Category: Olympia history (Page 5 of 9)

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.

This letter to the editor (actually just one passage of it) in Olympia Power and Light bothers me more than it should:

Columbia Heights Partners LLC, a Chinese backed company…

 Backed by the Chinese? Why does that matter? Is it the implied xenophobia that matters to me? Probably.

Yes, the major investors behind the project have Chinese names, but live in Washington.

The person seemingly managing the project was born in China, but went to school in North Carolina and is an American citizen.

But, now in terms of who builds what downtown, we’re concerned about what country they come from?

Especially when the Chinese connection to that particular block of downtown runs way deeper than I assume the letter writer knows. If there’s one particular block of Olympia where people with Chinese names should build, its that one.

Ed Echtle, as always:

As downtown expanded in the late 1880s, Chinese relocated their
businesses to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Columbia Streets, on what
was then the waterfront.  Five two-story wood frame buildings, housing
the Hong Yek Kee Company, the Quong Yuen Sang Company and the Hong Hai
Company were built on piles over tide flats.

Here’s a couple other views of the block, where you can see the layout of Chinese businesses on the block where now a group of Chinese-American businessman want to build a new building:

1888, mostly down on 4th Avenue, ironically where the New Moon Cafe is located.

And now, just one labelled “old Chinese” in 1896 on the southwest corner of the current parking lot:

By the way, these maps are Sanborn maps and are available online at the Timberland Regional Library.

It was a strange road that led Enoch Bagshaw, the legendary Husky football coach, to Olympia in 1930. But, it was specifically and literally a road.

Bagshaw had been a young public works man in Snohomish County before his life’s vocation found him taking up the position as Everett High School’s gridiron football coach. His success at Everett led him to succeed the four coaches in four years that had attempted to replace UW’s first great coach, Gil Dobie.

Welsh born Bagshaw was not friendly. He won games, and led the high powered Husky offense to two Rose Bowls (tying one, losing the other).

Washington as a state was flying high through the 20s. And, if Bagshaw was the symbol of Washington’s sporting accent throughout the decade, Gov. Roland Hartley was the political embodiment. Laissez-faire to Hartley would be putting it mildly. Hartley wanted to cut down government to a size in which it would not interfere with timber men like himself, or any other capitalist.

And, like Baghaw’s Huskies, Hartley played rough and tumble, ignoring the polite insider politics that often made things happen in the state.

Hartley would also turn out to be Bagshaw’s last benefactor. Both men hailed from Everett (though both were born elsewhere). After Bagshaw finally left the Huskies, Hartley brought him down to Olympia to serve as a transportation administrator.

The Enoch Bagshaw that moved from Seattle to Olympia in the spring of 1930 was not a well man. The 1920s had been hard on his body. He probably didn’t know it, but his road was a short one.

As Seattle progressed towards the Great Depression in the summer and fall of 1930, there was a lot of doubt that Cascadia couldn’t keep on growing as it had in the 1920s.

Seattle Times in July:

“Seattle looks very good, said Mr. Oakes. “Your shops and stores and your industrial activity indicates that your people are not paying much attention to the toalk of business depression that is so much the topic of conversation in other centers at this time. You seem to go serenely on your way…”

And, in in November:

As in all depressions, much of this depression is psychological. People in Seattle are unduly depressed because they hear exaggerated rumors that people elsewhere are depressed. What people really ened is to know the facts. When these facts sink in, our people will realize that things are, as Mr. Coue said, “getting better and better” — and then, they, too, will feel better and better.

 By 1931 only 62 percent of those employed in Washington two years before still had jobs. Timber exports in 1933 were half of what they were in 1929.

Neither Bagshaw nor Washington may not have realized its heart was ready to go out.

It is ironic that the building in which Bagshaw died (today where the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction is located), then called the “Old Capitol Building” was also a symbol of our own economic over exuberance here in Thurston County.

Its its first life, the Chuckanut stone building was the Thurston County Courthouse. Built in the high flying days following statehood, Thurston County soon ran out of money, and sold it to the state, which was looking for decent quarters.

And, a final note, Hartley, who lost in 1932 to Clarence Martin, was fond of tearing down portions of state government. 1932 would be a highwater year for Democrats in Washington State. Both Hartley and the U.S. Senate seat would be turned over to Democrats that year. To give you a good sense of the how much 1932 change politics in Washington State, there were 41 Republicans in the legislature to one Democrat. In 1933 there were 21 Republicans and 25 Democrats. A couple of years later there were 41 Democrats and five Republicans (the total number of seats had gone up).

Last, what is one of the agencies that Hartley went after in his high tide days in the mid 1920s? OSPI.

Sometimes I think about what it means to Olympia to be a Capitol City. I’m not sure how many times in history it has happened, but I’m sure at least once a city has lost that status. Throughout the early history of Olympia, that tension, the possibility that Walla Walla or Yakima or Tacoma might snatch the seat of government seems to be overpowering.

It has been decades since anyone has thought about moving the capitol or even a good amount of state employees out of northern Thurston County. But, we still make civic decisions based on our status as the seat of government. The debates about issues like restoring Budd Inlet or downtown development are influenced by the gravitational pull of the state government.

If I haven’t changed the header of this  blog by the time you read this post, you’ll see the graphic is a detail of a Sanborn map of Olympia. You’ll notice a gulch that no longer exists running through what is now the capitol campus.

