Taking Care of the Dead On D-Day and the German Quest for its Missing Sons, All Day Every Day.

There was a large transportation system in Saigon during the Vietnam War that moved the many administrative troops who lived in hotels and barracks across the city to their jobs.  Mostly, the transportation was provided by dark green school buses that lumbered through the impossible traffic of the impossible city to their destinations at the television station, various command centers, the Post Exchange, the Embassy and other spots that lent a kind of administrative normalcy to the incredible events that were taking place around us. 

Soldiers would wait for their buses in the small lobbies of their hotels because waiting outside was discouraged.  Usually there was a name in the slot above the windshield or a cardboard sign in the lower right corner of the front window that indicated the destination although some of the buses had no markings at all and somehow, people knew which to get on.  Those soldiers who worked at the mortuary had a bus with a sign that said “San Francisco/Oakland.” 

For a time I thought it was kind of funny, one of those ironic realities that help people keep moving through a tough time.  And, when someone changed the bus name from “San Francisco/Oakland” to “Mortuary” I was a little miffed, thinking that a bit of human scale sentiment had been taken away.  At the end of a year, however, I realized that there was nothing funny at all, nothing ironic at all, nothing worth being miffed about and it was probably a good idea to change out the sign.  Dead is dead and there is nothing clever or little about it.

I had no idea why I came to feel that way until I read Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s “Republic of Death,” her Civil War history about the problems dealing with impossibly large numbers of people killed in war.  The book shows how the Civil War's slaughter changed the way we thought about caring for our dead soldiers and their grieving families.   

United States Park Service

After the first battle of that war, a body remaining on the field would have as good a chance of being dragged off by an animal or dug up by someone looking for good boots than their family being notified and the body registered, the contents in its clothing stored and catalogued and a good idea of where it was going to be buried temporarily along with plans for a more permanent resting place.  Frequently, families never found the body of their child.  The system in place was a system that had no respect or compassion, just lists published in the papers or the good will of a comrade or a farmer returning to his ruined field.  People hired individuals to go look for their child in the ruins of past battles.  Bodies decomposed half in and half out of a field with nothing more than a penciled note on their tunic.


While having coffee with a friend the other day we got to talking about how moved we had been walking through the battlefield sites in Normandy. He had just returned and his emotions were still fresh. I asked if he had gone to the German cemetery near St. Mere Eglise and he said he had not, that the last day kind of slipped away and he regretted not going. It got me thinking about that cemetery, Orglandes, the name of the town nearby, and the trip to it down a monument-rich stretch of country lane. At the cemetery, there is a tiny turnout for a handful of cars and a Norman tower forming the entrance.  It is a quiet and peaceful place where over 10,000 German soldiers lay who happened to be stationed in Normandy in the Spring of 1944.

It is a simple and understated place, one of six German cemeteries in Normandy.  Each headstone announces the names of six people, their birth dates and the month and day they died, three names on each side of the cross.  It does not take long to get a feel for the nature of the German forces buried in Orglandes.  They were disproportionately younger and older than the German Army generally was at that time.  The best troops in the Wehrmacht were in the east, trying to alter the grim Soviet momentum after Stalingrad.

For some reason I know that the German Memorial Day is in mid-November, so after coffee, I spent some time reading up on how Germany is caring for its war dead and found the astounding knowledge that nearly 70 years after the end of the war, Germany is still collecting nearly 40,000 bodies a year and reburying them in Germany or in German war cemeteries across Europe. Since the end of the Cold War, Germany has found, identified and re-interred nearly 716,000 of its World War II era soldiers, many from unmarked, mass graves that chronicle the retreat of the Wehrmacht from its near victory in Russia to its complete defeat in the suburbs of Berlin. 

Orglandes Cemetery

German war dead are cared for by a volunteer organization called the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge), the Volksbund, for short.  Its job is to register, maintain and care for the graves of Germany’s World War I and World War II dead around the world.  The Volksbund was formed after World War I, but when World War II began, the Nazi Wehrmacht took over the job of caring for the dead and disbanded the Volksbund.  Two years after the war, the Volksbund was reconstituted and focused, early on, within the boundaries of Germany.  Soon it had established 400 war cemeteries inside the country.  After bi-lateral agreements between Germany and other countries were signed, the Volksbund went to work abroad.  Sometimes these agreements were a long time coming.  France and Germany signed a treaty in 1966, 21 years after the war, that allowed Germany to have direct access to its war dead and operate cemeteries in France.

Today, the Volksbund has 9,000 volunteers and 560 full time employees. It maintains 824 war cemeteries in 45 countries, containing a total of 2.4 million dead. Since the early 1990s, the commission has restored or built more than 300 cemeteries from World War II and 190 from World War I across Central and Eastern Europe and in Russia.

Earlier this year, the Volksbund released an on-line data base that includes the names of over 4 million World War II soldiers who either are known to be dead or are missing.  They hope, through contact with the families using the site, they will find letters, diaries and other sources that lead them to sites where other soldiers are buried.  Because of the expense, the Volksbund concentrates on larger grave sites, usually containing 50 or more bodies, since retrieval and reburial of individual graves is beyond the current capacity and likely future capacity, of the organization.  Because of the cruelty of the Nazi Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe, the Volksbund search teams in Eastern Europe are frequently met with considerable hostility.  More than 20 million civilians in the Soviet Union and 6 million in Poland died during World War II. The British Newspaper “The Sun” reported in September of this year that grave robbing in Russia of German cemeteries for Nazi memorabilia was becoming a significant problem.

