Sunday At The Seattle Center, January 13, 2013

The Monorail between Experience Music Project Buildings - I took the bus up not remembering the monorail because my visits to the center have been rare

Since 2009 I have done volunteer work at the Pacific Lutheran University's Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Archives. Part of my inspiration for this has been a program early in the first Barack Obama administration for senior volunteers.

Before the StandUp Washington March for gun control from Westlake Mall to the Seattle Center on Sunday, January 13, 2013, I visited the Seattle Center. My thoughts were with 1962 and the Seattle World's Fair.

Stanley Ann Obama, according to historians, moved to Caspitol Hill from Hawaii in 1961 to attend the University of Washington Fall, Winter, Spring, 1961-1962. She got very good grades. With her was Barack Obama, a month old. It is unusual for Washington State to be where a United States President has lived. Older people who remember the 1962 World's Fair can place themselves where they afterwards kept noticing the Space Needle.

Can Stanley Ann Obama have attended high school games at the memorial field before the family moved to Hawaii? I learned that the deliberated choice for the World's Fair became the area with the Armory and the Memorial Stadium. The fair was partly a preservation achievement.

My thought is that Stanley Ann Obama held the Space Needle in her thoughts as a university student but only peripherally. Students focus on campus and their studies. I went to the U of W. On Sunday as I started for Westlake from the Center I realized I could get the monorail, I took the bus up not remembering the monorail because my visits to the center have been rare.

For me to volunteer at the Scandianvian Immigrant Experience archive was an desireable choice. Once I visited the National Archives at the Washington D.C. National Mall and glimpsed on microfilm what I was sure was my grandfather's passenger arrivals record. Later I made a microfilm copy of this at the Northwest Region's National Archives, which I found on the Sand Point Way bus line north of the University of Washington. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, I made microfilm copies of genealogy material. For others these were computer years, for me these were genealogy reference book and microfilm viewer years.

Another record I found, in the 1928 Seattle City Directory, was at 133 Nob Hill, my aunt Christine and her husband, Dewitt. Closest to this address now is the Seattle Center's Peace Garden.

The Peace Garden, 133 Nob Hill

My grandfather was the earliest of any of my immediate ancestors to arrive. It was 1881; (the spring after Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter). His earliest child, Christina, was born in Iowa in January 1892. In her mid-thirites, Christine became blind with glaucoma. Once I included the time I met Christine in a narrative poem (A Poem About My Father, Shelter, 1985, Dragon Gate Press) - but I had been mistaken about the American Religion she and her husband belonged to. Christine and Dewitt were not Fundamentalist, they were Jehovah's Witnesses.

The Sweden Pavilion, Still Used at the Center