his trial

The Journal fell hard for Langley’s version of the narrative and allowed Langley to write several pieces in the paper in which Langley spoke directly to the Journal’s readers.  The pieces described not only the Elkins extortion attempt and how the tapes were doctored, but also how he grew up admiring his father and how his dad ran the District Attorney's 30 years previous as an anti-crime crusader.  He explained how his own frantic efforts to establish a vice-squad were thwarted along the way by political enemies and how the Attorney General of Oregon saw Langley as a threat and was using the excuse of the scandal to get rid of a rival.     

And get this.  Is it really possible, in June of 1956, just six weeks after the last of the Turner/Lambert stories and while Langley is center stage at one of the greatest political storms in Oregon’s history, that William Langley finished second in the Oregon Amateur Golf Championship on his home course, the Portland Golf Club?  The Oregonian's obituary of Langley in 1987 says that is true. 

Witnesses at McClellan hearings.  Elkins is in the center.
I believe Clyde Crosby is second from left.

Portland’s sorry scandal moved very quickly to Washington, DC in February of 1957.  The Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, was formed at the end of January, 1957 and chaired by Arkansas Senator John McClellan whose chief counsel was Robert F.  Kennedy.  Portland’s mob problems were the first the committee took on. The situation in Portland fit the committee’s agenda for a number of reasons.  Portland showed how deeply the corruption of the Teamsters reached into daily life.  The mob goals in Portland seemed utterly fantastic – buy the mayor, buy the commission, buy the police chief and sheriff, buy the DA, buy the governor, buy the legislature.  They sought to acquire all the community’s institutions of law enforcement and according to many people, they had made a great deal of progress.  Secondly, the committee didn’t have in hand its number one target, Teamster President Dave Beck.  Beck was in Europe on an extended stay to avoid the committee’s many subpoenas.  So, Portland presented a fine opening act, kind of like what the Cubans and the CIA goons provided during the early days of the Watergate Hearings. 

Beck on the left with Hoffa

Beck finally came before the committee later in March and asserted his Fifth Amendment right well over a hundred times when he was asked about loans, other income and benefits from the union.  He retired from the union later in 1957, handing power to Jimmy Hoffa.  In 1959, federal prosecutors decided on a tax evasion charge that was a sure thing and convicted Beck of selling a union-owned Cadillac and keeping the $1,900 dollars he got for it.  He served 30 months. 

Langley was convicted of knowing of and attending places where the laws against gambling were not enforced, paid a $480 fine and was removed from office in April of 1957.  He worked as an attorney and maintained a fine golf game until his death in 1987. 

Fred Peterson didn't get indicted but never threw out another first ball at Vaughn Street Park.  It was torn down in 1956 and the Beavers moved to Multnomah Stadium.  However, Peterson's police chief, Jim Purcell was indicted for malfeasance.

In the Fall of 1956, Peterson was defeated by Terry Schrunk, the Multnomah County Sheriff.  Later, early in 1957, Mayor Schrunk was indicted by the grand jury on a bribery charge that he had take $500 from a Jim Elkins club manager.  A jury trial in September of 1957 cleared Schrunk on a related charge of perjury and four other indictments against him on other charges were subsequently dropped.

 After the events of the 1950s, and another stint in prison, Jim Elkins had a hard time making ends meet in Portland.  He was, at the core, still a criminal and he needed some shadow to work in.  However, in Portland, the flashlight was always on.  He and two associates were hanging out at a Raleigh Hills grocery store one evening and got busted for planning a robbery there.  The charges were later dropped. 

Elkins claimed that Jimmy Hoffa once called his wife and urged her to make a case to her husband that they should leave the country.  Others called the house with the message that they were a minute away and were set to break both arms and both legs.  Elkins said he sat with the shotgun in front of the door more frequently than he would have liked.

So, he moved back to Arizona in 1968 but soon after was killed in a traffic accident, the autopsy revealing a heart attack while he was at the wheel.  Or so said the coroner in Arizona.  There’s a story that some Portland cops went down to find out the truth for themselves after Elkins' sudden cremation and found a second reason for Elkins’ heart attack, a photo showing two bullet holes in his chest.  

