The Senior Scene

It’s college football season, and there also is some déjà vu in the air for University of Washington fans who remember the Huskies’ fortunes in the 1970s.

The Huskies of 2022 have a new head coach, Caleb DeBoer, whose background up to now of relative obscurity in college coaching, plus the uneasy situation he’s stepping into, is reminiscent of the era that began 50-plus years ago with the debut of Don James as UW’s coach.

Remember? After some uncharacteristic losing seasons under then-coach Jim Owens, Washington turned to James in hope that his success at relatively unknown Kent State University (the school who DeBoer will face in his debut Sept. 3) would translate to gridiron glory for the Huskies. Ditto for DeBoer, who, with previous success at Fresno State and tiny University of Sioux Falls (in South Dakota), is taking the Huskies’ reins after their flop of a 2021 campaign. UW fans, including those who wonder if his coaching pedigree is sufficient to reignite their team, will be over-the-moon happy if DeBoer can eventually replicate the turnaround that James accomplished.

When Washington began the 1977 season with a 1-3 record, fans were restless. In his third year at the helm, James had a 12-14 record amid widespread discontent. That started changing on Oct. 8, when Washington demolished Oregon 54-0. The Huskies won the rest of their games that year and stunned heavily favored Michigan in the Rose Bowl behind Warren Moon, who overcame struggles as Washington’s first black quarterback and was named the game’s most valuable player.

James’ Huskies became known for disciplined play, tough hitting, ferocious defense, and winning. The 1979 team finished 10-2 and upset Texas in the Sun Bowl. The 1980 and 1981 teams went to the Rose Bowl, with the latter squad blanking Iowa 28-0. In 1984, Washington beat Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl to finish 11-1 and ranked No. 2 in the country. That same year, Sports Illustrated named what it considered the top three coaches in college football: “1. Don James, 2. Don James, 3. Don James.”

In December 1991, as the undefeated Huskies prepared to play Michigan again in the Rose Bowl, no less than then-President George H. W. Bush was among the well-wishers gushing over James’ selection as national college football coach of the year.  The Huskies backed up the honor in front of 103,566 spectators in Pasadena, Calif. and millions of TV viewers by trouncing Michigan 34-14. The Huskies were declared national champions by the CNN/USA Today Coaches Poll after completing UW’s first undefeated team since 1916.

Then came trouble. On Nov. 5, 1992, five days after Washington beat Stanford for its 22nd win in a row, news broke that UW quarterback Billy Joe Hobert received loans totaling $50,000 from an Idaho scientist named Charles Rice. A month later, The Los Angeles Times began a series of articles questioning the integrity of the Washington football program and whether James was heading an outlaw program.

In August  1993, following a six-month investigation, the Pac-10 Conference put Washington on a two-year bowl probation and docked the Huskies 20 player scholarships and $1.4 million in television revenue–the most severe punishment in conference history. Conference investigators detailed 24 allegations referencing Hobert, Husky boosters, and manipulated expense reports by student hosts.

The Pac-10 also stated “there was no evidence that the University of Washington set out to achieve a competitive advantage.” The conference determined Rice wasn’t a booster and had no connection to the university, and that although Rice’s loan was inappropriate because it was predicated on Hobert’s projected earnings as a professional player, it was “inconclusive” whether UW coaches should have known about its existence. The Pac-10 cited a booster in California for paying Husky players for minimal or non-existent work in summer jobs. (Today, college athletes, football players included, can accept money for doing commercial endorsements, appearances and social media posts, writing books, hosting camps, giving lessons, and other commercial activities outside of their schools, all without jeopardizing their standing with their schools and athletic eligibility).

Following the announcement of probation, James resigned in protest, rocking the college football world. While being lauded by some of his supporters, he was criticized by others for abandoning his players at such a difficult time.

James, who never coached again, later claimed UW had turned its back on him and the team, leaving them to the Pac-10’s mercy. He said he told the school’s administrators that “if this university isn’t going to support us any better than that, after all the money these players have made for them, then I’m not going to work here any more.”

James, who died in 2013 at the age of 80, rolled up 153 victories with the Huskies, the most of any coach in UW history, dating to 1889. Now it’s DeBoer’s turn.

 

On a sunny Friday, the Browns Point Playfield courts in Tacoma were filled. Two athletic youngsters faced off against a retiree and a man using a leg brace. In the far court, an octogenarian played a younger newbie. Laughter rang out and jokes flew among the participants playing pickleball.

“It’s fun, it’s social, it can include everybody,” said Tom Yee, Metro Parks Tacoma’s pickleball supervisor, who runs the Browns Point sessions. “And you feel like a kid again when you play.”

