- Janet Pelz
Like the French bakery whose scent lures me with the promise of butter on the tongue, I’m drawn to Cicada Bridal to tease my fingers across the textures of raw silk and lace. Not to mention dreaming in the stunning designs and outrageously rich colors.
Starting the day at Cicada, 1121 1st Avenue Seattle 98121
I’ve been pulled in like this on several occasions since that magical day 15 years ago when I exited the dressing room in a lavender shantung silk column dress to see my friend Judy dialing her cell phone. “I’m calling Mario’s to tell them not to hold that other dress,” she said nodding at me, “because this is what you’re wearing for your wedding.”
It was an odd place to find a dress shop, on an upper floor of the old Rainier Office Tower, and one that I happened upon only because of an overwhelming need to pee and a memory of the public restroom hidden nearby. It seemed that much more fatalistic to have found this store, clock ticking the days away before my wedding -- way too soon for a future bride with any sense of decency.
I was rescued then by the artistry of Jennifer Gay and Elizabeth Klob, the pair that owns and manages Cicada Bridal as well as designing and sewing the unique pieces of art hanging on the racks where we now sit, in their current shop on First Avenue in downtown Seattle.
As they will do throughout our interview, the two throw back their heads in laughter thinking back to that old location. “What were we thinking? Why would ANYbody open a dress shop there? It was huuuuuuge; it was like an indoor golf course. All the space you could ever wish for, but nobody could find us.”
Playing off each other they recreate some of the more outrageous stories from that phase of their career, including the time an employee took after a thief with a couple of their prized gowns in a backpack. Elizabeth (left) and Jen in the shop
Jen and Elizabeth were in the back of the store, where they spent much of their days at their sewing machines. “You would think half of the dresses would have been stolen,” says Jen laughing.
But as odd a location as that one was, it was at least bigger than their prior 1,200 square-foot shop they shared with the go-to designer for the city’s drag queen clientele. “There was a fire in that building,” says Jennifer thinking back. “A fire, but no flood -- there,” Elizabeth picks up. “We’ve been through fires and at least three floods in our current building. I’ve had our insurance on speed dial. It just happens when you’re a retail shop in an old building and you’re underneath condos with plumbing problems.”
Oh well, just one more obstacle -- rather, learning opportunity as they prefer to call them -- to push through. If they knew when they first met in the basement of Retro Viva, stitching up creations from whatever bolt of fabric awaited them in the morning, that they would journey together through so many misadventures to get where they are today.... OK, after talking with them for a couple hours I have to guess they would probably do it all over again.
“So many young women want to interview us to find out how we did it. Our friend Maggie called. She used to work for us and she’s opening a bridal store in Denver. ‘Oh my God!’, she said, ‘I think about you every single day! How did you do it?’ Here’s how -- we didn’t think about it!”, says Elizabeth, laughing.
“We are hard as nails,” declares Jennifer, seriously. “Yes, we are hard as nails, Elizabeth agrees. “We didn’t have time to think. All these people call us and ask how we did it -- It was really 90 percent balls and ignorance. Really!”
Jennifer can’t wait to agree. “Oh my God, not a day goes by that we don’t fuck something up and learn a valuable lesson.” This line gets them laughing in stereo. “We are crazy!” says Elizabeth, stating the obvious.
Crazy maybe, but after 18 years, also very successful at what they do: designing, sewing, and fitting the perfect dress for any special occasion, from holiday party or prom to wedding.
They met when Jen stopped by Retro Viva to sell some hats she had made. “The big drag queen who worked there was like, you gotta meet Elizabeth down in the basement! And he takes me down to this dank, crap-ass basement, not even a daylight basement, but a basement basement with concrete floors. There’s Elizabeth, working away all by herself down there, weren’t you?” She turns to Elizabeth who throws in a response from the reception desk where she’s attending to details, making it clear that the two are used to jumping seamlessly in and out of each other’s conversation.
Jen joined Elizabeth in the basement until the store owner realized she couldn’t make dresses for less than they cost coming from China, “so she very nicely said, “I don’t think we can do this anymore,” and we said, “well, how about we do it ourselves?
“One of the things that was helpful is that we weren’t friends first. We walked into the relationship like work associates. It was a totally clean slate, with no weird pre-history. I mean, we learned we could work in a basement eight hours a day without killing each other!” laughs Jen.
With a boost from the store owner, who rented them all the equipment at a reasonable rate, they started a wholesale line selling mostly through trade shows. Their showroom was in Georgia “because that’s where our rep was based,” explains Elizabeth. “We were just flying by the design seat of our pants.”
“It was a lot of work for just two people,” adds Jen, thinking back. “You’d get an order for a dozen shirts and you’d have to sit down and make a dozen shirts.”
After listening to them describe fabric shopping trips to the garment district in New York City and a business where items were made in Seattle and sold in Tennessee I asked for specifics, like how much time and money they were putting into those shirts, and how much they had to charge in order to pay themselves?
“Those are GREAT questions that we probably should have been asking ourselves!” answers Jen, laughing once again. “That’s when we realized, we didn’t have any trouble selling our garments,” adds Elizabeth. “We were selling them way too cheap!”
“But then we decided we didn’t really like doing wholesale -- it was kind of soul sucking,” Jen reflects. They were running into problems collecting. Some stores went out of business, others bounced checks. “That was really new to us, having to chase down money. And at the same time we were getting a lot of requests to do wedding dresses. The business kind of suggested itself to us. I think we had done about five or six wedding dresses before we decided to put a really small collection together.”
Jen and Elizabeth will both say that the essence of their job is to make each customer feel exceptionally beautiful. “The thing with wedding dresses, we get to buy really top quality fabrics,” says Jen, and it’s evident that behind that statement lies years of polyester and velour remnants. “Really high quality fabrics and we get to put a lot of time into a very special item.”
(right: Elizabeth describes a gown she particularly likes these days, noting the textures, layering of fabrics and asymmetric hem)
A student of acting, Elizabeth appreciates the dramatic quality of the wedding, with the gown the essential costume. “There are so few rituals left in our lives – I’ve always been drawn to the ritual of a wedding. A woman gets to transform herself as if she’s on stage.”
The two of them take seriously their role in making that transformation exactly what their clients want. Says Elizabeth, “If I were asked, What’s the biggest things that’s saved us? Customer service and really listening to our clients. In this business people are so emotional, there is so much at stake. We hear time and time again about bridal shops that are indifferent to their clients. We really, really take our relationships seriously.” And in return? “We get hugs, tears, thank you letters. For all the trials and tribulations of owning your own business, this really means a lot.”
Jen handles most of the customer service on the floor while Elizabeth does most of the custom work. They credit their solid work relationship to having discreet areas of responsibility “without getting in each other’s hair,” Elizabeth observes. “We used to fight a lot before we did that,” pipes Jen. “We’re both east coast girls, so we speak our minds; we don’t hold back. When something is wrong we get it out!”
There are many gorgeous choices on the floor but if someone is coming in for a specific style, Elizabeth will do a custom design. “I work a lot with full-figured women who can’t get something off the rack but who really want something to flatter them. When we first started out I was eager to please no matter what. And now I’ve gotten to a point where I will not do something that’s not going to look good on the person’s body. I ask them to trust me. Or they say, thank you very much I’ll go elsewhere. But that doesn’t happen too often.”
“She’s very good at looking at a ridiculous number of pictures and distilling them into one dress,” says Jen admiringly of her partner. “You’re really good at that.”
(left: Jen shows one of her favorite party dresses, hand-beaded in India. One thing Jen loves about owning her own store – the ability to pursue new creative directions. “Some work, some don’t” she admits).
