At 2:38 a.m. on June 11, 1978, the Antonio Chavez, a Greek freighter piloted by an 80-year-old Puget Sound pilot, struck the Spokane Street Bridge, locking the north span in an open position. The damaged low-level bascule bridge seemed to be giving Seattle “the bird.”
Amid resulting confusion, the bridge tender mistakenly phoned former mayor Wes Uhlman, who hollered into the phone, “Call the goddamned mayor, will you?” By the time newbie Mayor Charles Royer answered the bridge tender’s call, all he could think to say was “Seize that vessel!”
The next day, Royer and city officials soberly assessed the situation. They figured they could count on help from Seattle’s Brock Adams, then Secretary of Transportation, and also from rock-solid Sen. Warren Magnuson, still chair of Appropriations and known for his “little amendments.”
Lending a major boost was Seattle City Councilmember Jeanette Williams. Determined to deliver a high-level bridge to West Seattle, Williams called in funds from the state, Port of Seattle and King County. The result: a lofty bridge above the Duwamish Waterway was under construction by 1981 and finished in 1984 during Royer’s second term. Later named the “Jeanette Williams Memorial Bridge,” the bridge would nevertheless become one of the many accomplishments of Charles Royer’s 12 years leading this city from being a semi-obscure outpost to being named the nation’s “most livable city.”
That Royer would accomplish so much during his three terms in office wasn’t apparent from the beginning. A nightly news analyst at KING-TV, he was only one of the 15 contenders seeking the office that two-term Mayor Uhlman was leaving. Included in the crowd were four of the nine councilmembers: Phyllis Lamphere, Sam Smith, John Miller, and Wayne Larkin. There were two high-profile outsiders who survived the primary election: Royer and Paul Schell, director of the city’s department of Community Development.
The knock against Charley Royer from the beginning was that he had virtually no government experience, save two years as PTA president of Nathan Eckstein. Nevertheless, he was a familiar face, having delivered pithy commentaries nightly on the much-watched KING-TV.
Royer’s stump speech had focused primarily on the public schools, on the need for school desegregation, and for making Seattle “a kids’ place.” His rhetoric sounded strangely misplaced. When he first appeared before those of us on the Seattle P-I editorial board, he devoted the bulk of his time to talking about Seattle schools and less about the other needs of the city.
After he left the meeting, we were all shaking our heads. My boss, editorial page editor Jack de Yonge, asked, “What did he say he was running for? For mayor? Could have sworn he wants to teach school.”
Still Royer scored points with Seattle voters by tapping into the neighborhood/populist anti-freeway mood and opposition to the 14-lane proposed Interstate 90 expansion. His campaign leaned heavily on his brother Bob Royer, who had also worked for KING, and their mutual friend Dick Kelly. Charley’s wife, Rosanne Royer, daughter of Serbo-Croatian immigrants, made use of her local connections. In addition, he had unacknowledged support of former colleagues in the KING newsroom.
His energetic campaign was one of Charley’s strengths. The Weekly’s editor/publisher David Brewster reported, “Royer was the only one whose campaign has any feeling of energy and freshness.”
But if “campaigning as fun” was one of Royer’s strengths, governing initially came off as less than fun, fraught with errors and false starts. The city’s daily newspapers, the Seattle Times and P-I, didn’t hesitate to pick on the new administration. They were bitingly sarcastic over Royer’s selecting his younger brother Bob as deputy mayor. At The P-I’s morning editorial board meetings, de Yonge dismissingly referred to “Deputy Bob” and identified the Royer brothers as “CharleyBob.”
It was, however, Bob Royer who delivered one of his brother’s signal achievements. During Charley’s second term, Bob achieved resolution of a decade-long controversy over the plan to raise Seattle City Light’s Ross Dam on the Skagit River. The high-level Ross Dam would have completely flooded a Canadian valley. In exchange for Seattle abandoning the plan, British Columbia agreed to supply an amount of electric power to the city.
Mayor Royer was accomplishing much in other areas as well. He instituted an aggressive recycling program. He oversaw passage of housing levies in 1981 and 1986 that delivered more senior and low-income units than were built in the state of California. He responded to the scandal of Seattle police keeping files on citizens (himself among them) by hiring Patrick Fitzsimmons, the city’s longest serving police chief.
After Royer created the mayor’s Lesbian/Gay Task Force in 1985, he requested and obtained approval from the City Council to recognize LBGTQ+ domestic partnerships with access to city benefits for domestic partnerships. He helped bring the Seattle Art Museum downtown, gave us Westlake Park, and established 20 community health clinics throughout the city.
Once Royer became involved with other elected mayors on the national scene, he discovered a taste for new challenges and began work with the National League of Cities. He was elected league president in 1983, becoming spokesman for American cities on housing, health care, civil liberties, and the needs of children. Several years later in 1989, Seattle was named the “best managed city in the nation” and Royer as the “Distinguished Urban Mayor.”
After completing three successful terms in 1990, Royer left for Boston to become director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Five years later he returned home to Seattle taking a job with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation working on poverty and children’s health. A lifelong baseball fan, Royer was appointed to the Ballpark Public Facilities District. He and his wife Lynn Claudon settled in Pioneer Square and he co-chaired the Friends of Seattle Waterfront Committee realizing his dream helping rebuild the city’s urban waterfront.
Former mayor Greg Nickels was among those who paid tribute to Charley Royer following news of his death on July 26. Nickels called the Royer years “transformative.” Former mayor Norm Rice, who followed Royer in office, noted that “he really did care about people” and “made sure the city was in a good place by the time he was ready to leave.”
Nice piece Jean thanks for this historical refresh – if only the Seattle today was as well run as the city of then…….
What is your take on Bruce Harrels performance to date?
Shortly after Charley’s taking office I was called to a meeting of Charley, Bob, and Jerry Garman, who was Power Manager for Seattle City Light. The City had been on a desperate electricity conservation program, one that enlisted the citizenry, because of a drought. Ppl had cut back their usage drastically. But then the rains came quickly and City Light’s reservoirs were suddenly within inches of the flood control limits. There was no way to halt the conservation effort fast enough to make a difference. Charley wanted to know the options. They weren’t politically palatable, with people still conserving: Generate more power and sell it to California (“for hot tubs,” Charley observed), or sell it to the PNW aluminum producers, whose power supplies the drought had curtailed. The only alternative was to spill water from the reservoirs without using to generate power. Charley asked, “If we spill, can we spill at night?”
Wonderful piece, written with humor and imagination — qualities C. Royer had in abundance. I miss old Seattle.
Thank you, Jean! And I agree with Trish Saunders re your piece.