Pickleball is Washington’s state sport. The Browns Point participants have grown to 150 players in just over a year, and Metro Parks is resurfacing outdoor courts and expanding indoor sessions to allow more people to play.

“It’s getting so popular,” said Parker Ayers, recreation supervisor. “We heard that people wanted more places for pickleball, so we’re creating more.”

Browns Point Playfield is one of those.

Pickleball courts also exist at the Vassault, Jefferson and Stewart Heights parks, and indoor drop-in sessions are hosted at the Norpoint, People’s and Eastside Community Centers, with equipment for loan.

The sport was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island as a family game on a home court, and it has taken off more recently, especially in the Northwest. Although it’s played in a four-quartered rectangle like tennis, it’s actually more like a giant version of ping pong, with similar paddles and a hard plastic ball (the latter is similar to a Wiffle ball). Competitors can play singles or doubles, or keep switching people in and out of the game. Either way, the focus is on strategy rather than athletic running and slamming.

With 35 percent growth nationally over the last three years, pickleball was recently featured on ABC television’s “Good Morning America,” and NBC News has called it “the fastest-growing sport you’ve never heard of.”

“This is a wildly popular sport because it’s a very entry-level activity and everyone is invited to the party,” said Ayers. “I can have a person in a sports wheelchair playing their able-bodied friend, or a 90-year-old man playing his 9-year-old grandson. It’s unique in who it can serve.”

“Playing social sports is so important for keeping people healthy at all ages, and pickleball is a sport for everybody,” said Metro Parks Commission member Aaron Pointer. “We’re really happy that Metro Parks can listen to our community and add more ways to play.”

At the Browns Point Playfield courts, one of the players is Yee’s 88-year-old mother, Pat (“It’s fun and good exercise”), and sister Teresa Hoggarth, who said playing makes her “feel young and competitive again. And you make so many new friends.”

Clare Broadhead, taking a break from a singles game with Pat, said she and her husband “are new to the area, and during (the pandemic) it was hard to meet people. This is so much fun and easy to pick up, and people are really welcoming. The courts are smaller, so you can have conversations all the time.”

On the doubles court were John Turnquist, a 74-year-old playing with a hip replacement and knee brace, playing doubles with Mike Williams against former tournament tennis player Tara Kleca and 29-year-old Christian Meister, a former minor-league baseball pitcher.

“This is physical therapy,” said Turnquist. “It’s kept me moving for five years.”

For Williams, it’s about the exercise and meeting “a bunch of people. And you know how you felt as a kid going out to recess? That’s how it feels playing pickleball.”

Beginners can get their start in pickleball by visiting one of Metro Parks’ community centers and using the equipment there. Players who have their own paddles can show up at Browns Point Playfield any weekday morning from 9 to 11am, or bring a friend to the courts at Stewart Heights, Vassault and Jefferson. Updates and opportunities are online at metroparkstacoma.org/pickleball.

 

Source: Metro Parks Tacoma

After 96 years as a landmark overlooking Puget Sound, the Masonic Home of Washington in Des Moines is facing an uncertain future.

Completed in 1926 as a retirement community for members of Washington’s Masonic Society, the stately structure features box beam ceilings, hand-carved woodwork, stained glass, and terrazzo floors. By 2004, the Masonic Grand Lodge of Washington started market the property as a traditional retirement home, open to Masons and non-Masons alike, but the economic recession put those plans on hold. Instead, the ornate building and grounds, became a venue for weddings, film shoots, and corporate meetings.

The property was put up for sale in 2013, and event-center operations ceased the next year. It was sold in 2019 to EPC Holdings LLC for $11.5 million and was transferred to Zenith Properties LLC, leading to an application to the city of Des Moines for a permit to demolish the building, which the Masons reportedly estimate needs $40 million in upgrades. Since then, city officials and the property owner have been in discussions about the proposed demolition and new uses of the site. As of this summer, the city hadn’t taken final action on the plans.

The Masonic Home, in its current state, has support from the public for keeping it the way it is in some form. Backers include Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, a non-profit organization that in 2015 placed the edifice on its Most Endangered Places list.

Washington Trust, an advocate for saving historic sites statewide, has encouraged the city to require alternatives to demolition as part of its review and studies of proposals for the Masonic Home and property on Marine View Drive South.

By Robert Horton/Crosscut.com

If Jean Walkinshaw were making a documentary about herself, how might she begin the film?

Perhaps she would start off with an introductory statement: Jean Walkinshaw is a pioneering, prolific, yet overlooked figure from Northwest filmmaking history, the producer of dozens of non-fiction films from the early 1960s to the present.