Most of their bridal gowns range in price from $1000 - $1700 with a custom design starting at about $2000. Since the economic downturn they’ve added a less expensive line, more appropriate perhaps for a beach or destination wedding. And on the opposite side of the store is a fabulous variety of eclectic designs for special occasions. So even if you aren’t planning a wedding any time soon, there are dozens of reasons to consider a shopping trip – or sensory indulgence – to Cicada. Either Jen or Elizabeth is likely to be the one welcoming you into the shop.
(A bridal gown and evening dress in the Cicada collection. To see more, visit their web site. photos by Rathbone Images)
While they love their work, it’s not all that fills their lives. They both had children during the course of their partnership. “And we’re both really active, creative people outside of work,” says Jen earnestly. For her part, as you might expect of someone who spends her days sewing wedding gowns, she fills her non-work hours playing drums in local punk bands. She started on her son’s rejected miniature drum kit and still takes lessons at Seattle Drum School. “I love learning new things,” she effuses. Click here to listen to her “girl punk” band Minirex, for whom Jen designed the group’s costumes, of course. You can hear her keeping the beat in the sample songs there. Or you can find a youtube video of her playing with Witches Titties in a show with Alice Bag, whom Jen describes as Chicana Punk.
Having a teenage daughter at home with a penchant for reality shows, I had to ask about the impact to their business from shows like “Say Yes to the Dress.”
“I don’t have a television,” admits Elizabeth. Jen has seen the show once or twice when on the road. “Why would people bring so many people to their appointments? And everybody wants to have to have alcohol. We don’t allow that. They need to think about it sober -- we do not want any bubbly decisions that are regretted later.”
For her part, despite the craziness of the business, Elizabeth has nothing to regret. “I want someday to walk out of this and say, that was the best decision I’ve ever made. It’s still what I want to do – I love coming to work everyday and I’m not good working for someone else.”
(In the back of the store where the creations are made)
Jen and Elizabeth’s Not-So-Secrets for How They Do It?
What has Jen read recently?
“I mostly read biographies, non-fiction and brain science books. I lost my appetite for fiction.”
Who should I interview next?
It has been a couple weeks since I posted my story about Detective Cookie, which brought with it a wonderful new friend and some readers new to my site. It’s a nice feeling having a friend in the police department.
I loved Cookie Bouldin’s reaction to seeing her story among all the others I’ve posted: “It makes me want to meet all these amazing women! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all get together and learn from each other?” Which is basically what I hope this web site could do, without the challenges of organizing schedules among a few thousand calendars.
If you’ve learned something from Detective Cookie, I hope you’ll share it with her by clicking the red ‘comment’ link below as others have. Meanwhile, the last additions to her story:
How can you support Detective Cookie’s Urban Chess Club?
Donations can be made to the Seattle Neighborhood Group Inc. for the Urban Youth Chess Club at 1810 East Yesler Way, Seattle, WA 98122. The phone number is (206) 323-9666. SNGI website.
Seattle Police Department Detective Cookie Bouldin protests the shooting death of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. Photo: JOE DYER / SEATTLEPI.COM
Cookie Bouldin’s Not-So-Secrets for How She Does It?
What books has Cookie read recently?
· Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny; by Hill Harper
“Letters to a Young Brother is drawn from the humbling life lessons Hollywood actor Hill Harper learned on the road to his Ivy League education and beyond.” – Amazon review
After being contacted by Detective Bouldin, Harper sent some copies to help her start a book club. “I gave it out to boys who needed that brother. Just yesterday I had a young man call me saying he was in college in Hawaii. I used to see him at the rec center, always with a basketball in his hand. I told him then that he needed to go to college. He thanked me for giving him the book three years ago.”
· Standing Above the Crowd, by (former Seattle Sonic)James Donaldson
“Standing above the Crowd is jam-packed full of success strategies that I've used throughout my life in the areas of athletics, business and community.” -- Donaldson
“James has been a mentor and role model. His book tells you the right things to do -- never be satisfied with someone telling you you’re not good enough, keep going, keep trying. I keep it in my car, close to me all the time.”
- Janet Pelz
It seems like everyone knows Detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, even at the times she hadn’t known herself. In the Chicago projects where she grew up, opportunities to make the wrong choice were a plentiful commodity. But thanks to strict parents and a number of adults who took the time to care, Denise Bouldin learned to know herself. And she’s determined to return the favor those people paid her, in a hundred different ways, every single day.
In a loud and lively lunch spot in Seattle’s Rainier Valley, I wait my turn to say hello to Detective Bouldin. Dressed in police blacks with a purposeful bearing, makeup and nails mastered from her days modeling for Ebony and Jet Magazines, her entrance commands the attention of wait staff and diners alike. She knows someone at every table, shaking hands and patting shoulders, some stopping her proudly to show off their children and grandchildren. She finally takes a seat at my table, but not before her eyes meet most every other pair in the room.
Everybody here knows Detective Cookie.
(photo credit: KING 5 News)
I came to know her after listening to a story about her by Jamala Henderson on our local public radio station KUOW.
I stayed in the car until the piece was over and scribbled a note to myself. It took a while to track her down and find a time to squeeze into her schedule for a quick lunch between two elementary school classroom visits where, as a community relations worker for the Seattle Police Department, she delivers lessons in anti-violence. And chess.
It started like this. A while back she was given the task to organize an activity for kids in the neighborhood – something healthy for them to do while interacting with the police in a positive way. So Officer Cookie organized a basketball game between the neighborhood kids and a police team. It was a rousing success. The kids outlasted their grown-up opponents and relished the chance to rub it in.
So, when time came around the following year for another activity, she assumed she’d be organizing a repeat match.
“But the kids said, Officer Cookie, ‘We don’t want to do a basketball game again. Not all of us play basketball.’ And when I thought about it I realized, there were a lot of kids who didn’t play basketball but just sat and watched. So I asked them, what did they want to do? And a few of them said, ‘Let’s have a chess tournament.’ A chess tournament? That’s the last thing I expected to hear. But I’m saying to myself I gotta make this happen, so I said, OK!”
But then what? Officer Cookie didn’t know much about the game and what she did know, she didn’t particularly like.
“As a kid, I was pretty much brainwashed that I wasn’t smart enough for chess. I never saw a black person playing chess. Never. And then someone showed me all the pieces on the board and said, ok this is what this one do and this one do, and I got frustrated ‘cause I kept forgetting. And I said, you know what? I hate this game, I hate it, hate it, hate it. Don’t ever want to play it again,” she declared, hand sweeping the table as if she were clearing the board. “My brain just wasn’t made for chess. And when anyone would try to teach me I would say, I can’t do it, I’ve tried.”
But this was for the kids, not for her. So she went to the Parks Department and got some chess boards and organized a picnic in a local park.
“So, we got ready for the chess tournament and I set up the boards, and to my surprise there were only a couple of kids who knew how to play chess and the rest of them were just standing around watching. (photo from Detective Bouldin)
“I asked the kids, be honest, how come you don’t play chess? And they would answer, ‘I’m not smart enough to play chess. I don’t play because chess is for smart people. Chess is for white people, for nerds.’ I realized that the answers these kids were giving were the same answers I gave for not playing chess. The same reasons!
“Now, I was a real good, set-the-chess-board-up-person. And making sure kids came. But whenever the kids wanted me to play chess I would just mimic their moves. Wherever they moved their piece, I would move my same piece. I had no clue to why or whatever reason it got there and for what purpose.”
She was getting ready for another such match when she heard a little kid whisper to her opponent. “He was about 4 or 5 years old and he said, ‘don’t worry, you’re going to beat Officer Cookie’, and I’m like, oh no he didn’t! No, he did NOT say that! All I could do was laugh, but he was so right!”