In Czechoslovakia, a dispute about plans to bury the exhumed bodies of 2,000 German soldiers in a new cemetery went on for years, demonstrating how complex reburial can be. Some of the bodies were those of Waffen SS troops and some Czechs made a distinction between the appropriateness of burying regular army soldiers versus soldiers from the hated SS.  The bodies were finally taken from an old warehouse and buried in 2005. During World War II, 170,000 German troops were stationed in Czechoslovakia. More than 60,000 are unaccounted for.

Bodies from both wars are frequently found across Europe today, unearthed by transportation projects, new buildings, farmers, souvenir hunters.  The discovery of these sites demonstrates just how difficult it is to make identifications. A site in the south of France near Nice was found in 2006 by a local medical student and, at a depth of three feet, the remains of 14 German soldiers. They had died in August of 1944 in a firefight and the burial site was soon forgotten. Students from the medical school as well as archeologists worked with Volksbund to help identify not only who the soldiers were but find their cause of death and see what kind of historical evidence could survive over 62 years. Among the pieces of evidence was that of the fourteen soldiers, only one had shoes on his feet.  A universal truth about war is the value of shoes.

Only 7 of the 14 had dog tags, the Germans use oval discs, were discovered at the site and led to identification of six bodies. The information on one was destroyed by shrapnel.  For each tag there is a file in a Berlin agency that has the tag information along with other clues to finding a soldier’s identity such as wedding rings, medals or samples of handwriting. Two others in the group were identified by cross checking this additional centralized information that is maintained on 18 million German soldiers. The bodies were buried a year later at the German military cemetery in Berneuil, France. There was enough individual information gathered over the year of research that sixty German relatives attended the burial ceremony.

Staff Sergeant Elbert Legg
US Army Quartermaster Corps

Early this year, a World War I trench complex was found in France with 21 bodies of German soldiers in it. It had apparently collapsed all at once when it suffered a direct hit by a powerful artillery round. Bits of newspaper, clothing and other materials survived. The bodies were identified and returned to Germany.

Among the finds of my research is an account by a young sergeant from the Quartermaster Corps Graves Registration Company, Elbert Legg. Arriving on one of the nearly 1000 gliders landing in Normandy during the invasion, he hit the ground between St. Mere Eglise and Orglandes on the afternoon of June 6.  Soon, he is in a field nearby where wounded and dead have been brought and he begins to organize a respectful place for the dead.

He will learn on the job. He has never touched a dead person before. He will also redeem in our time the new values Drew Gilpin Faust described as evolving in the Civil War.

“Four dead paratroopers already lay in the corner by the crossroads. Five gliders were in the hedgerows that surrounded the field. As I examined the site, two jeeps with trailers loaded with bodies drove in, and were directed to the corner of the field where the other bodies lay. The drivers made it clear they were delivering but not unloading. I sized up the situation and decided the time had come for me to be, and to act like, the graves registration representative that I was. For the first time in my life I touched a dead man. I grabbed the leg of one of the bodies and rolled it off onto the ground. As I struggled, the drivers gave in and assisted me with the remainder of the bodies. There were now 14 dead lying in a row and more loaded vehicles were driving into the field.”

Normandy, 1944
US Quartermaster Corps

“After studying the surrounding terrain, I went to one corner of the field and stuck my heel in the ground. This would be the upper left corner of the first grave. I found an empty K-ration carton and split it into wooden stakes. I paced off the graves in rows of 20 and marked them with the stakes. I had no transit, tape measure, shovels, picks or any other equipment needed to establish a properly laid out cemetery. I also lacked burial bags (mattress covers), grave registration forms and personal effects bags. The situation rapidly exceeded what had originally been planned for the one-man graves registration unit, and this was still the first day.”

“There were plenty of parachutes in the field, so nylon parachute panels served as personal effects bags and body bags. Each body was searched and all personal effects were secured, but no inventory was taken. A ruled tablet served as Graves Registration Form No. 1. Both identification tags were left with the body until it was ready to be placed into a grave. One tag stayed with the body after burial and the other was attached to the stake that served as a grave marker. The personal effects and Form No. 1 were kept together and wrapped in a parachute that served as a "filing cabinet" for the first days of the invasion. About 50 bodies were interred on D+1. More were arriving all the time.”

While Sergeant Legg was inland near a town called Blosville opening a cemetery and dealing with the growing rush of bodies in the first hours of D-Day, other temporary cemeteries were going up on the beaches, first at Omaha and then at Utah.   By the end of the week, Legg’s cemetery outside of Blosville held 350 dead.  By the end of the month there were 6,000 people buried there.   

American Cemetery Above Omaha Beach
Google Earth

By June 10, the temporary cemetery on Omaha Beach closed and the bodies moved up on the bluff overlooking Omaha Beach, near the site of the present, American cemetery, a lovely place that amazes.  By June 20, the field near Orglandes opened for both German and American dead, who are buried in different areas of the field.  Soon, a decision is made by the Quartermaster Corps to make Orglandes a German cemetery and move the American bodies to the Omaha Beach bluff site.

About 2,500 American soldiers were killed on the ground on D-Day along with 1,500 allied troops and several hundred airmen.  It is not known exactly how many Germans were killed in action that day.  What we do know is that there are nearly 80,000 German troops buried in Normandy, along with 10,000 Americans, 18,000 British, 5,000 Canadians and 650 Poles.  The reason that there are so many British burials in Normandy is that it is a British custom to bury their dead near where they fall.  There are 18 British cemeteries in Normandy, only two American. 

French Women Placing Flowers on Temporary Graves
 St.  Mere Eglise Cemetery
June, 1944

At the beginning of 1947, American families of fallen soldiers received letters giving them a choice.  For the 233,181 Americans killed in action, the government told their families that they would repatriate the bodies of their loved ones.  However, they also could choose to leave their loved ones where they were buried or in permanent cemeteries abroad.  The families of 80,000 war dead had no choice.  The bodies of their sons, daughters and loved ones could not be found and were listed as missing. 

