Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 33 of 177)

To struggle to protect treaty rights has been heavy on my mind this week. It is worth pointing out how long this struggle actually is.

This letter to the Puget Sound Courier (Steilacoom’s paper) is a pointed attack at Governor Stevens during the Puget Sound War. The anonymous writer points out that the execution of the war and the removal of Indians to internment camps violated the terms of the treaties that were just signed. Like newspapers of that era, the Courier was picking sides in a political battle against Gov. Stevens.

But, the letter also marks the beginning of the treaty rights struggle that continued, sometimes in secret, through to today.

…let it be remembered that the Indian Department in Washignton territory, negogiated a treaty, forwarded it to Washington city for ratification, received that ratification, and violated, all within the short space of a year.

I wrote about one episode in Oyster Light (here’s just that chapter), in which the Boldt Decision almost happened 50 years early when a young Olympia lawyer joined a coordinated legal effort to try treaty rights in court.

The treaty rights struggle, the tense relationship between these governments and our communities, goes back throughout our history. Its is impossible to understand the history of our region without thinking hard about it.

To that end, I would highly suggest the Katie Gale. I’ve read a lot of pieces, books and essays about treaty rights, tribal history and natural resources management. And, obviously Cecelia Svinth Carpenter is the original gold standard.

But, Katie Gale takes a perpendicular track to other things I’ve read. It tracks the life of of a women literally of the first post-treaty Indian generation. She was raised knowing only the world Scorpion described the launch of.

The book can sometimes slog down into details that don’t move the narrative forward. We set the scene so long, it seems like we’re taking in the scenery rather than listening to a story. But, those details really only remind us that our history is really complicated.

And, it is very local. This all happened right here. Someone who was central to these stories walked the same place you walked. Scorpion, Issac Stevens and Katie Gale have all been on the same streets as you.

One little detail. But, I can admit when I’m wrong. Here’s one passage in a history I wrote of the formation of Capitol Lake:

Depending on the source, one of two things then happened. Either the state capitol committee rejected a lake altogether or they accepted the Olmsted’s earlier limited version.

In the late 20s, Wilder and White and the Olmsted firm participated in a back and forth over the landscaping plan, with the state capitol committee in the middle. In one telling, the result was that all waterfront improvements (including Capitol Lake) were written out of the landscaping plan (Johnston, 91).

According to another Capitol Campus historian, Mark Epstein, Capitol Lake was retained in the 1920s landscaping plan, but in the form of Olmsted’s modest saltwater tidal pond rather than an aggressively dammed estuary (Epstein, 67).

Also, ten years after he first proposed it, damming the Deschutes apparently was not in the front of Carlyon’s mind. As Wilder, White and the Olmsted firm debated landscaping plans that could have included a lake, Carlyon wrote an essay about the vision and construction of the capitol group. Lacking from the essay is a single mention of a lake (Carylon, 1928).

Even though it was rejected in 1916 and was an afterthought in Carlyon’s mind by 1928, the lake project did not go away.

This passage had to do with the late 1920s when the capitol builders were putting the finishing touches on the original capitol group. It was also just about 10 years before the successful (and locally originated) effort to build Capitol Lake.

From what I  found in a 1929 Seattle Times piece, I wasn’t totally correct:

A small difference I suppose. But, a big enough difference to add another sentence to that section in the piece I linked to above. It was a proposed lake. It had been proposed in 1911 as part of a locally funded package of civic improvements. Again in 1915 by local politicians as a solution to transportation problems. It was also proposed in 1897 as a grand freshwater port scheme:

It was proposed a lot, but it wasn’t the centerpiece of a grand plan for the capitol campus. It was an old idea by 1911 that had been kicked around and recycled several times in various forms of urban renewal and natural resources destruction.

Shanna Stevenson’s chapter in “The River Remembers” (edited by Gayle Palmer) is a thorough history of transportation through Tumwater. Most of it is a lead in to Tumwater’s most notable historic wound, the construction of Interstate 5 through the historic center of the city.

Stevenson’s history includes an interesting footnote on what could have happened if Olympia had gotten its way. Instead of going straight through the old Tumwater historic neighborhood down by the former Budd Inlet waterfront, the Olympia city leaders wanted the highway through their city.

The proposed route was to loop the interestate through the town coming from the west through the Percival Creek canyon. Then, it would go through downtown in a tunnel under 10th or an elevated roadway over 7th.

So, the two options both included a highway at the foot of the capitol campus. Option one was a new tunnel. Option two was a viaduct running just south Sylvester Park.

This overlay of Olympia in 1941 with our current roads shows exactly why this was feasible. Even though the old Swantown Slough was filled for decades by this era, very little of the south end had been developed.

After finding a way through downtown, it would have been easy to route the interstate through the rest of town.

I also find it interesting that when this plan was seriously being considered (1952 through 1954), it was the early days of Capitol Lake. The city was advocating for a major interstate to loop through a place that they’d just spent more than a decade pushing to become a lake. Hardly fitting the Wilder and White vision of Capitol Lake creation, I’d say.

Of course, Capitol Lake then was hardly the park rimmed area it is now. In the 1950s, the first lake park was still ten years off. There was still a major rail yard on the south bank under the capitol and industrial buildings were still on other banks.

So, in the mind of the city leaders, in the early 1950s, the lake being the setting of a major downtown park was hardly in the plans.

Going through Tumwater ended up being cheaper, so the state highway commission chose that route. But, it wasn’t because Olympia didn’t want it.

Seattle Times, 1983

We all mourn the closure of the Olympia brewery. We all hope it comes back, at least the territory of the brewery, to become a new heart for our oldest non-native community.

