Seattle Post-Times

A Seattle media time capsule

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer today waxes nostalgic about the 30th anniversary of the Seattle SuperSonics winning the NBA championship — the only big-league title ever won by a Seattle team. (No, I don't count the Stanley Cup of 1917.)

Not being a basketball fan, and then being a relatively recent transplant, I wasn't all that into the Sonics. But I do recall that weekend in Seattle vividly because I had just moved here for the summer — to take some classes at the University of Washington, to get a taste of a big university and Seattle before finishing up the following fall at Whitman College in Walla Walla.

I lived that summer of 1979 in the basement of a house on Brooklyn Avenue Northeast, which a friend shared with other UW students. Except for a seminal course on media law taught by Don Pember, it was an unremarkable quarter academically, which was in no small way due to the fact that I was myself academically unremarkable. Had a blast living in Seattle, though, and I vowed to return. Which I did, for good, six years later, to work for The Seattle Times, a paper I first got acquainted with that summer long ago.

But I digress. The real reason I'm blogging this is to point out a very interesting component of the P-I's story today about the old Sonics. It links to a PDF of the June 3, 1979, edition of the P-I, and on that front page are examples of how things crazily change and stay the same over time:

The space program: We planned it with the apes

National Geographic reminds us that 50 years ago NASA sent monkeys into space and returned them safely to Earth, a couple of years before the first manned flights. The first mammal to orbit the Earth was a chimp.

At the time, we thought they were animals. Today we know that their DNA was 98 percent human.

Here's to Ham (above) and all the rest memorialized in this NG photo gallery.

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A dim view of the Blethen legacy

Longtime Seattle Times chronicler Bill Richards has the cover story of monthly Seattle Business. In it he reveals some interesting new details behind the turbulent past decade of the newspaper company and has an unflattering assessment of CEO and Publisher Frank Blethen.

In "Blethen's Choice: Decisions made to pull the family together have weakened the Seattle Times," Richards suggests that a deep history of dysfunction among members of the Seattle-area Blethen family, which has controlled the privately held Seattle Times Co. since 1896, shaped the small newspaper chain's character in good and bad ways.

Frank Blethen, Richards reports, saw the company as something of a salve for familial wounds. But while the family's growing emotional attachment to the newspaper company resulted in kinship and good journalism, that passion also led to a number of bad business decisions that hurt the company's chances for survival in the digital age. Says Tony Ridder, the former Knight Ridder CEO whose company owned 49.5 percent of the Seattle Times Co.'s voting stock: "The Seattle Times was a good newspaper. But Frank absolutely did not make good business decisions."

Seedlings of the very first Earth Day

Image via Wikipedia

Thirty-nine years ago, I was 12, and Albion, Mich., was abuzz about the first Earth Day. The students of Albion College were particularly active [Word document] in things environmental. (Walter Pomeroy, the most prominent among them, was a geology student of my father.) Hughes Rudd of CBS News was in town to chronicle the students' activities for a special that night hosted by Walter Cronkite. CBS aired a roundup of reports from around the nation — and little ol' Albion was among them.

One of the activities surrounding that first Earth Day, and the one I remember best, was the planting of tree seedlings in a pasture that is now part of Albion College's Whitehouse Nature Center. That small conifer forest today is tens of feet tall and stands out in the above image from Microsoft Virtual Earth.

FBI engages citizen-sleuths in the D.B. Cooper case

The FBI recently took new interest in the epic 1971 Seattle hijacking by a man who called himself D.B. Cooper. The perp took his ransom money and a parachute and exited a Northwest Airlines 727 by way of the rear stairs — while it was in flight.

The agent who has taken over the investigation has discovered an obscure French comic book hero named Dan Cooper, who was a paratrooper. And the agency has engaged amateur sleuths to examine evidence from the case using new technology.

It's an idea right out of the citizen-journalism movement.

History takes a back seat to ad revenue

Puget Sound ferry riders, remember those wonderful historical photos that adorned the walls of the three Jumbo Mark II Class boats, the MV Puyallup, MV Tacoma, and MV Wenatchee? The selection of nicely framed blowups was appropriate to each vessel — old-time pics of those cities' distant past.

Well, they're gone, replaced by wall-sized advertising, presumably because Washington State Ferries is navigating the economic storm that has state government listing to starboard ...

David Horsey weighs in

Pulitzer Prize-winning Seattle Post-Intelligencer political cartoonist David Horsey, who joined the paper in 1979, has an interesting blog post marking the likely closure of a printed P-I:

I have no particular nostalgia for the old days. Having worked with what seems like several generations of P-I colleagues, the current staff may be my favorite of them all. There has never been a better time at the P-I. My compatriots are a largely-young, talented crew with a passion for the job and a camaraderie that has made it seem we'd always be able to beat the odds.

He says it's heartbreaking but logical that Hearst would see the futility of continuing to wait for an opportunity to buy The Seattle Times:

It seemed unthinkable that such a shift could come, so none of us at the P-I imagined it. Yet it was the essential fact that drove a cold calculation: If it no longer made sense for Hearst to purchase another debt-ridden property like the Times, there was also no longer any reason to keep losing money by keeping the P-I afloat. On Friday, this all became terribly clear when the P-I was put up for sale with the expectation there would be no buyers. Barring some utterly unlikely turn of events, the Post-Intelligencer will cease publication in 60 days. I hope the Times will survive. But, given the state of the newspaper business, it is entirely possible there will soon be several cities without daily newspapers and Seattle could be one of them.

