For decades, Kay Bullitt has helped lead local preservation efforts -- she served on the first Pioneer Square Historic District Board (later known as the Pioneer Square Preservation District Board), was a long time member of Historic Seattle's Council and more recently served on the Historic Seattle Foundation. Kay has also been a key advocate for area maritime heritage. In this interview, part one of two conducted on May 17th, Kay recalls the earliest days of Seattle's maritime preservation effort.

HM: How did you come to be interested in historic preservation?

KB: I got interested in preservation through an interest in maritime heritage.

Sometime in the early 1960s, I read a Seattle Times article about the Wawona, and thought it was something very important, something worth saving. Wing Luke, who was then on Seattle's City Council had shown an interest in saving that ship, so I spoke to him. He was very supportive. I ended up being an incorporator for Save Our Ships, and then I was its secretary for a long time. I was on the board from 1963 until just last year.

The effort to save the Wawona, and to protect maritime heritage in general, came about in fits and starts. Every time we were ready to raise money something happened. At the beginning, the person who said he would help with the fundraising put the names of all the key establishment people as members of the finance committee in the newspaper. Unfortunately, he never asked them if he could do that. No one ever agreed to that. Can you imagine what that did to our credibility? That was our first problem.

When Wing Luke was killed in an plane crash in 1965, we just hobbled along. We tried to raise money, but our image was too poor, and it was always just a small group that cared.

John Ross helped us raise the $28,000 needed to buy the Wawona. Some enthusiasts went around the shipyards with empty hats and collected money. A local DJ raised some funds too, and local artists painted and sold images of the Wawona and contributed proceeds to the effort. People from the Seattle Repertory Theater painted it.

Save Our Ships bought the Wawona in 1964, then we got the light ship Relief. Two of our board members participated in getting that at an auction but there was another party that was sharing it, which made things quite complicated.

My mother-in-law (Dorothy Stimson Bullitt) and Ivar Haglund loaned money for the purchase and eventually just gave us the money. Finding free moorage for the Wawona was a full-time task. We were required to remove the masts. A number of timber companies tried to identify the right trees for new masts. Scott Paper eventually found the trees near Lester, which is near Mount Rainier.

The masts were turned in Tacoma, and the Port stored them until we were ready to install them.

Then the Foss Company gave us the Arthur Foss which is 117 years old now, I think. Those two ships have had a lot of work, paid for by federal grants. We're still hopeful about future funding for those projects. And we've had a lot of volunteer help with them.

We're still fighting the battle of restoring the Wawona. It's a very precious vessel, the only three-masted schooner, or windjammer left in the Northwest. It was built by a wonderful Danish shipbuilder, Hans Bendixen, in Eureka, California. It was well cared for. It only had two owners -- from 1887 to 1914, Dolbeer and Carson, a lumber company, and Robinson Fisheries for cod fishing from 1914 until 1946. Because it has spent a lot of time now in fresh water, it hasn't suffered like the Thayer down in San Francisco with all the toredoes (ship worms) eating it up. Below the waterline, we're in good shape.

HM: Were you involved at all in the Kalakala effort?

KB: No, I gave my heart to these other ships. The San Mateo nearly killed me. That was a great ferryboat. The ferry system gave it to state parks who wanted to put it down on the Seattle waterfront. They made all the plans, but a couple of the legislators didn't like the idea, so they advanced a bill in the legislature requiring that state parks get rid of it. They were forced to give it to a city or a government entity. There was no city ready to take it on, but because Historic Seattle was quasi-governmental, we were qualified to do it. Brewster Denny was on the (Historic Seattle) Council then. Quite a few people were very reluctant to get into the ownership of this vessel.

But we got Northwest Seaport (which grew from Save Our Ships) to promise to take it over in three years. Historic Seattle took it on as a pass-through project. Al Elliott, who had been Executive Director at Historic Seattle became our executive at Northwest Seaport for a while. He practically gave his whole life to try and save the San Mateo. People wanted it in Japan, California, and Tacoma. The Navy, thanks to Herb Bridge, allowed us to moor in South Lake Union. We had a difficult time when Charles Royer was mayor for 12 years; he had no interest in historic preservation. "That was Wes Uhlman's thing." So he didn't encourage us at all.

