Washington Hotel in 1903 UW Collections |
Near the end of April, 1903, Scott Calhoun, a young son of a
pioneer physician, stood on the corner of what would someday become, in his judgment, the
corner of Second Avenue and Virginia Street. He was teasing out of his imagination what the new corner would look like and, for that matter, how the entrance to his new hotel would fit on the new corner.
The distressing look of his next door neighbor, an ornate structure,
a great hotel, stranded on top of its property line, 140 feet up in the air,
didn’t bother him much. He continued to see nothing but opportunity
in the property he had decided to buy and was confident it would have great value once all of this got cleaned up and
streets and street corners set and marked and the engineers and workman were dislodged
by the real estate people.
Another man was a frequent visitor here, Reginald Thomson, the city engineer, whose work all this destruction was. Thomson saw Seattle as a landscape in need of alteration by a wise man's hand. It was to him a collection of too steep hills, high bank waterfront, all kinds Reginald Heber Thomson UW Collections |
The up-in-the-air hotel used to be called the Denny Hotel,
after one of the original settlers of Seattle, who had tried and failed to develop it. It was now renamed “The Washington”
by its new owner, James A. Moore, who had purchased the place in 1903 and finally put the
unlucky structure out of its misery, making just-generous-enough final offers
to the bill collectors, contractors, lawyers, bankers and consultants who had sucked the place dry
since the day the construction contract was signed, 14 years previous. It never had a paying guest.
James A. Moore Historylink |
Originally, Moore opposed the regrade, as Thomson called his
latest public work, but soon found romance and business promise in the straight
lines Thomson was drawing on the landscape. Moore was working on an idea that would result in a hotel and a theater
near the site, across the street from Calhoun’s would-be hotel. He saw bright lights in this mayhem. He had recently told the Seattle Daily
Times:
“Second Avenue is to be the Broadway of the Queen City. What that famous thoroughfare of this country
is to New York, Second Avenue will be to Seattle."
The Seattle Daily Times couldn’t have agreed more. Its owner, Alden Blethen, came to Seattle
nearly broke but the city took him in and he prospered. He had a fine building on Union Street on
the Seattle Broadway, Second Avenue, and he
could look up the street to the north past many
of his advertisers toward the slight turn to the left the street took as it was
finding its true footing in the glittery future.
About 112 years later, my wife and I were walking home on Second Avenue, past the New Washington Hotel, now called the Josephinum, past the Moore Theater and over to Virginia Street where Scott Calhoun must have lingered all those years ago, only imagining the sidewalk that we now stood firmly on. We noticed the hotel seemed almost open after the months of construction and remodeling that we had learned to ignore. We tentatively opened the door, saw some people with luggage at the front desk and quickly and confidently found the route to the bar.
We learned we were visiting at the end of a soft opening for Seattle's newest Kimpton Hotel. We love Kimpton hotels and seek them out when we travel. They have not only a sense of style but almost always a sense of history and scale. The food is good and this bar, called Pennyroyal, is lovely, its original white marble bar incandescent against the old, dark and polished wood still in place. Known originally as the Calhoun Hotel, it had become the Palladian Apartments over time.
From the thirties to the seventies, Second Avenue did not exactly reflect the visions of Moore, Blethen, Thomson and Calhoun as the new Broadway. There were repossessed cars parked in the area in lot after lot during the Great Depression and new and used cars replaced them in the fifties and sixties.
Finally, the office buildings, then the restaurants and then the apartments and condos followed. Today, the Denny Regrade has the city's greatest density, is home to thousands and soon to be home for other thousands more, mostly techies working at the new Amazon campus three blocks from this corner. Maybe that Broadway dream is enjoying a new day.
I started searching for Scott Calhoun soon after we came home from that first drink at Pennyroyal and found a young man whose prominence in his time had almost completely disappeared in our own. His role in his greatest public accomplishment, the creation of the Port of Seattle, is unknown to nearly all the people who are the port's stewards today. In addition to his accomplishments, his life had plenty of tragedy wafting through it, the early deaths of two wives and the death of a toddler son still booming across time, but who is hearing them today?