So Officer Cookie connected with the American Foundation for Chess, who promised her she would be playing chess in 30 minutes or less if she came to one of their trainings.
“So I went. And they taught me chess piece by piece. We started with just pawns. And after about 20 minutes, I was playing chess and I was LOVING it, I could not get enough of it. And I wanted to play chess day and night.”
And the more she played chess with kids in the neighborhood, the more she realized that it was much more than a game.
“I use the chess boards to teach anti-violence and to teach about making good choices. Cause if you don’t make good choices, there will be consequences. If you’re so quick to take somebody’s pawn and you don’t notice that there’s this knight over there hoping you make that move so he can take your queen, it’s going to kill you! Same thing on the streets! You’ve got to make this choice -- do you want to be in a gang? Do you want to pick up a gun and shoot somebody? What are the consequences? I’ve had kids tell me, Detective Cookie, you know, chess is like real life! And when a kid tells me that I know I’m getting through.”
(photo from KING 5 News)
Denise Bouldin knows well what real life is like for these kids.
“In my neighborhood people tried to get me to do drugs, to sell drugs, to do prostitution. I refused to do that, basically because my parents were strict. Back in the day, you knew you would get a whipping -- you wouldn’t get a time-out or spanking, you got a whipping. After you get one, you don’t want to get another. That’s not to say I didn’t try. Some times I would meet my friends dressed in hoochie-mama clothes,” she confesses, arching her eyebrows to make sure I knew just what she was saying.
A young Denise showed up once at the local Boys and Girls Club wearing some super-tight pants when an older woman pulled her aside to offer some advice. “She said, you know what? You’re not that type of person. Because of your clothes, it’s going to make people think different of you. She gave me a long talk about it. Back then, everybody could say something to a kid; everybody was your parent. I tell people today, talk to kids, cause sometimes just saying something can make a difference like it did with me.
“I trusted what this lady said and I never dressed like that again. I started thinking about how other people would see me. It made me realize, I had friends who were gang members, but I wasn’t in the gang. I didn’t want to be seen like that so I had to give up some of my friends. Someone could come by in a drive-by shooting, they’re not going to tell me to move aside because I’m not in the gang. They just shoot.”
When Detective Cookie addresses third graders at a south end elementary school, she shares this life history with kids who sit up straight, hands folded on their desks, listening intently.
“There’s going to be times when someone is going to ask you to do drugs -- by the time you get to high school, maybe even middle school. You will have to be ready with your answer. If you have a weak ‘no’ they’ll hear that as a ‘maybe’. Don’t be afraid to say no; you have the right to say no; you have a right to mean no. Make your no mean no.”
And then Detective Cookie gets out the chess boards. Quietly, the group divides into pairs and sets up. The kids have all learned the lesson of the first move – reaching across the board to shake hands. And then they get started. Most of the students seem to have a good command of the game. Solid moves and captured pieces activate the classroom. The few who are still learning the game work together in one corner where Detective Cookie circles back frequently to answer questions.
In the school hallways the kids smile at her and wave. “Hi Detective Cookie!” is offered down the line. She knows these kids and she knows their families. If one of them misbehaves in school she’s got the family’s number on speed dial in her cell phone, and she’s not afraid to use it.
This kind of police work has earned the recognition of many notables. In 2011 U. S. Senator Patty Murray awarded Detective Bouldin a “Golden Tennis Shoes” award. In accepting the honor, Detective Cookie used the podium to inform the crowd the chess club would be coming to an end due to lack of funding. Read this clip from The Stranger about her moving address.
In 2011 she received a Community Builder Award from the Seattle Neighborhood Group. In 2010 she was chosen as the Best Police Officer by the Rainier Valley Post.
Becoming a police officer would surprise the people she grew up with. Back then cops were rarely your friend. “I hated the police, just like everybody else. I thought all police harassed young black people.”
(photo credit: Red Fish Blue Fish Photography)
But when she got to high school, “I met a police officer who was at our school everyday, it was his assignment -- and this police officer was the nicest person. You could go up and talk with him. That’s when I started thinking I might want to be a police officer like him, interacting with people.”
Success in the Seattle Police Department didn’t come easily. “When I came to the Academy they thought I was sort of joke, because I didn’t look like a police officer. When I went to my personnel interview I dressed like my other job -- a professional model. I was in my modeling clothes; make-up perfectly done.”
There was one white woman in her Academy class along with about 25 men. And one African American woman in the entire Seattle Police Department.
After she graduated she learned that her classmates had placed bets that she would fail. “The ones betting against me didn’t make it through the Academy themselves! What they didn’t know, I’m from Chicago, I got five brothers, I’m street smart, very street smart, I’m athletic, I’m a tomboy.”
After the Academy she had to make it through training. Although she met some encouraging officers along the way, “some were trying to get me to quit. We would sit down for coffee and they would tell jokes about the white man, the china man and the black man, and always the black man would get the butt of the joke. I didn’t say anything, all I wanted to do was to get through. One guy wrote me up for taking too long to do my report. He didn’t mention that before we got to the precinct he had us running all over town picking up his laundry and all his other jobs.
“I had a supervisor tell me the same thing, I took too long on my call. But you have to realize what I’m doing! This old lady got in a car accident, it totaled her car. I’m waiting until the tow truck comes to get it and I’m not going to leave this little old lady ‘til the cab comes to get her. We once did a raid on a house and I stayed a little longer because I saw that there were kids in the house with no food, so I went out to get some. And then I volunteered to take the kids to child protective service so they could get in a foster home. It takes me a little longer because I’m not going to leave until the job is done.”
(KOMO TV: see the full clip here)
Detective Cookie finally made it through training, and this day over her lunch order delivered to the nodding waiter as ‘my regular’, she realized she had just passed her 32 year anniversary on the force.
“I tell kids, you gotta start planning your roads now. What you want to be way down that road to success -- start that road right now. Even if you’ve done some wrong things in the past, you can make a change right now. I stopped hanging with people doing the wrong things, and it allowed me to become a police officer. “
As a police officer Detective Cookie has experienced some of her proudest moments. She was a body guard to Rosa Parks when the civil rights leader spoke at Garfield High School. “And I was one of the Seattle Police Officers on security detail for the inauguration of President and First Lady Obama. I had tears running down my eyes. I got a beautiful gold badge. This is something I will cherish for my whole life.”
Look for an upcoming column on Detective Cookie along with directions for how to support her Urban Chess Program.
- Janet Pelz
New Years rolled in like a mild surf on the bay, the days as small waves lapping on the shore. Back in the times when New Years seemed like something that didn’t come around very often, January would crash with a resounding wash of foam upon a waiting beach.
I’ve been aware of a numbing around the edge of days. I imagine this like a type of encroaching blindness where the periphery loses to black while only the center image remains. Is this a simple reaction to aging, I wonder, or is it a response to our moment in history? Is it internal to me or shared by everyone else – everyone outside that periphery?
Four years ago I thundered with anticipation of each new day. We were moving toward a moment in time when something remarkable would take place. The election either of the first woman or first African American President, a dramatic reaction to the prior eight years of chest beating and dumbing down. The news was thrilling – I drank it thirstily, absorbing each nuance that suggested that the country was coming to its senses and that our side might actually prevail. My children watched me weep along with hundreds of others when my brother announced that our state had voted for Obama and the march of other states seemed to be doing the same. And then there were the images from Chicago – the beautiful family, Jesse Jackson crying quietly on the sidelines.
