With his work on the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board and his work on a new book, CHS hasn’t seen as many of Rob Ketcherside’s one-of-a-king meldings of Capitol Hill past and present recently. The fruits of that absence, however, are ready for you to enjoy on a local bookstore shelf near you and in upcoming appearances at Elliott Bay Book Company and the Seattle Public Library. Ketcherside’s Lost Seattle is a look at pieces and parts of the city that have faded away into the background. Ketcherside pulls as many as he can back to the surface — including a couple of pieces of Capitol Hill’s lost past:

As I mentioned, I have two articles about Capitol Hill: Broadway High and Auto Row. For the Broadway High article, I chose 1946 as the date that it was “lost”. Most people would probably look at 1974 as the end date, when Seattle Central demolished the buildings. I chose the earlier date, when the high school was displaced by veteran school programs and students were moved to Garfield, Lincoln, and Queen Anne highs. Here’s my sidebar on Adele Parker, a teacher at Broadway High from its start to the 1920s. She’s fascinating and there hasn’t been a lot written about her. In my Re:Take articles on CHS I learned the joy in going on tangents about interesting people, and I manage to do that at least a few times in Lost Seattle.

Here’s the piece on Parker.

ADELE PARKER

Broadway High School’s civics and economics teacher was representative of the school’s energetic and progressive staff. Adele Parker came to Seattle with her parents in 1886 at age 17. Her father was a lumberman and land developer, and also involved in progressive politics. While teaching high school Adele Parker graduated in 1903 from the University of Washington’s new law school. Of course she used this new expertise to improve her curriculum. But she also was an active member of Seattle’s women’s suffrage movement and an activist for good government. She campaigned for women’s voting rights for 20 years leading up to the successful 1910 election, including writing articles for a regional magazine. Parker also wrote the Seattle city charter amendments for initiatives, referendums, and recall. Recall was used in 1911 to kick out Mayor Hiram Gill and clean up his corrupt cronies. In 1921 she resigned from Broadway High and set off for Moscow in Soviet Russia, where she hoped to write a book describing the economic and political experiment as it unfolded. She planned six weeks to arrive there, but it took more than a year of travel through Siberia and Russia including two deportations. Along the way she married one of her fellow travelers, hydraulic engineer Kay Bennett. Back in Seattle, Adele Parker Bennett was elected as State Representative for King County in 1935.

You can see Ketcherside at his December 7th appearance at Elliott Bay Books or at a December 14th reading at the downtown SPL branch. Enjoy his CHS Re:Take articles here.