Like so many journeys in Seattle, this one starts at "little crossing over place," the Coastal Salish term for what became Pioneer Square -- the still beating and true heart of our city.
The natives would come there to tie up their cedar canoes in a small bay protected by a sandbar angling across its mouth. Good water ran into the bay out of springs just up the hill. An ancient footpath started near the bay and went all the way over the steep hill and down to Lake Washington where many native families had longhouses along the lake, well protected from the winter winds blowing out of the southwest.
Today, the tiny bay and sand spit are all covered over by pioneer detritus -- sawdust, ship's ballast, swamp muck, ash from the Seattle Fire, stumps, dead work animals and lots of other garbage -- sealed over time by layers of dirt, gravel, asphalt and cement.
Scott Calhoun’s family was not among the very first Seattle pioneers, but the family was early enough. His great uncle, Rufus, was a sea captain living in gold rush San Francisco. Rufus Calhoun had once sailed into Puget Sound and past the place the original Seattle settlers moved to when their first choice of land wasn’t working. Scott's prosperous, doctor father, a Regent of the Territorial University, lived with his highly verbal family just up the street from "little crossing over place" and, as a young boy, Scott saw the still disappearing outline of the original land that was Seattle.
When Scott’s great uncle sailed by, 300 people clustered around a steam driven saw mill owned by Henry Yesler whose supply of Douglas Fir and Cedar was pulled down the ancient footpath by teams of oxen. They started calling the road ‘Skid Road’ for its great contribution to the town’s only real industry. Finally, they named the path for Yesler, who later built a mansion adjacent to it on the apple orchard he had earlier planted.
The Calhouns had a ringside seat for the construction of Yesler’s amazing mansion, a 40 room affair on a full block surrounded by the orchard. The Calhoun family had moved to Seattle in 1876 right across the street, along Third Avenue about where the Morrison Hotel stands today. Scott was two, and as he grew, learned that the old, smallish woman selling baskets along his street was none other than Princess Angeline, the daughter of Chief Seattle. He and his sister recalled visiting old man Yesler during apple season where he would secretly give them bags of fruit in a way that kept the transaction from his wife, Sarah, who did not share Henry’s generous streak with children. There were now 3,000 people in Seattle and Scott's father was one of six busy doctors.
He was also noticed. George V. Calhoun was appointed to establish a Marine Hospital in Port Angeles and later to lead the older, more established Marine Hospital in Port Townsend. Hospitals like these were created during the Presidency of John Adams to provide health care to merchant mariners and act as health screeners at US Ports of Entry. Later, the hospital cared for US Navy personnel and the service became attached to the US Public Health System. The old Art Deco building on the top of Beacon Hill, recently used as the headquarters of Amazon, was part of the marine hospital system and traces its origins to our second president.
Scott Calhoun was young, likable and sophisticated. He enrolled at Stanford University on the institution's first day. He graduated from Stanford’s very first class, in 1894, along with his wife-to-be, Mary Burke, daughter
New Washington in center of photo as Second Avenue angles to the west to meet the new grid forming in the regrade. Seattle Daily Times Building is in the lower right corner |
About 112 years later, my wife and I were walking home on Second Avenue, past the New Washington Hotel, now called the Josephinum, past the Moore Theater and over to Virginia Street where Scott Calhoun must have lingered all those years ago, only imagining the sidewalk that we now stood firmly on. We noticed the hotel seemed almost open after the months of construction and remodeling that we had learned to ignore. We tentatively opened the door, saw some people with luggage at the front desk and quickly and confidently found the route to the bar.
We learned we were visiting at the end of a soft opening for Seattle's newest Kimpton Hotel. We love Kimpton hotels and seek them out when we travel. They have not only a sense of style but almost always a sense of history and scale. The food is good and this bar, called Pennyroyal, is lovely, its original white marble bar incandescent against the old, dark and polished wood still in place. Known originally as the Calhoun Hotel, it had become the Palladian Apartments over time.
From the thirties to the seventies, Second Avenue did not exactly reflect the visions of Moore, Blethen, Thomson and Calhoun as the new Broadway. There were repossessed cars parked in the area in lot after lot during the Great Depression and new and used cars replaced them in the fifties and sixties.