And the morning of the inauguration, watching throngs crowd the Mall despite the bitter cold to witness history. I welcomed in the elderly women in my neighborhood who I knew would otherwise be watching all alone in their homes. “Hurry!” I said, choking down tears, “Aretha Franklin is singing My Country Tis of Thee!”. The pundits were calling Republicans irrelevant. The country was a blank slate for us to fill, with wisdom and generosity and justice. I felt electric with possibility.
And then came the frightening power of no – the Republicans believing their best strategy was to prevent any forward movement. It was as if we had been walking through a dark cave for years towards an elusive light – experiencing first the almost imperceptible shade of gray, the expansion of air, a thin strip of yellow that leaked in through a fissure, and then, finally, the full brightness of day stinging our eyes at the mouth of the cave. And just as we were ready to step out of the dark confine, the doorway collapsed, leaving a heap of jagged rock in our path. The light was still perceptible, but nearly impossible to reach.
The escape has been difficult, and it feels like we’ve had to shed so many parts of what we aspired to and what inspired us to be able to surmount the immense pile of rubble in front of us. And where normally I would have the ambition to help lead us out, instead I feel as if I’m climbing each boulder one at a time, with lots of deep breathing in between. I’m grateful for the protestors in Madison and the 99%-ers who are doing their best to drag us along – it seems right this time to be led rather than doing the leading.
Hopefully in this year upcoming the path will be cleared. When presented with the alternatives, common sense will prevail. Our country will find again a sense of community and embrace the least among us with the same fervor as we did those who exploited credit default swaps (and who understand what those are). I’m working on reigniting my optimism.
In this New Year, I hope to find the means to issue a steady parade of meaningful waves on the shore – I’ll stick to the bay and leave the ocean to those with a surfboard to navigate.
photo credit: Nathan Griffith, featurePics
You may have noticed I haven’t posted in a while. Since my last post, I came by some writing gigs that actually produced a paycheck and they filled the hours between managing the family’s comings and goings. With those behind me, I’m looking forward to writing about other (extra)ordinary women. Those I’ve met in the course of this project have lifted my spirit and inspired me onward, and, if you just read everything that preceded this, you can see that both are needed.
Let me know if you have ideas of women I should meet. I’m in the process of setting up some new interviews, but I’m always eager for more ideas.
And in the meantime, if you have a glimmer of optimism for the year ahead, please share it by clicking the red “comment” link below and submitting your thoughts. I’m guessing we can all use it.
Thanks for sticking with this through the quiet times.
- Janet Pelz
Part way through my volunteer shift distributing food at the Downtown Food Bank a face came through the line. I went through the data bank of my memory – did the person evoked have a job the last time I saw him? Yes – a good one working for the State. Age similar? No, this face was much older. I shut down the computer on that file, but a thought lingered. Something about how any of us could end up on the receiving end of a food line one day, and that you’d be surprised at who you might see….
After a river of faces flowed by I closed the file on that idea as well until I saw him.
He might have accepted my choice of milk or orange juice and moved on like any other, but the line had slowed just as he approached. And there on his chest was a badge identifying him as a seller of Real Change, the newspaper written and distributed by the homeless. And on that badge was his name: Scott Harper (not his actual name).
The computer in my brain booted up again whirring through files of names and experiences of years past. I studied him a bit – the last time I saw a person by that name he would have been 12. How many years ago? Maybe 18 by now. What would a 30 year-old version of Scott look like today, adding a few extra years that the streets would have worn on him? He waited there longer, almost as if the line had stopped deliberately to help me put the pieces together.
These pieces. Those 18 or so years ago I was heading up the Seattle Center Academy. The program was a brainchild of Virginia Anderson, then the Center’s Director, to match the tremendous artistic assets of Seattle Center with young people at a particularly impressionable age. Each student had the choice of one group to study with in the morning and another in the afternoon during their two-week summer session. Hip Hop dance and pottery were among those most often requested. Pacific Northwest Ballet offered a class in the old Opera House rehearsal hall. It was filled almost entirely with girls in pink leotards. And one boy – Scott Harper.
He arrived in a pair of gym shorts and a t-shirt.
I stopped by that first class, knowing the one boy might need a bit of encouragement and support. Although he wasn’t fixing his hair or comparing leotard colors with his other classmates, he nonetheless seemed comfortable enough in that group. Put in other words, he didn’t do what we would have understood in that context – the pre-teen bolt. Instead, he joined the line when the instructor organized the group, and when the first chords of music struck, he straightened his back and extended his arm so gracefully that those of us watching caught our collective breath.
Most everyday thereafter I would wander by the rehearsal hall and peek in to see how things were going. Scott was always participating with commitment equal to any of his female peers, but with an innate sense of grace that exceeded any others. When I got a chance to talk with him about his choice of classes, he responded straightforwardly, “I heard that football players take ballet to improve their footwork and balance.” Scott played football.
At the performance on the last day of camp, Francia Russell, co-artistic director and director of PNB’s prestigious dance school was clearly impressed. “We’ll give him a scholarship to study at the school if he’s willing to make the commitment,” she offered enthusiastically. We spoke with Scott and we spoke with his mother. The deal was sealed.
PNB’s DanceChance Boys in Modern class.
©Angela Sterling
When the Scott Harper standing before me declared his preference for milk I asked the question in the best way I could, not wanting to probe the circumstances that had brought him to this place in front of me. “Are you a dancer?” I asked.
He raised his head, looking directly at me for the first time. “Hey,” he said, “I remember you, from Seattle Center, right?” He delivered his words with a full smile, as if we had bumped into each other browsing the neighborhood book store. “Yeah, I had a full ride at PNB, and then I broke my leg.”
And then he was gone. Accepting a bag of potatoes from the next volunteer in line and looking ahead to what followed.
He left me there, leaning on the table to keep from falling over. Such a flood of emotions, the first, until I realized the egotism of it, about me. I had felt so good about making a difference in this young person’s life.
On the shelf in my office I still hold a ballet dancer’s black shoe. On the bottom the following is scrawled in black ink, “Janet, Thanks for sending Scott to PNB. The best to you always.” It is signed by the woman who taught that Seattle Center Academy class.
And then, once realizing that I was not the casualty in this story, I wondered about the parade of events in this young man’s life – in anyone’s life – that had brought him to selling Real Change on the street corner while relying on the food bank for his meals.
For me, yet again there was first a lesson in humility. As exciting as the possibility might have been that his life could have been turned around by one contribution I made is, of course, unrealistic vanity.
And then there was a small sense of satisfaction, that I could have touched this one man’s life twice – once to give him an opportunity and another to give him a gallon of milk. I hope there are others in his life to give him more of both.
Want to know more about the Downtown Food Bank, including how to volunteer?
Dignity and service are at the heart of the Downtown Food Bank’s mission. In 2010, the Downtown Food Bank handled approximately 45,000 visits and provided more than 269 tons of groceries to the elderly, homeless and working poor within the Pike Place Market and downtown Seattle communities. The Food Bank also provides clothing, baby supplies and hygiene products, which are donated by the community.
Dedicated volunteers -- many of whom are clients of the Food Bank themselves -- contribute thousands of volunteer hours to help meet the growing demand for the Food Bank's services. If you would like to volunteer, contact Kevin Futhey.
You can make a contribution by clicking here.
- Janet Pelz
I catch up with Jennifer Argraves of Crown-S Ranch at the midpoint of one of the many cycles that makes up her life. Through our conversation, there are references to the cycles of the land, of the animals she raises, of the business she runs that supports her family, even of the materials she and her husband use to build their feed sheds and solar-powered chicken trains. And each of these cycles is guided by their motto, “Better for the animals, better for the environment, better for you.”
