Jim Ellis left an extraordinary legacy of civic achievement when he died in 2019 at age 98. Perhaps best remembered for his successful efforts to clean up Lake Washington, Ellis also was instrumental in efforts to finance King County mass transit, parks, pools, and other public facilities through "Forward Thrust" bonds in the 1960s; to preserve farmlands in the 1970s; to build and later expand the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in the 1980s, and to establish the Mountains to Sound Greenway in the 1990s. In this excerpt from his memoirs, Ellis writes about Walter B. Williams, who worked with Ellis on Forward Thurst bond initiatives, served as president of the Japan-American Society of Washington, and helped preserve and modernize Woodland Park Zoo.
Unsung Hero
Members of our family occasionally visit Acacia Memorial Park in Lake Forest Park to leave flowers for family members who are resting there. On each Memorial Day visit, I am heartened to see a large number of people show up with flags and flowers to remember those killed in war. Over the years, I became inspired by friends who were shaped in different ways by their World War II experience and devoted part of their post-war lives to making friendships that helped bridge cultural differences. They are unsung heroes. Walter B. Williams is one of them.
Williams and I became close personal friends during the Forward Thrust years when he served as an active member of the Forward Thrust Committee I was leading. He became an important and reliable source of information and support during our struggle to move the crucial Forward Thrust legislative program through the Senate in the 1967 state legislative session. He went by "Walter B."
The Walter B. Williams Story
Walter B. Williams was born May 12, 1921, in Seattle. He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1939 and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Washington before beginning military service. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and attended the Navy Japanese language school in Colorado.
When Walter B. began combat service in the Marines, he was immediately assigned to active duty in the Pacific War theatre where he served on the Islands of Bougainville, Guam, and Okinawa. As a Japanese language officer, his job in combat was to attempt to persuade holdout Japanese troops to come out of their caves voluntarily and surrender. This was a difficult assignment because the emperor had ordered that no member of the Japanese military should surrender, but instead should fight to the death.
Walter B. was surprisingly successful in his efforts because he made personal contact with these Japanese soldiers in their island caves. Armed with his language skills and a bullhorn, he was sometimes able to talk one or two men into coming out. He assured them that they would not be harmed and that they would be taken as Prisoners of War (POW) and treated humanely. On one notable occasion, Williams was able to persuade a Japanese doctor who had been caring for wounded Japanese to come out of a cave and talk with him about the possibility of safely evacuating his patients to an army hospital on Guam, where he could better tend to his wounded patients. The doctor agreed to talk with the men. They surrendered and were safely transferred to Guam. Walter visited the doctor in the Guam hospital and learned his name was Dr. Yoshida.
The two men talked for hours and became friends. During one of their conversations, Dr. Yoshida asked Walter if he would deliver a letter to his family in Tokyo. Walter promised him that if he got to Tokyo he would try to find his family and deliver the letter. Most people would have put the letter in the hands of the postal system, but not Walter. When he was transferred to Tokyo a month later, he took Yoshida’s letter with him. He made a number of inquires about the location of the address, which was somewhere in the heavily damaged Tokyo metropolitan area. He spent a total of three days in a Jeep looking through the huge, half-burned-out city suburbs for Dr. Yoshida’s family. On the third day, he found the house! As Walter approached, he saw that the people inside were celebrating something. Incredibly, they had gathered for the funeral of Dr. Yoshida.
After introducing himself, Walter was able to communicate in Japanese that Dr. Yoshida was alive and well and had given Walter a letter for Mrs. Yoshida, which he handed directly to the astonished Mrs. Yoshida. The letter explained that her husband was not going to be able to get home for some time and probably would not be able to get another letter to them. Mrs. Yoshida was overcome with emotion that her husband was still alive. She invited Walter into their damaged home, and the funeral gathering changed from a sad memorial to a celebration of life. Within a matter of months, Dr. Yoshida was reunited with his family, and they never forgot Walter’s kindness.
