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University of Washington

Wartime Boomtown: Kirkland, Washington, a Small Town during World War II Author(s): Lorraine McConaghy Source: The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 42-51 Published by: University of Washington Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40491035 . Accessed: 30/05/2013 19:16

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42 PACIFIC NORTHWEST QUARTERLY

Wartime Boomtown

Kirkland, Washington, a SmaJJ Town during

World War II

Lorraine McConaghy

In Kirkland, Washington, on the Ameri- can small-town home front during the Second World War, popular cultural in- stitutions – church, press, and school – joined national governmental agencies and the local civilian defense in urging preparedness. This consensus promoted discipline, sacrifice, and vigilance and affirmed traditional small-town values. However, the boomtown created by mo- bilization of the shipyards there on the northeastern shore of Lake Washington, east of Seattle, did not conform to these values. The new community was noisy, disorganized, and materialistic; its style was brash and self-indulgent.1

The sober responsibilities of the home front confronted the exhilarating oppor- tunities of the boomtown, drawing the community into conflict and scandal. As the area across the lake from Seattle – known as the Eastside – became less rural in character and the environment deteriorated, crises in public safety, pub- lic health, and the public trust out- weighed the economic benefits of mobi- lized industry. With the end of the “Good War” and the disappearance of the home front, the waning boomtown faced a clear choice between continued industrializa- tion of the lakeshore and redevelopment for residential suburbs.

Those most concerned with the outcome of this decision had little say and less power. Despite wartime self-discipline and goodwill, the prewar residents of Kirkland never fully embraced most newcomers, who remained customers and strangers. Many of the defense work- ers were “people who worked with their hands, who had gone from job to job to job,” moving their families around the country, chasing one elusive opportunity after another. They found their big chance on the Eastside home front, building auxiliary vessels for the United States Navy in the Lake Washington Shipyards.2

In wartime, unskilled shipyard laborers started at nearly $1 an hour and worked six-day weeks. With overtime, weekly paychecks easily reached $60 or $70. Few workers had ever earned that kind of money before. One woman bought a new dress every two weeks; another scrounged scarce shoe ration tickets and collected dozens of pairs of shoes.3

Despite wartime scarcities of consumer goods from candy to roller skates, the 1942 holidays brought Kirkland “the greatest rush of Christmas buying in the history of the city.” In spite of the war, or because of it, people displayed an al- most desperate gaiety and reveled in spending.4

When the shipyard mobilized as a de- fense plant, the downtown boomed, rid- ing high on the rich payroll. As the shipyard comptroller put it, “The ship- yard made Kirkland . . . and it made the Eastside.” Deposits in Kirkland’s First National Bank increased by 500 percent between 1940 and 1945, despite the well- subscribed War Loan bond drives, and there was ample local capital available for investment. Consequently, though

1. For more extensive treatment of issues raised in this essay, see Lorraine McConaghy, “The Lake Washington Shipyards: For the Duration,” M.A. thesis (University of Washington, 1987). The national cultural context for this particular small-town home- front experience can be studied in John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory (New York, 1976); the regional context is established by Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The impact of the Second World War (Bloomington, Ind., 1985).

2. Herbert and Florence Wilkinson, tape- recorded interview, Oct. 27, 1984, Lake Washington Shipyards Collection (LWS), Marymoor Museum, Redmond, Wash. This and other interviews cited in this essay derive from oral history projects the author conducted; the materials are located at Marymoor Museum unless otherwise noted. The evidence of oral history is most safely used in simple corroboration of other primary sources; however, there are people and processes in the past that would remain completely hidden but for recorded interviews. This essay is intended to demonstrate the value of this nontraditional historical evidence. See Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (Nashville, Tenn., 1984), for wide discussion of oral history issues, opportunities, and pitfalls.

3. Neis Nelson, Roy St. Clair, Wilfred Miller, tape-recorded interview, Jan. 17, 1985, World War II Homefront Collection, Museum of History and Industry (mohai), Seattle. Virginia Lang, tape-recorded interview, Aug. 21, 1984; Eleanor Holsten Somsak, tape- recorded interview, Aug. 5, 1984.

4. Lucile McDonald, tape-recorded interview, April 6, 1985, mohai; East Side Journal (Kirkland), Dec. 24, 1942 (qtn.).

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APRIL 1989 43

In 1947, Kirkland was no longer the bustling boomtown of the war years. (Seattle Post- Intelligencer Collection, Museum of History and Industry, Seattle)

building materials were scarce, many lo- cal businesses expanded and remodeled. Between 1942 and 1944, a new service station, post office, bakery, furniture store, auto repair, butcher shop, bar- bershop, insurance agency, and numer- ous clothiers opened downtown. A bus- tling small city catering to shipyard defense workers replaced the modest and somewhat shabby market town that had served Eastside truck farmers and chicken ranchers.5

Kirkland continued to be the social and market focus for an extended com- munity. It served between 12,000 and 15,000 people at a time when employ- ment in the shipyard neared 8,000 and additional hundreds were employed lo- cally in subcontracting shops.6

The population within Kirkland’s city limits more than doubled during the war, and the general Eastside population in- creased by as much or more. The pres- sure for housing was tremendous. Shipyard families lived in drafty garages and shacks “neither plumb nor square nor level” and had their rent raised on a monthly basis. But the housing crisis could not be met by sharing existing homes, parking house trailers or pitching tents in vacant lots, or converting out- buildings. By the fall of 1943, the Defense Housing Authority had constructed housing for 1,500 shipyard families and a dormitory for 200 single men south of the Kirkland city limits, in the unincor- porated county.7