No picture has showed up.  Like so many things about Elkins, most evidence was just beyond reach or hidden under the next bush.

Dorothy McCullough Lee was appointed to the US Parole Board in 1953 by President Eisenhower.  Certainly some of her former colleagues must of thought she might be useful to them if convicted, but she moved on to another federal position before anyone of substance in the scandal went down.

She came back to Portland and ended her career running her law firm and lecturing at Portland State and Portland University on the importance of good government.


McClellan Committee Transcripts of Portland Hearings

The Fall of Dave Beck from RFK's Book "The Enemy Within"

Dave Beck: The Most Amazing Thing at the Seattle World's Fair

Read the Oregonian's Pulitzer Prize Winning Coverage

Tempest Storm's Facebook Page

Our Norwegian Boys Move On After the 1926 Rose Bowl

Rose Bowl Poster Art, 1926
Tournament of Roses

This is the second essay of two about the 1926 Rose Bowl, the game that brought southern football to the national stage, when the so-called ‘Tuscalosers’ took the train out to Pasadena and beat the powerful Washington Huskies for the national championship.  It is also about the Norwegian immigrant Guttormsen family of Everett, Washington and one of their sons, George, who played on the Everett High School team that lost one game in a decade and who followed his coach, Enoch Bagshaw, to the University of Washington and the big game in 1926.

Johnny Mack Brown
Encyclopedia of
Alabama

George is a kind of Forrest Gump figure who connects with several big events and larger than life personalities in Seattle.  Last week we recounted the high school national championship game in Ohio and the big game in Pasadena.  Now, we’re moving on, as we do after every New Year’s Day, to the rest of our lives, and theirs. 

Each side in the 1926 Rose Bowl had a future movie star on the field.  Alabama’s star halfback, Johnny Mack Brown, whose football handle was the ‘Dothan Antelope,’ signed a movie contract a few weeks following the Rose Bowl game.  He appeared in nearly 200 movies, mainly westerns and many short reel westerns, and became a bigger star in Hollywood than anything he was in worshipful Alabama.  On the field, he was pretty good.  He scored two of the three touchdowns Alabama scored in the decisive third period of the ‘26 Rose Bowl, both on long passes.

The other was Herman Brix, the Huskies’ left tackle.  He came from a wealthy timber family in Tacoma and was just two years from winning a silver medal in the 1928 Olympic shot put competition where he set a world’s record of 51’9” on his last throw.  After receiving a pep talk from Brix, teammate and Kansan John Kuck then stepped into the ring threw the shot 52’ for a new world record and the gold. 

Brix become an actor after meeting Douglas Fairbanks Junior, who had a gym in his Beverly Hills home.  Fairbanks would invite US athletes to train there prior to the Los Angeles games of 1932.  Just 25, Brix was reaching his prime, was still reliably world class and fully expected to medal once again. 

Brix was an economics major at the UW and inclined to business and, when not training for the Olympics, was selling insurance and other products, assuming his life would change after the Olympics and he would turn to a life in business, like his father.  Fairbanks thought he could be successful in the movies and, and perhaps looking at the economic realities of the time, Brix put his skepticism aside and relented.  He soon was in the running for the role of Tarzan and was MGM’s favorite for the role of the ape man.

But in 1931, in the movie “Touchdown,” Brix broke his shoulder and MGM by-passed him and cast Johnny Weissmuller as the star of the first Tarzan movie, “Tarzan the Ape Man.”

Lord Greystoke nee Herman Brix
Brian's Drive-in Theater

Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the Tarzan books, did not like the guttural, monosyllabic man child MGM had turned the role into. He loved Brix because he was the essence of the nobility he saw in the character he made, articulate, athletic and thoughtful.  So, in 1935, Burroughs made his own version of the Tarzan movie with Brix in the starring role.  The more sophisticated Tarzan showed his upper crust stuff when found by explorers in the Burroughs movie version:

“Yes, I am Tarzan, also known as Lord Greystoke.  How may I help you?” 

Burroughs didn’t have the distribution muscle that MGM had, but the Burroughs version – and Brix -- became highly popular in Europe.