About 140,000 bodies were brought home, at a cost of some $200,000,000, well over $2 Billion today.  Nearly 95,000 families chose to have their relatives buried in American cemeteries abroad, like the one on the bluff overlooking Omaha Beach.

On October 26, 1947, sixty five years ago this month, in a ceremony hardly anyone remembers, the Liberty Ship Joseph V.  Connelly arrived at the foot of 21^st Street in Manhattan with 6,248 coffins below decks and one flag-draped coffin on deck, the first of those who had fallen, were buried and reburied abroad and who were finally coming home.  The man in the coffin on the deck was killed during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and was a posthumous Medal of Honor winner.  His name or home town was never revealed. At 12:45, the coffin is taken off the ship and placed on a caisson attached to an armored car.  The USS Missouri, in the harbor and escorting the Connolly, fires a salute, and a largely silent contingent of 6,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen, cadets from the military academies, police and firemen began walking behind the caisson heading uptown past silent crowds along the sidewalks.  Later, the Connolly sails to Brooklyn where it unloads the caskets to trains that will take them to destinations all over America. 

About 400,000 people on the New York sidewalks watch the parade as it passes by, silent except for occasional music from the Army Band, “Onward Christian Soldiers” was one piece of music, “Nearer My God to Thee” another. David P.  Colley, an author who wrote about this parade, reported that at 63^rd and Fifth Avenue, “a diminutive street sweeper raised his broom with his left hand in a present arms and snapped a salute with his right hand as the coffin went by.”

The procession turned into Central Park at 72^nd Avenue and assembled for a ceremony at the Sheep Meadow.

In San Francisco that same day, a similar ceremony was going on, with the caskets of six soldiers from all the service branches placed in San Francisco City Hall that morning, the people walking past them until late at night.  The boat in San Francisco Bay, the Honda Knott, had over 3,000 caskets on board, waiting for the trains that would ultimately find the hometowns that had to be found.

Still Waiting, the Eisenhower Memorial

Back at the end of March I saw an extraordinary hearing on C-SPAN 3 that alerted me to the controversy swirling around the Eisenhower Memorial proposed for the nation’s National Mall.  The hearing revealed a dispute between Eisenhower's descendants and the person many feel is America's greatest living architect.  It displayed the corrosive partisanship eating away at the country and how people who want to change the design also feel it necessary to destroy the designer's reputation.  It prompted me to write about how difficult it is to create a monument in this atmosphere, but it also drew me in to the amazing story of how the National Mall came to be and how everything is hard in that space. 

So, I gathered stories about the National Mall, its many changes and controversies and about the amazing return from the dead of Pierre L’Enfant whose design was largely discarded after he was fired by Washington himself, died and was buried uncelebrated in a friend’s pasture and 100 years later, brought back to the Capitol building, displayed in its rotunda and buried in Arlington Cemetery overlooking everything he had lost in life.  It had become politically expedient to create this reborn hero and no place but Washington, DC has the skills to make the dead come to life so convincingly. 

Read the story about the Eisenhower controversy and the history of the Mall here.

The proposed Eisenhower Memorial would sit on four acres just off the Mall in front of the Department of Education Building, not far from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.  The original design’s story featured an inconspicuous “barefoot boy,” sitting on a bench watching the major accomplishments of his career unfold -- Boy, General and President.  The image comes from the lovely speech Eisenhower made in his hometown of Abilene, Kansas when he returned from Europe in 1947.

“…no man is really a man who has left out of himself all of the boy. I want to speak first of the dreams of a barefoot boy. Frequently they are to be a streetcar conductor; or he sees himself as the town policeman; above all he may reach the position of locomotive engineer, but always in his dreams is that day when finally he comes home, comes home to a welcome from his own home town … today that dream of forty-five years or more ago has been realized beyond the wildest stretches of my own imagination. I come here first to thank you, to say the proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene.”

 

WorldwarII.com

The scenes in the first version of the monument are taken from famous photographs of Eisenhower.  One is Eisenhower animatedly talking with members of the 101^st Airborne Division on the evening of June 5, 1944, before they will parachute into France behind the German lines.  Another scene is from a Karsh photograph where Eisenhower stands next to a globe, his hand resting on it.  Behind these scenes and to the right and left of the property is a metal mesh on which you see the Kansas landscape of Eisenhower’s youth, the steel fabric forming an enclosure supported by large round columns.  

Karsh, Ottawa

Many things have happened since I watched that remarkable hearing last March.  First, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission tried to stick to its design, initially with the standard “full confidence” letter about architect Gehry, quickly followed by the conciliation letter offering a meeting with the Eisenhower family and Gehry and the release of a letter from Gehry in which he states his willingness to do what is necessary to make the Eisenhower family happy. 

Unfortunately, this is hard to do.  The family is led by Susan Eisenhower, the president’s granddaughter, a body puncher whose firm opinions and willingness to use charged language – she compares the wire mesh to the fences of a Nazi concentration camp.  She also hits the design in terms of the cold war, claiming that tapestry depictions of Mao and Stalin were de rigueur when her Grandfather was staring down those commies.  She compares them to billboards.  “My grandfather hated billboards."  She has the Commission and the Congress on their heels and also Gehry.  Susan’s brother, David, seemed a go-along, get-along guy as a member of the Eisenhower Commission until December, 2011, when he resigned.  He was the last Eisenhower to fall into Susan’s line. 

 

Susan Eisenhower

Other of Susan’s allies include two non-profit organizations, The National Civic Art Society in Washington, DC, whose mission is to be “in the vanguard of a traditional artist counterculture emerging as the indispensable alternative to a post-modern, elitist culture that has reduced its works of 'art' to a dependence on rarified discourse incomprehensible to ordinary people." The second organization is the National Monuments Foundation in Atlanta, an organization for whom all public art stopped when they put a figure of Nelson on top of the column in Trafalgar Square.  Like Susan, they appear intractable foes and are clearly aware that a good fight has a direct impact on the bottom of their 501 (c) (3) lines. 

