Topic: Biographies
Pat O'Day: Founding father of Northwest rock 'n' roll or the "Godfather" of the 1960s teendance scene? A vampire or the catalyst? Or all of the above? There are many Northwesterners who would debate t...
Seattle native Elmer Ogawa worked as a freelance photographer for a variety of Asian American newspapers from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. He produced more than 14,000 photographs depicting...
Peter Skene Ogden, a fur trader employed by both the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, worked throughout the Columbia region during the first half of the nineteenth century. Many acquai...
Scott and Laurie Oki took advantage of their great wealth amassed at Microsoft, Inc. to help their community. In addition to their philanthropic giving through The Oki Foundation, they are personally ...
James "Jim" Kazuo Okubo, World War Medal of Honor recipient, was born in Anacortes in 1920 to hard-working Japanese immigrants. He grew up in Bellingham – industrious, well-liked, and active in ...
Darrell R. Oldham helped to organize Seattle's original alternative newspaper, The Weekly (now Seattle Weekly), in 1976 and guided its advertising and marketing program for eight years. He also helped...
During Seattle's "dry" years of the 1920s, Roy Olmstead, through guts and guile, became the biggest bootlegger and one of the most well known personalities in Northwest history. He began as a police o...
Jack Olsen was a respected journalist and prolific writer who pioneered the genre of "true crime." Olsen also wrote fiction and books about sports and social issues, but it was his true-crime writing ...
Douglass Winnett Orr helped found Seattle's Northwest Clinic of Psychiatry and Neurology and the Blakeley Psychiatric Group in the 1940s. He was the founder, with Edith Buxbaum (1902-1982), of the Sea...
Lee Orr was a champion Monroe (Snohomish County) athlete who excelled in track and football and had an illustrious career in the 1930s, first for Monroe Union High School Bearcats and then for the Was...
The Spokane husband-wife environmentalist team of John Osborn and Rachael Paschal Osborn have been in the lead of Eastern Washington's conservation movement for decades. Osborn is an internist and chi...
Michelle Pailthorp was a major force in Seattle Democratic politics, civil rights, and feminist causes over a span of 30 years, including the campaign for passage of the 1972 state referendum on the E...
Alexander Pantages was a theatrical entrepreneur who had a considerable impact on the development of popular stage entertainments in the Puget Sound region in the early twentieth century. He created a...
For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the name Reginald Parsons was readily associated with civic leadership and philanthropy not only in his adopted home town of Seattle, but also in o...
Eccentric, Libertarian, cantankerous, opinionated, insane, brilliant; there are many words that have been used to describe the late Snohomish author John Patric (1902-1985). Perhaps the most accurate ...
Ancil Payne, one of the most influential broadcasters in the Pacific Northwest, served as president and chief executive officer of King Broadcasting Company from 1971 to his retirement in 1987. The Gr...
Angelo Pellegrini, born into a sharecropper's family in rural Italy, went on to become one of America's favorite writers on the pleasures of food, wine, and community. After his family immigrated to G...
Thomas Minor Pelly was a Seattle civic leader and a 10-term Congressional Representative for the 1st District (King and Kitsap counties). He fought to protect Puget Sound fishing interests. He was a s...
Jerry Pennington's primary career was as a newspaperman, working his way up in The Seattle Times from accountant to publisher and chief executive officer. His leadership garnered national recognition ...
Baptiste Peone was a chief of the Upper Spokane band of the Spokane Tribe. He was portrayed in Spokane news accounts as a most unusual kind of chief -- a wealthy, shrewd businessman. Yet for most of h...
Gertrude Johnson Peoples is the founder of the country's first academic-support office for college student athletes. For over 40 years she has been mother, friend, and academic adviser to athletes at ...
Lucia Perillo was an award-winning poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist who received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 2000 for her raw, unflinching, and searingly honest poetry. Perillo was diagno...
Terry Pettus was a progressive-minded newspaper reporter who became Washington state's first member of the American Newspaper Guild. He was a key organizer of the Seattle chapter of the Guild, which i...
Donald Phelps, educator, singer, and TV commentator, was the grandson of John T. Gayton (1866-1954), one of Seattle's black pioneers. He rose through the ranks, starting as an elementary teacher in Be...