Mossback's Northwest

How a double whammy of catastrophes had a profound impact on the Pacific Northwest. It’s hard to imagine, but in 1910, two separate avalanches days apart swept all before them and still stand as the most fatal ever in the U.S. and Canada.

During WWII, a Hollywood set designer used his skills to fool the enemy. Did it work? John Detlie, a major Hollywood studio set designer, was called up to Seattle to camouflage the factory where B-17 Flying Fortresses were built, aircraft key to the war effort. The challenge: render a major facility with 30,000 workers invisible.

For millennia, clam culture has infused our region with mythology, humor and flavor. Clams were eaten and traded in vast numbers by Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. One First Nations people traced the origin of humanity to a clamshell opened by a raven. Settlers too discovered how essential clams were and even sang about them as the key to contentment.

The frontier Barnum, Buffalo Bill Cody, started a trend with Wild West shows – and Seattle was an eager audience. Audiences for Wild West shows were steeped in the mythology of the old West, but performers were presented as “authentic” cowboys, Native people, soldiers and others reenacting a pageant of Manifest Destiny.

We look back at an Olympic park stunt – one that proved to be key in the region’s environmental movement – and how a film of that event has surfaced to help us relook at it. The hike in 1958 was held to protest the proposed construction of a highway on the northern Olympic Peninsula coast. The “protest” hike highlighted the beauty of the coast’s pristine nature.

Minoru Yamasaki sought to uplift humanity with his work in Seattle and on New York’s World Trade Center. Born in Japantown on Yesler Way, he faced prejudice and hardship. He attended the University of Washington’s architecture school and found success, building Seattle’s Pacific Science Center, the downtown Rainier Square complex and the IBM building.

How wood helped fight two wars, and the timber women who also answered the call. WWI transformed the Northwest timber industry as the U.S. military took charge to ensure the supply of Sitka spruce for building airplanes to fight the Red Baron. Women were tapped to work in the woods during both world wars, the so-called “Lumberjills,” and spruce again was drafted to help fight the Nazis.

Back at the turn of the century, a Seattle educator set out to teach that birdwatching made good citizens. Adelaide Lowry Pollock was a pioneering educator who moved from one-room schools to modern ones in the early 20th century and made learning about birds a part of the grade school curriculum at her Queen Anne school. She also wrote two books about local birds.