Or might she begin with a grabby detail, a hook to keep you watching? Something like the moment in 2013 when she got a phone call from someone at KCTS, Seattle’s public broadcasting station (and Crosscut’s sister organization), informing her that a Channel 9 employee had noticed some of her original tapes and films stacked in a hallway. Thinking they were in danger of being thrown out, the employee had taken the tapes and hidden them in an electrical closet at the station until some sort of rescue mission could be made.

As alarming as the phone call was, it led directly to Walkinshaw recovering a huge amount of her material and, years later, to her work being celebrated and catalogued online by the prestigious American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The robust Jean Walkinshaw Collection was released online in 2021.

The narrator of this imagined film profile might pause here to note that Walkinshaw, having not worked at the station since 2003, was in her mid-80s when that phone call came — a poignant detail in an already arresting story.

But, in reality, few of Walkinshaw’s films rely on narrators. “My method,” she explained from her home in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, “is letting people tell their own stories in their own words.” It’s a technique she adopted early in her career.

“I was of a philosophy then that you mustn’t have narrators, because it was them telling you what to think from on high,” she said. “And I wanted to really dig what the person said.”

We’ll try to honor that method and let Jean Walkinshaw tell most of her own story in her own words. But first, cue the narrator to supply a few biographical basics.

 

Jean Walkinshaw (née Strong) was born in 1926 in Tacoma, into a family with deep Northwest roots. After graduating from Stanford University and traveling to Japan in 1951 to build houses in a still-devastated Hiroshima (a project led by the celebrated peace activist Floyd Schmoe, the subject of a later Walkinshaw documentary), she married a lawyer she met at a Quaker meeting, Walt Walkinshaw. For the next six decades, they embodied a certain kind of Northwest progressive ideal, promoting causes and advancing the idea that Seattle might be a great city and not merely — as any longtime Seattleite can quote — a “cultural dustbin,” in the notorious phrase of conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.

Walkinshaw’s career as a documentarian began through luck and proximity.

“I came into it through knowing the right people at the right time,” she remembers. “My husband was a good friend of Stim Bullitt, who was head of KING broadcasting company. This was when television was so young, and Stim didn’t have much respect for it, but he was put in charge of the station by his mother (the late Dorothy Bullitt, who was the first broadcaster here in the Northwest. He wanted to upgrade everything. Stim came to my door one day and asked me to come to KING television — and Stim was way ahead of his time, a strange guy, a wonderful guy — but he brought me to KING to do this little morning show once a week on interesting women. Women weren’t supposed to be interesting in those days; we were to cook and be nice and obey our husbands.

“I was teaching school at Bellevue Junior High. We didn’t even have a television set for our kids, but I thought ‘This is an interesting thing to do. KING was wonderfully alive in those days — Stim brought a lot of movers and shakers, mostly (East Coast) elite. So you can imagine how popular I was. And I was never very good on camera. Oh, dear heaven, the director of programming brought me in and gave me hell for my performance after a year, and I wrote a letter of protest and said, ‘How dare you treat me this way.’ At that point, in a huff, I registered at the University of Washington to study television.”

Walkinshaw took classes on TV production from Milo Ryan, another mighty figure from Seattle broadcasting history and the first director of programming at Seattle’s new public-TV station, KCTS. Ryan became another of her mentors, and Walkinshaw was soon working with him on a new project at the station.

“I am a person of causes,” Walkinshaw said, and by that point she already had the idea that TV might be used to investigate social issues. She contacted one of the “interesting women” from her KING series, Roberta Byrd Barr — who would later become the first Black principal of a Seattle school — to host a series called “Face to Face.” Byrd’s cut-to-the-chase style and telegenic charisma dovetailed neatly with Walkinshaw’s crusading instincts. “Face to Face” quickly moved from KCTS to KING, gaining national acclaim. “The right thing at the right time,” said Walkinshaw.

“Once I went to KCTS,” she said, I was put with a marvelous, funny photographer, Wayne Sourbeer. Wayne came to it as a still photographer; I came at it as an idealist wanting to use the medium to get my ideas out. And it was Wayne, really, who taught me a huge amount. He had a Bolex [a Swiss motion picture camera], and he was ahead of his time in letting a woman put her hands on equipment.”

Next came “Faces of the City,” a series of short profiles of mostly non-famous Seattleites. “We weren’t asking the head of the committee to come on, we were asking one of the go-fers. We had a garbageman and a woman who worked nights cleaning rooms. Most of them were people you wonder about: ‘What is their job like?’ They were the people who were striving, working folk,” Walkinshaw related.

Because audiotape was so much cheaper than film, Walkinshaw would record her interviews and let that determine the narrative; then she and Sourbeer would put visuals to the story. “The interviewing was just so important. It was the bones of the show,” she said. “I just felt you should rivet them with your eyes, and don’t start looking at your notes to see what your next question was going to be. Let them take the lead. They’ll give you a bunch of stuff that, if you follow it, is much more interesting than what you preconceived.

