The history of bread goes back some 30,000 years, to the hunting and gathering phase of human development. Fast forward a few tens of thousands of years to 1891, and a local version of civilized society crafted by Columbia pioneers began to materialize. Lumber and shingle mills as well as the railway attracted workers who needed their daily bread. Historical records indicate several locations for bakeries along Rainier Avenue between Edmunds and Hudson Street, the two-block stretch originally designated as the business district. Frank Goetz was the proprietor of Columbia Bakery at 4855 Rainier Avenue beginning in 1914. The building was vintage 1899, a two-story wood frame commercial-residential structure. A bakery as early as 1901, it utilized a brick oven heated by burning cord wood in the baking chamber. The ashes were raked out and then the dough put in to bake. Mr. Goetz advertised “Large Cakes, Pies and Cookies Baked Fresh Every Day.” In the late 1920s this building was razed to make way for the brick clad building we see today and refer to historically as the Calvert Bakery building, where William Calvert baked breads and cakes until about 1930. About this time, Claude McNabb left Colorado with his wife Florence and children Frank, Frances, Dorothy and Claude Jr., known as “Bink”. Claude was headed north to Alaska to start a bakery but after arriving decided “that was no place to raise children.” He soon returned to the University District in Seattle where he owned and operated the Mity-Nice Bakery on the Ave. In November of 1931 a burglar fled the bakery with $7 in loot as pajama-clad Claude pulled the trigger of his revolver five times. By July of 1933, C. H. McNabb was looking for a small bakery to buy or lease, in or out of Seattle. The Columbia Electric Bakery at 4863 Rainier Avenue became that bakery and the McNabbs moved to Columbia City. At 4863-65 Rainier Avenue stood the two-story Knights of Pythias building. While the building originally featured an ornate false front with turrets, these decorative elements had been removed by the 1930s. The upstairs community gathering space had become known as Phalen Hall, named after W.W. Phalen who purchased the building in 1901. Bill Phalen, mayor of Columbia City in 1905 and again in 1907, was a successful businessman with “W.W. Phalen, Your Grocer” in the north storefront on the first floor (4863 Rainier). In the late 1930s, Columbia Electric Bakery ran Saturday specials for lemon filled and three-layer vanilla, chocolate, caramel, or coconut cakes. Also offered were assorted sliced deli meats and cheeses, Claude’s home-made mayonnaise (bring in your own container), and their own hand-dipped chocolates - stiff competition for Nick Vamkros’ Confectionery just one building to the south. Claude was also known for his rye bread crusted baked hams - customers made special requests for the cracklins left in the pan. The Columbia Electric Bakery was a union shop and Happy Cook, their first baker, was known as Cookie by the youngsters. The McNabbs lived blocks from the bakery where Claude left the family home in the early hours to begin his work day. Florence went in later, often walking home in the evenings after closing. Daughters Frances and Dorothy began working at the bakery afterschool and on Saturdays as cashiers waiting on trade. Son Frank helped with the doughnuts. But it was on Easter Monday, April 14, 1941, that the Columbia Electric Bakery really made the news. At 3:44 a.m., Battalion Chief Lincoln Johnston of Hillman Fire Station answered the first fire alarm and shortly thereafter the McNabb family heard a knock at their door. It was a man alerting Claude the bakery was on fire. Last Resort Fire Department archives reveal the two‑alarm fire started when creosote condensate on a smoke pipe ignited as the pipe overheated. The fire spread inside the walls to the other occupancies, up into the attic and through the roof. The fire was determined under control at 4:19 a.m. While the first floor of the building suffered the least damage, the Columbia Electric Bakery’s oven was ruined. Repairs were made to the building and a new roof was built over the first floor. Phalen’s Hall suffered extensive damage and the upstairs wood floor would host dances no more. A new oven was bought for the bakery and the smoke damage cleared out. In August of 1941, Claude McNabb baked the wedding cake for his daughter Dorothy’s marriage to Roy Nornholm at Columbia Congregational Church. In 1942, Claude and Florence McNabb sold the Columbia Bakery and moved to Point Mugu in California after Claude Jr. graduated from Franklin High School and was accepted for naval air training in 1943. They joined Claude’s sister and husband to manage a restaurant, motel and gas station there. Frances McNabb continued her work at the bakery with the new owner, Louis Bock who had recently arrived from Yakima, and Happy Cook is rumored to have become the manager. Mr. Bock sold to the Jack Alman brothers at some point and it became the Columbia Bakery & Coffee Shop by 1958. During the 1970s and 1980s, La Bakerery was in business and eventually, the Gather Consignment shop we know today opened its doors at 4863 Rainier Avenue South. Many thanks to Dorothy McNabb Nornholm for sharing her family memories of the bakery. Our condolences for the loss of her sister Frances McNabb Stowell on June 13, 2015. Frances was a 1939 graduate of Franklin High School, and was employed as a line cook at Franklin High School’s cafeteria for many years before retiring. Frances continued to live in her Rainier Valley home on Myrtle Street for 60 years. She was an active member of the Rainier Valley Historical Society. Also thanks to Galen Thomaier, Seattle Fire Department Historian, of Last Resort Fire Department for providing information from their archives about the fire.

Audio recording, John Parker describing the Model T Ford he built up from parts of several cars during the 1920s. https://soundcloud.com/rainier-valley-history/10005098-john-parker

Audio recording of John Croce recollecting the Italian School from the Garlic Gulch neighborhood in the 1930s.

Interview of Jack Collier by Buzz Anderson from 1994.

The song "Carry Me Back to Columbia City" sung by the Columbia Pioneers at the 1973 annual meeting.

