Seattle P-I advertisement, courtesy of Jean Godden. View more Seattle P–I photos.

The History of the Post-Intelligencer

03/09/2009

The Seattle Post–Intelligencer traces its origins to the Seattle Gazette, founded in 1863. Through the decades, the paper has been marked by its Hearst ownership and its rivalry with The Seattle Times. P–I journalists have described the paper as a nutty, swinging, hard–drinking and courageous place to call home. In part one of our series, KUOW's Amy Radil speaks to some veteran reporters to get a sense of the paper's illustrious past.

Shelby Scates was a celebrated political reporter at the Seattle P–I in the 1960s and 1970s. When he walked in the door at the paper, he says the newsroom looked like something straight out of the movie "The Front Page" — a hard–drinking, hard–working culture.

Scates: "Part of the reason, I think, for that was damn near everybody when I went to work for the P–I was a veteran of some sort: Korean War, World War II. I was also a veteran. Very very different atmosphere. Now, if you walked in there with a cigarette in your hand, they probably might call the police."

Scates is 77 years old now and lives in West Seattle. We meet at an Irish pub on Alki, which seems fitting, considering the newsroom culture he remembers. Scates spent time covering the state capitol in Olympia.

It was a state legislator named Bob Perry who handed Scates one of his biggest stories. Perry was fleeing federal corruption charges and feared for his life. His bodyguard phoned the P–I and said Perry wanted to tell his story to Scates and turn himself in.

Scates: "So, we sat there for two hours and Perry spilled his guts. He told the story of how he was paid for this bill and that bill and who doled out the money and who he subsequently gave money to. It was a hell of a story, to put it mildly."

But Scates says the biggest public reaction he ever got was when he wrote a story about racial discrimination within Husky football in the late 1960s.

Scates: "It seems incredible now but it was almost like we'd attacked the church and cast racial aspersions on the Pope. The phones came off the hook in the P–I. Mail poured in. I thought I was going to have to leave town."

That type of muckraking story would never have been written by the P–I's legendary sports editor and columnist Royal Brougham. He once fabricated a story in which Husky football players supposedly visited children in the hospital.

Brougham joined the P–I as a copy boy in 1910 and worked there for 68 years. He orchestrated visits from Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, promoted Seattle sports, and became one of the city's most powerful citizens. He also promoted himself. His colleague, Steve Rudman, once attended a banquet in Brougham's honor where many famous athletes sent congratulatory telegrams.

Rudman: "So, we left the banquet about an hour later to come back and finish the newspaper with a whole new respect for Royal Brougham. And we go back and this copy aid comes over and says, look at this piece of paper. We look at it and all these telegrams were written on this copy paper. Royal wrote them himself and he gave it to the copy aid to take to Western Union to then send to the banquet."

Rudman recalls Brougham's egomania and his massive appetite for hot dogs. But he notes that Brougham also gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in children's scholarships and did a lot for Seattle. Rudman was also there the day Brougham died.

Rudman: "I think it was a game against Denver in the Kingdome in 1978 and Royal had just polished off half–a–dozen hot dogs. And I just heard this loud clang behind me and Royal had fallen down. And all of a sudden this was ambulance time, so we knew that this was serious, and he died of a ruptured aorta."

From the 1940s through the 1980s, the P–I was housed in the building at Sixth and Wall where it acquired its signature neon globe. Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) curator Howard Giske remembers visiting friends in that newsroom in the 1970s.

Giske: "And if it was time to meet those deadlines, it was just a clatter of typewriters and little bells, as the days before the computer had come into the news business. These writers were just flogging those typewriters as hard and fast as they could."

Seattle City Council member Jean Godden went to work in that newsroom in 1974. She says the P–I definitely had its own culture.

Godden: "It was just a little bit more swinging, shall we say, socially."

Part of the difference was dictated by when Seattle's papers went to press. Up until 2000, the Seattle Times was an evening paper. Godden says the Times attracted a more buttoned–down employee.

Godden: "The people at the Times would go to work fairly early, get their work done, and go home and be with their families, cut the lawn. They'd have a peanut butter sandwich in a box for lunch."

Whereas, P–I reporters often had lunch at a watering hole called The Grove, but known as The Grave. And on Friday nights, Godden says the cue for happy hour was the rumble of the presses, printing the first Sunday edition.

Godden: "You couldn't leave until the presses started running, and then you would run across the street to the Grave and everybody would be seated around one of the round tables and you'd be pulling up more and more chairs. And it was very dark and kind of wicked."

The P–I has always been smaller than The Seattle Times. It struggled to survive and has been on the brink of death many times before. In 1983, the Joint Operating Agreement with the Seattle Times was initiated to keep the P–I alive. The Times took over advertising, printing and circulation for both papers.

Editorial cartoonist David Horsey came to the P–I in the 1980s, fresh out of the University of Washington. In those years, Horsey saw the last vestiges of the old–school newsroom. He also published one of his most inflammatory cartoons, about the proposal to build the Tacoma Dome.

Horsey: "I did a cartoon imagining what the Tacoma Dome would look like. It had bowling and topless dancing and pull tabs. Uh, anyway, we got an enormous reaction from people in Tacoma who were strangely sensitive to some Seattle punk making fun of them."

The P–I was inundated with letters and phone calls once again.

Horsey: "I learned both the effect my cartoons could have and also to not pick on Tacoma anymore."

Then the P–I moved to its current building along the water on Elliott Avenue. The hush of computers replaced the clatter of typewriters.

Horsey says the 1990s were a career–building time for him. And in 1999 his work won the P–I's first Pulitzer.

Horsey: "That was the day I learned that champagne in your eyes is very painful."

Horsey won a second Pulitzer in 2003. He was in Washington D.C. chronicling the first 100 days of Barack Obama's presidency this year, until news from his own paper brought him home. Hearst announced it could no longer take the P–I's financial losses, and would close the paper if a buyer was not found.

Sports columnist Art Thiel says his paper was never expected to last this long.

Thiel: "We did quite well, I think, to get this far, in a situation where our doom was forecast on an almost annual basis, by the pundits and seers who said we weren't going to make it. So there is certainly a lot of pride, but that hasn't stopped the hurt and despair over the end of 146 years of journalism. This is the oldest continuous business in this city, and it's going to be over, and it is going to be very, very hard on March 19."

It's not clear yet when the presses at the P–I could stop. Employees expect the Post–Intelligencer to continue in some form online, but they doubt it will be capable of bringing in fugitives and documenting discrimination as in the paper's proud history.

Amy Radil, KUOW News.

© Copyright 2009, KUOW