Walt Crowley

Since before Seattle voters decided in 1902 to build their own lighting plant, City Light has been a source of fierce civic pride for its independence from "foreign" corporations, its impressive public works projects, and its consistently low electricity rates. It has also been a headache for competitors, managers, and politicians. In the first years of the electric age, when Seattle was still a hard-scrable frontier town, power was supplied by a revolving cast of small private utilities remembered mostly for frequent mergers with rivals and mediocre service at high cost. The failure of the privately owned water company to deliver enough of its product to quell Seattle's Great Fire of 18889 got city officials and residents thinking about an alternative utility model--municipal ownership. Voters quickly approved a municipal wter system, and within a decade had laid the groundwork for an electric utility. City Light quickly began a campaign of dam construction that for most of the twentieth century provided Seattle with the cheapest electricity of any major city in the country.This brisk history traces the utility's origins to 1889 and follows its story through the national energy crisis of 2000-2001 up to the present. It is a quintissentially Northwest story.

In the spring of 1898, a 5-year-old Seattle boy named Willis Clise suffered and eventually died of what was called "inflammatory rheumatism." There was no treatment,and no doctor west of Philadelphia who specialized in childhood ailments. Willis's mother, Anna Clise, embarked on a mission to create an association dedicated to providing surgical and other hospital care to children, regardless of class, race, or ability to pay.She organized a board of like-minded Seattle women and in 1908 opened an eight-bed treatment and recovery facility. Today Seattle Children's is a regional medical center, a leader in pediatric medicine research, and is consistently ranked among the top 10 children's hospitals in the nation. This book recounts the history of a remarkable institution and its impact on Seattle and on the thousands of patients it has served.Seattle historian Walt Crowley was the author of more than a dozen books and a cofounder of HistoryLink.org. David W. Wilma, former HistoryLink.org deputy director, is a freelance writer.

From wagon trails to interstate highways, this book retraces how the leaders and employees of the Washington State Department of Transportation and their predecessors helped to shape Washington's transportation system during a century of technological revolution and dramatic transformation of its communities and landscapes. Washington's transportation system includes one of the nation's finest road networks, an internationally renowned ferry system, passenger and freight rail, statewide airports, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, and a myriad of other programs.

On a hot summer night in 1963, a teenager named Walt Crowley hopped off a bus in Seattle's University District, and began his own personal journey through the 1960s. Four years later at age 19, he was installed as "rapidograph in residence" at the Helix, the region's leading underground newspaper. His cartoons, cover art, and political essays helped define his generation's experience during that tumultuous decade.Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle weaves Crowley's personal experience with the strands of international, intellectual, and political history that shaped the decade. As both a member and in-house critic of the New Left and counter-culture, the author offers a unique perspective in explaining why the experiments and excess of the period "made sense at the time."Anti-war marches, human be-ins, rock festivals, psychedelic drugs, underground newspapers, free universities, light shows, inner-city riots, radical skirmishes, and hippie antics are chronicled with personal anecdotes, contemporary accounts, and historical insights. In the pages of Rites of Passage, the reader will encounter Black (and White) Panthers, the Seattle and Chicago Seven, Weathermen and Radical Women, and many more remarkable characters.As an engaging blend of history and personal reminiscence, Rites of Passage places the sixties in a context unavailable to its participants at the time. In addition to his text, Crowley has assembled a chronology of the decade beginning with its harbingers in the forties and fifties and continuing through its aftermath. This compilation covers political, social, and cultural events, and provides the most complete synopsis of sixties history now in print.