A Magnifying Lens on How Seattle was Built: New Jim Ellis Autobiography

Jim Ellis, that indefatigable pillar of Seattle who lived from 1921 to 2019, worked for many years on his memoir. He never finished it, but thanks to Jennifer Ott of HistoryLink.org, it is now out as a book called Jim Ellis: A Will to Serve, co-published by University of Washington Press and HistoryLink.

To make it short enough to be published, editor Ott pruned out the repeated stories, sacrificed the ancestral material, penned some new material, and nixed Ellis’s working title (“Friends Along the Way”). What remains, cautious and diplomatic as it is, is a deeply satisfying book about the way Seattle used to operate.

The autobiography provides detailed and presumably very accurate accounts of the creation of Metro (cleaning up Lake Washington), Forward Thrust (capital projects such as the Kingdome, but falling short of funding rail transit), Mountains to Sound Greenway, and Ellis’s time as a UW Regent and Ford Foundation board member. The measures were sometimes too ambitious, underfunded, spread thin to capture votes, and too hard to sustain (such as wedging ACT Theatre into the underbelly of the Convention Center).

They reflected, as Ellis did, a generation raised in the Depression to mind the pennies. They also were very devoted to accessible outdoor recreation for the family, as Ellis was. Ellis was a bond attorney trained to avoid even the slightest mistakes (lest lawyers pounce). Some ideas, such as the siting of the Convention Center in a geographically challenged site over the I-5 Freeway, were probably mistakes. Others depended on a future generation of civic-minded mini-Ellises that never appeared. Even so, it is a heroic and visionary life that shaped modern Seattle.

One example of the too-discrete story-telling in the book concerns downtown Seattle’s Freeway Park. Ellis once told me the juicy version of the story. Seattle Mayor Dorm Braman, stung by KING radio’s Irving Clark, suddenly quit the mayor’s post and prevailed on the super-connected Ellis, a progressive Republican, to get Braman a job as Secretary of Transportation (Nixon has just been elected, but had promised the job to Massachusetts Governor John Volpe, who appointed Braman as an undersecretary, gave him a huge office, and froze him out.)

Months later, according to the Ellis story he told me, Ellis called Braman to see how the former mayor was liking his new federal job. Not at all, was the bored reply. Ellis told Braman that he could fund Freeway Park by diverting freeway funds to build it, expertly give Braman a task of his own. In the book, Ellis tells a bland version. Again, one marvels at the obstacles (freeway noise, expense, safety, tree roots) that appealed to Ellis’s problem-solving ambitions.

At another saga, Ellis describes his meeting with the American League to try to pry a baseball team for the Kingdome that Forward Thrust had built. “There was a knock at the door from one of our $200,000 subscribers. After brief pleasantries, he announced to Eddie [Carlson] that he expected to be named team manager…or he would withdraw his [badly needed] subscription.” Carlson told him no way, and scrounged up the money and saved the team. A lively story, but the extorting executive is never named!

The book is a magnifying lens on the way Seattle was built. The values were simple and very middle class: “open space, clean water, and bus service.” The teams Ellis built to pull off these feats were extensive, mostly white male lawyers. Both daily newspapers signed loyalty oaths and boosted the ideas. (I once asked Ellis if a Forward Thrust 2.0 would be possible, and he said no way, because media have turned critical.)

Organizations like the Municipal League (2,500 members then, zero now), and the League of Women Voters (notably Madeline Lemere) were loyal and active and specialized in what was Ellis’s secret weapon, called “neighboring.” Above all, Ellis had a genius in persuasion for the “long view,” worked stupendous hours, was modest but very ambitious, kept all the details and strategy in his head, and liked to “run the railroad.” 

There are lots of hero-helpers in the book: Tom Gibbs of Metro, Rep. Bob Greive, Slade Gorton, Dick Page, Mayor Gordon Clinton, Sally Jewell, Floyd Miller, Ed Munro.  First among the heroines is Mary Lou Ellis, who was famously sensible, connected, optimistic (she was raised a Christian Scientist), and inventive (she cooked up the slogan Forward Thrust). The book is a tender love story of Hym and Beaver (nicknames for Jim and Mary Lou).

In one revealing illustration, when Ellis was working full time on the Forward Thrust campaign to the point of developing a perforated ulcer, Walter Straley, president of Pacific Northwest Bell, made Ellis an offer to pay him $35,000 a year for two years, just to have him work on his civic crusade. Ellis was excited, but Mary Lou talked him out of it: “How can you ask volunteers to work for nothing, when you are making good money?” Ellis remarks, “As usual her intuition was right.”

A friend of Ellis once told me that this civic paragon often started out with the wrong idea but then, by analysis and conferring with many others, got himself to the right position (often too late). The snake in this civic Eden was growth. The city, despite Ellis’s warnings, outgrew its infrastructure and its confined geography. It also outgrew its middle-class value structure when the prosperity bomb (Danny Westneat’s valuable phrase) exploded over the region and torpedoed the civic spirit. Ellis was himself an apostle of growth, as was his era, and his tragedy was that he was unable to corral it.

But, lordy, did he try!