“The New Adventures of Tarzan” was followed three years later by “Tarzan and the Green Goddess” and Brix’s movie career was solidly underway.  By this time, however, Brix wanted fewer adventure roles and more dramatic, serious ones and decided he needed to distance himself from his by now-typecast self.  He changed his name to Bruce Bennett and mostly succeeded for two decades in higher end films like “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “Mildred Pierce” and “Dark Passage.” 

He truly did take after his businessman father, leaving the movies in the early sixties to start several businesses. He also had a keen eye for real estate when we all wish we had such an eye at such a time in California.  He died a rich man at 100 years in 2007.

KOMO Broadcast Team
Walter Reseberg, Arthur Lindsay and George

Guttormsen graduated from the University of Washington School of Law in December of 1930.  He had been making money on the side as a broadcaster of UW football games and in 1930 radio was really kicking in, making Guttormsen a familiar voice in local sports broadcasting.  Then, several radio stations shared the extensive costs of remote radio broadcasting. KJR, KOMO and KOL together acquired the rights for Husky Football but each had their own broadcasters. KOMO’s guy “in charge of the KOMO’s remote control microphone” was Guttormsen. 

George was also listed as an instructor in 1930 at the brand new Lakeside School, then under construction in the north end of Seattle.  An announcement in the Seattle Times reported that he was a teacher in mathematics and was its ‘physical director.’ 

Mary McCarthy met George Guttormsen at a party given by Broussais Beck, the manager of the Seattle Bon Marche department store, at Beck’s Three Tree

Mary at Annie Wright School in Tacoma, 15 years

Point summer home south of the city.  Beck was one of the many men in Seattle who tried to get into Mary’s pants when she was in high school.  He failed, but apparently was not overly put off by the rebuff and she visited the summer home often.  That summer, 1931, was just after her sophomore year at Vassar College, when she had returned to Seattle to visit her grandparents, Frank and Augusta Preston.  They had raised Mary and two other children after their parents had died in the influenza epidemic in 1918.

When you think of McCarthy, you tend to think of sex, perhaps because of her book, “The Group” a best seller in the early 1963 that was full of particularly frank and detailed descriptions of sex.  It is about eight women who leave Vassar and make their way in the world and not always with their step-ins on.  Think “Sex in the City,” only better.  She also authored one of the most depressing depictions of losing her virginity in her memoir How I Grew.  An LA Times review of the front-seat-of-the-roadster description provided by McCarthy said: 

“It suggests abdominal surgery with a local anesthetic.”

You will also remember her because she remembered Seattle so frequently once she moved to New York and became a national literary figure. Seattle started popping up in the New Yorker, Mademoiselle and many other publications from the forties to the eighties.  Her time in Seattle had formed her sexuality and her independence and she thrilled to recall her clandestine explorations of the city as a very young woman and adventurous girl, sneaking out for sex with artist Kenneth Callahan and the Russian bohemians on Queen Anne Hill and creating elaborate lies to cover her many transgressions from her over-protective grandparents and the Catholic Church she had by then largely abandoned. 

You might also remember her feud with playwright Lillian Hellman and her words in an interview with Dick Cavett.  “Everything she writes is a lie,” she said.  “Including the words ‘a’ and ‘the.’”

Frank Preston was a founding partner of a law firm called Preston, Thorgrimson, later Preston Gates and Ellis and today among the largest firms in the city, K&L Gates.  Mary lived with her grandparents along the ridge above the Leschi neighborhood and Lake Washington at 712 35^th Avenue, a great street then and now.

She would start and end many of the adventures at 34th and Union trolly stop, a favorite corner of mine, my first home in Seattle and home today to a lovely neighborhood renaissance.

She loved the memoir form and returned to it again and again.  This was her genre, in large part, because it couldn't fail to be all about her.  

In How I Grew, published in 1987, she writes from the date she calls the ‘birth of my mind,’ the year 1925 when she was 13, until she is out of school at 21, in New York and focused on her growing intellectual life and a series of bad marriages.   In 1931, six years after the birth of her mind and 19 years after that of her body, she met Guttormsen, just out of law school and, she writes, headed for work in Harold Preston’s law firm.  (I don’t think Guttormsen ever worked at Preston, but who’s counting?)