Regrade in 1929 |
I started searching for Scott Calhoun soon after we came home from that first drink at Pennyroyal and found a young man whose prominence in his time had almost completely disappeared in our own. His role in his greatest public accomplishment, the creation of the Port of Seattle, is unknown to nearly all the people who are the port's stewards today. In addition to his accomplishments, his life had plenty of tragedy wafting through it, the early deaths of two wives and the death of a toddler son still booming across time, but who is hearing them today?
Little Crossing Over Place Burke Museum |
The natives would come there to tie up their cedar canoes in a small bay protected by a sandbar angling across its mouth. Good water ran into the bay out of springs just up the hill. An ancient footpath started near the bay and went all the way over the steep hill and down to Lake Washington where many native families had longhouses along the lake, well protected from the winter winds blowing out of the southwest.
Today, the tiny bay and sand spit are all covered over by pioneer detritus -- sawdust, ship's ballast, swamp muck, ash from the Seattle Fire, stumps, dead work animals and lots of other garbage -- sealed over time by layers of dirt, gravel, asphalt and cement.
Scott Calhoun’s family was not among the very first Seattle pioneers, but the family was early enough. His great uncle, Rufus, was a sea captain living in gold rush San Francisco. Rufus Calhoun had once sailed into Puget Sound and past the place the original Seattle settlers moved to when their first choice of land wasn’t working. Scott's prosperous, doctor father, a Regent of the Territorial University, lived with his highly verbal family just up the street from "little crossing over place" and, as a young boy, Scott saw the still disappearing outline of the original land that was Seattle.
Burke Museum |
When Scott’s great uncle sailed by, 300 people clustered around a steam driven saw mill owned by Henry Yesler whose supply of Douglas Fir and Cedar was pulled down the ancient footpath by teams of oxen. They started calling the road ‘Skid Road’ for its great contribution to the town’s only real industry. Finally, they named the path for Yesler, who later built a mansion adjacent to it on the apple orchard he had earlier planted.
The Calhouns had a ringside seat for the construction of Yesler’s amazing mansion, a 40 room affair on a full block surrounded by the orchard. The Calhoun family had moved to Seattle in 1876 right across the street, along Third Avenue about where the Morrison Hotel stands today. Scott was two, and as he grew, learned that the old, smallish woman selling baskets along his street was none other than Princess Angeline, the daughter of Chief Seattle. He and his sister recalled visiting old man Yesler during apple season where he would secretly give them bags of fruit in a way that kept the transaction from his wife, Sarah, who did not share Henry’s generous streak with children. There were now 3,000 people in Seattle and Scott's father was one of six busy doctors.
Calhoun’s family was from Nova Scotia and several of his relatives and their neighbors came out to the Washington Territory, settling in the Skagit River delta in and around La Connor. His father became a doctor, studying at Glasgow University, finding a wife there and returning to Civil War America in 1864 to join the medical corps of the Army of the Potomac. The experience provided a bloody but priceless internship for the young doctor.
George V. Calhoun |
Scott in 1894 Stanford University |
Calhoun was literally in at the beginning of Stanford. He suggested the school colors, scarlet (from his favorite handkerchief) and white and attended -- and took pictures -- at the very first Stanford-Cal football game, now called simply "The Game." He had played baseball at Stanford and was a fine athlete, also high jumping on the track team.
Mary Burke and Scott married in San Francisco and returned to Seattle after Scott graduated from law school. With them was the first of their three children, Ellen. The couple were leaders of the Republican Party, young people of note whom everyone believed would soon be influential leaders of the community and later quite prosperous.
His mind was as agile as his body and 1903 was a busy year for both him and his home city. He was offering some serious time to the
campaign of Richard Achilles Ballinger, who would be elected Mayor in the fall and later become President Taft's Secretary of the Interior. Scott had talked to Ballinger about seeking
election in the near future as Corporation Counsel, the city’s lawyer. Calhoun
and a close friend were also helping a client acquire a baseball franchise for
Seattle in the brand new Pacific Coast League.
