Topic: Biographies
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...
Charles Plummer arrived in the village of Seattle in 1853 and opened a store. Later, he co-owned a sawmill and a coal mine, started the town's first brickyard, constructed a waterworks, built a livery...
George Y. Pocock was internationally famous for designing and handcrafting the best and swiftest racing shells in the world of crew racing. A native of England, he was recruited in 1912 by Coach Hiram...
Doting husband and father, generous benefactor of many community charities, astute but scrupulously honest businessman, loyal almost to a fault, keenly alert to life's ironies and absurdities, and alw...
Edwin T. Pratt was the Executive Director of the Seattle Urban League, a member of the Central Area Civil Rights Organization, and a leader in the struggle for integrated housing and education in Seat...
Exposed to Buddhism at a young age, Reverend Sunya Gladys Pratt became an important spiritual leader for Jodo Shinshu Buddhists in the Pacific Northwest. She first joined the Tacoma Buddhist Church (l...