Topic: Biographies
Darrell R. Oldham helped to organize Seattle's original alternative newspaper, The Weekly (now Seattle Weekly), in 1976 and guided its advertising and marketing program for eight years. He also helped...
During Seattle's "dry" years of the 1920s, Roy Olmstead, through guts and guile, became the biggest bootlegger and one of the most well known personalities in Northwest history. He began as a police o...
Jack Olsen was a respected journalist and prolific writer who pioneered the genre of "true crime." Olsen also wrote fiction and books about sports and social issues, but it was his true-crime writing ...
Douglass Winnett Orr helped found Seattle's Northwest Clinic of Psychiatry and Neurology and the Blakeley Psychiatric Group in the 1940s. He was the founder, with Edith Buxbaum (1902-1982), of the Sea...
Lee Orr was a champion Monroe (Snohomish County) athlete who excelled in track and football and had an illustrious career in the 1930s, first for Monroe Union High School Bearcats and then for the Was...
The Spokane husband-wife environmentalist team of John Osborn and Rachael Paschal Osborn have been in the lead of Eastern Washington's conservation movement for decades. Osborn is an internist and chi...
Michelle Pailthorp was a major force in Seattle Democratic politics, civil rights, and feminist causes over a span of 30 years, including the campaign for passage of the 1972 state referendum on the E...
Alexander Pantages was a theatrical entrepreneur who had a considerable impact on the development of popular stage entertainments in the Puget Sound region in the early twentieth century. He created a...
For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the name Reginald Parsons was readily associated with civic leadership and philanthropy not only in his adopted home town of Seattle, but also in o...
Eccentric, Libertarian, cantankerous, opinionated, insane, brilliant; there are many words that have been used to describe the late Snohomish author John Patric (1902-1985). Perhaps the most accurate ...
Ancil Payne, one of the most influential broadcasters in the Pacific Northwest, served as president and chief executive officer of King Broadcasting Company from 1971 to his retirement in 1987. The Gr...
Angelo Pellegrini, born into a sharecropper's family in rural Italy, went on to become one of America's favorite writers on the pleasures of food, wine, and community. After his family immigrated to G...
Thomas Minor Pelly was a Seattle civic leader and a 10-term Congressional Representative for the 1st District (King and Kitsap counties). He fought to protect Puget Sound fishing interests. He was a s...
Jerry Pennington's primary career was as a newspaperman, working his way up in The Seattle Times from accountant to publisher and chief executive officer. His leadership garnered national recognition ...
Baptiste Peone was a chief of the Upper Spokane band of the Spokane Tribe. He was portrayed in Spokane news accounts as a most unusual kind of chief -- a wealthy, shrewd businessman. Yet for most of h...
Gertrude Johnson Peoples is the founder of the country's first academic-support office for college student athletes. For over 40 years she has been mother, friend, and academic adviser to athletes at ...
Lucia Perillo was an award-winning poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist who received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 2000 for her raw, unflinching, and searingly honest poetry. Perillo was diagno...
Terry Pettus was a progressive-minded newspaper reporter who became Washington state's first member of the American Newspaper Guild. He was a key organizer of the Seattle chapter of the Guild, which i...
Donald Phelps, educator, singer, and TV commentator, was the grandson of John T. Gayton (1866-1954), one of Seattle's black pioneers. He rose through the ranks, starting as an elementary teacher in Be...
Margaret "Peg" Phillips was a retired accountant and late-blooming actor who won fame as the crusty shopkeeper Ruth-Anne Miller in the television series Northern Exposure.
Walter Shelley Phillips (1867-1940) was a popular Western writer, artist, and lecturer best known by his pen name, "El Comancho." During his childhood in Nebraska and his years as a game hunter for th...
Paul Pigott was president of Pacific Car and Foundry Company from 1934 until his death in 1961, rebuilding the Seattle company from a "pile of rust" with 125 employees to one of the top 300 industrial...
William Pigott founded two of Seattle's major industrial enterprises, Seattle Steel Co. (later Bethlehem Steel Co. and Birmingham Steel Co.) and Seattle Car Manufacturing Co. (later Pacific Car and Fo...
The life of Antoine Plante -- voyageur, trapper, mountaineer, and ferry keeper -- spanned the period from the fur trade era to the white settlement of the Inland Northwest and the resulting tribal dis...