Like all Washington today, this issue is completely polarized and politicized.  Defending the presentation of Eisenhower’s legacy is now the ground of the Republicans and the importance of free speech through artistic freedom has become the lot of the Democrats.  Neither side really likes what it has been handed, but that’s Washington.  An article in the Weekly Standard called “Do Right By Ike,” graces the websites of the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Foundation. “We’d like what Ike would have liked,” is the way the National Civic Art Society puts it. 

Justin Shubow

What is completely reprehensible and very visible to ordinary people is the attack on Gehry’s thinking and professional competence by The National Civic Art Society’s Chairman, Justin Shubow.  He portrays Gehry as a kind of architectural anarchist who has no respect for tradition or current day values and whose architecture is a disgrace. 

Gehry, like Susan Eisenhower, uses colorful and controversial language to make his point.  Shubow uses Gehry’s own words to savage him.  His NCAS website has a section called “Frank Gehry in His Own Words” in which he assembles pages of Gehry’s quotations and highlights parts of them.  “Get a load of this guy,” is what he seems to be saying.  You can’t trust an ego like his with the culture of this country nor with the property of the United States.” 

There is no doubt about Gehry’s ego – nor Shubow’s – but there is something in the NCAS argument that is mean-spirited and destructive, an extension of our politics to the arts and architecture.  Some of the quotations on Shubow’s website show Gehry at his best, beautifully simplifying the idea of creativity.

Frank Gehry

“When I start my [architecture] class I ask the students to write their signatures on pieces of paper and put them on a table. I have them look at them, and I point out, “They’re all different, aren’t they? That’s you, that’s you, that’s you, that’s you.” I say, “That’s what you have to find in architecture. You have to find your signature. When you find it, you’re the only expert on it. People can say they like it or don’t like it. They can argue about it, but it’s yours.”

In June of this year, the Eisenhower Monument Commission made a request for $60,000,000 to apply to the Gehry design.  They were turned down, even though a Commission member, Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho, who had supported the Gehry design, was the chair of the House Appropriations Sub-Committee that drafted the bill.  That is a bad signal.  Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior and the cabinet member responsible for the Mall, entered the fray afterward, saying he wanted to “look at the design.”  Clearly, nothing is going to happen for a while.

My thinking on what to do has evolved.  No matter how I reject the hard edge of Susan Eisenhower or the condescending meanness of Shubow, I’m with them on starting over.  I came to that point of view from two starting places.  One was Bill Clinton’s nomination speech of President Obama and the other was an OpEd from the British Newspaper “The Guardian” by Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College, who writes frequently about America in that newspaper. 

I thought there is nothing harder to do than make something simple and no better a practitioner than Bill Clinton.  While watching that night, I put my admiration for his ability to simplify into the context of the Eisenhower Memorial.  I asked where the simplicity was in the Gehry design.  And I didn’t find it.  I found a kind of basic narrative that touched the right bases and a number of technical solutions to the difficult problems of the site.   But not simplicity.  I didn’t find the weariness of Lincoln’s face nor the temple to the intellect of Thomas Jefferson.  I found a storyboard.  I found a basic narrative, a 'Keep It Simple Stupid' narrative I hated when I was working in television news.  There was no woman with a torch lighting a way, no statement of pure strength like the Washington Monument.

In his Guardian piece, Nicolaus Mills said it just right:

“A memorial is not a biography in stone. A memorial’s task is not to sum up a life, but to capture the essence of a life in a unified, powerful image.”

He makes the case that the essence of Eisenhower is somewhere in the image of the General talking with troops from the 101^st Airborne on June 5, 1944 who will, in the dark of the next day, parachute into occupied France.  The essence of the scene is that he is there with his people, connecting to them as their leader and, at the same time, another human.  Sleepless, he will later read a western novel into the night as they fall through a chaotic dark sky.  The essence is somewhere in the confidence that all of this is all necessary, a job the culture and country made and somehow chose him to do. 

Mills also surfaces a good idea.  Forget about the complicated site now under consideration.  Place the Eisenhower Monument near the World War II site where Eisenhower will be in a larger context and with his troops once again, where a good monument to him could only improve that unfortunate, clunky design. 

National Civic Art Association

National Monuments Foundation

Eisenhower Memorial Commission

Nicolaus Mills on the Eisenhower Memorial
 

George Bartholick and how he fixed the Pike Place Market

The recent completion of the Pike Place Market $70 million infrastructure replacement project is now done and the market looks fit and hardy, proving that the market at 105 years, is really the new 50. 

It was all done just in time for the start of the cruise ship season and the crowds of tourists that come in the summer, crowds I don’t necessarily like but support fully because they benefit the city and my many friends who work in the market and because the place is such an American treasure we simply have to share it without too much complaint.

The remodel made me much more aware of the many changes in the market that somehow slide into the place and seem old on their second day. Except the pig, the brass piggy bank at the market’s entrance under the clock, which has been under the clock since 1986.  I still feel highly Seattle when I say “meet you under the clock” and have tried to stick to that description for many years. The pig has changed the whole thing around and when I email “meet you under the clock” I get a response that says “why don’t we meet at the pig?” followed by a Smiley Face emoticon. 

I love the gum wall, something that just showed up and must drive the health department crazy.  Another is the bierstube that Uli’s Sausages created.  I went in the other day and had a spicy Italian sandwich and a brew and felt pretty good about where I was sitting and what I was doing.