(some of the grass fed cattle at Crown-S-Ranch in Twisp, Washington)
This weekend cycle started at 5 a.m. on her eastern Washington sustainable farm, loading freezers with beef, pork, chickens and lamb before adding 100 dozen eggs in the trailer for the monthly trip across the mountains. She’s headed for a series of drop-off locations around Seattle, where a community of consumers, careful about the food they eat and the imprint they leave on the environment, pick up their monthly deliveries. When she steps through my front door it’s as if a fresh breeze blew in, on a smile that seems to have forgotten its end point.
Over my dining room table this urban woman tries intellectually to understand the mechanics of Jennifer’s farm, which for her is as natural as that smile. I know this conversation would be far more meaningful if I were actually watching her cattle graze or smelling her one-of-a-kind composter in action. But until I can fit in a 10 hour outing to see it all myself – which I hope to do -- I’ll have to write from my imagination, shaped by Jennifer’s words, the photos from her website (you can take a virtual tour here ), and from my taste buds when I experience the farm fresh eggs she has brought as a hostess gift.
The eggs, she tells me, are among their farm’s most popular products. “They are collected literally in the days before we come. A supermarket egg can claim to be fresh when it is 10 weeks old – our eggs are never that old. We collect the eggs and they just fly out.” Because their chickens graze, “it’s a real seasonal egg, so you’ll see as the flora and fauna change on the farm, the egg yolk changes. We’ll get really orange yolks when the grass is really green.”
Jennifer and her husband Louis Sukovaty are engineers by training. After graduating from the University of Idaho they moved to the big city of Seattle to gain experience and hone their engineering skills. (It was in Seattle that they met their neighbor, Joanie Warner, who recommended that I write about Jennifer). This was part of Jennifer and Louis’s 10-year plan that would culminate with a move back to the land, where they would continue in their respective engineering fields while dabbling in farming.
But as with many life plans, life has a way of complicating them. For them if was literally a life -- a new life, their son Geza. His birth set Jennifer to thinking about the food she would be feeding him, and the more she learned, the more concerned she became.
“He was a year and a half old and that’s really where the whole story of the farm starts. All my life I’ve been a professional, I’ve done my own thing, my honey has done his own thing Then we have this baby and the baby starts to eat. I had all this time with him and I started to do all this research about food, and it’s, oh my gosh, all these things I didn’t know -- I used to go to McDonald’s! I researched about cattle being fed grain instead of eating grass. Cows are perfectly set up to eat grass, and they’re paired with us. So for hundreds of years we’ve been eating grass fed beef. The coli that’s in their gut goes into your gut all the time. But you’re paired with it and your stomach acid gets rid of it. But a grain fed animal actually gets sick. It has different stomach acid. And that’s why we get sick from it. So I’m like, there’s no way I’m going to feed this to my child! I just became obsessed about food.”
This obsession coincided with the announcement from Louis’ parents that they were ready to sell their 50-acre farm in eastern Washington where Louis grew up. Jennifer and Louis bought the property.
Their expectation? “We were just going to be engineers. We wanted to raise our kids ourselves, so the idea was we’d have one full-time working unit between the two of us. We’d continue being engineers -- we started North Cascades Engineering -- and have a little toy farm with a garden like we each had growing up.
“So while I started to learn about food Louis was starting to learn about systems. And it just got to a point where I wouldn’t eat chicken unless we raised the chicken and I wouldn’t eat pork unless we raised the pig. And pretty soon we’re going to raise all these things, and we have friends who want good food for their kids too, and I can’t find anyone out there who’s doing this. And Louis is loving it and every mom should know where her family’s food comes from.”
From there, Jennifer describes the process that incrementally transformed this ‘toy farm’ into a professional business and lifestyle shift, growing in inverse proportion to their engineering business until they finally closed North Cascades Engineering.
Now they apply their engineering skills creating and testing systems for an organic, sustainable farm. And they do all this while challenging the assumptions Americans have had about farming since the arrival of petroleum-based fertilizers and other toxic elements that, while advertising their efficiency, ignore a phalanx of complications they create.
Instead, Jennifer and Louis come up with simple ways to control pests without pesticide by working with natural cycles. “We layer everything. In one pasture, the cattle will go through, the sheep go through, the pigs rotate, the chickens go through. What we’ve found is that most animals are a dead-end host for the animal before them. So any kind of parasite that might come with one animal doesn’t make the next animal sick.”
Chickens help control the pests that on other farms are killed with chemicals. “They are really good at picking horn flies and face flies out of manure.” Chickens come through a pasture recently grazed by cattle in their solar powered chicken tractor (click the link to see it in action).
It’s a Rube Goldberg-like contraption made of salvaged wood powered by a solar panel so it moves by itself, guiding the chickens to new grass and bugs. “The chickens eat the flies in the larva state so they never mature. The chicken also pulls the pat apart, and the rest literally gets absorbed into the soil, providing nutrients, and you never have the smell.”
Perusing farming manuals from before World War II (pre-petrochemicals), Louis read about a passive walk-through flytrap -- a low-tech solution in our hi-tech world -- and set out to build one himself. The cows simply walk through baffles that brush the flies off their bodies. These fly up to a light above – their natural instinct – and they die in the baffles and fall down. (I pointed out this process sounded a bit like my writing – I start with about 15 pages of interview and then run that through baffles until a few ideas fall down and then I put them together like a jigsaw puzzle).
“Then we take the flies and compost them or we feed them to the chickens because they are protein. Industrial farms use two different pesticides to do the same thing. We get the same numbers or better with our chickens and fly traps, and we use no pesticides. The more you work with nature, slow down and look at it, the more these solutions come up.”
As another example, Jennifer points proudly to a photo of their compost facility as another mom might show off her daughter’s chess trophy . “I don’t know of any other compost facility like this, not only in the state, but I’m not sure where.” (photo below of composter)
Everything of a butchered cow that can’t be eaten is sent to the composter. “In six weeks it will completely break down. It’s just a matter of having nitrogen and carbon. Nitrogen is the animal, carbon sources would be from our organic straw or chips from our mill. It’s a balance of that, plus water. We use the water from our poultry processing facility – recycled water. That water goes through a septic system to remove the pathogens and it comes out gray water and we pump it here. When the compost is heated up it gets pushed over the wall to the back. Then we take the compost and put it into a manure spreader, so the nutrients that came off the farm get put back into the farm. We’re actually building top soil – our soil is more fertile now than when we started because of the way that we farm.”
For a long while, “the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) wanted us to take all the offal and bag it all up to take somewhere. We had to prove from an engineering standpoint that what we were doing actually worked.” Louis and Jennifer pointed out that industrial farms take animals and feed them to other animals (which Crown-S doesn’t do). So, they argued, if a chicken can be broken down to the point that another animal can eat it, it should be safe to take parts of that same chicken and break it down into compost to put back into the soil.
On the Crown-S Ranch the cycles of the land and the animals weave among those of the entire family. Geza, now 13, “rocks when it comes to systems.” Before the Ranch had its own WSDA certified chicken processing facility, Jennifer and Geza did the chicken circuit together. “At about 10 at night, my son would crawl into the coops and hand the chickens to my husband. They’d do it in the middle of the night so it’s less stress on the animals. I would go to bed and at about 1:00 in the morning my son would be done, so he’d crawl into the truck with me and go to sleep while I’d drive us through the night to Spokane – a four-hour drive to the nearest processor. So at 7 a.m. when the processor starts in the morning, we’d pull in, drop the trailer and go to sleep in a parking lot – I mean, this is where your food is coming from! We’d have breakfast and then we’d bag the birds because we want them to be perfect. We have these shrink wrap bags, we’d put them on ice right away. It’s quality – we’re eating it, you’re eating it!