Walt Hundley, who was head of the Parks Department at the time, was opposed to the San Mateo on South Lake Union. McDonald's was willing to restore it and put it on the waterfront. But Royer said we didn't want a McDonald's on the waterfront. McDonald's opened next to the ferry dock soon after.

It's really too bad. It was such a wonderful opportunity. Much of the maritime heritage community and the National Trust thought it was a great idea to have McDonald's help restore it. The restaurant would have been on the car deck, and then Northwest Seaport would have occupied the upper deck.

We finally gave it to a man in Canada who wanted to use it for an art program. It was so sad to see it go through the Locks. I've never been able to go up and look at it. I've heard it's still on the Fraser somewhere. Maybe something's happening with it. Our other ships were moored in Kirkland for several years.

There was good momentum back in the mid-1970s when we moved the ships from Kirkland over to South Lake Union. We had a lot of movers and shakers on the maritime task force. They paid TRA for a study by Mark Hinshaw, to help us figure out what to do. Norton Clapp, Ned Skinner, Herb Bridge and others were on the maritime task force. Garrett Eddy helped us for many years. Bob Coe, Dick Marshall, and Hunter Simpson both contributed a lot of time and enthusiasm. Bob Ashley, a friend of Wing Luke's worked to save the Wawona for about 10 years. Both Fred Fisher and his wife volunteered for years to save the Thayer.

HM: There's so much activity going on in South Lake Union now it seems like this is one of those moments where things could go very well for maritime heritage.

KB: I felt very hopeful because after we lost the Seattle Commons, which I also worked on, Mike Foley, who was against the Commons, was for the maritime development. Mike was very generous and interested in that project. And I think he still is interested in having the maritime center there. Though Seattle's Parks department has been slow in coming along, Don Harris, a manager in the Parks Department, has always been supportive. His girls loved the Wawona.

It was quite an achievement when we got all the ships moved to South Lake Union but now we're being threatened again. The Seattle Parks Department would like to have a passive park, not a shipyard there. Personally, I think people would find it really interesting to see historic ships being repaired there.

HM: So in your work with the maritime heritage community, what did you see as the primary challenges to accomplishing the goal?

KB: Getting a very small and fractured community to come together. That's always a challenge with any community work. People interested in maritime history care about different aspects of that history. And then there was just a lack of interest in preserving old ships. When people think of preservation they tend to focus on preserving historic buildings, not boats.

Some of the maritime heritage people were just interested in the history, photographs and artifacts. Horace McCurdy donated bows of ships to the maritime wing at the Museum of History and Industry (Note: McCurdy was an avid collector of ship models, photographs of historic ships and maritime artifacts and was a significant force while on the Board of the Museum of History and Industry. For more on this, visit HistoryLink). But when you asked him about saving the Wawona, he just said "no, it's a sink hole." Just a way to throw your money away." But then, he owned an old boat.

There have been efforts to bring together the whole maritime heritage community many times. The last one was a few years ago with the Maritime Heritage Foundation. With the dot-com success, we thought this would be a great moment to finish or move along the project. The idea was to bring together all the small organizations dedicated to the cause. But we couldn't raise the funds we needed to make the foundation work.

I think preserving maritime heritage was always something people thought was a good idea, but it wasn't their priority. We advocates just didn't have the where-with-all, but it's not over yet.

HM: Recently, last week or the week before last there was another maritime heritage summit. John Chaney attended it. It was May 7th. It was another effort to bring together a community that understands its past problems.

KB:Yes, and there was a very good article in the PI, perhaps you saw it, a few weeks ago by a man named Joe Follansbee. It was an op-ed, talking about having a PDA like Historic Seattle, except for maritime heritage. That was the first time I ever heard that suggested.

HM: So what do you think about this idea of a maritime heritage PDA?

KB: I think it would be really wonderful.

For more on preserving maritime heritage, visit the 4Culture website.

View last month's Voices article

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