Seattle had a franchise in the Pacific Northwest League, the Clamdiggers,
but Scott and others saw far more opportunity in a league that would stretch
all along the great west coast of the country and one day redeem the city’s promise as a big league town.
Most of the players were new to Seattle fans as the ownership had just concluded a frenzy of contract signings and poaching from other teams during the winter, trying to find a team that could be competitive. Frank Vernon Hemphill was one of those players and had done all this before and in many towns. A native of Michigan and a journeyman outfielder, Hemphill would have a career with a total of 40 major league at bats from which he squeezed out three hits. His weak hitting days ahead of him, his role this day was to be a charmer, someone who knew a sound bite from a salmon.
“This is the first time I ever saw the town,” he told the Daily Times sports desk, “But it looks like home to me.”
1903 Chinooks UW Collections |
A former major league catcher with the nickname "Fatty," Dugdale recalled for the court his conversation with stern old Jacob Furth after being told he had no field to put his baseball club on.
“What will become of me?” Dugdale told the court he had asked Furth. The old banker and businessman responded with something just this side of recreational cruelty: “I don’t know, Mr. Dugdale. I’m not in the baseball business.”
Days before Roosevelt's arrival. The hastily erected rail line is on the right. UW Collections |
Calhoun had paid $15,000 for his property just north of the
Washington Hotel. It was a big purchase for him. Scott’s day job then was as grading attorney
for the city and his title Assistant Corporation Counsel. He was just 29,
but with some help from his father he was able to buy the property.
Corporation Counsel Seattle Municipal Archives |
As the regrade project dragged on, Calhoun settled into the
political preparations he needed to win the office of Corporation Counsel. He became the Chairman of the Republican
Party Executive Committee in early 1904.
Even though the current Corporation Counsel, Mitchell Gilliam, was
re-elected with the largest majority ever for that office, Scott had a
plan. He and others began to sound the alarm to the legislature about the growing backlog
in the King County Court system.
Sure enough, by 1905, the legislature approved a new judge. Gilliam first thought he should not take the
position, if offered, since a friend in his office also seemed to want it. There certainly appeared to be conversations
among the principals. Soon, Gilliam took
the judgeship and Scott was appointed Corporation Counsel. Gilliam’s friend took over as grading
attorney. Everyone agreed it was a very
tidy play.
George Cotterill as Assistant City Engineer Seattle Municipal Archives |
This was good news for the residential real estate market,
now growing further
from the city’s downtown core. The boulevard system help create and connect very special,
close in neighborhoods and people found housing in those neighborhoods highly desirable.
The Sylvia |
The real estate industry saw great strategic value in the Calhoun Hotel. It would be the first large building to cross Virginia Street to the north, meaning that investor confidence in the expansion of the downtown was no longer imaginary. The Moore Theater and its hotel annex also went up, following the construction of the great New Washington Hotel, built on the lot of the original Denny Hotel.
The Calhoun |
Having survived the Panic of 1893 by the great happenstance
of the Alaska/Yukon Gold Rush, Seattle was booming and ready to welcome the era of
the Pacific in a great World’s Fair, the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition. This not only gave a theme to the growing
city, but stimulated hotel building and made lasting changes to the city. After 1909 when the Calhoun opened, the three hotels -- the Moore Annex, the New Washington and the Calhoun were changing the center of hotel gravity in Seattle, pulling it north from Pioneer Square.
It’s hard for a Corporation Counsel to have policy priorities. He represents the city on so many legal matters that he has limited time for his own advocacy. Plus,
his hotel was underway and it required a lot of his time. But one issue always was
near the top of the stack on his desk, an issue that he drove for years– the
creation of a port district for the city – an organization that could compete
on behalf of the public against the influence of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The Northern Pacific had long controlled the
city’s front porch through its rail yards and docks. Harbor improvements other than those favored by the Northern Pacific were not easy politically and rarely done.
Railroad Avenue Museum of History and Industry |
In the 1907 session of the legislature, Cotterill found
himself nicely positioned as the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Harbors
and Harbor Lines. He and Scott Calhoun
worked on a draft of a Port of Seattle bill that found its way through the
legislature, only to be vetoed by Governor Albert Mead at the insistence of the
Northern Pacific. The bill died in the
1909 session as well.