KOMO Publicity Photo, about 1931

Guttormsen has a small but important role in How I Grew.  She remembers him as the person she might have married had she decided to stay in Seattle rather than set off for New York and the considerable literary life and many heartbreaks awaiting her.

"Once I even made love with a man I met at the Beck's summer place.  He was an intelligent young man, a sort of intellectual, even, a freak case of a football player who was Phi Beta Kappa (I don't think George was Phi Beta Kappa either) and good looking as well."

"But I was at the end of my last summer when we met and excitedly made love, so that I never saw him again…In an alternative life, I hope, he could have been mine." 

George had a busy year in 1934.  He was handling a high-profile divorce case on behalf of a University of Washington champion swimmer and was frequently mentioned as participating in several weddings.  One wedding was of his sister, Agnes, to a Seattle newspaperman, Ted Crosby.  He was also an usher in the wedding of Mary Bard to Dr.  Clyde Reynolds Jensen.  Mary was an accomplished writer like her more famous sister, but didn't have a book that took off like the rocket ship that was Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I, an account of living on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in the twenties with some low brow, low rent next door neighbors Betty named Ma and Pa Kettle.  

Universal Pictures

The Kettles were big hits in the 1947 movie made from the book starring Claudette Colbert as Betty and Fred McMurray as Bob Heskett, Betty's husband who, in real life, she left at the farm to head back to Seattle.  The book would be published long after she had married Donald MacDonald and created a completely happy life in Seattle, on Vashon Island, where she still kept chickens and in Carmel, California, where she presumably did not.

Hollywood loved the Kettles and made nine movies featuring their fictional, but believable self-destructions, mishaps and malaprops. Marjorie Main played Ma, the much put upon matriarch herding her inept but usually well meaning family, most of whom had a tough time crossing a paved road without dropping the milk bottle.

As the year closed, George Guttormsen and Miriam Herington, an Oregonian and graduate of Reed College who was running the YWCA in Seattle, drove up from her home in Madison Park to Bellingham where they quietly married. 

Universal Pictures

That whole thing about that Heskett woman and her writing that book made life pretty awful, complained the Bishop family, the real life next door neighbors in Chimacum. First off, there were all those visitors coming at all hours, blocking the road, taking pictures of the Heskett farmhouse and the Bishop place. Sometimes they would take pictures of Bishop family members, pointing and laughing as they did. They had to put up all those no trespassing signs, hand coloring in “And that means you!!”

Trips into Chimacum, their non-fictional town, turned into many small and sometimes major humiliations. People remembered that the Bishop barn had burned down once, but they were not aware that one of the Bishop boys, as told in The Egg and I, when asked to burn the trash, piled it up against a wall of the barn and lit the fire.

So, in 1951, the Bishops sued MacDonald, along with the publisher, Lippincot and the Bon Marche, where the book was sold. They asked for damages of $925,000, claiming that MacDonald had used stories from their own lives for her book and publication had caused them great pain and suffering, loss of sleep and continuing humiliations in and around Chimacum and the whole damned Olympic Peninsula! George Guttormsen was part of the defense team hired by MacDonald.

Seattle Times

It was a tough ticket and there was always a line outside Judge William Wilkin's court. Ma was dead and Pa was sick -- I mean Mrs. Bishop had passed and Mr. Bishop was sick and couldn't make the crossing of Puget Sound to attend the trial, but the trial was still as entertaining as anything in town. Copies of the book were all over the court room and Betty MacDonald found it difficult to leave without signing a bunch of books.

Her defense was that The Egg and I truly was a work of fiction and the similarities with the real Bishops were mere coincidences, like the barn burning down or the story of the Bishop boy who was working as a traffic flagger where blasting was going on and he let a US Mail delivery truck go right through just as the highway crew blew up a rock face, breaking all the windows in the truck and scaring the hell out of its driver. “I’ve always learned that the Yew S Mail must go through,” he said in the book and also, in his testimony in Judge Wilkins' court.

The Bishops had a difficult case to make. To win, they had to show they were really as stupid as they appeared in the book. Judge Wilkins perhaps had that it mind when the jury ruled in favor of MacDonald and the judge said if he had been hearing the case without a jury he might have found for the plaintiffs and offered a nominal award, like a dollar.