They came down from Beacon Hill, from the Central District, and from the valley floor. Most came by foot with a friend or two. The children came to learn the language of their parents in a small building on Valentine Street behind the New Italian Café in the heart of Garlic Gulch. The Scuola Italiana Dante Alighieri, its official name, was set up by the Italian community in the 1930s to provide the formal training in Italian that was difficult to provide at home. Many immigrant families continued to speak their regional dialect, if they spoke Italian at all at home. According to Italian-American businessman John Croce, Mussolini sent a teacher over and this teacher was paid by the Italian government. We kids all spoke dialect Italian at home; at the school we learned how to speak correctly, read and write, pronounce, and all that. We learned how to sing Mussolini songs. We didn’t care. We didn’t care about Mussolini. We learned about the good Italian language, the verbs and all that stuff. Lucy Colarossi Salle walked the few blocks from her home near Judkins Park with a girlfriend twice a week for the after school sessions. She remembers performing in a Christmas skit for parents: In the play, the teacher had me conjugate the verb “to be.” And I was supposed to make a mistake in the play, and then say “Oh, no, no!” and then correct myself. Lucy Salle recalls that some of the boys were “mischievous,” setting off firecrackers in class. John Croce testifies to a more serious incident. Alvie, he got up and in Italian says “I hate you” and shot the teacher with a starter pistol and the guy collapsed on the floor. I was there! Then he ran out of the damn school room and he went and stayed in the woods. We had a shack up in the woods that we built out of scrap lumber. The teacher got the Italian consul, went to Alvie’s old man and Alvie’s old man was looking for him for a week to beat the hell out him. Finally Alvie come out of hiding and the old man whipped his butt. He couldn’t go back to the Italian School after that! Sometime after this episode, the professore returned to Italy, now on the verge of war. For a time, a female teacher, “a gal from the neighborhood” according to Lucy Salle, taught the children. For reasons both political and geographic, the little school in the shadow of the coming freeway did not survive into the 1940s. After the war, classes continued for a time in a borrowed classroom at the Coleman School and at Deaconess Settlement House on Atlantic Street. Caption: Christmas at the Italian School. Luce Salle is at center left, hand in coat pocket. Professore Bovio stands in the back on the left side. The cabinet is draped with the flag of the Kingdom of Italy. Photo courtesy of Lucy Salle. Listen to the audio of John Croce.

A culinary history of the Rainier Valley going back 100 years with recipes and stories from our multicultural community. This project began with a two-year multicultural oral history project based on food, using Rainier Beach High School students and adult volunteers as interviewers. We wanted to use the universal topic of food to reach out to the many different ethnic and cultural groups in the Rainier Valley. We also worked with teen photographers from Youth in Focus to document some of the stories we uncovered.

Written by Rainier Valley Historical Society and published by Arcadia Publications. Where could one find "Garlic Gulch," a stadium named Sick, an urban fireworks factory on a hill, a Japanese American botanical garden, and the largest stand of old-growth timber in Seattle? All are icons of Seattle's Rainier Valley, an area whose past and present are richly varied. Although the fireworks factory and the stadium are gone, the smell of garlic still hangs on mixed with the aromas of Asian spices, Ethiopian coffee, Mexican salsa, and fish and chips. Saved from development by the organized protests of the community, the 85-year-old botanic garden still thrives. And Seward Park, with its virgin timber, is celebrating its 100th anniversary as a public park. The Rainier Valley, one of the most ethnically and economically diverse communities in the country, is a reflection of the many families, businesses, and events that filled the past 150 years

“Dear Sir, In donating the Remington electric typewriter to us, you have added a spoke to the wheel of justice.” --Jean French, Director, Rainier Community Action Center On December 10, 1973, in the middle of Columbia City’s holiday shopping season, Ellen Burris’s jewelry store was robbed. Five men, two of them armed, entered the store at closing time, told Burris and a customer to lie on the floor, and proceeded to fill a pillowcase with watches and rings from the store’s display cases. Then they took the cash drawer out of the register and grabbed the customer’s purse; their total haul was $12,000. Burris had already lost $10,000 in two earlier robberies that year. This was the last straw—a month later she closed her doors for good, after 26 years in business. David Suffia, writing for the Seattle Times, placed the closing of Rainier Jewelers in the context of a neighborhood “awash with crime and fear," where elderly people were “afraid to walk the streets, even in daylight," and according to the local bank manager, “the hoods are driving the merchants out.” Some might have questioned this histrionic characterization of the neighborhood, but no one could deny that crime was up: in 1963 there had been two robberies in Columbia City; in 1973 there were 53. Several factors contributed to the increase in crime: the “Boeing Bust: of 1969-71 had hit South Seattle hard, and the resulting exodus of white middle class residents had weakened the once-stable community. Some people worried that the South End’s concentration of low income housing had brought more poor- and possibly desperate- people into the neighborhood. And certainly ill-planned low income housing developments such as Greenwood Gardens near Holy Park had become havens for criminals. At the same time, a decline in police manpower had left local residents and businesses to fend for themselves—and they were trying. Rainier Jewelers had a button behind the counter that sounded an alarm at Grayson and Brown Hardware next door, and according to the Times article, “police recently responded to a robbery in progress and found merchants armed with sticks and baseball bats waiting for robbers to emerge from a store.” But the merchants knew baseball bats weren’t the answer to their crime problem. Two weeks after the robbery at Rainier Jewelers, the Executive Board of the Rainier Chamber of Commerce met to discuss the matter, and in particular to identify strategies for getting more help from the City. Thus began a long-term, multi-pronged anti-crime campaign headed up by local business leaders determined to keep their community—and their customer base—from slipping away. It seems worth pointing out that these were not disenfranchised members of the community who needed to learn how to access the levers of power. These were established citizens who, in the words of social scientist William Lyons, “had long records of accomplishment and reputation in the community and downtown as serious and responsible civic leaders in the Rainier Valley. It was