However, time was on the side of public ownership of the
waterfront and the strategic situation was changing. The French effort to
build the Panama Canal had collapsed and the grand idea was tarnished by
disease, corruption and incompetence. There was an opening for American presence there.
Roosevelt, like the assassinated McKinley whom he replaced, saw the Pacific
as the new center of the country’s world view.
It is highly likely that among the cables he received at the Washington
Hotel during his 1903 Seattle stay were updates of conversations between
Panamanian Nationalists and American military men. Over the summer, the Panamanian Revolution against
Columbia ignited. By November, with the
Nashville, an American gunship, standing off the Panamanian coastline,
Panama declared itself a nation. Two
days later, the US recognized the new country and, by Thanksgiving, a treaty
between the US and Panama gave America the right to build the Panama
Canal.
“Let the dirt fly,” Roosevelt said.
UW Collections |
At the same time, he announced the sale of 19 of those lots for $60,000. In one move, the sale guaranteed the Thomson dream of northward expansion on a level gradient, but also Cotterill's dream of a graceful residential and park development along north Capitol Hill down to the shores of Lake Washington. Today, Interlaken Boulevard remains among of the most lovely neighborhood byways of the city. Scott's family, wife Mary and his three children, were financially set.
By the 1911 session, the Panama Canal was the strategic driver of state trade policy. Cotterill and Calhoun pulled all the levers they had and created a powerful consensus around the idea that the era of the Pacific was not to be decided by the Northern Pacific Railroad but by citizens of Seattle. Newspapers and politicians and advocates were lining up. But it still an iffy deal in Olympia.
In a dramatic move as the session was nearing its end, the Progressive leadership in the legislature feared the worst. They asked Scott to explain the legislation and allay the fears of the fence sitters. The legislature met as a committee of the whole to hear Calhoun's passionate arguments. He carried the day. Even the Seattle Daily Times, no friend of public ownership, lent its editorial page to fulsome praise by supporters of the port bill which now, after the governor signed it, had to be approved by the voters of King County. Publisher Alden Blethen kept his personal distance, but his newspaper clearly approved the port district as the right thing to do.
At the end of the year, Scott resigned his job as the city's lawyer and hired on
as the new Port District’s lawyer. Thomson became the district’s Chief
Engineer, beating out his old assistant, Cotterill, whom the Daily Times
vigorously supported. That was news in
itself. Cotterill was a Democrat, all for
public ownership and, even worse, a prohibitionist, positions Alden Blethen vigorously opposed. The Times reverted to form in the election
for Mayor that followed, supporting the thoroughly corrupt Hiram Gill over Cotterill. Cotterill won.
Harbor Island as envisioned by Calhoun |
Political life swirled around Scott and Mary and they had to squeeze
in somehow the everyday parts of life. A couple
of days before Scott was elected chairman of the Taft delegation to the state
convention on March 9, 1912, Mary scheduled
an appointment at Providence Hospital on March 12 for what friends called a minor procedure. She checked in at
8:30 in the morning and was dead two hours later. She was just 37.
Scott's oldest sister, Nellie Calhoun, moved in to help with the kids, Ellen and Katharine. After Ellen's graduation from Queen Anne High School, she enrolled at Stanford and excelled as had her father. Like him, she became the editor of the school newspaper -- just the second woman to serve and the first woman elected. She was an athlete, rowing on the varsity women's crew. Katharine remained in Seattle, mostly, though she attended Stanford briefly. She and her sister were close, even as they were embarked on very different lives. Katharine visited Ellen at a southern California ranch her second husband owned and Ellen came to Seattle to help out with the birth of Katherine's daughter, Maribeth, who also became a journalist. Maribeth Morris was one of the first women to work in the Seattle PI Newsroom.
