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I have six indispensable books authored by Walt Crowley on the shelf in my City Hall office, tears in my eyes, and a very large hole in my heart.
Crowley, 60, keeper of the city's memories, died Friday night, Sept. 21, at Virginia Mason Hospital, felled by a stroke after an operation to remove a recurring cancer of the larynx. Earlier this year, his natural voice was silenced when his voice box was removed. But he had been gamely learning to make himself understood with help from a mechanical device. His many friends knew that - if anyone could - Walt would continue the good fight.
They, like me, are stunned, bereft, and devastated.
First and foremost, Walt was the main chronicler of our times in this city, starting with his arrival in Seattle at age 14.
In his crackling good historical memoir, Rites of Passage, he recalled, "I first saw Seattle from the windows of the Great Northern's Empire Builder early one November morning in 1961. Three days out from Chicago, the train delivered my mother and me to King Street Station, where my father waited to take us to our new home. My eyes filled with tears, but not of joy."
In years to come, Walt would fall in love with his adopted city and become Seattle's unofficial spokesman. He would riot in our streets, lead our anti-war demonstrations, help found The Helix, an alternative newspaper, and then guide our leaders, advising them and writing their speeches. Ultimately, he found his highest calling: sorting out our successes, our failures, and our visions and putting them into perspective. He was a professional writer, provocative commentator, popular historian, speechwriter, artist, cartoonist, art lover, and bon vivant.
If you wanted to prioritize the importance of an event, if you wanted to focus on an aspect of city living, if you wanted a quotable observation, a succinct summary, a wry bon mot, you went to Walt.
He was our institutional memory. And, perhaps most importantly, he was the founder of one of the state and city's great treasures: HistoryLink.org, a Web site that boasts more than 12,000 images and 3 million words. Walt considered the site his crowning achievement and, indeed, it is his great legacy. The site is a national role model. He not only founded it along with his enormously talented wife, Marie McCaffrey, and his friend, photo-historian Paul Dorpat, but he cajoled and scrounged for funds to keep it afloat, making history accessible and free to all.
As a journalist, I turned to HistoryLink.org almost daily. As an elected official, I use it no less frequently. I can scarcely imagine how we operated before its founding in 1997.
By the time he founded HistoryLink, Walt had become a public figure, well known to those who heard him during his seven-year run, from 1986-1993, on KIRO-TV's "Point-Counterpoint" with his conservative foil, John Carlson. It says much that Carlson and Crowley, opposite ends of the political spectrum, remained close friends to the end. They disagreed sharply, but they always preserved an aura of mutual respect and friendly rivalry.
Well as TV viewers and Seattle Weekly readers came to know him, Walt had another persona, one that he revealed fully to the surrogate family that descended upon their Phinney Ridge castle when he and Marie gave their annual Christmas Eve parties. Guests would climb the impossibly steep stairs to reach storied art-packed chambers, filled with tech toys, extraterrestrials, flying saucers, and other precocious artifacts from a marriage that also was also a thriving book-producing business and an enduring love affair.
Few of the hundreds who attended will ever forget the party Walt and Marie threw prior to removal of his voice box. The object: to hear his last natural words. Walt said that they would be: "I love you, Marie." What characteristic élan.
And, speaking of élan, Walt functioned as a study in pluck and bravery in the precious months that followed last February's larynx removal. He covered his scars with bandage, ascot, and scarf. He looked a Seattle fashion plate, the very model of a trench-coated man-about-town. He scribbled tirelessly on a white slate.
He even thought briefly about a political career.
Walt had been a candidate for a City Council seat in 1979. It was a draining campaign, one that he lost along with one of his opponents, current City Council President Nick Licata. At the time, Walt was unmarried. He often joked, perhaps not entirely facetiously, that, in order to persuade Marie to marry him, he'd been forced to promise he would never again run for office.
Still and yet. In the days following Walt's surgery, an opportunity for office seemed to present itself when City Council member Peter Steinbrueck announced he would be stepping down at the end of this year. An empty seat is a temptation, especially to someone who has been so much a part of the city's life and times.
At one meeting of the "The Word Salon," a group of Walt's and Marie's friends who meet monthly to parse and discuss aspects of a single word, Walt scribbled a question to political consultant Cathy Allen: What did she think of his chances at a run for council?
Although Walt would have been an appealing candidate, well known, knowledgeable, ready to hit the ground running, the rigors of a campaign might have sapped his precarious health. Pity. It would have been welcome to follow a race in which rhetoric and hyperbole were limited to bursts of rapid writing and the growls of an R2D2-like mechanical device. (Walt wryly called it "an electronic dildo.")
Walt's incredible journey is over, leaving those of us who knew him to mourn this significant loss. He was and remains an original, the kind of only-in-Seattle character that he himself celebrated in the thousands of essays on HistoryLink.
The popular prints write that he is survived by wife Marie, his mother, Violet Kilvinger, and father, Walter Crowley. But they don't list some of the other survivors, all who flock to his greatest legacy, HistoryLink.org. Those of us already missing our good friend can send a donation in his memory to History Ink/History Link, 1425 Fourth Avenue, Suite 710, Seattle WA 98101.
And we can recall Walt's humor-to-the-end last words, as related to me by Ken Vincent, Walt's close friend, who went to see him near the last. Marie told Ken that Walt's last words were, "Goodbye – and you're wrong."