The Pike Place Market After Its Completion
UW Collections

While there, I asked myself if George Bartholick would have thought the place a good idea.  George was the architect and planner we entrusted with the complete structural remaking of the market beginning in 1974 and who completed the job six years later in 1980.  It is one of the great historic preservation jobs of its time and remains a great one today.  Little was known about how the market had been constructed or how the damage from fires and earthquakes had been repaired, if they had.  Record keeping had been sloppy, plans and documentation often absent.  The original construction was done in haste and on the cheap.

Its reconstruction was not.  The project had a lot of surprises and all those surprises cost a lot of money.  Planners in the Department of Community Development took to calling the project “Our Vietnam.”  They also worried whether the investment would truly pay off.  When the renovation started, 80% of the market was not rented. 

Seattle PI

George explained to me once that he had essentially put a new backbone of steel running north and south of the main market structure.  To that, he added steel ribs running east to west.  The buildings were attached and hung on that basic structure.

It was a bohemian place that he took on and he put back largely unchanged, still bohemian, however updated, and with a backbone of steel.  He often won credit for checking his considerable ego at the door and putting the market back pretty much as it was physically.  He had no control what happened to the spaces he remade, but they seem to fit today.

Courtesy of Robin Bartholick
George is the little guy to the right of the
steering wheel

George was able to do what he did, in part, because he was a bona fide bohemian himself.  He grew up in Bellingham, the son of a shoe shop owner who liked to do things up right, like building a giant, mobile shoe that was a mainstay in the little parades that popped up around Bellingham, like the Tulalip Days Parade.

George was just the right age to join the greatest generation’s great quest, serving as a navigator on B-24 bombers making up the 446^th Bomb Group.  He guided his aircraft, the I Hope So! to Dresden the night of February 13, 1945, the night it was destroyed, the night some of Europe’s finest architecture collapsed into the firestorm. 

446th Bomb Group
George is kneeling on camera right

Getting the airplane back was the biggest problem for the young navigators of the time, like George.  After crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, The 446^th Bomb Group deployed in England in November of 1943 and finished in April of 1945.  In their first missions, beginning the last two weeks of December, 1943, 31 crew were killed during six bombing runs over Germany, mostly over Bremen.   In January, February and March of 1945, the war resistance on the ground was waning but the crews flew nearly every day into seas of flak.   George would have seen the new Messerschmitt jets the Germans built and deployed late in the war, their appearance is noted in the logs of the 446th.  I knew George pretty well and he never talked to me about this part of his life, though I certainly wish he had.

He came back to the University of Washington, got an architecture degree there and headed back to Europe where he worked over the next six years in Holland, Sweden and Switzerland.  He also exercised his skill in drawing.

In 1953, George showed up one day at the Paris home of Alex Trocchi, a Scottish writer and one of the founders of the literary magazine Merlin, the first magazine to publish Pablo Neruda and Samuel Beckett and frequently Henry Miller.  It was highly competitive with The Paris Review and Trocchi was among the first of the Beat Generation.

George had drawn several panels showing Crusader soldiers and Muslim soldiers fighting with a red cloth as their banner.  At the end of the panel, all the soldiers on each side were dead and only the red cloth remained.  It got into the magazine along with a piece of criticism by Beckett, then almost completely unknown to American readers. 

George was very tall, had a full head of gray hair and expansive eyebrows.  I’ve never seen bigger.  He frequently wore black and in the winter he would wear a black wool cape, attached 19^th century style at the neck, over his suit. 

George kept odd hours, working most of the night and then sleeping through the morning, arriving at the market for breakfast about one o’clock.  His staff had been working since early in the morning and would prepare materials for his review.  While a supportive and kind man, George could be picky and demanding.  He wanted things done right, but mainly he worked for the joy of it and the relationships he found at work.

Sometimes his staff would play tricks on George, like designing an apartment that had a shared medicine cabinet with the unit next door, mocking a commercial for Right Guard Deoderant then receiving heavy play on televised sporting events.  George would take home such plans, discover the joke, and glow with the knowledge he had hired some fine, clever people but who had to be watched. 

He liked to say about the market project that it was like a forester restoring a mountain meadow, “If he does it right, no one will know that he was there.”

Western Washington University

We entrusted George with three of western Washington’s most important institutions.  The market, of course, is probably the most visible, but his first great project was Western Washington State College where he was the campus planner and architect from 1963-1979 and, with legendary state senator Barney Goltz, was largely responsible for one of the state’s most lovely college campuses, a sculpture park long before we got one in Seattle.  As the campus architect and planner, George always had a commission for some of the state’s best architects like Fred Bassetti and Ibsen Nelsen, as well as for the artists they liked.  A Bellingham native, George also provided the emotional and technical energy necessary to save the old falling down City Hall, now the amazing Whatcom County Museum.   

The third project was his most controversial and one he considered a failure, though, on reflection, it was just the start of a process that led to a great outcome, today’s Woodland Park Zoo.

Zoo on the left, Aurora Avenue and
Lower Woodland Park
Google Earth

A Nova Scotian named Guy Phinney built an estate around his home at the top of the hill overlooking Green Lake and surrounded it with 90 acres of trails, landscaping, a band stand, a bathing beach and a few deer and other exotics, all connected by his own, private trolley car.  There already was a zoo in Seattle, privately owned, in the Leschi neighborhood, where a trolley line, a casino, a bathing beach and a few animals behind fences lured Seattle residents to the new real estate

opportunities looking out over Lake Washington. 

The city annexed the Phinney property when it annexed Fremont, in 1891, and finally bought Phinney’s estate in 1900 for $100,000, causing a fire storm of complaints about purchasing a rich man’s private park, now known as Woodland Park and located so far from Seattle. 