At Katharine's wedding, her husband, Gerald Balthasar, had as his best man none other than Marion Zioncheck, the student leader at the University of Washington. Katharine's husband met Zioncheck at the University of Washington where Zioncheck was an older and influential student and its student body president. I'm wondering if Frank Edwards, about to be elected the Seattle Mayor, was at Katharine's wedding in that summer of 1928. Edwards was a great friend of Scott and might have been invited. After, Zioncheck organized the successful recall of Edwards who had sought to privatize the electricity utility. In 1930, after Edwards had fired Superintendent of City Light, J. D. Ross, by then the beacon of public power in the Northwest. There was a political firestorm that forged Zioncheck's political career and ended Edward's career. Said the New York Times:
"Mr. Edwards is out. Mr. Ross is restored to utility control. The Power Trust has a flea in its ear and the Moscow papers have a good story."
Over time, Scott's law practice began to emphasize business over public service and his work took him further away from Seattle. By 1923 he was working with an international company that was selling a new wood preservation product. He lived mostly in Chicago or New York. In 1923 he married a West Virginia girl, Alice Elizabeth Haller, and they took up residence in New York City where they lived at the St. Andrews Hotel on West 72nd.
In the winter and early spring of 1930, Haller experienced a series of colds that soon turned into pneumonia. In early April, his second wife had died.
Toward the end of the year, he went to a reunion of the the Editors in Chief of the Stanford Daily. Both he and his daughter, Ellen attended -- he served in 1895, she, in 1920.
They had to have talked seriously about their lives while at the reunion. The death of his second wife would have been very much on Scott's mind and Ellen's marriage to Dale Van Every, a dashing and talented man who had left Stanford to drive an ambulance in France during the world war, had been a blur. Success had came so quickly for the Van Everys.
After returning from France and earning his Stanford degree, he took a job with United Press International as a reporter in New York and then drew the assignment as bureau chief at the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Then Van Every found Charles Lindbergh. Doing what good wire service reporters are trained to do, he told a good yarn in a big hurry to capture the back story of the trans-Atlantic flight. "Charles Lindbergh, His Life," was early, good and a big seller. The Lindbergh book created a path to Hollywood where he was soon writing and producing and making more money in a year than Mary Pickford, the great female star of the day.
It's hard to see Ellen doing very well in her husband's wake, even if they are sailing in the magical place that was Beverly Hills in the 1930s. Their divorce was final in 1935.
In 1937, Mrs. Ellen C. Loeb and her husband, Edwin C. Loeb are listed as passengers on the ship Pennsylvania returning to Los Angeles from Acapulco. It sounds a bit like a brief honeymoon and it was. Ellen Calhoun had found quite a guy. Edwin Loeb is one of the inventors of modern Hollywood. Beginning in about 1914, his law firm, Loeb and Loeb, was the place Hollywood went to get help conducting business. Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer of MGM were major clients. Irving Thalberg, the genius producer, was his best friend. Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, Charley Chaplin and Mary Pickford
were clients.
Loeb attended the first Oscar program in 1927, an idea which many people believe Loeb himself had suggested, with Thalberg and his new wife, Norma Schearer.
Shortly after their trip to Acapulco, Edwin built a seven bedroom home in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles, near a reservoir looking over Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, Ellen was only the second of Loeb's three wives. I think it was their home as a couple and, when they were no longer together, he sold the place, in 1946. She had many interests. She was a founder of the Los Angeles Chamber Music Society and owned several college book stores in the Claremont, Pomona area. She died in California in 1969. Her sister, Katharine, died the following year in Seattle.
Scott moved back to Seattle not long after the Stanford Reunion and, in April of 1933, he married Jessica Brown Ross, the daughter of a friend of his, Judge Frederick V. Brown, a Supreme Court Justice in Minnesota before he was recruited to be the Western General Counsel for the Great Northern Railway.
Jessica was a sophisticated person whose first husband was in international trade and she had spent time in the far east, mostly in Shanghai.
Scott was fully retired by the end of World War II and was active in the Pioneer Association and living close by the club house of the association in Madison Park. In addition to heritage issues and public speaking about history, he particularly enjoyed seeing the young men he had hired at the Corporation Counsel's Office turn into judges and respected legal men. Scott had a touch for the small, important detail and he was a sought after speaker about the city's history. He died in 1952.
