Topic: People's Histories
This history and reflection on SAFECO was written by the well-published author Russ Banham and is presented by SAFECO.
In this People's History, Marie McCaffrey tells the story of how Seattle's Fat Tuesday -- the annual carnival-style celebration that takes place in Pioneer Square -- got started. The first Fat Tuesday...
This People's History tells the story of August (1859-1928) and Carolina (d. 1930) Holmquist, a couple who, perhaps more than any others, had an impact on the community of Monroe (Snohomish County) in...
This People's History presents the full official investigative report prepared by the state chief coal mine inspector of an incident at the Elk Mine in King County in which miner John A. Wolti was res...
This is Reuven Carlyle's farewell to Jermaine Magnuson, widow of Senator Warren G. Magnuson (1905-1989). Jermaine Magnuson died in Seattle on October 14, 2011. She was 87 years old. Reuven Carlyle is ...
Mary and Alfred Breuer met in grade school in California and were reunited many years later in Eatonville, Washington, a small town in the Cascade foothills of Pierce County. They married in 1923 and ...
This People's History is based on Heather MacIntosh's interview of Homer Venishnick in January 2000, in Renton, Washington. In 1890, Captain Edwin R. Burrows took one look at the idyllic landscape at ...
On December 17, 1975, at 2:30 p.m., Palmer Coking Coal Company dynamited the portal to the Rogers No. 3 mine and the subsequent explosion closed the state's last underground coal mine, ending a signif...
Rogers Playground, located in Seattle's Eastlake neighborhood between Eastlake Avenue and the TOPS at Seward school, was named after Governor John R. Rogers (1897-1901). It began its existence as a pl...
This is a reminiscence of trains and the railroad in Seattle during the 1920s and 1930s, and during World War II. It is by Warren Wing (1918-2011), historian, author of To Seattle by Trolley (1988), a...
This is a reminiscence and reflection on Seattle's Roosevelt High School by 1934 graduate Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011). In 2009 Dorothea Nordstrand was awarded AKCHO's (Association of Kin...
Mary Lou Hanify was a teenager in 1937, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Port Angeles to look at the wilderness area proposed for Olympic National Park. More than 30 years later, Hanify wr...
On March 23, 1900, Rose Brooks was one of 50 working women who gathered under the dynamic leadership of 23-year-old Alice Lord (1877-1940) to found Seattle's Waitresses' Union, Local 240, of the Hotel...
This People's History presents the full official investigative report prepared by the state Inspector of Coal Mines after an explosion at the Roslyn Mine on October 3, 1909, claimed the lives of 10 mi...
William E. Barr wrote this account of an early environmental lawsuit brought by a Spokane-area citizen that alleged air pollution for the Autumn 1987 issue of The Pacific Northwesterner. It is reprint...
This account of the mural of Seattle's Great Fire painted in 1953 by Rudolph Zallinger (1919-1995) was written by MOHAI historian Lorraine McConaghy, Ph.D. The fire occurred on June 6, 1889. The mural...
Ruth Ittner (1918-2010) was an ecologist, trails advocate, hiking legend, tireless volunteer, author, and University of Washington public policy administrator, She is most remembered for her work with...
The Four Seasons Resort on the southwestern end of Beaver Lake, located on the Sammamish Plateau in east King County, was built about 1936 by Gus and LuLu Bartels. By the late 1930s it had become a po...
For several decades in the middle of the twentieth century, San Juan Island was virtually overrun with rabbits. A population of several thousand domestic rabbits released in 1934 from a failed breedin...
Bill Bonham managed hotels in the Northwest in the 1920s through the 1940s, including the Seattle Hotel at 1st Avenue and Yesler Way in Seattle and the Hotel Monticello in Longview. Bonham's daughter,...
Sandy A. Moss, a diesel engineer, was born in Topeka, Kansas, and was brought by his parents to Seattle in June 1900. As a black child growing up in Seattle during the early years of the twentieth cen...
The eventful life of Jean Kurosaka Sano, a Japanese American from Seattle who became a close friend of Joe and Ruth Caldbick soon after they moved to the city from rural Northern Ontario in 1929, is t...
In this People's History, Eleanor Boba remembers the popular holiday-excursion trains sponsored by Seattle's University Village Shopping Center. Each December for about a decade starting in 1956 when ...
Bob Santos (1934-2016), born and raised in Seattle's Chinatown-International District, spent most of his life as an activist in his old neighborhood -- saving it, nurturing it, defending it against ou...