George keeps up his relationship with the University of Washington as President of the Alumni Association and through the periodic rehashing of that great 1925 season, a reason why he is chair of homecoming every so often and organizing the occasional Bar Association or alumni golf tournament. He and Miriam adopt George Geberg Guttormsen after his sister Caroline dies a few weeks after childbirth and it is clear that her husband will be unable to care for the boy. They name him George G. Guttormsen, not a Junior. Our George is a George C. It was a careful, lawyerly choice, yet a loving one. 

UW Collections

The Guttormsens have captured me fully and I need to find some way to sign off and say goodbye to them and their friends and loved ones for now. That requires a bit of a sum up so you know what I know of what happened to some of these people.  We know that Zioncheck, Guttormsen's campaign manager flew out of the window of the Arctic Building in 1936, but you may not know he came down headfirst 20 feet in front of his car where his wife, Rubeye,  was sitting.

It ended poorly for George Wilson.  Today he would be signing a $35 million contract for three years, the first two guaranteed, but then the NFL was really an exhibition sport and paid little money except to stars like Red Grange who played out of a real media market in Chicago.  Before he died of a pulmonary embolism walking to work as a cargo checker on the San Francisco waterfront in 1963, he must have relived a couple of moments among the many he had in the bank.  Like the time he played against Grange a handful of years after the great game against Alabama and racked up 150 yards to Grange's 30.  He also may have thought how cool it was the UW Rose Bowl team of 1960 made such a fuss over him when he visited the locker room and posed for pictures with one young man after another.  He is one of only three Huskies who have had their jerseys retired.

Everything doesn't end badly in this story.  Bruce Bennett, nee Herman Brix, made plenty of money, was a critical success not only as Tarzan but in other films he made and was a financial smash in California real estate, living to 100 years.  

George’s brother,  Andrew, the Swarthmore student, was a wonderful car mechanic and ran “Tip’s Super Service” in Everett with his brother, the little boy in the picture, Leonard. The brother who never found his potential as a UCLA football player, Harold, worked for the school district there, then had a bookstore with his wife, Jean and worked as a salesman for a small publishing company.

Gunnar came back from the Navy to become an Everett Police Officer. Geberg suffered a stroke in 1937 and died in Everett. Agnes, the matriarch, stayed on another 10 years at 1801 McDougall.  

The twins, Ethyl and Esther both found their way to southern California and lived out their lives there. We know that Caroline died after childbirth, leaving George and Miriam with their only child. Little Eleanor lived in Everett her entire life and Agnes met a Tacoma man and moved to Seattle.  Both died in their early eighties. Little Leonard died a young man in 1966. 

Betty MacDonald had such a fine sense of humor. Her book about spending a year at Firland Sanitarium in Seattle while recovering from tuberculosis, she titled “The Plague and I.” She died way too young, in her fiftieth year. Bob Heskett, her thuggish former husband, was murdered in Oakland, California.  

Her sister, Mary, always a teacher, should have had more time to work on racial issues in Seattle. A testament to their rich lives and important contribution is that both are fully alive on the Internet.  

Mary McCarthy finally divorced that jerk Edmund Wilson and continued writing and scolding America and Lillian Hellman until 1989.  

Coach Bagshaw at Everett High, 1920
Nesika Yearbook

Enoch Bagshaw’s last year at the University of Washington was 1929 when alums and students who rejoiced at the Rose Bowls turned against him, forcing him out despite yet another winning year. That darned Tea Party governor, Roland Hartley, hired Bagshaw to run the transportation department of the state. Like everything Hartley touched, it went bad. Bagshaw was found near his office in Olympia, lifeless, at 46 years.

In 1975, there was a reunion in Tuscaloosa of the two teams who played in as good a Rose Bowl game as any. The UW and Alabama were scheduled to play a game of football in early October, 1975. The game was a few weeks shy of the 50th anniversary of the great 1926 Rose Bowl game. Miriam and George planned on being there, but it turns out only Miriam attended. George died that Spring.

Historylink historian Paula Becker frequently writes about women in Washington state and has written extensively about Betty MacDonald and Mary McCarthy.

Betty MacDonald material at Historylink.org

Paula Becker's Essay on Mary McCarthy

Egg and I Trailer

34th and Union in Madrona