This three-part People's History by Walt Crowley and Chris Goodman recounts the celebrations of the sesquicentennial of the first landing by settlers on Alki Point. On November 14, 2001, the Seattle Rotary 4 and Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce presented a special luncheon program in the Washington State Convention & Trade Center to celebrate the previous day's sesquicentennial of the Alki Beach landing of Seattle's founding settlers. The program recapped Seattle's history in the form of "The Early, Early Report" of "Channel 150 News." Anchors and reporters from KING, KIRO, and KCPQ television news played themselves and Chamber and Rotary members and other citizens portrayed various historical figures (see the cast list below).
Part 3: November 14, 2001, Seattle Sesquicentennial Luncheon: "Channel 150 News"
Cast:
Anchor Team 1: KIRO: Steve Raible and Susan Hutchison
Anchor Team 2: KCPQ: Scott Engler and Leslie Miller
Anchor Team 3: KING: Jean Enersen and Dennis Bounds
Announcers: Dorothy Bullitt, Rotary Club of Seattle
Alan Stein, HistoryLink
Field Reporters: Eric Bremner
Deborah Horne, KIRO
Don Porter, KING
Labor Reporter: Kate Joncas, Downtown Seattle Association
Science Reporter: Roger Oglesby, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Political Reporter: Walt Crowley, HistoryLink
Meteorologist: Henry Webrink, KCPQ
Business Reporter: Mike Flynn, Puget Sound Business Journal
Sports Reporter: Tony Ventrella, KIRO
Arthur Denny: Ralph Munro, Former Secretary of State
Chief Seattle: James Rasmussen, Duwamish Tribe
John Back: Jahn Hedberg, Consul of Sweden
Erastus Brainerd: Mac MacDonald, The LYFE Enhancement Company
Anna Louise Strong: Mary McWilliams, Regence Blue Shield
(News Team 3: KING)
Jean Enersen: Seattle is recovering from the shock of December 7, 1941, but the attack on Pearl Harbor is still reverberating for the former residents of our city's Japan Town, which was once the nation's second largest. Nearly 10,000 first and second generation Japanese Americans have been rounded up and sent to camps far inland from the West Coast.
Dennis Bounds: Few protested the internment. One man, Gordon Hirabayashi, has vowed to fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, many Japanese Americans have enlisted in the Army and distinguished themselves in Italy and other combat zones.
Enersen: There's a lesson for us not to judge people by skin color or ancestry. Loyal Americans are forged by individual choice and conscience, not by birth or culture.
Bounds: President Truman just announced that Boeing B-29 Stratofortresses have dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan has surrendered, but it seems we've entered a dangerous new era. For more on these startling events we turn to Channel 150 science reporter Roger Oglesby:
Science Reporter (Roger Oglesby): It's the dawn of a new age. The war has spawned a host of new technologies -- nuclear power, jet aircraft, powerful rockets that could reach the moon and beyond. We're seeing advances in health, too, like portable heart defibrillators, improved kidney dialysis machines, the Group Health Cooperative, and new ideas for drugs and cancer treatments based on genetic engineering.
Bounds: What do you see ahead for Century 21?
Oglesby: All sorts of marvels are on the drawing board: Soaring towers topped by revolving restaurants, six-wheeled cars called Seattleites, spherical glass Bubbleators, whizzing Monorails to solve traffic congestion, supersonic passenger planes, and computerized typewriters no larger than a refrigerator. They might even replace newspapers with giant electronic view screens!
Enersen: Sounds like a good excuse for another world's fair.
Bounds: Does indeed, but we've got some problems to deal with first in the here and now of the Sixties. Let's go downtown for a report from Channel 150 political reporter Walt Crowley:
Political Reporter (Walt Crowley): There's a lot of movement down here -- make that plural, movements. Minorities are demanding open housing, school desegregation, and fair employment. Women want equal pay for equal work and an end to male chauvinism. Young people are marching against the war in Vietnam. Native Americans want their rights to fish under the old treaties. The suburbs want more freeways, and city neighborhoods want to stop them, and the people in between want mass transit and regional government. Oh, and a bunch of hippies just want to make love and smoke grass. Frankly, all hell's broken out down here.
