Seattle

I always suspected that the fact that we all ended up in Seattle was a plan hatched by Dad in the early 1950s. Dad was introduced to Seattle in 1934, during a brief visit when his father was looking for work. He returned in 1943 to rivet B-17s, until he was old enough to enlist. He enrolled at Michigan State under the GI Bill, but transferred to UW, where he graduated in 1949. He went to Berkeley for his Masters, then came back to work in Seattle for a couple of years. He hiked in the Cascades and played golf at the UW course along the Montlake Cut (now Health Sciences, I think). But then he headed east to work in NY, where he met Mom and got his PhD.

He and Mom got married in New York City while Dad was at Columbia. They honeymooned in Europe and brought back a VW bug. And then Dad got a job at Bowdoin in 1957 and they spent the next 35 years in Brunswick.  I arrived in 1958 and Jane showed up a couple of years later. Somewhere in between Jane and me, they moved into 75 Federal, where they lived until 1992, when they moved back to Seattle.

Dad's time at Bowdoin is nicely summarized in the Bowdoin Daily Sun.

Every couple of summers in the 1960s and 1970s, Dad led us on long car-camping trips to the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. We visited Seattle. We took the ferries, we camped at Sunrise, we visited Lake Quinault. We couldn't help but notice the attraction this place had for him, but I'm not sure we realized that he was busy planting seeds.

I'm sure the early exposure to Seattle contributed to me ending up here for grad school in 1983, where I immediately met Michele. Jane dabbled with Seattle about that same time before seeking adventures in NYC and San Francisco. But in 1991, she and Rob also moved back to Seattle.

We knew Mom and Dad were contemplating retiring to Seattle. They checked out real estate on their visits and we knew they had their eyes set on something that might offer a glimpse of Mount Rainier. In 1992, both fully retired, they sold the house in Brunswick and headed to Seattle for good.

They found a house that took care of itself, unlike the wonderful, but high maintenance, place back in Maine. It had enough room to accommodate Dad's post-retirement hobbies - his 1934 Buick and his 1940 Chevy. And his other hobby, too. He re-created the western railroad landscape in HO in the basement - laying track around two large rooms and building an impressive inventory of the Milwaukee Road, Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Great Northern, Burlington, and more. He and mom went to train meets and to old car shows. He won ribbons. They drove the old Chevy down to Burgermaster for lunch. They drove down to Edmonds to watch the trains along Puget Sound.

They were in Seattle when Devon and Leigh and Will were born and they watched them grow up. They served pancakes on Sunday mornings and hosted our family birthdays. We did family trips to Mount Rainier, to Puget Sound, and we all celebrated their 50th Anniversary in Jasper (not Seattle, but another place that Dad introduced us to early on).

In the last few years, Dad began to slow down. Eventually Mom had to take the keys away from him and take over the taxes. But it seems like every day they could, they drove down to McDonalds and picked up their chicken sandwiches and their coffee, then parked at the lake and watched the mountain, and the kite surfers, and the ducks. The routine only faltered in the last few weeks, when Dad's mobility ratcheted down another notch.

This past fall, Jane and I took Mom and Dad downtown and up to the roof deck of the Russell Investments Building, so he could look out over Puget Sound and a Seattle that had changed immensely from when he first visited with his family during the depression. I think he appreciated it - at least in the moment.

Dad first visited Seattle in the midst of the depression, when he was nine. He kept coming back, for work, for college, on vacations with his young family, and later, to visit his grown children. But I think his plan all along was to come back for good, once he assured that the rest of us would already be here. Dad died on April 10th, but he left Jane and Mom and me in a pretty good place.