this long-term commitment to civic responsibility that constituted a form of social capital.” Social capital, Lyons explains, "is a form of stored reciprocity”: a network of connections among members of a community who have lived and worked together long enough to develop mutual respect, trust, and sense of responsibility for each other’s fate. The Chamber Members who joined forces to fight crime in the early 1970s had this kind of relationship with community leaders across the Rainier Valley, and, in some cases, among decision makers in government. They also knew how to wield the tools of the business world: colorful charts to display information, Remington electrics to pound out press releases. Many businessmen got involved in the Chamber’s various anti-crime activities Sam Shoel, Lou DeFranco, James Wasson, Virgil Fox, Clay Yost, and John Flaherty, publisher of the local newspaper. But one of the most formidable figures in the fight was a woman: Jean Vel Dwyk. The granddaughter of a Dutch immigrant who worked his way across the country from New York City to the Rainier Valley, Jean Veld Dwyk had attended Whitworth Grade School and Franklin High School. She went to work for Allstate Insurance at the age of sixteen, “not giving them my true age.” By the time she left the company eleven years later, she says, “I supervised numerous departments, Because I could not be a manager due to the personnel code, which required all managers to male, I took a newly designated position, ‘supervisor of supervisors’—training the managers.” Vel Dwyk’s rapid rise at Allstate was not typical of women in this male-dominated field—most women in the insurance business (or any business, really) were stuck in low-level clerical jobs with little hopes of advancement. As president of the National Association of Insurance Women, Vel Dwyk worked to change that, both by promoting professional development opportunities for women, and –perhaps more importantly – by addressing their male bosses. “I went around and spoke directly to the heads of companies and brokerages in 33 cities in the United States to… tell them that we needed them to give us a pull up if we were going to push our women to get themselves better educated, do a better job in their position, and to be recognized for it.” Vel Dwyk’s own career served as a clear challenge to long-held assumptions—embedded in personnel codes throughout the industry—about what women were capable of. In 1959 Vel Dwyk struck out on her own as a real estate agent (changing the spelling of her name to Vel Dyke for professional purposes). She might not have heard of the notion of “social capital” but her charisma, hard work, and can-do leadership meant that she was producing and banking it at an impressive clip. “Well, as a businessperson—in real estate, it’s just a natural that you have to be outgoing. You have to communicate with people, and you have to make yourself visible and aware, and just meet as many folks as you can, and tell them what you have that they might be interested in, or how you might want to help them at some point if they care for that help, or what you might need from them.” When she joined the Rainier Businessmen’s Club, she was one of its only individual women members, Later—after the organization had become the Rainer Chamber of Commerce, she served as its first female president. The activities of the Chamber at that time reflected the members’ desire to socialize, network, promote their businesses, and improve their community. In the 1960s and ‘70s they had luncheons and dinner dances, sponsored the annual Rainier Pow Wow, elected Seafair Princesses, and worked on projects like installing a pedestrian bridge over Rainier Avenue at Franklin High School and closing Seward Park’s outer loop to automobile traffic. That last project drew a certain amount of flak. “To this day,” says Vel Dwyk, “there are a couple of people in Rainier Valley that won’t talk to me—no kidding! Because they thought that was a crime.” The Chamber also tackled thornier issues, like the concentration of low income housing in Southeast Seattle, which they felt had a negative effect on the surrounding communities, and in particular on local businesses, And they tackled the complicated, ongoing issue of crime. The Chamber had to walk a fine line when they spoke about crime in the Rainier valley—they didn’t want their complaints about, say, the slow police response to 911 calls to contribute to the public’s impression of Southeast Seattle as a crime-ridden war zone. That impression—often exaggerated in the press—was just as bad for business as the actual crime rate. Lou DeFranco’s 1974 letter to the Seattle Times reflects some of this frustration: Your recent article… concerning [a] Rainier Valley robbery is certainly erroneous and damaging to our area. Your article refers to the fact that the robbery took place at La Cantina Tavern at 8601 Eighth Avenue South which is hardly in the Rainier area. I am sure you are well aware that 8601 Eight Avenue South is in South Park and should be so indicated. Crimes that have been committed along the freeway –airport area as well as along hiway 99 South and in South Park have time and again been referred to as happening in the Rainier Valley, and as an insurance agent we are having much difficulty in keeping people insured in our area as a result of this bad publicity. We are not trying to minimize the problems that we have however, it would seem to me that you ought to correct your articles so that in the interest [of[] truthful newspaper writing you place crimes where they actually happen. Lou DeFranco's 1974 letter to the Seattle Times The battle over perceptions of crime was a minor one, though, compared to the Chamber’s mobilized effort to fight the real thing. After December 1973 Executive Board meeting, Chamber President Jean Vel Dwyk met with Mayor Wes Uhlman, requesting that more police officers be assigned to the Rainier district. After the meeting, an increasingly pointed correspondence between the two resulted in the temporary assignment of mounted police officers to the Columbia City business district. ”Frankly,” the mayor wrote at one point, “I do not understand what your organization expects from my office other than continued direction to the Seattle Police Department… to work with you in solving the problems of crime in your community. None of the powers or authorities granted to me as Mayor make it possible to simply eradicate a complex problem at the local level by executive decree.” Unsatisfied the Chamber broadened its efforts. They turned Ellen Burris’s shuttered jewelry store into the Rainier Community Action Center (RCAC), where coordinator Jean French distributed public safety information and displayed local crime statistics on large color-coded charts so the public could see the latest trends. French also organized Block Watch groups (which were credited with a sevenfold decrease in crime in one Rainier Beach neighborhood) and oversaw a revolutionary Court Watch program. The Chamber held public meetings with City Councilmembers and the Police Chief, demanding action on the crime issue. (Here again, the collective social capital of the Rainier Chamber ensured that officials would show at such meetings when they were invited.) Early on, Chamber activists had identified repeat offenders as a major source of criminal activity, and this was the focus of the most well-attended public meeting. Jean Vel Dwyk explains: We went to the police and said, “Why are you not solving our problems? You need to get these people off the streets.” And they said, “Well it’s not us, it’s the prosecutor.” And then we went to the prosecutor and said “The police say that you’re not willing to take these cases.” And the prosecutor said, “ Well, that’s because the courts [are] just letting them go anyhow, so why would we waste our time with this when the judges aren’t giving us any kind of support?” So then we went to the Juvenile Court, and they said “Well Superior Court gives us our directions,” and then we went to the Superior Court—you know, we just went all the way up the line, until one day we said, this is ridiculous, We need to get these people together—in front of the public.” So [we called] a huge meeting we got the prosecutor, the head of the judiciary, the head of the Juvenile Court, the police, everybody there. And it was a great meeting I think I moderated it, as a matter of fact. And it was a great meeting because [they[ couldn’t give us an excuse for what was going on. [When they tried], one of the others would correct that. We had studied this enough that we could say, “Well Mr. Prosecutor, didn’t you say that this happened in that case? Could you explain that what’s going on here?” We had a marvelous series of meetings, but that one big meeting was the peak, I think. Jean Vel Dwyk The RCAC’s Court Watch program was designed to look into- and hopefully influence—the sentencing patterns of the Superior Court. Sentencing debates raged in the newspapers: columns with headlines like “Who is more important, criminals or people?” reflected the public’s frustration with judicial leniency. On the other hand, Judge Donald Horowitz told the Times that “prison is not the answer to providing public safety,” and pointed out that “98 percent of all prison inmates come out of prison and ‘are worse when they come out” Horowitz believed that probation was probably more effective than prison at stopping repetition of criminal activity.” The Court Watch program provoked alarm in some quarters—a Seattle Times editorial expressed concern that “an element of vigilantism may develop”—but RCAC proceeded with its plans, assigning volunteers to attend trials and report on the outcomes of various cases. Eventually the Court Watch program included an in-depth statistical analysis of the sentencing patterns of individual judges. According to an RCAC press release, “the court records were turned over to evaluation teams after substituting code numbers for the identity of the judges and the convicted criminals.” Co-chairs Buzz Anderson and Jean Vel Dwyk “developed a rating system which they feel is highly objective,” taking into account “the actual crime committed.. the past criminal record and conditions of probation, if applicable.” Five hundred criminal cases were revied by program volunteers.” When the numbers were released two years later, Horowitz and seven over judges were deemed “unacceptable.” In judicial elections later that year, according to Rainier Community Action Center President James E. Wasson, every one of these “unacceptable” judges was defeated, and seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the Court Watch program were elected. In November 1976, James E. Wasson received a letter from the King County Superior Court. “The debate will rage among lawyers and others as to what sentencing attitudes ought to be,” Judge Jerome Johnson wrote. “Regardless of such debates, I personally believe that the efforts of your group have resulted in dramatic influences in the headling of both adult and juvenile correction matters. Many of the recommendations made by you after the long study at Juvenile Court were considered carefully and resulted in changes. The robust discussions alone in the community have been beneficial.” While the Chamber (and various offshoots such as RCAC) certainly enjoyed victories such as this, it is difficult to pinpoint the direct effect of its various efforts on the crime rate in Columbia City. Their advocacy did result in some increased patrol coverage in Rainier Valley business districts,s and they supported the Police Department efforts to get better radio equipment so officers could respond to calls faster. These were probably among the many factors that contributed to the lowering of the crime rate in Rainier Valley (at least until crack arrived in the Rainier Valley ten years later – but that’s another story!). What is clear however is that the members of the Rainier Chamber of Commerce successfully used their social capital to raise awareness about the problem among residents, merchants, and elected officials. In William Lyons’s somewhat academic language, they subscribed to “a story about [their[ community that “assumes a capacity to solve problems.” In plain English, we might say they felt responsible for their community, and empowered to act on its behalf. And collectively, they had the connections, energy, and resources to make a difference. --Mikala Woodward

Community organizing starts with problems—a rat infested apartment, the steady drip drip from the ceiling of an elementary school after a storm, an intersection with no stop might where a car hits somebody’s daughter. By the time the Southeast Seattle Community Organization (SESCO) set up shop in the summer of 1975, many Rainier Valley residents were fed up with all the little problems and had come to the conclusion that they were the victims of the city’s neglect or worse, of a deliberate plan to dump Seattle’s problems in the South End. The complaint was common, but vague; it unhelpfully pointed the finger at the city’s entire political establishment and suggested no action. As pioneering community organizer, Saul Alinsky put it, “What the organizer does is convert the plight into a problem.” Trained in Alinsky’s methods, SESCO’s community organizations sought to overcome feelings of isolation and helplessness by mobilizing people around a modest issue that was concrete, specific and realizable. In a pivotal early organizing effort, SESCO hit upon one of those little issues that was symbolic of southeast Seattle’s plight and literally concrete. Residents of the Dunlap neighborhood noticed a steadily growing pile of construction rubble behind their houses. The nuisance became intolerable when one day in February of 1976, it rained the sheet built of the mount diverted enough rainwater to flood their basements. The dumping was originally intended as a fill for the site of a future church whose congregation at the time met at a house on the same property. The pile, which stood at 17 feet and was made up of dirt, large slaves of concrete and settle support rods, contained ten times more debris than the city-issued dumping permit allowed. With the help of the SESCO organization, the first thing the neighbors did was arrange a meeting with the official from the city Building Department, which had issued the dumping permit. The official told them he would investigate, by that they should really be taking the