“My daughter Icel (even the family names are recycled. Icel’s great-grandmother and grandmother both had the same name) knows the sounds of the country. She knows if a chicken is in distress, she baahs for her lambs and they come to her. She has a feeling of the earth. I don’t know how she does it but my daughter actually has chickens in her room. And she has cats in her room and the cats don’t eat the chickens.
“My daughter wanted a dog and I was, like ugh! I just can’t deal with a dog – they’re so much responsibility! I suggest a lamb instead -- they just seem so much easier. I know it doesn’t seem that way to you, but she can bottle feed them all summer when she’s actually home and then they go off with the flock. But a dog? My gosh, you’d have to walk it and train it and what if it ate a chicken? The lamb deal was way better.”
Icel with Betty and Rose
Though the kids live on 50 acres, the community K-12 school campus is right across the street. Yes, they may have a long way to get to a soccer match at another rural school, but Jennifer points out that a 30 mile drive on country roads might be easier than traveling through Seattle at some times of the day. The family doesn’t have a television – they figure there’s always plenty of fun to be had outdoors.
Since starting the farm, Louis and Jennifer have been adding to it incrementally, careful not to grow too quickly, a fault that has put similar operations out of business.
Starting with the 50 acre farm they bought from Louis’s parents, the couple now leases an additional 70 adjacent acres. On 10 of these they grow their own feed – field peas and wheat side by side and without pesticides. “It’s really healthy food we give to the animals that are supplemented with grain (cattle eat no grain). If the animal is healthy then you’re healthy and the environment is healthy.”
Each new addition – a new animal, a new system, a new crop -- is methodically measured and analyzed with an engineer’s precision. The data generated, they hope, can help others replicate their success.
“Once you close all the cycles on 150 acres, you can determine, ‘we can grow this much food to feed this many people.’ And then you ask, how much land do you need if you have this population base? When we first started everyone told us, oh, you’re such a cute little farm, but you can’t feed the world. But what we found is that we can feed the world -- better.”
(most photos on this site credited to Ken Kailing, GoodFood World)
Are you interested in eating healthy and supporting the efforts of Jennifer and Louis?
Jennifer, Louis and Icel at the farmer’s market
Jennifer’s Not-So Secrets for how she does it:
What books has Jennifer read recently?
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan
And if you want to learn how modern farming is damaging our health and environment, read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan or watch the documentary Food Inc.
- Janet Pelz
This New Year’s resolution was to find myself in some unexpected places and to say yes to some unexpected offers. Fortunately, no one has invited me to go skydiving or to dine on cockroaches.
I’ve already stepped into some new territory this year and had reason to congratulate myself. But then the big offer came through – the one coming at the midpoint of calendar that allowed me to draw a big black line through that resolution and mark it ‘done’.
It started when my brother Dwight Pelz, Chairman of the Washington State Democratic Party called and posed the question. “I don’t suppose you would have any interest in, say, going to the White House when the President (of the United States, just in case you were wondering) congratulates the Seattle Storm on their national WNBA title last year? Like, if I were to come up with two invitations for you and, I don’t know, maybe your daughter Casey, to go?”
Red meat on a plate for supper.
Women’s basketball, my daughter, oh yeah, the President (not just any President but one I would actually want to meet and one who is not just a fan of basketball but of women playing basketball), seeing my sister and one of my very best friends? Let’s add that up.
It comes to a big, hell yes!
So then came the challenge of booking a flight (thanks to my wonderful husband Bob, who coughed up a stinking heap of frequent flyer miles and who, because of his super-duper flying status earned us access to someone who could cut through the red tape and actually get us on a flight, not to mention a free cocktail on the way home). And then there was the process of getting security clearance into the White House (I’m not even going to start with the list of offenses they had to ignore for that to come through). And all of this to get done within a week.
But get done it did, and there we were, my basketball-playing daughter Casey and me, on an early morning flight heading east. She, sacrificing two days of her basketball camp and me having lined up play dates and carpools for her brother Matthew for those same days. Landing in DC, on a flight with one of the team owners, the Storm’s CEO and VP, dinner that night with my sister Mary and my dear friend Gail Dratch and then the announcement that because Gail’s husband is the head of OSHA, he was able to score her a pass as well. Perfect.
Even more perfect when Tuesday’s thunderstorm scared all the humidity out of the air and the weather was a sunny, breezy 85 degrees. Casey and I got dolled up in our bought-for-the-occasion-40%-off-JC Penney-dresses and drove downtown with Gail. We killed some time walking the neighborhood before getting in line at noon at the guests-only White House gate.
We were the first ones there (having not gotten the memo that the gate time got moved back an hour) but enjoyed the time meeting and greeting the new arrivals. The first were a couple of young women – Katori and Ingrid -- who, like us, were there because of a connection with the Democratic National Committee.
(l-r Ingrid, Katori, and Katrina – sister of player Ashley Robinson, who flew in from Dallas for the event. In the background Seattle’s mayor checks his emails).
Then others began to arrive, including Anne Levinson, one of the team’s former owners, Dwight’s former colleague on the King County Council Larry Gosset, the Mayor of Seattle, Mike McGinn (who, we discover as we’re chatting with him and waiting, has a daughter who went to elementary school with Casey), and many others. The waiting took on a quality of a pre-event tailgate party sans keg.
When the gates opened, Casey, Gail and I sprung to the front and were the first to clear the several security checkpoints and be met by the dress-uniformed greeters. When I asked if we could walk on the grass to the water station at the opposite end of the Rose Garden, the female officer told me “Make yourself at home. After all, this is your house.”
(Casey greeted as she enters the Rose Garden)
Loved that. I mean, not to get too sentimental, but in what other country on the planet would that be the invitation?
The Rose Garden itself is not that much to write about but the portrait of FDR on the hallway leading there certainly caught my breath, as did the façade of the south portico, which was close enough to touch. We were snapping photos like fools, and I had to get one of Katori, who had put on her crown and ‘Miss Black America District of Columbia’ sash when she entered. What a tease to keep that bling in her bag!
(Gail, Queen Katori and Casey inside the Rose Garden)
Then they let us through to the opposite side of the portico, and we’re kids in a candy shop, clicking the cameras again. But we stop in time to make it to the lawn where chairs are set for the event. We snake around the back row to nab some empty seats near the front, so we have a clear line to the podium, which bears the Presidential seal. More photos of us framed by the White House, of the other visiting notables there for the occasion. We recognize Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services; Ron Sims, former King County Executive; Former Washington Governor and newly-appointed Ambassador to China, Gary Locke and his wife Mona, and Senator Patty Murray. The two Washingtons in one place.
And then that thing happens when everyone spontaneously stops talking and moving in anticipation of something big. We mute our giggling to a whispered voice.
Doors open and out march the WNBA Commissioner, the team owners and managers, and the players – the beautiful, tall athletes, their strong shoulders proudly worn in dresses to set them off.
(Storm team and owners, their trophy in lower right)
And the Big Guy makes his entrance, alongside the Storm coach Brian Aigler (the team’s affirmative hire) and takes the podium. In case you ever find yourself in this situation – this is a time to stand. Show your respect to the most powerful man on the planet.
Though in this context, strength is not what he’s out to prove. As he must do with countless of these events – which for his audience are once-in-a-lifetime occasions – he presents himself with warmth, grace and a touch of self-deprecating humor. He lauds the team for their accomplishments, for the fact that they exemplify teamwork, for providing to girls like his two daughters wonderful role models of women who are strong, self-assured, and know how to compete. He shares the experience of coaching his own daughter’s basketball team a couple times since taking up residence in the White House. He acts overwhelmed with surprise when presented a Storm jersey bearing his name as well as a ring matching the championship style on all the players’ hands.