Scott Calhoun very much liked Shirley Ross, who was 16 when he married her mom. She married Bill Speidel, a police reporter and columnist turned public relations guy. Earlier, each had married a bit too quickly and a bit in a hurry, and so, once they got together, they determined to have a rich relationship and live well and actively in their out of the way home on Vashon Island.
I love this photo of them, taken about 1951 or 1952. It portrays them at the top of their attractiveness. She is elegant, smart and funny, he the stud he was before he became the grizzled old Seattle historian known for "Sons of the Profits" where he chose to avoid conventional history writing and provide a conversational and casual style that sometimes drives some of today's historians nuts.
I think the picture is a promotion for Bill's first book "You Can't Eat Mount Rainier," of which I have an autographed first edition. I knew him when he was the grizzled preservationist -- scratchy beard, a cigarette always nearby. I also think of his constant, frenetic activity, a way to avoid his desire to drink alcohol which he successfully did. Once, in their home on Vashon Island, where I'd gone to ask him to speak at some event, he was making chocolate peanut clusters and watching a Seahawk football game, a chocolate mixing machine spinning slowly in front of him, not quite far enough away from the ashtray.
Together, they started the Seattle Underground Tours as a way to contribute to the saving of Pioneer Square from the parking lots that relentlessly followed the construction of the Kingdome. Largely, they succeeded and the tour program, a regular feature of Seattle culture, has its offices right on top of "little crossing over place."
Ghost Shorelines Project, Burke Museum
History of Seattle Water System Slide Show
1946 Pacific Coast League Promotional Film
50th Anniversary of Stanford University
Ellen Calhoun at Stanford |
Scott's oldest sister, Nellie Calhoun, moved in to help with the kids, Ellen and Katharine. After Ellen's graduation from Queen Anne High School, she enrolled at Stanford and excelled as had her father. Like him, she became the editor of the school newspaper -- just the second woman to serve and the first woman elected. She was an athlete, rowing on the varsity women's crew. Katharine remained in Seattle, mostly, though she attended Stanford briefly. She and her sister were close, even as they were embarked on very different lives. Katharine visited Ellen at a southern California ranch her second husband owned and Ellen came to Seattle to help out with the birth of Katherine's daughter, Maribeth, who also became a journalist. Maribeth Morris was one of the first women to work in the Seattle PI Newsroom.
Marion Zioncheck |
At Katharine's wedding, her husband, Gerald Balthasar, had as his best man none other than Marion Zioncheck, the student leader at the University of Washington. Katharine's husband met Zioncheck at the University of Washington where Zioncheck was an older and influential student and its student body president. I'm wondering if Frank Edwards, about to be elected the Seattle Mayor, was at Katharine's wedding in that summer of 1928. Edwards was a great friend of Scott and might have been invited. After, Zioncheck organized the successful recall of Edwards who had sought to privatize the electricity utility. In 1930, after Edwards had fired Superintendent of City Light, J. D. Ross, by then the beacon of public power in the Northwest. There was a political firestorm that forged Zioncheck's political career and ended Edward's career. Said the New York Times:
Frank Edwards, 1928 |
"Mr. Edwards is out. Mr. Ross is restored to utility control. The Power Trust has a flea in its ear and the Moscow papers have a good story."
Over time, Scott's law practice began to emphasize business over public service and his work took him further away from Seattle. By 1923 he was working with an international company that was selling a new wood preservation product. He lived mostly in Chicago or New York. In 1923 he married a West Virginia girl, Alice Elizabeth Haller, and they took up residence in New York City where they lived at the St. Andrews Hotel on West 72nd.
In the winter and early spring of 1930, Haller experienced a series of colds that soon turned into pneumonia. In early April, his second wife had died.
Toward the end of the year, he went to a reunion of the the Editors in Chief of the Stanford Daily. Both he and his daughter, Ellen attended -- he served in 1895, she, in 1920.
They had to have talked seriously about their lives while at the reunion. The death of his second wife would have been very much on Scott's mind and Ellen's marriage to Dale Van Every, a dashing and talented man who had left Stanford to drive an ambulance in France during the world war, had been a blur. Success had came so quickly for the Van Everys.