matter up with the property owner who was ultimately responsible. Church officials said they had asked their contractor repeatedly to stop the dumping. The residents contacted the contractor, who said he had nothing to do with the landfill and that he was “not about the to be city’s fall guy on this deal.” (1) This dizzying circle of deferred responsibility is very often the point where people like that Dunlap residents give up. Alinsky observed in his book Rules for Radicals that “in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck.” He directed community activists to pick a specific target as responsible and “freeze” it, relentlessly holding them alone accountable. The residents of Dunlap chose the superintendent of the city Building Department, a man with the unfortunate name of Mr. Petty. Twenty-five of them made a trip to his office and presented for his signature a document stating that the debris would be removed within a month. He demurred, stating that “any action on the matter would have to come about through court proceedings.” It looks like someone erred, “he told the Southeast District Journal, which had been called there for the occasion, and speculated that his department not intervening to stop the dumping “might have been an honest mistake.”(2) The Building Department’s idea of action was to issue a succession of stop work orders, which went ignored since nobody would admit to dumping at the site. Faced with continuing pressure for his department to clean up the site, Petty protested, “We’re supposed to go through the proper channels. We’ll only take it out if there are no other choices. It’s the responsibility of the property owner.” (3) In delivering what was no doubt his department’s boilerplate evasion, the superintendent inadvertently spelled out the newly minted neighborhood activist’s end game – to make it clear that there would be no choice Petty could stomach but to clean up the site. On Wednesday, April 28th, 1976, Residents and organizers loaded a pickup truck at the dump site and made a trip north to City Hall. They unloaded their cargo—a concrete slab which was estimated to weigh three tons and twisted 20 foot- long steel support rod—at the entrance to the Building Department’s office and labeled them with the specification of the fill material allowed by the city permit “8 inch piece of dirt.” Though Petty was still out to lunch when the activists arrived (until 2:15 p.m., the Seattle Times noted)., two of his representatives read a statement recounting the city’s efforts to address the complaints. One city employee noted down the names of the activists “in case there is some liability for removing the material,” he said. (4) Before they left, the Dunlap residents handed out a press release warning that, until the city cleaned up the dump, they would return with more of its contents. The simmering conviction that the city was using their community as a place to hide Seattle’s problems became real in the chunks of concrete, and now, with the help of SESCO, the community was rubbing the political establishment’s nose in the mess they refused to acknowledge. City Hall had become the dumping ground. Petty and other officials involved with the dumping issue took comfort that they were following the correct process, regardless of the result. Convinced that they had acted correctly, they were able to address the residents from a professional distance. The residents of Dunlap, who lived with the growing landfill in their backyards, were only concerned with results, which they intended to get. As recounted in SESCO’s newsletter, “The residents visited Mr. Betty at this home. There he refused to talk with they, so they visited his neighbors to tell them how he ran his department.” (5) Rodney Herold, who was SESCO’s director at the time, described the chain of events that led to the visit of the superintendent’s home as the “principle of escalation.” “People are reticent to get involved and do things,” he said, “So first they write a letter and nothing happens and they get frustrated, so they make a call. If nothing happens then, they go to the person’s workplace. And if that doesn’t work, we certainly went to people’s homes a couple of times.” (6) The principle of escalation, fed by intransigence and frustration is the motor of community organizing. It turns detached authorities into personal targets and anonymous citizens into committed activists. Someone must have told the mayor what SESCO was up to because, a few days later, one of the Dunlap residents received a call from his office conceding that the city would take care of the problem. The next week Mayor Uhlman, who was making a bid for governor, personally visited Dunlap to assure the residents the debris would be removed at the expense of the city and the contractor. SESCO organizers went on to build “action groups” around a number of other issues with names like Concerned Residents of Holly Park, Georgetown Community Against the Animal Shelton, and the Bolmor/Jacobus Committee. From these issue-specific groups, SESCO built a coalition of community groups made up of everyday residents who were ready to tackle issues that affected the entire Rainier Valley, such as housing segregation and real estate redlining. Seattle Post Intelligencer, Everybody Dumps: Problem of Fill,” 3/24/76 South District Journal, “City Action South in Landfill Conflict,” 3/31/76 South District Journal, “Residents Rock City Hall,” 5/3/76 Seattle Times, “Protestors Leave Big Calling Card,” 4/29/76 SESCO Staff Reports and the Northwest Institute Report, Volume 1976, No.6 In person interview, 11/17/09 Read more stories from this project below: Lessons In Civic Activism: Greenwood Gardens A Concrete Problem: SESCO and the Principle of Escalation Schoolyard Standoffs: The Tale of Whitworth Elementary How to Build a Bridge The Rainier Chamber’s Crime Fighting Spree: Harnessing Social Capital “Everybody In” packs it in

Kubota Garden Entrance Gate - photo by Laurel Mercury Most first-time visitors to the garden are amazed to find a mature 20-acre garden located in a residential neighborhood a few blocks from the southern city limits of Seattle. The story of the garden is also amazing. It is the creation of Fujitaro Kubota and his family and unique to the Pacific Northwest. The Historical and Economic Background The story begins in Meiji Japan, with the rapid westernization and industrialization there after the emperor was restored in 1868. New taxation and economic policies affected the farming class very harshly. Taxes were applied to land and had to be paid in cash. In a time of inflation, rice prices were kept artificially low and in the 1880's farming families all over Japan lost their land. There was a custom of working temporarily away from home and the Japanese government extended this permission to include the island of Hawaii where there was a desperate need for workers in the sugar cane fields. The field work was brutally hard but wages in Hawaii were about six times higher than in Japan. When the first 600 work permits became available in 1885, over 28,000 people applied. The Japanese government and the emigrants themselves viewed this time abroad as temporary. The workers were generally from farming communities