“And that’s been my philosophy of producing documentaries. I love this matter of discovery, of hanging loose. I’ve certainly had an outline, but that’s in the background. When I get in the field, I try not to impose what I want people to be. So many of them went in different ways than I anticipated. I never had a writer, I never had anybody to tell me what to do. I didn’t write — I wrote with their words, and I took my voice out completely. Wayne and I would decide on visual equivalents — if (the interviewee) got angry about something, maybe a rose bush with some thorns on it.”

 

Walkinshaw landed a National Endowment for the Arts grant for her 1976 documentary, “Three Artists in the Northwest” — a trio composed of Theodore Roethke, George Tsutakawa and Guy Anderson — which had multiple national airings and won a few regional Emmys. “We were showing off the beauty of our Northwest. It set me on my way,” she said.

For most of the next three decades, Walkinshaw’s way was whatever rang her bell. Her influences included her husband’s environmentalism, her interest in the Asian influence on Northwest culture, and her status as a self-described “peacenik.”

“I had a lot I wanted to say, and I started out being quite didactic, and just wanting to tell people what to think,” she said. “I did one show, “Trident: Supersub or Dinosaur?” (1977). It was about the Trident supersub in Puget Sound, which is lurking there still. And I was almost embarrassed by the show. It was so full of facts and figures, and I was trying to do too much and say too much, and I realized that just isn’t me. So I went the other direction and decided, well, if I make things beautiful, maybe I’ll get farther. Bringing human interest — that’s the way I can produce best. I was much better at people. I love people.”

In these documentary portraits, Walkinshaw chased a definition of something she identified as a Northwest Mystique. “Is it an imaginary idea on my part, or are we different? Why is the Northwest the way it is?” Highlights from this era include winning the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism in 1991 for “The Children of the Homeless,” and making KCTS’ first high-definition program, the hour-long “Rainier: The Mountain,” from 2000. And while the Pacific Northwest has been her focus, she has nevertheless strayed enough to make films in places like Ghana and Russia and Japan.

When she parted ways with KCTS during a turbulent station upheaval in 2003, it was a prelude to the dramatic scene 10 years later, when Walkinshaw got that phone call about the discovery of her old tapes. Among the many gems in that pile was an interview with Alan Hovhaness, one of the 20th century’s most prolific composers. “They didn’t want to have this archived stuff any more,” she said. “It was just heartbreaking to me, but we did rescue it.”

With Walkinshaw’s body of work facing obscurity, she coordinated with the enthusiastic staff of SCCtv, Seattle Colleges Cable Television, headquartered at North Seattle College. They brought cars to Channel 9, loaded up cans of film and boxes of VHS tapes, and stored them. “They sat with this material for three years until I could make an agreement with the University of Washington to archive them,” Walkinshaw said. In the meantime, she got a grant to digitize everything, which “just absolutely saved me.”

Walkinshaw continued to produce for SCCtv (“They were some of the most interesting shows I did”), including a series called “Remarkable People,” which featured profiles of writer Charles Johnson, gospel choir leader Patrinell Wright, and community organizer Assunta Ng, among other locals.

At age 80, she learned how to edit, tutored by SCCtv’s Dean Cuccia, who worked on digitizing her tapes. “Now I’m a one-man band,” she jokes. She also heard about the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, an initiative between the Library of Congress and Boston’s public television station WGBH to “preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media.”

And so the American Archive heard about Jean Walkinshaw. “We immediately recognized the significance of this collection, not only in documenting the history, people, culture and environment of the Pacific Northwest, but also as a collection of programs produced by a female pioneer of public media,” said Casey Davis Kaufman, associate director of GBH (formerly WGBH) Archives and project manager at the American Archive.

Kaufman noted Walkinshaw’s work ticked a number of essential boxes, including the preservation of voices of historically marginalized populations, “thanks to Jean’s career in elevating the lesser-known stories of people in underrepresented communities,” and the deep representation of the Northwest. “It has been our mission to fill regional gaps in the collection,” Kaufman added.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s Jean Walkinshaw Collection now boasts 44 documentaries and 200 other items, including raw footage and unedited interviews. If it sounds like vindication and rediscovery for Walkinshaw, that is certainly how the filmmaker herself sees it.

“I’m so happy right now, at the age of 95,” she said. “I feel the full circle has come around. It’s the dream of any producer to have this happen.”

Robert Horton, who wrote this article for Crosscut.com, has been a film critic in Seattle for many years. Crosscut is a non-profit Northwest news site and part of Cascade Public Media.