Feliks Banel offers fond recollections of the late great KJET, the AM modern-rock station that ruled a small but eventually-influential portion of Seattle’s listening audience from 1982 to 1988.
Thanks to the kind Lori at Espresso To Go in Fremont, I recently got a look at the SeaTimes’ Washington Territorial Centennial supplement.
This was an eight-section addition to a Sunday paper in the summer of 1953. Each section ran twenty pages or more. (Remember, newspaper pages then were one-third wider than they are now.)
There’s little to no content about the state’s pre-Statehood past. Instead, what little “editorial” content there is consists of puff pieces for the advertisers.
Most of these advertisers aren’t companies selling consumer goods. They’re construction firms, timber giants, commercial truck dealerships, shipyards, cement plants, fishing-rig outfitters, metals processors, agribusinesses, restaurant-supply companies, etc. Their common, simple message: They’re proud to be part of the Evergreen State’s great industrial infrastructure.
OK, there is one huge ad for Fisher Flouring Mills and its about-to-launch subsidiary operation, KOMO-TV. The ad juxtaposes a drawing of the big Fisher plant on Harbor Island with a glamour image of that fresh, new television talent Betty White, who could be seen in her sprightly comedy series Life With Elizabeth once KOMO-TV started telecasting later that year.
Can you imagine today’s SeaTimes managing to sell even a fraction of all that ad space to local companies that have nothing to sell to a mass audience?
Last week acquaintances boasted to me of withdrawing all their deposits out of Washington Mutual. I tried my best to assure them WaMu would not collapse. It would survive, it would be sold whole, or it would be sold in pieces. And its most valuable, most saleable pieces were its bank branches and its individual accounts.
Today, this point was proven. The FDIC just arranged to have these assets sold off to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion.
It might not have been so necessary, so imeediately, had there not been so many sudden withdrawals from WaMu accounts–more than $16 billion in less than two weeks!
Thus ends the rollicking saga of the little Seattle thrift institution, a secondary player in the local banking market back during the days before interstate banking giants, that became the biggest institution of its type in the nation.
It effortlessly subsumed such former giants as Dime Savings in New York and Home Savings in California. Like a dot-com (only using real money), its business model was to Get Big Fast. At the peak of America’s housing bubble, WaMu was the nation’s biggest home-mortgage originator, with some 2,000 branches coast to coast.
But all that growth was predicated upon one gamble– that the national home-buying mania, abetted by lax government regulations and the massive trading of obscure “mortgage-backed securities,” would just keep on a-growin’ forever. Or at least for five or six more years.
It’s easy to say they should have known better.
Which I just did.
But think of it this way: Imagine you were running the last big financial outfit still based in the NW region. Imagine you’d come to believe you had two options. You could remain a local player, slowly but surely losing ground against the consolidating industry giants. Or, you could become one of those consolidating industry giants.
Yeah, I would have picked (a) also.
WaMu’s shotgun marriage creates another addition to the roster of big companies that used to be based in Seattle but aren’t anymore. Some others:
KOMO-TV’s long-running afternoon talk show will disappear in August, ending a 24-year run.
Producers had tried to shake up the show in recent years, slicing it into four or five segments per hour instead of its traditional two. But the lure of low-cost, high-profit syndicated talk fare has finally done it in, just like it’s done in most of the local gabfests around the country.
Also threatened by the dictum of talk-is-cheap: The daytime soap operas, which NWA cohost Cindi Rinehart has chronicled since the show’s debut. At that time, there were 14 daily serials on American TV. Now there are just eight (not counting Spanish-language imports). Almost all of those shows are scrambling to cut their budgets and shrink their acting and writing staffs.
In the ultimate unintended irony, the syndicated show that will replace Rinehart and co. has the same title as a former long-running soap, The Doctors.
Before she was the first Asian American on the King County Council, she owned the first Chinese restaurant in Seattle outside of the Chinatown/International District. With her husband in the kitchen, she presided over the dining room as a pure diva. This name/face recognition fueled her rise to influence, both within the Asian American community and beyond. You may know of her daughter, longtime public-schools advocate Cheryl Chow. You might not know Chow was the sister of Mary Pang, whose frozen-foods mini-empire met a fiery end at the hands of Pang’s convicted-arsonist son.
After multiple restructurings and selling off its iconic U District office tower, Safeco Insurance has allowed itself to be eaten by Liberty Mutual. Now there’ll be one fewer corporate board to hit up for charitable donations, one fewer set of bigwigs to serve on blue-ribbon civic improvement task forces. And they’re not yet talking about how many head-office troops will be fired. But the Safeco brand will remain, which means the signs on Safeco Field stay up, at least for now.
As predicted in many quarters, the NBA’s team owners voted to pursue commissioner Stern’s screw-Seattle strategy. Only our own Paul Allen (representing the Portland Trailblazers) and Allen’s pal Mark Cuban (representing the Dallas Mavericks) said no.
It’s not over. Not by a buzzer-beater long shot.
But the way to save pro basketball in Seattle won’t be pretty. In fact, it’ll be as ugly as this past Sonics season.
Essentially, we’ve gotta keep litigatin’ to keep the team through the two more contracted seasons on its KeyArena lease; all the while assembling all the ingredients of a privately-financed, NHL-capable arena. Two different groups are trying for this. Let’s make it happen.
…to the Century 21 Exposition, better known as the 1961 Seattle World’s Fair. So much has been written, some of it at this site, about the fair as the city’s official coming-out party, the event that put the town on the proverbial map and kick-started its fine-arts scene, whilst leaving a “permanent legacy” in the Seattle Center complex.
Less frequently mentioned is the fair’s most important and most forgotten legacy, its utopian attitude.
The fair occurred in the days before the ’60s assassinations, during the . The Vietnam war was still a small-scale police action. The civil rights movement had started to make waves. The new science of contraception promised to eradicate overpopulation and associated sufferings. Western Europe had finally recovered from WWII’s aftermath. America had two spankin’-new states to welcome into its civic bosom. Peace and prosperity seemed like true possibilities at the peak of JFK’s “Camelot” era.
More important locally, it was the dawn of jet travel. The world had grown hours or even days closer. Beyond that, the whole of outer space awaited our exploration.
In this milieu of memes, the fair’s buildings and exhibitors promised a great big beautiful tomorrow.
It doesn’t matter that the fair’s specific predictions about lifestyles and technologies didn’t come to pass. (Domed cities, nuclear-powered everything, etc.) For that matter, they didn’t predict women in corporate management or the Internet.
What matters is that, eight years into the century prophesied at the fair, we’ve lost that confident progressive spirit.
Now, some of us are trying to bring back that forward-looking spirit. This group includes those who’ve coalesced around a guy who was still in diapers when the fair opened.
Spoke before an audience of 40 retirees at Ida Culver House Broadview. Despite a few technical glitches, I spent more than an hour sharing reminiscences and stories about our fair city’s heritage. I had a whole script prepared the night before, but set it aside and just chatted like I usually do at my “readings.” A nostalgic time was had by all.
…your Starbuckless evening. Now on to a new day!:
