I wouldn't want to live there

The normal reply when the Seattle area is mentioned is that the person wouldn’t want to live there.

I remember when my family learned we were going to move to the Seattle area.

All we could think of was the things we could do in a large city. This was in 1964. We were so surprised that you could drive downtown and park right next to a movie house. We were in Bothell at the time. I fished off the dock in Edmonds, visited every art gallery in town and most of the museums.

Our neighbors were friendly enough, and we largely kept to ourselves.

After a few years things started to change. Traffic was building up. The things we enjoyed doing were not as much fun, and it seemed that a lot of people had a chip on their shoulder.

I was involved in a newspaper and periodically had calls to make in downtown Seattle. I could only make a couple of calls in one day because of traffic and parking.

That’s when I started thinking about living here. We lived in Bothell, about 16 miles from downtown, and we noticed that Bothell was even busier.

It seemed that people had two or more cars and that they were all on the road at the same time.

We had lived in the coulee area just prior to going to Seattle, and both of us, my wife and I, came from small towns; I was from Palouse sand my wife came from a farm near Buhl, Idaho.

I frequently was called to go to Bellevue for corporate meetings, and while the 405 freeway was only a half mile from the house, it often took an hour or so to go to Bellevue, some 16 miles away. I got a call of a meeting in Bellevue and allowed an hour to go the 16 miles.

It wasn’t enough time, and I was 45 minutes late.

That was the beginning of the end. We took a long weekend and drove to the Coulee Dam area where we had friends from our first time here.

That was when I first met Merle Kennedy, and before I knew it, I had purchased a house here. I had made up my mind that I didn’t want to live in the Seattle area.