The Rest is History

Bit players in Seattle’s past have had a serendipitous effect on its history.

By Chris Winters | November 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

1896: Theodor Hilferstadt, telegraph operator for Western Union who had recently arrived in Seattle from Germany, sneezes while sending a wire and accidentally substitutes a “g” for “c” in the message “Plenty cold in Yukon.”

1900: Arthur Hamsher Jr., a Minneapolis attorney for the Great Northern railroad, was looking for unused assets to liquidate to help fund the company’s expansion plans. He identifies 900,000 surplus acres of undeveloped land in the Pacific Northwest that the company would probably never use, and brokers its sale to a 66-year-old German in the region, Friedrich Weyerhäuser, who said he was looking for “a little peace and quiet close to nature.”

1901: Department store salesman Harold Adolphus Richmond gets chewed out by his boss, which affects his mood the rest of the day. One customer, a 30-year-old Swede named Johan W. Nordström, is unimpressed with Richmond’s customer service skills, and knows he could do a better job. Richmond eventually enjoys moderate success selling buggy whips.

1909: Shortly before the Seattle Grand Cotillion Ball, local debutante Bessie Iona Ricketts has an argument with her date, the 27-year-old president of the Greenwood Logging Co., and decides to stay home. Her erstwhile date, William E. Boeing, goes instead to check out the flying machines he’d been hearing about at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Ricketts dies a spinster.

1939: Over an oyster dinner, David Glenn, a field engineer for the Public Works Administration, tells his friend Melvin Franklin, a local insurance adjuster, that his boss overrode his rejection of the flawed Tacoma Narrows Bridge design to “save two cents.” Franklin feels sick hearing this, partly from knowing of the new policy on the bridge awaiting approval at General Insurance, but also from a fatal case of shellfish poisoning that will prevent him from acting on this new information.

1975: Albuquerque Police sergeant David Garcia scowls at the
21-year-old kid brought in for speeding and driving without a license.
“You’re not from around these parts, are you?” he asks the young,
bespectacled man. “I got my eye on you.” The young man pulls $1,000 cash
out of his wallet to pay his bail and quietly decides to blow town and
take his software company with him. Garcia retires to Jemez Pueblo in
1980.