(Click here to watch the video of his comments and see the event for yourself)
But for that pesky debt-ceiling issue I don’t doubt that he would have stayed for another hour of hand shaking, but he had another podium to get to and under far less pleasant circumstances. After he left, the team filed out through that colonnade you always see in White House movies and photos – Kennedy worrying over the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bush trying to understand what just happened inside -- and disappeared inside the White House to conduct a basketball clinic with some local Boys and Girls club kids.
We popped up to shake hands and grab a photo with Gary Locke, whose daughter also went to school with Casey in Seattle and amazingly was coached in soccer by my brother-in-law when the family moved to D.C. area, and with whom I shared a rickshaw ride around Beijing on the Ambassador’s first ever trip to China many years ago. We also greeted former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowski, the current Federal Drug Czar, whose bigger claim to fame is that his parents live in the same retirement home as mine. All these connections spanning the continent and every member of our family adding to what was already an amazing afternoon.
We clicked a few more photos before making our way out the gate, just like hundreds of thousands of others have done, who undoubtedly felt just as special as we did at that moment.
Giddy and with time to kill before heading back to the airport, Gail had the brilliant idea of taking the elevator to the top of the Hotel W across the street from the White House, where an open-aired porch offered fabulous views of the DC skyline as well as lunch. We sat there savoring the moment and took up a whirling conversation with a young woman chasing her toddler son who had to stop to note how Casey and I looked so much alike and how wonderful it was to see strong women and Mazel Tov and a kiss to Casey in congratulations for something, though it wasn’t clear just what. On the way to the airport I told Casey that it was if we were on the set of the Truman Show and everyone with whom we came in contact were actors put in place to say and do wonderful things for us.
Debt ceiling and Republican recalcitrance aside, it was truly perfect. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, or at least the last one until Casey is standing behind a future President, celebrating her team’s national title. In which case, I intend to be sitting in the first row.
- Janet Pelz
For Seattlites, Uwajimaya is not just the destination for home-made sushi ingredients, it is a journey to a far-away place at the end of the ride-free bus. Amid the shelves piled high with exotic food items you’ll see the regular neighborhood customers, many of whom are elderly immigrants, filling their grocery carts with reminders of home. You’ll see pre-school classes ogling the live fish and bins of strange fruits and vegetables, tourists taking photos and office workers on lunch break. It’s a place that has come to define Seattle almost as much as the Space Needle.
I enter the sprawling retail complex that is Uwajimaya looking for my interview with its CEO, Tomoko Moriguchi-Matsuno and notice a woman whose head barely rises above a display of rice sacks. She is engaged in what looks like any conversation between two neighbors catching up with family news, although here, one is the store owner and the other a customer.
I introduce myself as she finishes her impromptu chat and she takes up with me as if I were the next neighbor. We climb the employees-only staircase until Tomoko stops a man descending. “What’s up with that -- ‘Can I meet in an hour’?,” she asks him tauntingly. “The soy sauce rep, doesn’t he understand we’re one of their biggest customers?”
“Not one of their biggest customers,” corrects the man with a smile, “their biggest customer!”
“Well, you tell him next time that won’t work, and I don’t give a rat’s ass what he says!” She giggles with these words. “And don’t forget,” her voice shifting to business mode as she continues upward, “I need the names and addresses of the big-wigs in San Francisco to invite to our event down there.”
We’re on a hunt to find a place to talk, and though she has just arrived, she knows what’s going on in any possible space. “That one’s busy with a 401(k) training,” she nods as we approach a room filled with employees. Tomoko offers greetings and personal comment to each person she passes. Striding into an office area she raises her voice loud enough to address everyone sitting at their desks. She breaks into a friendly exchange in Japanese with one woman as we squeeze through to a small room at the back, where Tomoko pushes a stack of supplies to the edge of the small round table, and pulls up a stacking chair.
Across the table from me in this supply-closet-turned-Executive-Conference-Room sits Tomoko Moriguchi-Matsuno, Uwajimaya’s CEO, dressed in a palette of color suggesting an artist’s sensibility. She carries none of the officiousness one would expect from a corporate executive and indeed our interview is peppered more frequently with self-effacements than with boasts of business success.
In the next hour I’ll come to see that this one woman, who reaches 4’10” in a pair of sensible shoes, embodies a package of contrasts which she moves between as quickly and easily as images in an iPad commercial. She speaks fluent Japanese and in English can swear like a sailor. She is an artist surrounded by engineers and business leaders. She was born in the custody of an internment camp yet embraces her American heritage. She can barely reach a kitchen counter, but she worships the giants of the NBA, calling herself a Kobe Bryant ‘freak’.
Raised in a traditional Japanese American family where the men are in charge, she sits at the head of her family business, which last year had $95 million in sales.
From the moment we begin talking, Tomoko demurs, suggesting there is nothing so interesting about her that would fill the paragraphs of a story.
“This is really just a grocery business, it’s not rocket science. I think my family is more interesting than me -- what they are to Seattle and to the Japanese community.”
Although I’m not convinced, I agree to travel back in time to the beginnings of the business at the top of which Tomoko sits today.
(some of the colorful shelves at Seattle’s Uwajimaya)
Uwajimaya, named for the Japanese town of Uwajima where Tomoko’s father Fujimatsu Moriguchi learned his trade (the suffix ‘ya’ means ‘store’), began in 1928, when he started making fish cakes in Tacoma to sell to the Japanese farmers and fishermen around Washington State. It was part of his plan to make $5,000 and then return to Japan. “My father was very, very poor. He had just a seventh grade education, if even that.”
But before Fujimatsu Moriguchi could realize his dream, the war came, and with it Executive Order 9066 in 1942 which forcibly relocated to internment camps 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent, the Moriguchi family included.
An arranged marriage had partnered Fujimatsu to Sadako Tsutakawa, sister to George Tsutakawa who later would achieve international renown as a Seattle sculptor. Mr. and Mrs. Moriguchi had sent their oldest child, a girl, to Japan before they were interned. Tomoko, their youngest child, was born in the land of the free but not in freedom. She was the last child born in the internment camp in Tule Lake California, her sister having the distinction of being the first child born there.
Tule Lake, in northern California, was one of the most infamous of the internment camps. Prisoners there held frequent demonstrations and strikes, demanding their rights under the U.S. Constitution. As a result, it was made a "segregation camp," and internees from other camps who had refused to take the loyalty oath or had caused disturbances were sent to Tule Lake. At its peak, Tule Lake held 18,789 internees. Tule Lake was also one of the last camps to be closed, staying open until March 20, 1946. -- J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah
With two other children born before and three born in camp, the Moriguchis were released in 1945 -- a family of six children with $75 in their father’s pocket, the dreams of returning to Japan having vanished like the smoke from an incense burner. “So, we came back to Seattle and moved into what I learned a little while ago was a barn -- I always thought our house was a little bit strange,” her voice floats higher as her eyes roll upward. “You know, we were very poor but we didn’t know we were poor because we had such good people in our lives.”
Her father started a store at 4th and Main in Seattle’s Nihonmachi, or Little Japan Town, an area just a shadow of what it had been before it was cleared of many of its residents. “It was a very small Uwajimaya store where he made his fishcakes again.”
The family worked hard. “Oh, we lived in the store, my mother and father worked 7 days a week; 15 - 20 hours a day.” Knowing a life of poverty, Fujimatsu was determined that his children would have greater opportunities, starting with a solid education. Undoubtedly reflective of his recent experience he would tell his children, “There are many things that can be taken away from you, but not an education.”