This was the beginning of a long friendship between the Williams and Yoshida families. Over the years, there were many visits between Japan and the United States, and the Williams family sent food packages when food became scarce in Tokyo. The children of both families became friends, creating memories that remain vivid today.
Walter’s language skills and his ability to build friendships bridged the chasm of war-time hatred in several ways. After he returned home from the war, Walter B. took a leadership role in Japanese American business associations and became president of the Japan-American Society of Washington. This was a natural progression for Williams. He never thought of himself as a star player; he simply wanted to be involved with improving understanding among his Japanese and American business friends and to extend his friendship with the Yoshida family to a wider circle. Looking back, it was both remarkable and very typical of Walter to be involved with his former enemies, building such an intense personal friendship. His children followed in his footsteps and remembered their relationship with the Yoshida family as exceptionally warm and inspiring.
In His Father's Footsteps
Walter’s father, W. Walter Williams (1894-1983), was a prominent Republican businessman who founded Continental Mortgage Co. and was chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate against Warren Magnusson and became active nationally in support of the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952. The senior Williams was one of the people who visited Ike in Paris and persuaded him to run. Once elected, Ike appointed the senior Williams to be Under Secretary of Commerce. He remained a trusted member of the Eisenhower Administration until 1958, when he resigned and returned to Continental Mortgage as chairman.
The senior Williams continued to be a major political figure and turned his efforts to supporting the campaign of Richard Nixon. In early 1960s, he served on the board of the Century 21 World’s Fair and maintained a long and outstanding community service career, serving at least one term as president of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, YMCA, Real Estate Board, Mortgage Bankers Association, and the annual Community Chest (later known as the United Way) fundraising campaign. He died at the age of 88, on December 19, 1983, and left his son, Walter B., with a recognized political name and a strong business reputation.
After the war, Walter B. attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1948. He then went to work for the Seattle law firm of Bogle & Gates. Walter B. ran for the state legislature after he had been practicing law for a few years. In 1961, he was first elected a member of the State House of Representatives, and in 1963 he was elected to the state Senate, where he served for eight years. He was an influential senator in the minority party but was never one to make headlines.
Neil McReynolds, a Home Street Bank board member who was Governor Dan Evans's press secretary in the 1960s, once said, "Walter B. was one of the smartest guys in the Legislature. He didn’t have an agenda. He just gave you an honest appraisal of the situation." Walter B. had an intense and genuine personal interest in politics. He supported legendary Governor Dan Evans in every way, but was known to stay in the background. When Evans would hold meetings with key supporters, he used the bank’s meeting rooms. Walter often would sit at the side of the room and seldom volunteered opinions unless called upon.
Walter B. was trusted and respected by everyone he knew. He became the founding chairman of Continental Savings Bank, which later became Home Street Bank, and served in this role for more than 30 years. He led the company’s expansion from a small Seattle real estate lender to a full-service community bank with branches in Western Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii. Among his long list of civic involvements, he served as president of the Rotary Club of Seattle, the Puget Sound Association of Phi Beta Kappa, and the Downtown Seattle Association. He was a founding member of the Washington Roundtable, and a board member of the Chamber of Commerce, Municipal League, The Evergreen State College Foundation, and Medina Children’s Services.
Friend of the Zoo
Walt’s most absorbing civic interest was Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. In 1984, he was appointed by Mayor Charles Royer to chair a 50-member Zoo Commission at a time when the Zoo was at a crossroads. The group oversaw the Zoo’s new long-range plan for a state-of-the-art facility and recommended placing a King County Zoo bond issue on the ballot in 1985. Walt chaired the bond campaign, leading it to passage. He chaired the Zoo Oversight Committee for 10 years, serving as a key player in its development into the world-class conservation and education facility under the long-range plan approved by the Forward Thrust Parks proposition in the 1968 election.
In 1992, the Zoo honored Walter, presenting him with the Woodland Park Zoological Society Medal for his many years of work and his contributions to the Zoo’s goals of education, conservation, wildlife research, and recreation.