When the Olmsted brothers started work on the comprehensive parks plan in 1903, they were delighted to include this property into their plan and added some playfields along the Green Lake side of the park and thought it a good idea to expand its tiny zoo with ‘hardy animals.’

After the lots had been sold in Leschi, the developers thought to gift the animals from their zoo to the city’s collection.  Other acquisitions followed, often through gifting.  One of the largest acquisitions was Tusko, the elephant thought to be the largest elephant in captivity.  Tusko died after creating a great drama in Seattle, being seized by Mayor John Dore and dispatched to the Woodland Park Zoo until the city was paid for his up-keep by the deadbeat owner who, some said, was plotting to kill Tusko and stuff him for a museum.

Tusko in 1933
Seattle PI

While a diversion from our story, Tusko requires some of our attention.  Tusko was known to have a temper and if you had been treated like Tusko, you’d have a temper too.  By 1933, the biggest elephant in captivity had been sold by a legitimate circus to a series of small time operators who would show up at local events with Tusko and his size as the attraction. 

Tusko was well-known in the Northwest because, eleven years previous, the animal had gone crazy in Sedro-Woolley where he threw his trainer, took off through town where he broke up a street dance and continued on a 30 mile, two-day rampage destroying cars, a couple of barns and many utility poles before he came upon a still outside the town in the woods where he ate all of the fermenting sour mash and calmed down.   I'm not sure about the still but the Bellingham Herald was and it remains part of the lore.  Everybody knew Tusko.

Later, while with his small time torturers were exhibiting him in Portland over Christmas of 1931, Tusko began ripping up his tent and stood triumphant among the debris with all but one of his tethers broken.  Jack O’Grady and Sleepy Gray, who had bought Tusko for his feed bill at the Oregon State Fair, where he had been abandoned, quickly called police.  The police chief, Leon Jenkins,  decided on the spot to shoot Tusko and assembled several officers to do the deed.  However, Portland Mayor George Baker wouldn’t have it and ordered the police to holster their weapons.  The Mayor had in mind keeping the elephant for the Portland Zoo, but as in so many events in Tusko’s last years, it all fell through.  Tusko, the biggest unwanted elephant in the world, soldiered on. 

While in Seattle in ’33, Tusko got the attention of another mayor, John Dore, who waded into a controversy and a comedy of errors that left the elephant stranded in downtown Seattle with the city feeding him.

Then Dore heard that his owner planned to shoot the animal, stuff and sell him.  That was enough for Dore.  He seized the animal for non-payment of feed and proposed taking him to the zoo, which authorities ultimately did, closing down streets along the way and walking Tusko up to the zoo. 

Just as they got Tusko settled and, after 80,000 visitors came to the zoo to see him, the zoo started a campaign raise the money to keep him fed and in a decent shelter.  Weeks later, Tusko laid down on his side and died of a blood clot to his lungs.

Seattle PI

Just to the south of the zoo the George Washington Bridge was being built, a high level crossing of Lake Union.  It was, until 1932, a kind of bridge to nowhere as citizens had Seattle’s very first freeway fight over what they then called a ‘speedway’ through Woodland Park.  The speedway would turn out to be Aurora Avenue North and it would, save for a a trio of small and little used bridges, divide the park into Upper Woodland and Lower Woodland after an initiative to abandon the speedway project died.

These two events motivated George Bartholick.  The horrible treatment given animals by most zoos – sterile cages, restraints, nothing to break the monotony of imprisonment – and the division of Woodland Park by Aurora Avenue moved George to weave those two unrelated events into a singular theme that George saw as the centerpiece of his zoo project.  He wanted to cross Aurora with a superlative, glass covered zoo exhibit and that would create room for expansion of the zoo into Lower Woodland Park where animals could have more room for natural living spaces.

Aurora Avenue
UW Collections

Rather than solve the divisions created by Aurora, George’s plan made them sharper.  The fact that this really cool idea doubled the budget was a problem and the recreation interests, seeing a major encroachment, organized.  And a woman named Benella Caminiti, who George could never understand because she both worked at the Washington Primate Research Center and hated zoos, became involved and became a powerful opponent.  Passionate and tireless, Caminiti ultimately got George’s plan to the Seattle ballot where it was defeated.  The zoo director, an interesting and  creative businessman whose own passion was a world class zoo, resigned. 

George was devastated, but as things happen, a young man named David Hancocks, who was part of a consulting team brought in after the election, became director of the zoo and soon created a natural space in which lowland African Gorillas could live much more normally and still be seen closely.  The exhibit was fantastic and put the zoo on the international map.  It also became the standard for further exhibits at the zoo that respected the animals.  Other exhibits followed, the African Savannah, Asian Primates and a New England Marsh followed.  Ultimately, the zoo’s exhibits won county-wide financial support and gave it the resources to set out on another series of terrific exhibits that mark it as one of the fine zoos in the world.

George got to see many of the changes to the zoo and they made him less bitter about his zoo plan.  He moved on to the Pike Place Market Project and made his great mark there and was famous everywhere for his skill at historic preservation.

He moved about – teaching in Mexico, fixing buildings in Mt. Zion Monument Park and finally back to Bellingham, where he died, in 1998.

I figured that George would have thought Uli’s place fit into the market because it was simple and fun with no pretense.  Like so many places in the market it is a hole in the wall that shows off a fine surprise when you enter.  I also figured it would be terrific to have George be able to see how the market fits into the plans for the new waterfront, with a kind of cascading connection down from the top of the hillside, where the market sits with its steel backbone, down to the waterfront.  George would have something to say about it and would know viscerally what it might do or not do for the market.

I thought about another beer at Uli's but decided against it and made my way through the market, buying peonies and early raspberries, all the time wishing that George would have made that play on Aurora Avenue and wondering who in the future will rise up to his cause and unite Woodland Park once again.