Here’s another map from 1919 that show it in much better detail (via Washington State Digital Archives):

The history of this gulch has always fascinated me. I’ve always wondered where it went, who decided to fill it in. It seems pretty straight forward given the context of history. In the early 1920s the campus was being developed. The gulch was in impediment to that development, so it was filled in.

But, I could never find a record of when or how it was filled.

Recently I learned the gulch had a bit more interesting of a history than just a former ditch in the way of a beautiful campus. As state leaders were gathering ideas for the layout of the modern campus in 1911, they decided a stadium would be built inside the gulch

The Olympian, April 1911:

The Stadium Bowl had just been finished in Tacoma inside a similar Puget Sound gulch, and local leaders imagined the Olympia Bowl as a smaller version.

But, as the capitol plans were slowly rolled out over the years, no stadium was ever included.

The proposed stadium was almost totally forgotten until local leaders tried to bring it back up in 1921. They not only wanted a stadium, but to save what was left of the gulch itself, which had been used as the trash bin for the capitol builders.

The Olympian, September 1921:

But, obviously the gully was filled and the stadium was never built. In 1922 30,000 yards of dirt were hauled to the gulch by the contractor who was grading the campus, finishing off the gulch for good.

Now, obviously the gulch still haunts us. All that fill is slowly working its way downhill, to the point that the beautiful greenhouse that sites right on the crest of the fill closed six years ago.

Filling the gulch to create a even lawn running up to the campus and not building a stadium is the type of choice that capitol cities make. Olympia did need a stadium. The old Athletic Park  wasn’t much. And, even Stevens Field (new in the early 1920s), when compared to a possible Stadium Bowl on Budd Inlet, doesn’t exactly shine in comparison.

A nice clean campus is good for state government, it just looks nice.

A utilitarian and centrally located stadium would’ve been good for Olympia. These are the things we give up when we decide to fight to be state capitol.

This is a strange sentence to me (from the Capitol Vista Park website):

There is a continuity in the evolution of this vision from 1911, through
the development of Heritage Park and the Fountain Block, to this next
phase which will be the Capitol Olympic Vista Park.

What’s being talked about here is the plan for a new park across the street from Heritage Park on what is common called the isthmus in downtown Olympia. Really, its one big earthen dam. But, what the writer here is referring to is a 1911 proposal for how that part of downtown should look.

Here’s a representation of what those early 20th century architects (Walter Wilder and Harry White) wanted:

What you’re seeing is something totally different than this:

 

 

Wilder and White did not propose a park across the isthmus, they proposed a few block of at least three or four story buildings.

 

When I wrote up a longish history of the Deschutes River estuary, I summarized the late 1920s like this:

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.

The late 1920s was an interesting time in the creation of Capitol Lake. The central part of the current campus was coming into form. And, the final push for the lake was about five or six years away from starting.

So, in the three versions I could find at the time, the lake was either totally gone from the plans, changed into a saltwater lagoon or just an afterthought.

But, I recently came across a piece in the Seattle Times that contradicts this. There was still some discussion in 1929 of a possible lake.

From April, 1929 in the Seattle Times about the need for plants for capitol landscaping:

It will be almost impossible to get too many plants, flowers and shrubs, for when the land strictly within the Capitol grounds is improved, there will remain the long stretch of shore land and overhanging cliff that some day will be included when the proposed fresh water lake is created by damming the waters of the Des Chutes River at the head of Budd Inlet.

 To me, this is a small corner of the lake and estuary history. The idea of the lake was already rejected in 1915. Tumwater wouldn’t agree to damming the river’s mouth and it wasn’t until 1941 that Tumwater citizens changed their minds. And, it wasn’t until the Little Hollywood shantytown took over underneath the capitol that Olympia residents seriously made a push for the lake.

But, still, I was wrong about 1929, so I thought I’d correct the record.

Read this crap (full size version here):

Let it soak over you.

Present happy situation could deteriorate into ghetto

Think about it.

…Negroes here are well educated, affluent and aware of their rights without being what whites think is “uppity” about insisting upon them.

This was published in the Seattle Argus in April 12, 1968. Martin Luther King had literally just been assassinated the week before. I have no idea about the weekly Argus‘ news cycle, but it seems at least in bad taste to publish something like this a week after the civil right’s leaders death.

At worst, the Argus editors and Mike Layton deliberately chose the week after King’s death for this. “Hey Layton! King’s death sure is leading the news, let’s do up a piece about how Olympia is being ruined by his sort!”

And, let’s get this straight. This was main stream thinking for our community. The Argus, while not a major daily like the Times or PI, was a serious Seattle newspaper. From what I’ve read about it, it would be close to what we’d consider the Weekly to be. Old time and storied reporters like Shelby Scates and Mike Layton passed through the Argus at different points.

And, let’s get back to Layton, who wrote this piece. When he passed away in 2011, there was a lot of good things said about him. “He bluntly spoke truth to power,” “a fierce reporter” and “could spot B.S. at a hundred paces.”

Well, that’s a funny way to put it, because the level of bull shit in Layton’s Argus piece the week after King’s death is amazing.

Olympia has obviously changed. Thurston County used to vote for Republicans (and Reagan specifically) and used to put up with this kind of racist crap. I’m not saying we should go back and absolutely revise Layton’s reputation, but we need to remember that this used to happen. And, we weren’t always nice, friendly liberal people.