Bounds: We don't get to use that word yet.
Crowley: Sorry, but the times, they are definitely a-changing.
Enersen: We get the message. This just in: Boeing has announced it's laying off 60,000 workers by 1972 -- and somebody put a billboard asking the last person leaving Seattle to turn out the lights. Better go back to Mike Flynn at the business desk for an update...
Mike Flynn: I'd keep the lights on a little longer. We're seeing a huge wave of innovation and investment: The Port of Seattle's gamble on containerized cargo is paying off... Boeing's headed for a merger to become the world's largest aircraft company... couple of Lakeside kids have become the world's software kings... Washington Mutual, Eddie Bauer, REI, and Nordstrom's are going nation-wide... Fred Hutchinson and UW and companies like Immunex are leading the genetic medical revolution... Downtown's never been stronger, and the suburbs are humming. It looks like a whole new economy... if we could figure out how to get traffic moving.
Enersen: Well, while we're waiting for the monorail, let's go over to the sports desk and Tony Ventrella, who has been unusually quiet for most of this report.
Sports Reporter (Tony Ventrella): (Irked) Yeah, because you guys took all my time up with real news! OK, here's a 150 years of sports in as many seconds. (Breathlessly) Seattle beat Spokane back in 1890 in the city's first pro baseball game, and the Seattle Metropolitans captured the Stanley Cup in 1917. Helene Madison and the Husky rowing crew brought home Olympic gold in the 1930s, and the Rainiers dominated the Pacific Coast League after Sick's Stadium opened. Stan Sayres revolutionized hydroplane racing in 1950, and the Dogs have gone to the Rose Bowl so many times I lost count.
Bounds: Well, that's pretty exciting. Turning now to...
Ventrella: Hey, I'm just warming up! Back in the 1970s, we built the Kingdome for the Seahawks and Major League Baseball, but the Pilots turned into the Brewers after one season. Speaking of brewing, Howard Schultz just bought the Sonics, which won the NBA championship in 1979. We dumped the dome last year to build a new nest for the Hawks, and it the Mariners won the AL West in SAFECO Field and tied the Major League Baseball record for most wins in a regular season.
Enersen: Done?
Ventrella: Highlights at 11.
Bounds: We'll sum up this amazing 15 decades after this message.
Announcer (Alan Stein): Is the world going too fast for you? Catch up with a hot cup of Starbucks coffee -- or slow down with a cold pint of Redhook. Take a break and go to Nordstrom's, play a computer game or two, or rave off those tensions at a grunge rock concert. Get your genome tuned down at the Imuno-Hutch, or better yet, window shop at Amazon.com on your latest Microsoft program. Remember, the future starts in Seattle.
(Music: Also Sprach Zarathustra theme)
Enersen: Let's recap out latest headlines... (Rapid fire)
Bounds: Anti-WTO demonstrators battled police downtown...
Enersen: Fat Tuesday mobs rampaged in Pioneer Square...
Bounds: An earthquake struck Puget Sound....
Enersen: Boeing executives relocated to Chicago...
Bounds: Seattle sent blood, sweat, and tears to New York and Washington after the worst terrorist attack in history...
Enersen: And the new century is less than a year old.
(pause)
Bounds: Can Seattle survive this kind of turmoil?
Enersen (emphatically): Let's not forget the other side of this year's story: Bellevue opened a new art museum. Seattle's building new libraries, parks, and community centers, and the expanded state convention center is about to open. Boeing's poised to revolutionize air travel with the Sonic Cruiser. The Fred Hutchinson Center team just won its second Nobel Prize, and Microsoft released its latest operating system. We've got top schools, universities and research labs, industry leaders in a host of fields, a million smart workers, more entrepreneurs per capita than any city in the world, creative civic groups and political leaders, a natural setting second to none -- and a hundred and fifty years of history of practice riding this roller coaster.
Bounds: I guess current events do look a lot brighter when you consider all that Seattle's gone through before. So I'll see you back here for the bicentennial?
Enersen: Medical science permitting, you bet.
Bounds: That's the Early, Early Report for now.
Enersen: We'll see you in 2051...
Bounds: Bye...
Enersen: ...And Bye.
(End)