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Sep 24, 10:15 a.m. Inappropriate
Beautifully written.....: Beautifully written Jean. You captured and articulated the Walt that impressed me from the day we met in 1970 till his last email a few weeks ago. It's not often in life one meets a person who unselfishly gives to our community and is a true friend. To me, Walt Crowley was both. ~~~ Jim Sykes
Posted Mon, Sep 24, 10:51 a.m. Inappropriate
Seattle without Walt Crowley?: The Moon may as well go out; the Emerald City turn blue; the wolves' howls turn to wimpers and the gulls drop into the sea. I've been thinking a lot about Walt's effect on Seattle over the past two days and realized that just about everything we love about our city was shaped in some way by Walt. (I'm talking about the essential Seattle, here, not the money mongers and developers.) From the Helix days on, he was the essence of Seattle--the intangible difference that we were so proud of; the difference that people from around the country heard about that made them either want to move here or to stay far away...the difference that made preening fundamentalist neocons so furious with "Seattle liberals." To me, Walter embodied the Seattle ideal--socialist, activist, liberal, witty intellectual, literary whiz kid. He evolved, but he never sold out. Walt Crowley was our city's heart and soul.
My heart goes out to his family and friends.
Posted Mon, Sep 24, 1:21 p.m. Inappropriate
Thank you, Jean. Thank you, Walt.: I never met Walt Crowley. As a travel journalist, I too use HistoryLink on a regular basis. HistoryLink has taught me more about Whidbey Island, where I've lived for 32 years, than any other source. I never met Walt, but I read him and I listened to him. Occasionally I'd see him on the streets of Seattle, walking along anonymously, looking around at his city. The last time was several years ago. I was tempted to go up to him and say, "Thanks, Walt .. I've enjoyed your work all these years." I didn't. Next time I want to thank someone, I will. Right then and there.
Posted Mon, Sep 24, 3:53 p.m. Inappropriate
Appropriate, since both serve as institutional links in the collective chain of memory about Seattle, how it got to be this way, and what it was like in times past...just like Walt Crowley.
In fact, given Mossback's passion for things historic, maybe instead of dwelling on the Ballard Denny's it would be interesting to discuss the remaining characters left in town who epitomize a Seattle that either existed in the past or existed only in our nostalgia for the past.
The passing of Walt Crowley from the scene means a link in that memory chain is forever broken and gone. Yes, his website is there, but he won't be able to breath life into what others will regard as merely dry facts and data.
What makes a town unique isn't buildings or left-overs from a world's fair, but the people; the interesting mix of folks who bump into each other every day in ways not seen in other towns is what gives a community life.
We see less and less about that as we see more and more conformity, uniformity, and sameness among those who claim to be the face of Seattle.
Walt Crowley has a niche unique unto himself, as does Ivar Haglund, Joshua Green, Dave Beck, Dorothy Bullit, Sam Smith, Emmett Watson, Royal Brougham, and a whole ton more. Someday, Mossback and Jean Godden may get added to this list...but only if they continue to cultivate what makes them unique, not what makes them like everyone else.
As one-of-a-kind's begat one-of-a-kind's, so that process should be respected, valued, and intentionally perpetuated.
The Piper
Posted Mon, Sep 24, 4:35 p.m. Inappropriate
RE: The great begats...: "In fact, given Mossback's passion for things historic... it would be interesting to discuss the remaining characters left in town who epitomize...Seattle..."
Amen, Piper.
I would add to the list, two more--the late, great Darrell Bob Houston (page 96, I believe, of W C's "Rites of Passage") and our (still very much alive) beloved Tom Robbins. And of course, our one-of-a-kind Keeper of All Things
Rare and Precious--Paul Dorpat. I mean, just think of the spate of stories these great begats would inspire!
Considering that, as D. Brewster cited awhile ago, over 30% of Seattle is now comprised of people who have been here five years or less--it's more important than ever to introduce these outsiders to the people who have molded and shaped our great Queen City.
(I still can't believe that Walt Crowley is gone.)
Posted Mon, Sep 24, 8:39 p.m. Inappropriate
Excellent.: Thanks, Jean. This was a really nice read. I've learned a lot more about Walt's life these past few days and as a result I've learned a lot more about Seattle. It's true, the city is about its people.
Posted Tue, Sep 25, 5:42 a.m. Inappropriate
Ditto, but: Moving here in 1986 Crowley and Carlson's 'Point-Counterpoint' did much to shape the foundations of my political perspectives. A tip of the hat to Godden for her well written tribute.
Godden herself is deserving of the same respect, but I still can't forget her recent wisecrack about Waterfront Tunnel opponents having 'sexual issues' with the 'tunnel'.
Even the best of us are subject to degradation in tolerating abuses of power, whatever their 'foundation'.
-Douglas Tooley
Lincoln District, Tacoma
Posted Fri, Sep 28, 6:33 a.m. Inappropriate
Seattle will be a less interesting city: Jean---
Thank you for reminding folks of the huge impact Walt had on this city that he so loved. Walt's passion, smarts, humor, irreverance and fondless for a cold drink will be sorely missed.
Indeed Seattle will a less interesting city without Walt Crowley.
-Kenan Block
Posted Fri, Sep 28, 12:37 p.m. Inappropriate
RIP Walter, I knew you well: I met Walt when first he came to Seattle and we both attended Jane Adams Jr. H.S. We went on to become dear friends, ex-lovers, and more. I will miss you, despite the fact we have seen each other perhaps 10 times in the last 10 years. Still, each time we met, it was an "event." Seattle just lost 20 combined IQ points in your passing.
My condolences to Marie and his parents.