and, because of the eight years of schooling provided in Meiji Japan, they were literate and, although poor, not destitute. They were expected to uphold the honor of their country abroad and to return to Japan when they were financially able to purchase a good position there. In fact, over 55 percent of the emigrants to Hawaii prior to 1924 did return to Japan. During Mr. Kubota's early years, the immigration activity between Japan, Hawaii and the United States was complex and tumultuous. In 1882 the United States Congress had stopped Chinese immigration in response to anti-Chinese hysteria, but the country still had an ever increasing need for workers in the mines, the railroads, the sawmills, and the canneries. Japan was very conscious of the anti-Chinese activities in America and consistently sought to control emigration so as to avoid confrontation and international embarrassment. In 1886 Japan prohibited contract workers from immigrating to America; the government had a horror of the world seeing destitute Japanese nationals homeless on the streets of America. Emigrants were screened for disease in both Japan and America, had to have a certain amount of money in hand, and could not be destitute. In 1889 all males in Japan became subject to military conscription, however students and emigrants were excepted from this obligation. In 1900 Hawaii was annexed by the United States and all Japanese workers with valid passports to Hawaii could enter the United States legally. Wages in the states were double those in Hawaii in 1900, and by 1904 over half of the Japanese immigrating to Hawaii actually traveled immediately to the United States. On the mainland, anti-Japanese activity began to build, especially in California. The combination of increased Japanese immigration via Hawaii and increasing anti-Japanese activity in the United States led to the 1908 "Gentleman's Agreement" which limited Japanese immigration to students, tourists, diplomats and the close family relatives of Japanese already in the United States. Fujitaro Kubota’s Early Years In February of 1879, Fujitaro Kubota was born in Kochi prefecture on the island of Shikoku. The smallest of the four big islands, Shikoku faces the gentle Inland Sea on one side and the rough Pacific on the other. Mr. Kubota grew up facing the Pacific Ocean, separated from the rest of Japan by a chain of mountains, far from the centers of power and surrounded by the beauty of mountains and sea. The people of Kochi are sometimes called the "Texans of Japan" because of their energy, vigor, outspokenness and independence. Fujitaro’s family were rice farmers and they were in comfortable circumstances. Mr. Kubota attended an agricultural school and, as the first-born son, was expected to take over his father's position as head person in their village. He was 26 years old, married and with two daughters when he went to Hawaii in 1907. One story says that he did not like to eat rice economically extended with potatoes, another says that he did not enjoy settling the marriage disputes, debts and other village conflicts brought to him as his father's son. Kubota family, probably in Japan, 1920. Courtesy Densho Kubota Garden Foundation Collection. To America He left for San Francisco soon after landing in Hawaii and his timing was impeccable. In March of that year, President Teddy Roosevelt signed an Executive Order which prohibited Japanese from coming to the mainland from Hawaii. Mr. Kubota landed in San Francisco and traveled up the coast. This was unusual since most Japanese immigrants stayed in California where agricultural work was close at hand. In1909, there were nearly 3,000 Japanese working in the sawmills in Washington State, one of them was Fujitaro Kubota. He worked at Selleck, near Black Diamond and was able to bring Mrs. Kubota to join him, family members being allowed to immigrate by the 1908 "Gentlemen's Agreement." About 1913, Mr. Kubota left Selleck and moved to Seattle where he operated and managed hotels and apartment buildings in Pioneer Square, what is now the International District, and Yesler Hill. His family grew to include two sons and two daughters, and he took the whole family back to Japan to visit. His business affairs prospered until the depression after the First World War when he lost his buildings with the exception of an apartment building which was also his home. Kubota family operated this rooming house in the Chinatown International District, Seattle, 1913-1920. Courtesy Washington State Archives. The Northwest economy was booming during the first years after Mr. Kubota arrived, and Seattle was growing rapidly. After the First World War, however, there was an economic depression, accompanied by an anti-labor and anti-immigrant reaction. Japanese workers were more often discriminated against, and Seattle's Anti-Japanese League agitated against competition from Japanese-owned businesses. At the same time, most labor unions excluded Japanese from membership. There were often fewer obstacles to starting a business than working for wages. In the nineteen-twenties garden maintenance was one of the usual occupations of the Japanese immigrants. Mr. Kubota had some available time and some friends in the gardening business who needed some help. He worked with them for a while, discovered that he liked the work and in 1923 founded the Kubota Gardening Company. There was some general public knowledge about Japanese gardens in the Seattle area. Josiah Conder's book Landscape in Japan had been published in 1893 and Japanese gardens were featured in the various international expositions held at the end of the century. Well established trade contact between the Northwest and Japan had created some awareness of the Japanese garden arts. The Kubota Gardening Company prospered, and he was soon doing more than cutting lawns. A Gardening Career Fujitaro Kubota was a pioneer in bringing eastern gardening ideas to the Northwest. Interviewed by Mr. lto in 1965 for the book Issei, he said: "I had not been trained as a gardener. After finishing grammar school, I went to the night class of a supplementary school where I learned only a little introductory botany. But American gardeners didn't even know about the three ingredients of fertilizers and about which plants grow in sun and which don't. I returned to Japan three times to study gardening which wasn't easy. In Kyoto I visited professional gardeners and asked many questions, but they wouldn't give me the most important part of their know-how. It was like the art of the tea ceremony and traditional dance in Japan which are taught in the rigid old family system. I knew a man in South Park - Ryotaro Nishikawa from Okayama Prefecture. His father loved gardens and so he learned about trees and plants from his father. He was particularly good at cultivating pine trees and came to help me whenever he had time. I would say he was my only gardening teacher, and no one else. Dozens of time I got stuck and was in trouble. Then I went into the woods and prayed to the gods for help. " Mr. Kubota's gardening style was distinctive, featuring stone and a few carefully selected plants. He designed with mature plants so that a new garden would look complete immediately and his work soon became