After returning from France and earning his Stanford degree, he took a job with United Press International as a reporter in New York and then drew the assignment as bureau chief at the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Then Van Every found Charles Lindbergh. Doing what good wire service reporters are trained to do, he told a good yarn in a big hurry to capture the back story of the trans-Atlantic flight. "Charles Lindbergh, His Life," was early, good and a big seller. The Lindbergh book created a path to Hollywood where he was soon writing and producing and making more money in a year than Mary Pickford, the great female star of the day.
It's hard to see Ellen doing very well in her husband's wake, even if they are sailing in the magical place that was Beverly Hills in the 1930s. Their divorce was final in 1935.
In 1937, Mrs. Ellen C. Loeb and her husband, Edwin C. Loeb are listed as passengers on the ship Pennsylvania returning to Los Angeles from Acapulco. It sounds a bit like a brief honeymoon and it was. Ellen Calhoun had found quite a guy. Edwin Loeb is one of the inventors of modern Hollywood. Beginning in about 1914, his law firm, Loeb and Loeb, was the place Hollywood went to get help conducting business. Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer of MGM were major clients. Irving Thalberg, the genius producer, was his best friend. Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, Charley Chaplin and Mary Pickford
were clients.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Edwin Loeb is standing between the right shoulder of John Barrymore, center and the left shoulder of Mary Pickford |
Shortly after their trip to Acapulco, Edwin built a seven bedroom home in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles, near a reservoir looking over Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, Ellen was only the second of Loeb's three wives. I think it was their home as a couple and, when they were no longer together, he sold the place, in 1946. She had many interests. She was a founder of the Los Angeles Chamber Music Society and owned several college book stores in the Claremont, Pomona area. She died in California in 1969. Her sister, Katharine, died the following year in Seattle.
Scott moved back to Seattle not long after the Stanford Reunion and, in April of 1933, he married Jessica Brown Ross, the daughter of a friend of his, Judge Frederick V. Brown, a Supreme Court Justice in Minnesota before he was recruited to be the Western General Counsel for the Great Northern Railway.
Jessica was a sophisticated person whose first husband was in international trade and she had spent time in the far east, mostly in Shanghai.
Scott was fully retired by the end of World War II and was active in the Pioneer Association and living close by the club house of the association in Madison Park. In addition to heritage issues and public speaking about history, he particularly enjoyed seeing the young men he had hired at the Corporation Counsel's Office turn into judges and respected legal men. Scott had a touch for the small, important detail and he was a sought after speaker about the city's history. He died in 1952.
Shirley and Bill Speidel |
Scott Calhoun very much liked Shirley Ross, who was 16 when he married her mom. She married Bill Speidel, a police reporter and columnist turned public relations guy. Earlier, each had married a bit too quickly and a bit in a hurry, and so, once they got together, they determined to have a rich relationship and live well and actively in their out of the way home on Vashon Island.
I love this photo of them, taken about 1951 or 1952. It portrays them at the top of their attractiveness. She is elegant, smart and funny, he the stud he was before he became the grizzled old Seattle historian known for "Sons of the Profits" where he chose to avoid conventional history writing and provide a conversational and casual style that sometimes drives some of today's historians nuts.
I think the picture is a promotion for Bill's first book "You Can't Eat Mount Rainier," of which I have an autographed first edition. I knew him when he was the grizzled preservationist -- scratchy beard, a cigarette always nearby. I also think of his constant, frenetic activity, a way to avoid his desire to drink alcohol which he successfully did. Once, in their home on Vashon Island, where I'd gone to ask him to speak at some event, he was making chocolate peanut clusters and watching a Seahawk football game, a chocolate mixing machine spinning slowly in front of him, not quite far enough away from the ashtray.
Together, they started the Seattle Underground Tours as a way to contribute to the saving of Pioneer Square from the parking lots that relentlessly followed the construction of the Kingdome. Largely, they succeeded and the tour program, a regular feature of Seattle culture, has its offices right on top of "little crossing over place."
Ghost Shorelines Project, Burke Museum
History of Seattle Water System Slide Show
1946 Pacific Coast League Promotional Film
50th Anniversary of Stanford University