Decades before our latest mourning, we mourned the sale of the company and brand to non-local owners. I wrote a bit about this history over at Thurston Talk recently. The story centered on a phenomena originating in the prohibition of tobacco advertizing in the late 1960s:

The true factor leading to the Schmidt family’s sale, in the early 80s, where market forces dating back to the ban on tobacco
advertising on television in 1971. Phillip Morris, one of the largest tobacco purveyors, decided to diversify a few years before the ban and bought Miller in 1969.

The Miller sale sounded off like a shot to the once traditional and staid brewing industry. “Budweiser met the challenge,”
Knight said. “The two companies started buying up every market in the U.S., rolling over smaller breweries.”

While it might seem like the tobacco giants were buying beer companies, what they were really buying was geography.  The
quickest way to break into new beer markets was to buy existing beer companies, gaining loyal beer buyers and their preferences, along with beer distribution arrangements.

A few years later, the Schmidt family reacted by buying Hamms (1974) and then later Lone Star (1977). “Olympia was a little late
getting into the game,” Knight said.

“They had to get bigger or get a lot smaller,” Knight said.
“Each time Olympia bought a new brand, it would give them a boost.”
Olympia’s attempt to appeal to the drinkers in the newly acquired
territories included the Artesians campaign.

But, in trying to keep up in a race of quickly nationalizing brands, the Schmidts eventually ran out of family talent and stock. In 1983 Paul Kalmanovitz (who owned Pabst and had also bought other Washington brands like Lucky Lager) bought Olympia Brewing
Company.

This is a totally plausible and realistic story that is backed up by other histories of the era, which additionally cite legal troubles brought on by the mergers. But, this business-centered history runs counter to the local knowledge of why Olympia was sold. Because the then president of the company was caught having sex with another man in the Capitol Lake bathrooms.


This did happen. In early 1980, in the twilight of locally-owned Olympia Beer, Rick Schmidt and two other men (a state legislator and a state agency director) were arrested for lewd conduct. The three non-out-of-the-closet men quickly faded from their public lives. All three quit their jobs and disappeared for awhile. Eric Rohrbach (the former state legislator) is back involved in local politics.

Both Schmidt and Joseph “Dean” Gregorius (as far as I can tell) never reentered public life.

The question is, whether Schmidt resigning had much to do with the eventual sale of the family firm. I’d say very little. The Schmidt family was doomed by nation-wide forces, not by the fall of the scion.

Research has pointed out that family-led companies have a particularly bad time reacting to industry-wide change:

The cultural view of family firms implies that these firms might be less willing to make changes to their overall strategy even when market pressures ask for such changes. Out of a sense of duty and respect for their elders, younger generations might find it difficult to change decisions such as where to locate, what to produce, or which customers to serve.

Just being a family-owned company is bad in the long run:

This paper provides strong evidence that promoting family CEOs in publicly traded corporations significantly hurts performance even after controlling for firm and industry characteristics, and aggregate trends.

I find that, consistent with wasteful nepotism,declines in performance are prominent in firms that appoint family CEOs who did not attend a selective undergraduate institution. In contrast, comparable firms that promote non-family CEOs do not experience negative changes in performance, even when incoming unrelated CEOs did not attend selective colleges.

So, what is the tragedy here? Sure, its bad that Rick Scmidt left the company. And, its bad that Olympia Beer had to be sold, instead of surviving as one of the few family owned breweries.

But, the real tragedy is that Schmidt, Rohrbach and Gregorius were arrested and publicly outed in the first place.

Let’s go back to Olympia in 1980. According to this history, the “Capitol Lake Bathroom Bust” followed “a period of harassment and police targeting of Gay men.” This also isn’t a time when men with public profiles could live out of the closet.

The reason the arrests of these three men was news was because they had public profiles, but also because the arrests were of gay men.

And, let’s put into perspective the operation that brought them in. The Olympia Police Department spent two weeks looking into the bathrooms before coming up with anything.

These type of operations, where police would stakeout homosexuals, hoping to come up with an arrest, has been called harassment by activists. The time spent by OPD in 1980 to come up with a few lewd conduct arrests certainly makes it seem that way.

Arrests like this also had deep social wounds. From a San Antonio library blog (of all places):

“I am primarily concerned with this grieving family in my parish, with
the fact that we have lost such a wonderful man, and the news media
played such an important part in driving him to suicide. There is no
question but that his learning that his name had been published was the
direct cause of his jumping off a bridge. . . .I also would say very
strongly that a society that pays its policemen to spend hours on their
haunches or lying prostrate on the top of a building peering through a
hole to spy on men is a very sick society.”

This excerpt from an
anonymous letter that appeared in a 1966 issue of Christianity and Crisis  captured
the devastation exacted on men who were caught having sex in public
restrooms and had their names published in the newspaper after being
arrested. Sting operations by law enforcement officials against
homosexuals in public places were nothing new. In San Antonio, police
had been ferreting out gay cruisers in Travis Park–located in the heart
of the city–since the 1940s. But were undercover operations
and demonization of those caught in the web of such actions indicative
only of the era that predated Stonewall in which homosexual harassment
was part and parcel of urban life?

We are a different town now. Our police are much more honorable. We are much more fair. But, we have to get our stories right.

The Olympia Brewing Company was caught in an economic storm that was swamping family breweries. That Olympia went down is nothing special. Rick Schmidt wouldn’t have saved them.

Blaming the loss of the brewery on him is unfair. It also takes blame off of us, the way our community was not at all accepting of homosexuals. The sting operation, the public castigation, the disappearance from public life of these men. That’s the sad story we should tell, the cautionary tale.