Horsey continues to have hope the P-I will survive in electronic form. I do, too, but that experiment is far from a certainty, and it isn't likely to resemble the P-I newsroom he loves today.

Reverse engineering

This is just awesome. This guy has built an Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical calculator, based on a few parts found by archeologists.

Sacramento: Saying goodbye to toy trains

SACRAMENTO, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 — Earlier this week I bid farewell to this and other pieces of the Lionel train set my brother, Keith, and I had when we were kids in the 1960s. We had a monster layout in the basement of our house in Albion, Mich. Its size and location — two plywood tables two feet off the ground in the southwest corner of the basement — made it the perfect tornado shelter:

California Zephyr: Salt Lake City to Sacramento

ABOARD THE CALIFORNIA ZEPHYR in California, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 — Breakfast in Winnemucca. Then, in Reno, a couple of volunteers from the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento boarded and provided occasional commentary as we crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This was cool for me because I recently read (most of) Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen Ambrose, about the first transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869 by the Central Pacific, working east from Sacramento, and the Union Pacific, which built west from Omaha. Today's California Zephyr follows much of the original route, except for a detour south through Colorado instead of Wyoming, so as to serve Denver and the ski resorts.

My Great Northern adventure

Today I'm embarking on my big railroad adventure, a solo trip from Seattle to Michigan and back via Amtrak. The Empire Builder, named for the historic passenger run of the Great Northern Railway across Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington, is scheduled to pull out of Union Station King Street Station in Seattle today at 4:45 p.m.

It's not clear I will be able to get online until Thursday, when I am in Albion, Mich. But I might be able to post before then. In any event, I will keep a log and take photos and post when I can.

We'll always have Albion

When British Airways Flight 48 from Seattle to London passes over our house, during its dinnertime northbound departure for the Arctic and beyond, I think to myself, "The plane to London. You would like to be on it?" I would someday, but in the meantime I think about all the people who pass within a mile of our house, in coach and business class and first class, on their way to Europe. This occurs to me because I just saw that this is the 66th anniverary of the release of Casablanca. The legendary 1942 flick has this exchange between Rick and Capt. Renault, who are looking up at a plane passing overhead:

"The plane to Lisbon. You would like to be on it?"

"Why?" says Rick. "What's in Lisbon?"

"The clipper to America," says Renault.

Etc., etc. Next week I'll be taking the train to Battle Creek. Albion, Mich., more precisely. I grew up within a mile of the main Detroit-to-Chicago rail line. And sometimes I think about all the people who passed by as passengers, during the golden age of passenger rail travel. Babe Ruth and all the other baseball stars? Gangsters? Politicians and inventors? We used to walk along the tracks and pick up grimy junk and take it home. Big fragments of springs. Spikes. Rusty artifacts of railroading.

Proximity is a funny thing, an inspiring thing.

More from the archives: crank phone calls

I found a compressed text file in my old Seattle Times stuff. I was covering television and media at the time, and apparently I was getting a series of odd phone calls. Sometimes when you get this stuff you ignore it, but when it starts to be a pattern, it's a good idea to log it, which I did. Here are my notes:

12/4/94, voice mail 12:43 p.m.: "Boo."

12/6/94, voice mail 9:23 p.m.: "How dare you treat me like that, Chuck." (Last story several days previous about CBS being third in the ratings in Seattle.)

1/6/94, live call 5:16 p.m.: Hang up. (Column that day led with Connie Chung's interview with Newt Gingrich's mother.)

1/6/94, voice mail 9:01 p.m.: "Hello, I read your stupid article today about uh where you repeated uh an obnoxious comment about Connie Chung. I just want to tell you you are a fucking asshole and - go to hell, prick."

1/6/94, voice mail 9:03 p.m.: "Oh hi, Chuck. Are you an angry white man or is it are you anxious? Come on, are you angry or anxious? Maybe you're just a stupid white man. And quite frankly, the way you are behaving, I think you'll be fired pretty soon. And that should make you anxious. Go to hell."

A 1993 Seattle Times memo

The same month in 1993 that the World Wide Web was opened to the general public, someone wrote a 1,000-word memo at The Seattle Times laying out the future for newspapers. The memo is remarkably prescient. It predicts the demise of print, the use of mobile devices for information access, including video, and the likelihood that if newspapers didn't seize the opportunity online, others would and might come to dominate journalism.

Today, as the Times and other papers struggle for survival, it's good to remember that so much of what is happening should be no surprise. The writer of this 1993 memo wasn't the first person in the newspaper business sounding the alarm 15 years ago. But at the time, ink on paper was lucrative and influential, and computers weren't anywhere near portable enough to take to the bathroom. It was easy to ignore the warning signs.

I found the memo in my electronic archives recently while researching journalism in the Internet age. The Microsoft Word document was created on April 2, 1993, and was last modified on May 1, 1993. The commercial Web did not exist, but that April the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) agreed to make the technology that launched the World Wide Web free and open. Some newspapers were experimenting with online dissemination through dial-up telephone access. And some other interesting experiments were under way. Earlier that year, America Online released its first software for Windows 3.x and the Macintosh. Online service providers Prodigy, which pioneered a graphical interface, and CompuServe were already established. But these were stand-alone, unlinked systems, and major news brands were largely absent. The San Jose Mercury News was a pioneer, putting its articles on AOL starting the month the Seattle Times memo was last polished.

It's not clear the memo was ever sent or, if it was, to whom. But knowing the author's tendency to speak up at the time, it's hard to believe it wasn't. So for what it's worth, here is what could be foreseen in 1993. I've added a few links to explain some references. Note the use of the word browsers to describe people, not software applications.