1 he hard times of the thirties had ended. “There is,” noted the Bellevue American, “plenty of work for everyone, and at good wages.” Every Friday, pay- day at the shipyard, workers streamed into Kirkland shops. Though most shop owners stocked merchandise tailored to the shipyard workers’ needs – boots, heavy jackets and rain gear, warm pants and shirts – they also offered more than just rough-and-ready work clothes. Gifts and luxury goods were featured, and ad- vertisements for pretty spring dresses

and well-tailored men’s suits promised a brighter image and a better life. Some ads appealed directly to the working woman, offering restaurant meals and laundry service or grocery products that pro- moted good health through quick-to-fix meals. In the East Side Journal, retailers welcomed “Newcomers, Defense Work- ers,” announcing longer hours to accom- modate shift workers, “So You Can Shop Leisurely . . . and Cash Your Paycheck.”8

Shipyard employees, attracted to Kirk- land shops by this superficial cordial- ity, often found themselves the object of uneasy suspicion. Shoplifting had be- come epidemic, as had “stiffing” the bill for services. Even doctors asked for cash payment, in advance, and one retail shop after another announced an end to buy- ing on credit and the initiation of a cash- and-carry policy. Presented with a giddy demand, merchants offered the shoddy consumer goods typical of wartime, as well as a few truly bogus items, like jewelry with fake gems. Kirkland’s friendly welcome sometimes concealed a cynical opportunism as the small-town values twisted awry in the wartime boom.9

Opportunists and incompetents flour- ished in the lush jungle of wartime pro- curement and appropriation. The Public Works Administration awarded Kirkland a huge grant for a new sewage system and treatment plant. Throughout the spring and summer of 1942, as the first housing projects went up, work rushed ahead on

the federally funded water system that would supply the new residents. Also, Kirkland received assorted smaller grants for public recreation facilities and road improvements. Just as very few de- fense workers in the shipyard had ever worked for a dollar an hour, very few of Kirkland’s public servants had ever han- dled the hundreds of thousands of dol- lars that these federal public works grants brought to town. Scandal was the result.10

5. Russell T. Mowry, tape-recorded interview, March 25, 1984 (qtn.); Washington State Highway Commission, An Economic Study of the Area East of Lake Washington (Olympia, 1951), 42; re renovations, see Journal throughout the war.

6. McConaghy, chaps. 1 and 3 and app. 2.

7. Population information from Kirkland Planning Commission, Kirkland City Hall, Kirkland; Herman Johnson, tape-recorded interview, March 10, 1984 (qtn.); housing figures from King County Housing Authority, Public Housing in King County, Washington: A Progress Report, Í939-Í945 (Seattle, 1946), 9.

8. Bellevue American, June 3, 1943; Journal July 9 (shop), 30 (newcomers), 1942, and ads throughout the war.

9. Somsak interview; “stiffing” from Trudi Schroeder and Jeanne Ostrander, telephone conversations, 1985; Robert and Ruth Wiesen, tape-recorded interview, Nov. 5, 1985; for change to cash-and-carry policy, Journal Oct. 29, 1942.

10. Journal throughout spring 1942.

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44 PACIFIC NORTHWEST QUARTERLY

After the deputy state examiner con- ducted a routine audit of Kirkland’s books in the spring of 1942, the city trea- surer – who had served in city govern- ment for many years – was indicted on charges of grand larceny. Then the mayor resigned his position to join the con- struction firm to which his administra- tion had just awarded the water system contract. Next, the county prosecuting attorney relieved Kirkland’s deputy pros- ecutor of his duties, and within a month, criminal warrants for misconduct in of- fice were issued for the former mayor, city attorney, and a city councilman. The county attorney soon dropped the crimi- nal charges and substituted a “friendly civil suit” against the mayor, city at- torney, councilman, and treasurer, who still faced the separate grand larceny charge. Between June and late Sep- tember, Kirkland’s treasurer, mayor, fire chief, water superintendent, city at- torney, and city clerk had resigned, and a city councilman’s chair fell vacant as he took the mayor’s place.11

Following a year on the home front, Kirkland’s city government was in com- plete disarray. County and state au- thorities, uncomfortably conscious of their own closeted skeletons, noisily de- plored this suburban saga of greed and dishonesty.

In contrast to the hungry thirties, the war years brought money – big money – that flowed like water. At a city council meeting in April 1942, the council mem- bers had granted routine approval to a businessman’s $60 monthly licensing fee for operating pinball machines in Kirk- land. One Roger Griswold interrupted the proceedings, offering to pay $150 a month for the same concession. Council members sat flabbergasted when the original applicant upped the ante to $300 per month. After hurried consultation, they moved to let the concession out for bid: no one had dreamed there was that much money in running nickel and dime pinball machines in Kirkland’s taverns.12

But boomtown recreation was big busi- ness. During the Christmas season of 1941, holiday liquor sales in Kirkland hit $10,000; a year later, business volume had tripled. Downtown taverns “coined money left and right” during the war. On

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Advertisements like this one drew thousands of workers across the lake to Kirkland, changing the community almost overnight. (Bellevue American, Oct. 12, 1942)

paydays, workers lined up to cash their checks at the bars and to spend the money in the slot machines or playing poker in the cardrooms. In the summer of 1943, a Seattle Police Department crackdown forced a high-stakes poker game out of the city; it surfaced in Kirkland, running 24 hours a day in a downtown bar. The Seattle Post-Intelli- gencer interviewed a knowledgeable in- dividual who explained, ‘The boys . . . figure the small towns might be all right for them because they’ve got defense workers who are in the dough now.”13

Workers in the dough joined sailors ready for a last fling in port. The navy had converted the Kirkland recreational center, built by the Works Progress Ad- ministration, into a barracks for an ever- changing group of about 200 sailors wait- ing for their ships to be commissioned at the shipyard. Local businessmen and

civic groups sponsored the Servicemen’s Club, which offered the simple pleasures of radio music, cookies, and back issues of popular magazines. Local clergy and educators hoped to provide a home-town atmosphere for boys far from home. Nev- ertheless, an East Side Journal editorial stressed the need for continued Shore Pa- trol in Kirkland, pointing out that “sev- eral tavern and restaurant owtiers” had complained that the sailors often got “out of hand.”14

But Kirkland never became a wide-open town. Seattle was just across the lake, and its First Avenue had become a round-the-clock mecca of taverns, peep shows, gambling, and “patriotution.” Still, Kirkland’s character did change somewhat for the duration of the war. In a town where everyone noticed a stran- ger, suddenly everyone was a stranger, and where a family atmosphere had pre- vailed, the sense of community control weakened. All around, comfortable and customary ways disappeared as the boomtown offered new choices. Wartime superimposed a new community over the old, the new held in place only by crisis and goodwill and by respect for the shipyard’s production. The yard ran three shifts a day, seven days a week, and Kirkland no longer shut down when the ferry stopped running at night. There was considerable pressure to amend the ordi- nance that set a ceiling of six taverns within city limits.15

11. Ibid., July 2, 9, Aug. 6, 13, Sept. 17, 1942; Maurice Powell, tape-recorded interview, Dec. 10, 1986; Kirkland City Council (KCC), meeting minutes, June 29, July 20, Aug. 21, 1942, Kirkland City Hall.

12. Journal, April 2, 1942; KCC, meeting minutes, March 30, April 20, 1942.

13. Journal, Jan. 7, 1943; John Bratt, tape- recorded interview, March 2, 1984 (qtn.); Henry Jovag, tape-recorded interview, March 4, 1985; Seattle Post-InteJIigencer, Aug. 7, 1943 (hereafter cited as P-Í with appropriate date); Seattle Times, Aug. 19, 1943.

14. Journal, Nov. 5, 1942, Feb. 18, 1943, and Feb. 1, 1945 (qtn.).

15. Robert McAusland, tape-recorded interview, Dec. 17, 1984, mohai; Powell interview; Ernest Thormahlen, tape-recorded interview, Oct. 21, 1985.

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APRIL 1989 45

The boom brought a new roughneck culture to the Eastside. Some men met in barns and basements to enjoy the bloody spectacle of cockfights and to gamble on them. At smokers, they bet on the out- come of boxing matches among young toughs from the housing projects who had organized into boxing clubs. Dances at the Juanita dance hall occasionally ended in drunken brawls, as did eve- nings at various local resorts. This was an edgy, muscular, and largely masculine culture. One shipyard welder remi- nisced, “At that time, I could swing an eight pound spike maul for eight solid hours and close up a tavern that night!” For a few, this boomtown cockiness edged beyond petty home-front con- nivances into lawlessness. Kirkland seemed to be changing rapidly and not for the better; newcomers came in for much of the blame.16

1 hough all boomtown public housing was built for shipyard war workers, each of the three housing projects developed a unique identity. Lakeview Terrace’s well- built single-family homes had lovely views of the lake and were the closest to downtown Kirkland. Kirkland Heights duplexes were temporary, and the de- velopment was quite small; it was near Lakeview Terrace, and the two projects shared a community center. The enor- mous Stewart Heights project was lo- cated farther to the south, within easy walking distance of the shipyard and quite isolated from downtown. Care- lessly built mass housing intended to last only for the duration, Stewart Heights was like a barracks for the soldiers of production.17

When Stewart Heights opened, the East Side Journal added a new feature called “Project Parade.” “Parade” appeared reg- ularly for more than a year and chron- icled the small doings of tenants, gossip- ing about promotions at the shipyard or visitors from out of state. It tried to foster a sense of genuine community among the resident defense workers, who had been recruited from all over the nation and thrown together into an artificial, imper- manent, and insecure society. School, home, friendship, church – everything was makeshift, and the job itself was temporary. “Project Parade” simply ig- nored these facts and cheerfully treated

the boomtown like a perfectly normal American small town whose residents could be expected to participate fully in community life. The columns showed the best face of the housing projects, a face acceptable to established Kirkland residents.18

The Kirkland Rotary Club threw a huge party at Collins Elementary School in the autumn of 1943 to welcome the residents of Lakeview Terrace and Kirkland Heights. And the open house at the Stew- art Heights project that fall was an enor- mous celebration to which everyone was invited. Then the Rotarians scheduled another welcoming party for all of “Kirkland’s new citizens,” and the Con- gregational church sponsored yet an- other – the welcomers could scarcely keep up with the newcomers. The ladies’ aid of the church expanded its usual pro- gram of home visits to new mothers, the ill, and the aged to include defense work- ers’ families, greeting them with “out- stretched hand and welcoming smile.” Yet, the group’s meeting minutes per- sistently described this duty as “calling on strangers.”19

In fact, many newcomers were too “dif- ferent,” even for the kindly women of the ladies’ aid. The East Side Journal con- tributed to this uneasiness, singling out the newcomers – “many of them, voting for the first time in this state” – as the local deciding factor in the 1944 Demo- cratic landslide. The Journal’s editor, who had supported Thomas Dewey over Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Cain over War- ren Magnuson, and Arthur Langlie over Mon Wallgren, found all these Republi- can candidates defeated at the Kirkland polls. In a subtle way, the paper associ- ated political affiliation with length of residence and with social class. Signifi- cantly, the perception rested on an inac- curate assumption. Though the total vote had risen in direct proportion to the in- creasing population, the political dis- tribution of the vote remained substan- tially the same as it had been before the war. Nevertheless, the editor’s insinua- tions sent a clear message to newcomers climbing the social ladder and eager to assimilate into Kirkland’s long-term community.20

Lakeview Terrace was at the top of the housing project social ladder; Stewart

Heights, at the bottom. There was a stigma attached to living in boomtown housing, and that stigma was greatest for residents of “Stupid Heights.” In a 1945 tenant census, the King County Housing Authority found that most out-of-staters were from the mountain and north-cen- tral states – adventurous Mormon girls from Utah and discouraged wheat farm- ers from Wisconsin. But longtime Kirkland residents wished to believe that most newcomers were hillbillies or toughs. Gossips eagerly repeated tales of the ignorance of Tarheels, Arkies, and Okies; they traded stories about the ar- rogance of Texans and the streetwise swagger of Chicago city slickers.21

Some newcomers arrived “out West,” lo- cals said, with brand-new cowboy boots, expecting Kirkland to be “cowboy and Indian country.” One story described a project family that asked a neighboring homeowner for a patch of land to use as a garden spot. After he agreed, the tenants planted a patch of okra and were bitterly disappointed when it failed to thrive. An elderly lady, another rumor had it, per- sisted in urinating in a coffee can and tossing the contents casually out the back door of her Stewart Heights apart-

16. For cockfights, resort brawl, see Nelson, Miller, and St. Clair interview (qtn.); for boxing, unsavory history of Juanita dance hall, see Journd, Nov. 25, 1943, Oct. 17, 1946, and crime stories throughout 1943.

17. Lakeview Terrace from Johnson interview; Kirkland Heights from Wilkinson and Wiesen interviews; Stewart Heights from Bratt and Somsak interviews and from Edith Osborn, tape-recorded interview, March 6, 1984.

18. Journal beginning Dec. 2, 1943.

19. Ibid., Jan. 7, Oct. 28, Nov. 4 (1st qtn.), 1943; meeting minutes, June 16, 1942 (last qtns.), Mary Martha Society, Kirkland Congregational Church, Kirkland.

20. JournaJ, Nov. 2, 9 (qtn.), 1944; Abstracts of Votes Polled in the State of Washington at Primary Election, Sept. 13, 1938, General Election, Nov. 8, 1938 (Olympia, 1938), 34, and Abstracts of Votes PoJJed, 1944, p. 28.

21. “Stupid Heights” from Wiesen interview; nearly all of the oral history narrators discussed the projects; King County Housing Authority, Characteristics of Residents of Housing Projects in King County, Washington: 1945, Research Bulletin No. 1 (Seattle, 1945), 15-17.

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46 PACIFIC NORTHWEST QUARTERLY

ment. Finally, a county nurse came and demonstrated to her the purpose and op- eration of the flush toilet.22

llome-front cafés and living rooms were alive with such tales. Whether exag- gerated or not, they were perceived to be true, and they reflect to a degree the real- ity of life in the projects. Certainly, other such perceptions have proven accurate. For example, the prevalence of family troubles among the occupants of wartime public housing, recalled by long-term Kirkland residents, has been statistically documented in King County records.

Home-front stresses often initiated fam- ily crisis or intensified existing conflict. Seattle’s juvenile authorities, alarmed at midwar by a 40 percent increase in cases of adolescent crime brought to court, spoke of “ordinary children forced to live under abnormal conditions” and cited five principal contributing factors: crowded housing, working mothers, ab- sent fathers, easy money, and the tempta- tions of a booming city. In Kirkland, the sheriff warned that “unless 1943 parents awaken to the graveness of the situation, the greatest crime wave this country has ever had will overwhelm us in five years.” Juveniles committed 68 percent of the crime in King County, he said, and “the real offenders were not the children but the parents who had become too busy to provide the attention, supervision and understanding which growing boys and girls must have.”23

Many project children lived in house- holds in which parents worked different shifts. Since one parent, then, would al- ways be asleep during the daytime hours, children spent their time away from home, unsupervised. Many other project children lived in single-parent homes. The East Side Journal observed edi- torially that “divorces, separations, and family troubles are hitting a new high in Kirkland these days.” A local lawyer de- voted his practice solely to divorce cases, and many of his clients were newly inde- pendent working women leaving alco- holic or abusive husbands.24

Small children from the projects some- times arrived at school tired and dirty, and a shower and clothing bank were set up to meet their needs. Some of these

children were physically abused, but more common were those who, in the busy and self-absorbed lives of their par- ents, were ignored. When, for example, an anonymous caller asked the King County Sheriff’s Department to investi- gate an incident of child neglect, auxili- ary deputies responded. They found that four children, ranging from 4 to 11 years of age, had been living alone for two weeks in a Stewart Heights apartment under the supervision of the eldest. Their parents had driven back to Oklahoma to visit a relative, leaving the kitchen coun- ter stacked with canned goods and the bathtub filled with coal. The apartment had no telephone, and the children had not received any word from their parents. Weeks later, the father and mother re- turned to discover that their children had been placed with foster families. Throughout the war, county juvenile au- thorities pleaded in the Journal for East- side families to provide foster care.25

Taunted by classmates, adolescents from the projects – especially from “Stupid Heights” – struggled academically and gained the reputation of being tough and fast. Many left school for the shipyard’s easy money or the glamour of the service. Or they simply left school for the day, lured to Seattle. Truancy increased dur- ing the war, and the local school board worked with town government to regain control of the high school population. After V-E Day, when the wartime curfew ended, the Kirkland City Council passed an ordinance that prohibited children under 18 from being “abroad or in a poolroom” after 11 p.m. and later rolled the curfew back to 9 p.m. Teen canteens opened in downtown Kirkland and at Stewart Heights, offering Ping-Pong, mu- sic, and a milk bar. The ymca opened a branch in Kirkland and sponsored a full range of social activities for teenagers, as did the project community centers. Nev- ertheless, there were continual juvenile offenses, such as the 1943 robbery at Kirkland High School during the Christ- mas holiday.26

1 he boomtown rapidly overwhelmed prewar social and law enforcement agen- cies. In July 1942, the Kirkland City Council made an emergency allocation to hire an additional patrolman and, five months later, created a full-fledged po-

lice department. During the summer of 1943, the council assigned a security guard to the city park. Social conditions demanded more. Although members of Kirkland ‘s Civil Defense Unit were sim- ply solid citizens – volunteers trained to direct an orderly response to emergen- cies and to enforce blackout and curfew regulations – the King County Sheriff’s Department deputized them as auxili- aries. Untrained in criminal law enforce- ment, the auxiliary deputies were none- theless issued badges and weapons and sent to work in the housing projects. They had responded to the anonymous complaint concerning the neglected chil- dren. Stewart Heights housed nearly 4,000 residents, and the project teemed with crime. If a woman hung sheets, tow- els, and blankets on the clothesline, she had to watch them until they dried or they might be stolen. At night, heavy drinking and yelling were common; knif- ings and brawls disturbed the peace. Men beat their wives and girlfriends; there were a number of sexual assaults.27

Occasionally, the auxiliary deputies en- countered even more unpredictable criminal situations, and their inexperi- ence was dangerous. After a string of li- quor store burglaries, for example, some

22. Robert Tibbatts, tape-recorded interview, July 29, 1984 (qtn.); Wilkinson and Somsak interviews.

23. P-Í, Oct. 10, 1943 (1st qtn.); Journal, June 17, 1943 (2d qtn.); juvenile crime statistics from annual reports, King County Juvenile Court, Seattle, 1943-1944, 1945; unhappily, Kirkland Police Court records for this period were destroyed by a flood.

24. Journal, April 8, 1943; Eugene Hatch, tape-recorded interview, April 15, 1984.

25. Anita Watson, telephone conversations, May 1984; Wiesen and Bratt interviews; example of foster family request, Journal, April 9, 1942.

26. Kirkland School Board, meeting minutes throughout the war, Lake Washington School District headquarters, Kirkland; Wiesen interview; Journal, Dec. 23, 1943, Aug. 17, 1944; KCC, meeting minutes, June 18, 1945.

27. KCC, meeting minutes, July 6, Dec. 14, 1942, June 21, 1943; Bratt and Somsak interviews; Vincent Widney, tape-recorded interview, Oct. 18, 1985; Ostrander conversations.

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47

Defense workers and their families doubled the Eastside population. To accommodate them, housing projects went up: Lakeview Terrace had single-family homes; Kirkland Heights had duplexes; and Stewart Heights – biggest, flimsiest, and farthest from downtown – had barracks-like apartments and a dormitory. (Public Housing in King County, Washington [1946])

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48 PACIFIC NORTHWEST QUARTERLY

deputies were assigned to stake out the Kirkland liquor store one night. Hidden behind the counter, two or three Kirk- land family men sat nervously on the floor in the dark, whispering occasion- ally as the hours passed. At about mid- night, they were aghast to hear a key in the lock. As the door opened, they shakily drew and aimed their weapons; one called out for the thief to drop his gun and put up his hands. When the store lights flashed on, the deputies found that they had captured a pale and trembling accountant, dropping by to do the books. The deputies were almost as frightened as he was.28

Boomtown problems of public health, like those of public safety, were endured rather than solved. The Kirkland medical establishment was simply overwhelmed by the exploding population. A sociolo- gist found the city’s wartime ratio of 4.5 hospital beds per thousand people to be “insufficient”; he went on to characterize the situation there as “even more se- rious.” The little hospital was overflow- ing, and new mothers and babies lay in beds throughout the hallways. In 1943, the two physicians who held the first-aid concession at the shipyard opened a clinic in downtown Kirkland to provide outpatient care. In the projects, public health nurses went from door to door, in- vestigating and educating, and a 12-bed infirmary was built at Stewart Heights. However, the disagreeable fact was that public health depended less on the avail- ability of health care than on the out- come of the breakneck race between the booming population and the promised sewage system.29

The Eastside had previously disposed of its sewage in septic tanks and cesspools; people living and working near the lake had always used it as a convenient recep- tacle. Before the war, the shipyard’s sew- age disposal system included a 16-hole outhouse built on a dock over the lake. Shortly after the war began, when sta- bility tests were performed for the ferry Lincoln, the chemist analyzing the water scooped from Yarrow Bay off the shipyard had exclaimed, “By God, this is almost pure urine!” At midwar, the Seat- tle researcher who had found Kirkland ‘s hospital accommodations wanting noted that sewage from the shipyard had pol- luted large areas of the lake.30

1 he East Side Journal, pointing to fire and police protection, water supply, and public sanitation, had editorialized in mid-1942 that “Kirkland [was] a city full of problems because the war [had] caused her expansion too fast.” Indeed, federal funding to construct a sewage system for Kirkland and the shoreline corridor to the shipyard had been delayed. In March, the city council had declared that an emergency existed in the shipyard area and ordered the contractor to proceed immediately. Council members were act- ing “on [their] own responsibility,” try- ing to avert a public health catastrophe. By summer, however, the urgent need for housing caused the council reluctantly to “bow to the inevitable” and allow Lakeview Terrace and Kirkland Heights to open without any sewage system. Al- though construction of the water and sewage networks continued, material, equipment, and manpower shortages hindered progress. A nervous council hoped that temporary septic fields and aboveground water pipes would meet the critical situation.31

But during the spring of 1943, scores of Lake Washington Shipyards workers be- came acutely ill after drinking water from fountains in the yard, and typhoid was feared. In the hot summer of that same year, Kirkland closed its beaches, declar- ing them unsafe for swimming. The in- dignant town water superintendent pro- nounced the lake water “almost sewage,” contaminated with Escherichia coli bac- teria, a direct consequence of untreated human waste running into the lake. The lowest contamination on the Eastside lakeshore was 180 units; in Kirkland, for the same volume of water, the count was 14,000 units. In July, the sewage system and treatment plant were completed, and the beaches reopened within a month.32

But that fall, Stewart Heights was com- pleted, built up along the bluff overlook- ing the shipyard. Intended as temporary and constructed in great haste, far from the limited reach of the Kirkland sewage system, the Stewart Heights row houses, apartments, and dormitory were con- nected to a large septic system. The fol- lowing June, in 1944, the State Health De- partment declared Kirkland ‘s drinking water unfit for human consumption, and once again the contaminant was E. coli, at five times the permissible level.33

Though the specific source of pollution remained unknown, its general cause was undoubtedly the leaching of sewage into the drinking water supply or dis- tribution piping. A portable chlorinator was hooked into the public water system that was not yet a year old. Three of Kirkland ‘s doctors publicly recom- mended daily chemical testing of tap water and advised local residents to boil their water before use. Throughout the summer, all water used for cooking or drinking in the Stewart Heights infir- mary was boiled on orders of the staff doctor. But the problem was not con- fined to the heavily populated shipyard area. Drinking water from taps in north Kirkland proved polluted as well. With the drenching rains of fall, contamina- tion eased. However, the city council re- mained concerned about sewage dis- posal and water quality for the duration: one of the lingering wartime images was of an illegally camped, overcrowded house trailer with a malodorous outdoor bucket.34

Resolution of these problems was limited by wartime scarcities of material and manpower. But to a far greater extent, it was limited by community response, the conviction that the troubles would end with the war. Kirkland ‘s boom peaked

28. Bratt interview.

29. Calvin Schmid, Social Trends in Seattle (Seattle, 1944), 324 (qtns.); Norma and Albert Warner, tape-recorded interview, July 31, 1984; Elma Storey Renner, tape-recorded interview, July 18, 1984.

30. Wayne and Frank Kirtley, tape-recorded interview, Feb. 23, 1986; Robert Matson, telephone conversation, March 1984 (qtn.); Charles Chowen to author, April 13, 1984, LWS, Marymoor Museum; Schmid, 325.

31. JournaJ, Aug. 20 (1st qtn.), 10 (last qtn.), 1942; KCC, meeting minutes, March 25, 1942.

32. International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Shipbuilders, Welders and Helpers, Local 104, 104 Reporter (Seattle), May 6, 13, 1943; Renner interview; JournaJ, June 10 (qtn.), Aug. 19, 1943; E. coli figures from Bellevue American, June 24, 1943.

33. JournaJ, June 29, 1944.

34. Ibid., June 22, 1944, March 7, 1946; for continuing concern, see KCC, meeting minutes, May 28, 1945.

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APRIL 1989 49

The navy’s Yarrow Bay moorage proposal polarized the community: businessmen and shipyard workers were in favor; others, against. (Seattle Times, July 1, 1945)

in 1943. Though Lake Washington Ship- yards made application to the War Man- power Commission to raise its employ- ment ceiling that year, the appeal was denied in the wake of a scandal over waste and overmanning at the yard. After the bitter public controversy ended, the shipyard work force fell from its peak of 8,000 to around 6,000 and stayed there for some time.35

In 1942, the Kirkland City Council had grandly passed a boomtown zoning ordi- nance encouraging, among nearly 100 en- terprises, steel mills, shipyards, and all sorts of heavy industry. The Journal ex- pressed the hope that the shipyard would continue to thrive after the war and per- haps help to rebuild the merchant ma-

rine fleet shattered by the enemy. Yet the same editorial also remarked that “Kirk- land and its environs are the natural place for Seattle expansion.” By midwar, many Eastsiders had grown skeptical of the benefits of their industrialized shore- line. How, they wondered, could this fac- tory town become a residential suburb? In late 1943, the city council appointed a postwar planning commission to explore Kirkland’s future.36

JVleanwhile, the mobilized shipyard was a difficult neighbor, and its public relations were poor. The 60-year-old or- chard of the Lake House, a local land- mark, had been bulldozed for shipyard parking lots. When Lake Washington

Boulevard was not packed with solid un- moving traffic, shipyard workers raced along its narrow lanes at breakneck speed, running the stop sign and ignor- ing their traffic tickets. Rats roamed the shipyard area, and ships undergoing re- pairs discharged their oily bilge into the bay and dumped garbage over the side. The cumulative roar of chippers, whis- tles, the loudspeaker, compressors, and dozens of huge engines could easily be heard half a mile away, 24 hours a day. The prewar yard had employed 250 men and was capable, clean, and quiet; the wartime yard was an industrial plant on an immense scale.37

In June 1945, two months before the end of the war, the commandant of the 13th Naval District announced the navy’s wish to locate a “fresh water reserve naval base” in Yarrow Bay in front of the shipyard. As the proposal was first re- ported, the bay would be dredged and widened, and enough floating piers placed across the bay to provide moorage for more than 300 ships. The navy would purchase the shipyard and the private property on the shoreline southward along the bay. All homes would be razed, and barracks, offices, and other facilities would line the shore. It was initially re- ported that this complex would employ 2,000 civilians.38

Among civic, fraternal, and community organizations all over the Eastside, indig- nation “reached the white heat stage.” The proposal was a “menace to the health and security” of a “quiet, peaceful

35. McConaghy, chap. 5 and app. 2.

36. Kirkland City Ordinance No. 464, July 20, 1942, Kirkland City Hall; Journal, June 11, 1942; KCC, meeting minutes, Sept. 20, 1943.

37. Kirtley interview; journal, April 2, May 14, Aug. 20, 1942; Jean Olsen, tape-recorded interview, March 11, 1984.

38. Seattle Star, June 26, 1945.

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50 PACIFIC NORTHWEST QUARTERLY

Community boosters resolutely proclaimed a “bright side” to Kirkland’s postwar economic and social slump. (Kirkland Chamber of Commerce)

residential community.” But in an un- likely alliance, the Kirkland Chamber of Commerce joined forces with shipyard union representatives to endorse the navy’s proposal enthusiastically. The is- sue polarized the community. Propo- nents of the plan cited “a moral obliga- tion to provide jobs for the several thousand war workers who want to re- main on the East Side following the war” and characterized the opposition as wealthy and effete – “people who clip coupons for their incomes.” Opponents of the “boneyard” had the backing of the American, which editorialized on their behalf: “Should a community be penal- ized because it refused to protest when property was injured by governmental agencies during the process of winning the war?” They were concerned about their lake views, their neighborhoods, and about the ecological hazards of stor- ing hundreds of “rusting, rotting vessels of all descriptions.”39

Yet everyone’s motives were ambiguous at best in this scramble for postwar se- curity. Those few who supported a Yar- row Bay moorage – the shipyard unions and Kirkland retailers – spoke loudly of national defense and neighborly respon- sibility to the defense workers, but their kindness and patriotism were clearly mingled with self-interest. A continued industrial payroll was greatly to their mutual advantage. Though community club members and other citizens advo- cated restoring the lake’s beauty and maintaining a “quality home-life” for their children, their concern for the en- vironment was self-interested too. Their property values would certainly suffer if the boomtown and its syndrome of prob- lems outlasted the war.

The navy expressed surprise at the inten- sity of local hostility and on August 29, 1945, announced its intention to moor its ships in Oregon. As the moorage contro- versy drew to a close, the boomtown ceased to exist. Rumors began to circu- late that Lake Washington Shipyards was for sale. Members of shipyard upper management were retiring or moving on to other jobs; the yard was not competing for private construction and repair bids. In 1942, 5,000 Eastsiders had lined the shore and cheered when Lake Washing- ton Shipyards launched its first seaplane tender for the navy; in 1946, nobody came to the last launching. The home front had ended with the war.40

The owners of Lake Washington Ship- yards put the property up for sale, but few buyers were interested. Meanwhile, men and women were laid off from the yard. They either moved away, chasing new opportunities, or they went on county relief and waited in the housing projects. Between July and November 1945, applications for public assistance in King County rose by nearly 400 per- cent. Local public housing, built for war workers, became in effect low-income housing, situated far from employment, shopping, and transportation. Emergen- cy home-front appropriations ended and the payroll disappeared, but school en- rollment did not fall, nor did the need for other human services.41

As local social agencies struggled with reduced postwar budgets, Kirkland was

left the difficult task of turning post- industrial blight into “the bright side of the future,” as the chamber of commerce put it. A substantial local industrial payroll seemed the solution to every problem, and Kirkland boosters put the little city on the market, talking up sea- plane bases and airports and countless other schemes. Throughout 1946 and 1947, a succession of ill-fated* manufac- turing ventures leased space in the enor- mous shipyard facilities, arriving to great journalistic fanfare and then departing in silence.42

There would be no more industrial booms, no more big payrolls. Gradually, most of the projects were pulled down or hauled away for emergency housing else- where. Bloated on wartime extravagance, the postwar shipyard proved both un- profitable to its owners and unwelcome to its neighbors.

39. Bellevue American, June 28 (1st qtns.), July 19 (penalized), 1945; Yarrow Bay Community Club, meeting minutes and correspondence throughout summer, at Yarrow Point Town Hall; Journal, July 5, 1945 (obligation, boneyard); Times, June 28, July 25 (vessels), 26 (coupons), 1945. Environmentalists were vindicated in spring 1946 when a refueling ship leaked 3,000 gallons of oil into Lake Washington, killing wildlife and fouling property along the shore; Journal, April 25, 1946.

40. P-Í, July 12, 1945; American, Aug. 30, 1945; Lake Washington Shipyards, On the Ways, Vol. 1 (March 14, 1942), 1; Lake Washington Shipyards, “Report by the Trustees to the Stockholders upon Liquidation of the Company” (1951), LWS, Marymoor Museum.

41. “Public Assistance in King County, Washington, January-December, 1946,” King County Welfare Department annual report (Seattle, 1947), 24; Journal, Oct. 18, 1945.

42. Kirkland Chamber of Commerce, The Bright Side of the Future ([Kirkland], 1947); Journal, Feb. 13, Dec. 18, 1947.

43. Journal, Feb. 6, 1947, Oct. 24, 1946, Sept. 20, Oct. 4, 1945, March 18, 1948; Arline Ely, Our Foundering Fathers: The Story of Kirkland (Kirkland, 1975), 110.

44. Examples of postwar studies of wartime boomtowns include Lowell Carr and James Stermer, Willow Run: A Study of industrialization and Cultural Inadequacy (New York, 1952), and Robert Havighurst and H. Gerthon Morgan, The Social History of a War-Boom Community (New York, 1951).

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APRIL 1989 51

The four-year boomtown binge left Kirkland with a social hangover. The Journal reported one downtown store’s annual shoplifting losses at more than $5,000 and worried about a wave of juve- nile crime and vandalism. Though the shipyard work force fell to fewer than 100 men, not one of Kirkland ‘s six taverns closed for lack of business. Drunken Sat- urday night brawls became common on street corners; holes kicked in the walls in the remaining projects were left unre- paired. Kirkland’s ferry and bus sched- ules were drastically cut, and then cut again. The Christmas buying season of 1946 was the slowest in years, and the Journal glumly forecast a local business recession.43

Gradually, it became clear that Kirkland would find a new identity as a postwar residential suburb of Seattle. Bankrolled by the GI bill and war bonds, newly afflu- ent young families bought cars and homes, trained rambling roses on picket fences, and commuted across the lake to the city’s white-collar jobs.

In the postwar transformation of the American West, Kirkland and other East- side towns seem to present a special case. Though conflict between home- front values and boomtown priorities is typical of many communities, the em- phatic rejection by most Kirkland resi- dents of an industrialized shoreline and the preference for a residential suburban

future are far less so. Few mobilized pop- ulations had such a clear opportunity for debate and consensus regarding their fu- ture. With the exception of local busi- nessmen and shipyard workers, residents chose to affirm the prewar small-town values and a high quality of life. The postwar suburbanization of Kirkland originated with a decision that grew out of the boomtown experience.44 D

Lorraine McConaghy is in the doctoral program in history at the University of Washington. President of the Women’s Heritage Center, she has published arti- cles in Portage and Columbia and is pur- suing her research on post-World War II suburbanization .

Dissension in the Rockies: A History of Idaho Populism. By William Joseph Gaboury. (New York: Garland Publishing, Modern American History series, 1988. xi, 462 pp. Il- lustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $77)

This volume is part of the substantial litera- ture on populism in the Mountain West, a re- gion in which the state and territorial people’s parties displayed a labor rather than an agri- cultural orientation. Idaho’s populists, never really free of “fusionist” characteristics, first organized themselves as a party in 1892, won effective control of the state in 1896 as a by- product of Populist-Democratic fusion, and proceeded to squander their potential in the 1897 legislative session by dividing into fac- tions. By 1898 party leaders could not even agree on a site for a state convention, and thereafter the populists disintegrated into two insignificant factions.

While Idaho populists advocated political re- forms and engaged in the usual condemnation of railroad abuses, the thrust of Idaho popu- lism accentuated the labor interest. Such de- mands as biweekly pay, the eight-hour day for mine workers, the prohibition of company stores, and restrictions on alien corporations

were party staples. Agricultural needs were less significant, but populists did press for public irrigation districts and regulation of ir- rigation companies. Obviously the party em- braced the cause of free silver, but most spokesmen for the established parties in the state did likewise. William Gaboury demon- strates that there was more to Idaho populism than mere silverism – a fact never doubted by serious students of the subject in the moun- tain region.

Gaboury’s narrative is clearly written, but he sometimes strays from his theme. There is, for instance, a lengthy discussion of labor trou- bles in the Coeur d ‘Aleñes which transpired when populism in the state was nearly de- funct. Conceptually, moreover, the work is de- void of sophistication and contains virtually no analysis of Idaho’s social structure, its economy, or its politics. The book is an unre- vised doctoral dissertation, completed in 1966, and in a current preface the author indi- cates that he has discovered no evidence in the past 20 years to modify his original con- clusions. Potential readers should take these realities into account. D

Karel D. Bicha Marquette University

Dissension in the Rockies

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• Article Contents
  • p. 42
  • p. 43
  • p. 44
  • p. 45
  • p. 46
  • p. 47
  • p. 48
  • p. 49
  • p. 50
  • p. 51
• Issue Table of Contents
  • The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 42-80
    • Front Matter
    • Wartime Boomtown: Kirkland, Washington, a Small Town during World War II [pp. 42-51]
    • Recent Books in Review
      • Dissension in the Rockies [pp. 51-51]
    • Taken Pictures: On Interpreting Native American Photographs of the Southern Northwest Coast [pp. 52-61]
    • Golden Years: The Decline of Gold Mining in Alaska [pp. 62-71]
    • Recent Books in Review
      • Breaking Trail [pp. 71-71]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 72-72]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 73-73]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 73-73]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 74-74]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 74-74]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 75-75]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 75-75]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 76-76]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 76-77]
      • Review: untitled [pp. 77-77]
    • Primary Sources Data Sheet [pp. 78-78]
    • Northwest History News Notes [pp. 79-80]
    • Back Matter