Don Munro

A  friend and I drove out to Vashon Island to visit Don Munro a couple of weeks ago, a mutual friend who was, it turns out, in his last days of life and would soon die, last Friday morning, of prostate cancer.

Don Munro in 2005
Seattle PI

Ultimately, we got around to the subject of death.  To paraphrase Don, he felt no particular fear about it. To him, death was merely the absence of life, a problem he could no longer make right, a state of being that would remove him from fixing other things that needed fixing, friends and colleagues who needed nurturing, keeping in touch with the business he founded, loving his wife, Carolyn, in the warm, simple and happy house on Quartermaster Harbor. 

Many prostate cancers are so slow growing that doctors decide not to treat them, like Warren Buffet’s recent diagnosis and treatment plan.  But doctors told Don he was soon going to die more than seven years ago when they found a particularly aggressive strain.  Then, other doctors at the University of Washington said he’d be an ideal candidate for this new, experimental drug that had not been tested yet on humans and Don was one of the first to try it.  He got seven years of a very good life from the experiment and suffered few side effects.  He was able to smoke the cigars he liked, consume the red wine he loved as the barbecue crackled on the back deck of his Vashon home, one he built, with his son, from lumber they salvaged at a torn down warehouse on the Seattle waterfront. The accomplishment of building that house together repaired a strained relationship and created a friendship to accompany the bond of father and son. 

Don grew up in the political culture of end-of-the-sixties Seattle.  We talked about that time when we were last together. At the University of Washington, Don became friends with Bob Gogerty, a young man who yearned to be at the center of political and business life in Seattle and they would talk about what they wanted to achieve over beers and cigarettes at the old Red Robin, just east of the University Bridge along the ship canal.  Don would become an engineer and work for a highway design firm.  He was busy there and designed an I-5 overpass that ‘is still standing.’ Don needed much more out of his work than freeway overpasses and Gogerty brought him to it.  

He hired him to work on Mayor Wes Uhlman’s staff right after the new mayor was elected in 1969.  It was a terrific time for Don.  The political culture in 1969 grew from a powerful optimism and sense of purpose with roots in the middle 50s when the region leveraged its technical dominance in commercial aerospace, demonstrated it could hustle the world at Century 21 and understood the need to address what were called in that day ‘metropolitan problems’ -- those problems that did not respect traditional political boundaries – water and air pollution, sprawl, transportation, recreation, open space.  King County voters approved a regional government, Metro, in 1958, similar to what citizens did in Toronto, Canada and later Vancouver, BC.  Metro began with a limited mission, the clean-up of Lake Washington, and its success, so obvious and complete, helped lead to a burst of civic energy 10 years later, Forward Thrust, that took the regional thinking into parks, recreation, open space and the building of a regional multi-purpose stadium, the Kingdome.  The only thing they didn’t get, though it had a slight majority, was a light rail system.  Three years after that, the legislature entrusted Metro with the authority to create a county-wide bus system.

This was Don’s time, the time when he was truly maturing as a person and a professional.  It offered tremendous opportunity to him and young people like him who would join government and have remarkable responsibility for their years. 

Many of these new people were thrown together in the savannah between City Hall on the hill and Pioneer Square below.  Metro’s offices were in the Pioneer Building, forming one side of the square, and many of its young workers would head out after work for the dark and smoky Central Tavern for beers or the J & M Café, three doors up the street, if a martini was necessary.  At the same time, five blocks up the hill, Wes Uhlman’s staff and those from a younger city council would leave city hall, obeying the gravity that pulled them to the same places.  Model Cities, the Johnson era urban renewal program, also contributed new young practitioners, many who had been denied opportunity in the past but who would seize it now.

Once gathered in the Pioneer Square, the work day proceeded by other means. “We’ve got to go to work tomorrow” they would say, after an evening of work -- gossiping, boasting, positioning, proselytizing.

Sometimes the same people would find themselves together during the noon hour in the basement of the Pioneer Building, the home of Brasserie Pittsbourg, once Pittsburgh Lunch, now turned into a French buffet by a real Frenchman named Francois.  Of the many cool things at Brasserie Pittsbourg was the butcher paper that covered each table for each setting.  Our young, eager bureaucrats would make notes during their certainly important conversations, tear off the piece of paper where this now vital information, partly obscured by the blotting of spilled water or a shimmer of butter from Francois’ Geoduck steaks with garlic, and head upstairs or up the hill to an afternoon meeting where millions were on the table and, quite theatrically, pull out the creased butcher paper and make the killer points they had honed so cleverly at lunch. 

Soon, Don was Deputy Policy Director and doing what he was really good at, creating and developing interesting ideas for the Mayor, who, by the way, really needed them.  Uhlman’s first term had been rough, a constant war with public employees, their unions and the council, and he was heading into a re-election campaign where it was clear he could easily lose. 

King County Metro

Don had an idea that there should be free bus service in the downtown and the Mayor jumped at it.  The Boeing recession was still biting sharply and retailers downtown were looking for anything that might help.  It was an instant success.  It was also a timely success.  Service began nine days before the 1973 primary election and clearly had an effect on that election, improving a dismal performance in which Uhlman finished a poor second, but also enhancing the general election where the mayor won handily. It was Don’s idea.  The timing was Wes Uhlman’s. 

Don moved on to Metro after the election to work on the bus system and was in charge of the planning for the bus tunnel in downtown Seattle. Later he handled the acquisition of the hybrid electric buses that would run in the tunnel, the first diesel/hybrid electrics to be deployed in scale anywhere.  Think about it – a fleet of hybrid electric buses in the late eighties when we are struggling to bring on a few thousand cars with the same technology today. 