appreciated in upscale neighborhoods. Soon he had seven or eight maintenance crews and one landscape crew working for him. Still living on Alder Street, he had a lot where he heeled in his plants and stored the equipment but he started looking around for a bigger piece of land where he could show what he could do. Property on Renton Avenue In 1927 a realtor brought him out to Rainier Beach to look at five acres of logged off swamp along Renton Avenue South. His youngest son Tom recalls that the land was very brushy and hard to walk through but that after they managed to push in a little way, his dad heard water and got very excited. The five-acre piece had some changes in elevation, several springs and an all-season creek. Tom says, "He wanted it really bad..." It took all the family's resources including the kid's savings to make the down payment and the land was purchased in the name of a friend since Mr.Kubota could not legally hold land. Rainier Beach had been annexed to Seattle in 1907 but was considered to be far out in the country and Renton Avenue was only paved for one lane. The family had a caretaker live on the property and commuted out from the International District to work on the garden. Their first project was to drain the swamp. A rockery was placed along Renton Avenue, roads were made and ponds were dug out along the creek. The Great Depression was slow coming to the Pacific Northwest and the Kubota Gardening Company continued to prosper through 1931 but then, according to Tom Kubota, everything stopped. During the depression when "We had time but no money," Tom recalls that they worked building the Japanese Garden. The pond was dug out with wheelbarrows and with horses dragging a Fresno Scraper. The excavated soil created the hill and the stones were glacial erratics recovered from construction sites and farmer's fields. After 1936, business began to pick up again and in 1940 the family moved to the garden to live. By this time Mr. Kubota had acquired additional land adjacent to the original five acres, more than doubling the property. Much of the area of the Garden was already planted with nursery stock for later sale to landscaping customers. He would continue to acquire property as he could afford it, having a strong feeling that "You need to have 20 acres to make something really good." It was always a financial stretch. Tom describes his dad as someone who “Just went out and did what he wanted to do, and then we all suffered." The Internment at Minidoka In 1940 there were about 7,000 people of Japanese ancestry in Seattle, about two thirds were citizens, born in America. Discriminated against in housing and employment, most lived in the central city and had little contact with the rest of the city of 368,000 people. After December 7, 1941, there were few voices raised in support of the Japanese Americans. On March 21, 1942, notices were posted in Seattle directing that all persons of Japanese ancestry were to report the following week for evacuation. Mr. and Mrs. Kubota and their daughter May, their son Tak and his family, were interned in Idaho at Camp Minidoka until the fall of 1945. Near Hunt, Minidoka was located on 33,500 acres of desert land reclaimed by the government when homesteaders abandoned it. Temperatures ranged from a minus 20 degrees in winter to 115 degrees in summer. It was an instant city of over 9,000 people uprooted from their homes, deprived of their civil rights, and never charged with any crime. Years later, in 1980, the federal Civil Liberties Commission would declare that the internment of 110,000 people nationally was caused by "racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and the failure of political leadership." Mr. Kubota served as representative of Block 26 at Minidoka and busied himself with landscaping, trying to make the area more comfortable by planting trees to provide shade. He was also active in the Variety Show Club that offered regular entertainment in the camp. Before the war Mr. Kubota had been an enthusiastic actor in the local Japanese theater, playing women's roles in the old time plays. He loved to entertain and Tom recalls that, "He would stand up at a gathering and would make people laugh or cry too". Kubota Family in Minidoka, 1943. Courtesy Densho Kubota Garden Foundation Collection. The Return to Seattle Tom Kubota served in the army in the Military Intelligence Unit and was given a furlough to help his family move from the camp. Minidoka was one of the last camps to close and word had reached Idaho of the rough treatment other returning internees had experienced. There was a real concern about whether it was safe to return to Seattle. Tom traveled to Seattle, talked with old customers and friends and returned to Minidoka to encourage his family to return to Seattle which they did. Many interned Japanese never returned to their home cities, rather moving away from the coast to mid-west and eastern cities. The family had renters staying in the house during the years of internment, but the garden had been untouched for four years. Grass had grown so high that the roads were unrecognizable, the carefully pruned trees had gone wild, and the ponds were full of silt and debris. Mr. Kubota was now sixty-six years old and he faced back taxes and assessments plus the interest incurred during the internment. Tom recalls spending three weeks cutting the grass around the house with a scythe. At that time the family decided that they would concentrate upon design and garden construction rather than garden maintenance. They began extensive plantings of nursery plants that were then grown to maturity for use on their jobs. Mr. Kubota had brought seed for Japanese black and red pines from Japan before the war. During the internment the seedlings had grown from one to over six feet and they were replanted all over the garden. These trained pines were the signature plant of the Kubota Gardening Company. Their old customers called and there was high demand for their work. Even before the war the Kubota firm had worked at Seattle University and they continued to landscape the fifty-two-acre campus during the fifties and sixties. Their expertise in moving large trees allowed them to bring a note of maturity to essentially a young campus. Although much changed due to the development of new buildings, the SU campus remains as a prime example of their public work. Another is the Japanese Garden at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, created in 1960. May Kubota, Kumae Kubota, unidentified woman, and Fujitaro Kubota in the Garden, 1946. Courtesy Densho Kubota Garden Foundation Collection. In the decades following the war the political climate for the JapaneseAmericans began to improve. In 1952 the McCarran-Walter Act allowed the Issei to become U.S. Citizens and in 1966 Washington State overturned the last Alien Land Law. The Seattle Japanese American community had traditionally been leaders within the national community. The Japanese American Citizens’ League was established in 1929, and had its first national convention in Seattle in 1930. Minidoka was the only internment camp which produced a yearbook, the Minidoka Interlude and in the mid '60s the community sponsored the 1016page book Issei, documenting