Of the seven children, every one went to college with the exception of the oldest sister in Japan. Represented among them are engineering degrees, chemistry degrees, home economics, and Tomoko’s fine arts degree.
(Left: Fujimatsu outside the original Seattle Uwajimaya)
While he was still alive, her father gave the business to the four boys. “He expected the girls to get married and not do anything.” With the sad passing of the family patriarch in 1962, Tomoko’s brother Tomio Moriguchi left his job at the Boeing Company where he was working as an engineer, and took over the family business, running it for the next 40 years.
Meanwhile, the youngest sibling Tomoko, was working as a graphic artist in San Francisco, living near her sister. Tomoko married her husband, Koji Matsuno, a San Francisco native, and they had two daughters. But when her sister announced that she was moving back to Seattle for her husband to take a job with the family business, Tomoko told her own husband that they would be leaving, too. “He was an engineer for the Navy, and I told him he would have to transfer.”
When she came back was it to be involved in the business? “No, no, no, no. Trust me, this is not what I thought I’d be doing today,” she says sotto voce.
And what did she think she would be doing? “I didn’t think anything beyond just bringing up my kids. I do everything for them, but I’m a tiger mom, too. People criticize that woman, I don’t criticize her. First of all, she’s not telling you what to do. That’s the way I brought them up, we were tough and they’re successful. I didn’t beat them, but we were tough.”
Shortly after her return to Seattle, “I was working part-time, fixing up the stores, setting up the displays. It was just a nice way for my family to give me a job. Actually,” she says conspiratorially, “I don’t know if they did give the job to me -- I think I just ended up doing it. We always kid that no one would hire us so we all had to come back to the family business.”
Over the years, her job at Uwajimaya grew to entail oversight of much of the business’s day-to-day operations. Tomoko was the one responsible for opening new stores in Beaverton, Oregon and in Bellevue and Renton, Washington. Along the way, she put her artistic flair to work in designing vivid store displays.
Then in November 2000, Uwajimaya made its second Seattle move since the 4th and Main location, to anchor Uwajimaya Village. Along with the grocery and gift market, the 66,000 square foot retail space includes Kinokuniya Bookstore, an Asian food court, underground parking and several other retail stores and services. Above the store sits the 176-unit Uwajimaya Village Apartments. Altogether, it represents a project of incredible magnitude for a family business.
(You can read more about the business in this Seattle Times story commemorating the 80th anniversary of Uwajimaya).
(Exterior of Uwajimaya Seattle; Village apartments visible above)
“And then, the four brothers for some crazy reason all retired within years of each other and they said, oh, we’re going to have you run it.” Tomoko was 62.
Her answer? “Well, I guess there’s no one else to do it,” she says with her eyes moving from side to side, feigning a search for an alternative. “We wanted a family member. So I thought, I think I can do it for a year (I’m in my third year now). But I’m very, very bad with numbers. I’m an art major! And my brothers said, we’ll just put good people around you and that’s what I have -- I have really good people around me. So, what choice do I have?” she asks as if scheming to find another solution.
“I was already doing so much of the day to day operations for the retail -- but I didn’t have the wholesale and everything else. But I’m always good at telling people what to do,” she says mischievously, her eyes sparkling.
She jokes about what the first days were like. “I just sort of sat around and thought, hmmm,” her shoulders hunched as if her goal were to make herself even smaller than she already was. “You know, I don’t have a secretary, I don’t have an assistant. It wasn’t like I was in a whole new world where people were driving me around and bringing me lunch -- in fact, I have to go out there and beg people to get me something,” she says, faking outrage.
She acknowledges that much of what she knows about the business comes from having been in it basically all her life. “I not just grew up in it but I understood from my brothers which were the important parts.
“The store is us and we are the store.”
The store seems to function as the sun in this family’s solar system. Each of the siblings, like planets, may rotate independently but their orbits always bring them back to Uwajimaya. Over time, each of the siblings have added to the family network, like moons to the planets, but still they all feel the gravitational pull of a business in its third and fourth generations, that is open seven days a week for most every day of each year after year. And like the sun, its steady presence becomes indistinguishable from the daily pace of life. It is no wonder there are no apparent boundaries in Tomoko between the personal and the business, from a chat with a neighbor to instructions regarding a contract. In addition to her Japanese upbringing, to which she attributes her reticence to take credit, the business is such an intrinsic aspect of daily life that it often goes unnoticed for how amazing it really is.
At this point in the interview Tomoko stops to challenge me. “How interesting is this? It’s so weird to think that anyone would want to read about me. Running the grocery store -- that’s not interesting, that’s second nature.”
After she describes all that is part of this family business, including an arm that sells wholesale products to Asian restaurants, I challenge her initial premise that this isn’t much like rocket science. It sounds pretty complicated to me.
“I wish I could say it is but because we’re in it every single day and it’s human. Retail is like farming -- you have to work with what you have, you have to have good common sense, good social skills, you have to think fast, and because you’re working in a grocery store, you can’t tell everyone to go to hell.”
I ask what changes Tomoko has witnessed in the decades her family has been growing the business. “It used to be (in the original Seattle store) that people actually worked for us -- and I don’t mean this in a power play at all -- because we were a business. Now the company works for the employees to give them good jobs and good benefits.” I note the 401(k) seminar we passed and she nods her head. “Thirty-seven cents of every dollar goes to employee benefits. For a small Asian family business, we work hard to take care of our 500 employees. We want our employees to be citizens, to pay their taxes, to get the same privileges of any other person.”
She points out that if the philosophy weren’t so ingrained, the family “would have taken a lot of money out of the business to drive fancy-dancy cars, but that doesn’t suit us. Now, were not starving,” she states sincerely, to assure me that martyrdom isn’t part of the business plan, “but we are not here to live the kind of life that we wouldn’t know what to do with.”
Where their clientele was once all Japanese, they are now 50% non-Asian in all their stores, and their Asian products represent every part of the continent. “The mix makes it stronger,” she says noting that the mix comes not just from the products they sell but from the different cultural and ethnic backgrounds and 30 native languages represented in their employee base. “But our policy is that you can only speak English on the floor unless a customer asks for something in another language. Because we’re America,” she says with a mixture of national pride and retail pragmatics. “We find it insulting to customers if we’re talking away in a language they don’t understand.
Has she changed during these three years of being in charge? “Yeah, a lot, but I can’t tell you exactly how because they are subtle things. I understand numbers better but I still hate them. Numbers are good but your heart is even more important.
“At the end of the year if we didn’t make $1 million but we made $900,000 and we did it by not letting people go -- the numbers can’t always drive you. If we were a public company, the investors would come in and tar and feather me. But for all my life working in this business, there are many stupid things I have done, not once have I been reprimanded. But also, my family figures since I never listen to them, why tell her?”
Tomoko sees herself in this position for another two years, but her family insists it will take longer than that to groom other family members to take over. And when she’s done being a CEO? “I’m going to find myself in either art or food or both. I like to cook, but I also have this art in me. I do crazy things with fabric. Somewhere I’ll find a mix with my art and my food, but I don’t know what it is yet. And I would like to tell women, in Japan mostly, that they don’t have to abide by the old rules.”
Before our interview comes to a close, Tomoko pauses to check her cell phone for a message. “My lawyer’s wife fell down today and he said he would call the minute she was diagnosed.” We leave the supply closet whereupon Tomoko issues a few more jokes to the office workers and a couple instructions regarding a contract negotiation before heading downstairs to see an old friend. I leave her by the rice sacks, talking to a customer just as I had found her a couple hours earlier.
Tomoko’s Not-So Secrets for How She Does It?
What has Tomoko read recently?
Whom does Tomoko want me to interview next?
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