He was very pleased to have thought up the idea to renumber the Metro buses the way it is done in the Paris bus system, an operation he admired.  Don would think of stuff like that but not always talk about it.  Sometimes, however, after dinner in a hotel bar, a cognac in hand, he’d reach over the table, grab a colleague’s arm and whisper:  “You know, I re-numbered Metro’s buses just like they do in Paris,” his eyes gleaming. There was an important purpose for it, but I never quite understood it, though you had to be happy for Don.

He left Metro for a while, consulting, and created the Ben Franklin Transit system in Tri-Cities.  He did everything and was proud that he not only ran the election that approved the bonds but hired and trained the drivers.

His real talent was business and he was successful because his greatest skill was recognizing talent in people and nurturing it. Don was no magician, but even if you lacked talent, Don could conjure up a bit of it in you.  With Don, you always felt like the most important person in the room.  In fact, you were, because Don told you to your face that you were the most important person in the room.  This sentiment was quietly shared with many others, often on the same day and sometimes in the same room.

Coastal Environmental Systems

He co-founded a company in 1981 with $500 that became Coastal Environmental Systems and was its CEO for 30 years.  Originally selling weather buoys for ocean use, then weather stations in the arctic for scientific purposes, Munro found those markets too limiting and began experimenting with other uses for scientific caliber weather systems.  Over the years, fire departments began using Don’s weather sensors to make hazardous materials response safer and more effective and, as the software development at Coastal improved and then became the very best, his products found their way to airports to feed excellent weather information to pilots and air traffic controllers.  First with the military and then for hundreds of civilian airports across the world, Don’s remote air traffic control weather systems became a standard.   
 

Don’s company was a regular on the Deloitte Touche Northwest 50 Fastest Growing Companies for many years and he was once runner up for the 2004 Ernst and Young National Entrepreneur of the Year.  The winner got a $100,000 prize.  Trying to look like he didn’t care, he would say:  “I never got a damned penny!”

Coastal Environmental Systems

I worked at Coastal a couple of years on a team developing new software for a product that would use a variation of his weather stations for public safety.  It was the first place I ever worked where people actually manufactured something.  Located in a brick building in Pioneer Square across from the football stadium, you can’t miss it.  The roof is covered with weather apparatus being tested. 

Inside, software designers in flip flops clack away at their several computers while in another room someone is bending metal into a container to hold their software and maintain it at just the right temperature.  There is an international look to the people in the building and a consultative culture.  On my second day at work, Munro called a meeting of all employees and asked me to tell them what my job was going to be and how I hoped to do it. 

During baseball and football seasons, Don allowed a group of his employees to make some extra money by bringing a food cart to the parking lot and sell food to passing fans. Some of his employees were new to the country and had limited language skills in English.  But over the year, Don would corner each of them in the shop where they assembled the systems and say to them in ways that pushed through any comprehension problems that he or she was the most important person working here. 

Don was deliberate in most things and moved very slowly around the shop, but his slow movement disguised a lot of energy he needed to work out. He adopted the management-by-walking-around style and would come into one of the small offices, few of which had doors, and plop down in the extra chair, if there was one, or simply lean against the door sill, staring silently across the desk and its computer to its operator.  Sometimes I tried to wait him out.  But I always talked first.

He had an unusual sense of humor and it gave him great pleasure.  Once I walked into his office, really a wide spot off a hallway, and saw him working along at his computer, I supposed he was working on an Excel spreadsheet at which he was highly skilled. 

“Get a load of this, Royer,” he said, turning the screen my way. 

It was a letter from Charles T. Firbolg, an alter ego of Don’s that emerged more than 30 years ago and who complained, on Don's behalf, to the Vashon Beachcomber and other publications or customer service departments of large companies, about pomposity, failed communications, ignorance or whatever else got under Firbolg’s skin.  He had other alter egos, but Firbolg was writing the letter I saw on the screen, a note to the late Kim Jong Il of North Korea.  Firbolg had heard that the dictator’s favorite song was “Song of Comradeship” and was hoping that Mr. Kim could send along the words and music to Don, the entrepreneur, in America. 

Don also had a striking resemblance to the actor Donald Sutherland, particularly when he was clean shaven and on one of his diets.  Once, on a business trip together, we were ordering breakfast and I could see the light of a potential celebrity sighting in the waiter’s eyes.  After Don had ordered and the waiter turned his attention to me, I confirmed what the waiter was thinking: 

“I’m having what Mr. Sutherland is having.”

Actually, Don didn’t think it was funny.  He did not approve of deception even though he tolerated Firbolg’s misrepresentations. 

When Don retired from Coastal, a year ago, the employees in the shop fashioned a plaque and presented it to him.  It contains these words:

Coastal Farewell

     Coastal has brought us together from all over the world with various aspirations and hopes of fulfilling the "American Dream."

     Your fairness and generosity regardless of faith, color or nationality, were invaluable tools in our quest for meeting personal goals and also becoming a professional team.

  In a final tribute and expression of gratitude you shall be remembered as the guy who meant a lot to us and give practical meaning to the words:

"He's not heavy, he's my brother."

ABC News

Don loved to say, as part of his introduction of the company, that Coastal 'landed the space shuttle' because his company had weather systems at the Kennedy Space Center and Edwards Air Force Base.  During the George W. Bush administration, he didn't say much about Coastal's systems at Andrews Air Force Base that also provided weather for Air Force One.  He did, however, thoroughly enjoy the idea that he was making life a little safer for Barack Obama.

King County, the successor to Metro, decided to scrap the free bus zone this year after 40 years.  The story was in the paper his last day of work at Coastal.  On the day he died, the shuttle Enterprise was flying low over New York on its last flight and I was reading that story online when I heard that Don had died.

"I know the guy who who helps bring that sucker back to earth," I thought. 

He was a wonderful citizen of Cascadia.