the life experiences of these then very elderly people. Seattle Nisei and Sansei were leaders in the Redress Movement which led to national apologies in 1988 and payments to surviving internees. Fujitaro Kubota's Certificate of Naturalization, 1955. Courtesy Densho Kubota Garden Foundation Collection. Fujitaro Kubota in a red pine tree in the Garden, 1965. Courtesy Densho Kubota Garden Foundation Collection. The garden in Rainier Beach was restored by the end of the forties and the family continued to develop it as time and money allowed. Mr. Kubota's last major project was the creation of the Mountainside in 1962, the year of the Seattle World's Fair. This garden is intended to give the visitor a trip into the mountains. Mr. Kubota had saved special stones and plants for years and he built a twisting path that gains 65 feet in elevation and used over 400 ton of stone to create a series of pools and waterfalls. He was then 83 years old and continued to work with his sons creating gardens across the area. In the early '70's the Moon Viewing Platform and Moon Bridge were created. Mr. Kubota was then in his nineties, and Tom comments that his dad mostly advised on this project. In 1972, when he was ninety-three, the Japanese Government awarded Fujitaro Kubota the Fifth Class Order of the Sacred Treasure, the highest such award then given in the Pacific Northwest. It was given in recognition of his "achievement in his adopted country, for introducing and building respect for Japanese Gardening and culture there." Mr. Kubota died in 1973 leaving a legacy of many fine private and public gardens, his own Kubota Garden and his family. A Public Garden The Kubota family continued the business but by the late '70’s it became apparent that sustaining the twenty-acre garden was unrealistic. Many proposals were developed to build residential housing on the property and this generated much concern among those who knew that a unique garden was likely to be lost. Mr. Kubota had an expansive nature; he loved to show people around the garden and had always made the garden available to the public. The Japanese- American community held many prefecture parties at the garden, school children in the neighborhood came for field trips and a manicured picnic lawn was kept for the neighbors to use for picnics. During Mr. Kubota’s life time, there had been talks with the city about acquiring the garden as a public garden but no agreement was ever achieved. In an effort to protect the garden, in 1981 the four-and-a-half-acre core garden was declared to be a Historical Landmark of the City of Seattle. Various proposals for residential development were rejected, however a proposal to build 268 units was given approval by Seattle's building department. Landscape designers, gardeners, neighbors, artists, Japanese-Americans, and old clients across the city encouraged the city to acquire the garden. City Councilwoman Jeanette Williams led the effort and facilitated the purchase. In 1987 the City of Seattle acquired the twenty-acre garden as a public park. In 1989 the Kubota Garden Foundation was established as a non-profit, friend’s organization, to “support, enhance, and perpetuate the Kubota Garden within the spirit and vision of Fujitaro Kubota.” Photo: Courtesy of theKubota Garden Foundation. Tom Kubota was the primary source for this article which I prepared for a lecture series “Japanese Elements in Pacific Northwest Garden Design” held at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in the fall of 1996. Tom died in 2004 but I have retained his voice here as a happy memory of his, as always, generous and gracious support. Mary Anne Parmeter August 15, 2010 Kubota Garden Foundation Board Member https://www.kubotagarden.org/

2010 marks the 100th year of operation for the Lakewood Seward Park Community Club Take a look at the Seward Park peninsula today and imagine what the terrain across Andrews Bay looked like 120 years ago. The woods along the west side of Lake Washington between Hudson Street on the south and what is now the Stan Sayres Pits, and bounded by 42nd Avenue on the west, formed a triangular piece of land called Lakewood. Guy Phinney, a wealthy lumber mill owner, purchased and platted Lakewood in 1883. By 1903, the area was booming thanks largely to proximity to the Southern Railway which ran through neighboring Columbia City. It wasn’t long before the “clearings in the wilderness” were sold and pioneers from Canada, England, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, as well as the U.S. Midwest began removing trees for their new homes. It soon became clear that road and trail improvements were of utmost concern. Few Lakewood residents owned automobiles at the turn of the century, and walking or traveling by cart and horse over the hill to the city, especially at night, was less than desirable. Transportation issues spurred the organization of an improvement club. Canadian real estate broker named Albert George Corbett presided over the first meeting of the male-only Lakewood Improvement Club in 1910; meanwhile Henrietta McCloy called to order the first meeting of 30 women, the Lakewood Civic Improvement Club. The groups met twice monthly; the women in the parlor of the McCloy home, and the men in a chicken coop and the Lakewood boathouse. Civic improvements included the installation of three plank sidewalks( instead of the standard two) to accommodate young families with baby carriages, the 48th Street overpass that crossed Genesee Street, and the grading of Genesee Street in 1912. A major success was the campaign to install a shuttle streetcar line for Lakewood residents -- the Genesee streetcar named the “Galloping Goose” ran on a one- track line from Hudson along 50th to Genesee and Rainier Avenue and back again. Civic improvements were just one aspect of the clubs’ goals. Having a social and meeting hall to host a variety of occasions was another. To that end, the “Lakewood Club House Company” sold $5.00 shares of stock to purchase land and building materials. With volunteer power from the Lakewood and Genesee Boat Club members, the first clubhouse in Seattle was built in 1914 on 50th and Angeline Street. In 1929, the name of the club changed to the Lakewood Community Club to include both the men’s and women’s groups. The mission statement “To unite all those whose homes and interests are in this vicinity and to work together for the development and common welfare of the community” still holds today. Seward Park neighbors joined this effort in 1979, consolidating the two neighborhoods of 6,700 residents, and the club name became the Lakewood Seward Park Community Club. Over the past 100 years, the Club has served the welfare of its community. It has provided a meeting space for hundreds of organizations and events, including Scouts, Little League, Food Co-Op, and Candidates Night, as well as private groups. Regular events hosted by members, such as the monthly dances, the New Year’s Eve Ball, picnics, potlucks, bingo, bazaars, are remembered by many. In the past year, neighbors have secured the continuation of the Cub for the next generation through a membership drive, the refurbishment of the clubhouse, and official adoption of not-for-profit 501(c)(3) status.