Best of Friends

By George Lowe

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469112053

George Lowe

George Lowe (1924-2013) was a New Zealand-born explorer, mountaineer, photographer and film-maker. He was a leading climber on the 1953 British Everest expedition, forging the route up Everest's Lhotse Face and cutting steps all the way up the summit ridge for his best friend, Ed Hillary. A true hero.

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Copyright © 2008 by George Lowe.

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Contents

Prefatory remark

Cast of Characters

Jerry Hoeck

Bill Finger

Harold Kawaguchi

Bob Peterson

Paul West

Fred Andrews

Bob Hughes

Scott Anderson

Wini Jones

Ken Parkhurst

Prefatory remark

My particular circle of acquaintanceship is probably no wider, more varied or picturesque than your own. But I like people. And because of my somewhat peculiar work (advertising), habits (long lunches, procrastination), and interests, (sailboats, art, politics), I’ve come to know an interesting assortment of individuals, ten of whom I tell about in this book. They all have two things in common. They’re my friends. They’re my Seattle. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

P.S. To Frank Chesley, Bill Johnson, Don Dumas, Jamie Anderson, Monty Dennison, Bob Denby, Dick Ferber, Jimmy Napolitano, Jim O’Keefe, Grant Fjermedahl, Bob Brine, Rick Cocker, Frank Denman, Dave Farrow, Yale Lewis, Dick Lilly, Don Kraft, Marvin Durning, Jeff Lee, Roger Hagan and Mike Tanner: You could be next.

George Lowe

March 12, 2008

Cast of Characters

   Jerry Hoeck:             political warrior

   Bill Finger:               gambling printer

   Harold Kawaguchi:  designing capitalist

   Bob Peterson:           food and Life

   Paul West:                words and music

   Fred Andrews:          traveling eye

   Bob Hughes:            Irish spirit

   Scott Anderson:       adventures of an architect

   Wini Jones:              fashionista of the snows

   Ken Parkhurst:         master of arts

Jerry Hoeck

He was my boss and we didn’t start out to be friends.

Gerald Arthur Hoeck (rhymes with deck) is that rare specimen, a jolly Norwegian. Gregarious, high-spirited, talented, smart. Good golfer. Fair tennis player. Beautiful, witty and formidable wife, Rosemary. Two lovely and talented daughters, Heidi and Kim, raised in West Seattle at their beach place about a mile north of Lincoln Park. Jerry (with a J) was intensely proud of his Norwegian heritage and liked to throw a summer solstice party every June 21, an all-nighter, wearing his Viking horned helmet.

I first met him when I went to work for the advertising agency in which he was a founding partner—Miller, MacKay, Hoeck and Hartung on Virginia Street just across the street from the old Benjamin Franklin Hotel. (Where the north tower of the Westin sits today.) Jim Miller and Wally McKay were the suits who ran the business. Jerry was the writer. Marlowe Hartung was the art director. They were young guys who had come back from World War II full of beans and ready to make their mark. And they did, becoming very successful in Seattle during the fifties and building a bright, imaginative, upstart company doing the best work in town. They had Rainier Beer. Bar S. Meats. KING broadcasting. MD Tissue. Buchan’s Bread. West Coast Airlines and Bardahl, the oil additive. Consumer products and services for which they did lively and effective advertising. They drank. They were Democrats.

At the time I joined them in 1963, MMH&H had just been bought out by McCann Erickson, the big new York agency. (This meant that they had to give up MD Tissue through a conflict with a McCann account, but picked up the state’s biggest bank at the time, Seattle First National, which was McCann’s only local client.) Wally McKay—whom I never met—had recently deceased due to poor health aggravated by excessive thirst. This had been a bit of an occupational hazard at Miller McKay Hoeck and Hartung, and still was when I joined them.

I was nominally hired as Co-Creative-Director working alongside with my boon companion and fellow Co-Creative-Director, Norman Charles Solari. (About whom I’ve written a separate volume.) But in truth and in fact, we were basically copywriters with fancy titles and our work was overseen—and not infrequently challenged—by Jerry Hoeck. I, of course, was full of myself, notoriously thin-skinned, highly averse to criticism. Although Jerry was indeed a genial and accommodating boss (and a better writer), I tended to smart under his direction, light-handed though it was. The worst I could really say was that Hoeck was sparing with his praise, and given my insecurity, this rankled. (Guy Williams, the old-time PR man who worked there for a while, joked that Jerry Hoeck looked at other people’s copy like it was a pile of something warm and steamy.)

Jerry was said to have had quite a war. Marine Lieutenant in the Pacific. Iwo Jima and all. He never talked about these experiences, and it was years before I really became his friend and finally learned his whole story.

It goes like this:

Jerry Hoeck is about as Seattle as you can get. His folks were both born in this country, but their parents were straight from Norway. Grandpa Hoeck had settled down for some peculiar reason in the bleak little town of Asotin on the Snake River in Southeastern Washington, but word reached him about Ballard and he set out with his wife, daughter, cow, wagon and Art, his two-year-old son, (Jerry’s dad-to-be). Two weeks later they ended up on Market Street in the heart of darkest Ballard where he promptly found employment as a fisherman and eventually saved up enough to buy his own boat.

"My Dad started out fishing with with Grandpa Hoeck quite early. One Sunday when Dad was a teenager, he was out with his pals on the Coaster, going up and down the canal just having a good time and talking to girls. And they spotted three especially nice-looking young ladies sitting on the beach and they asked them if they wanted a ride and the girls said ‘Yah’ and one of those girls was my mother. The pair eloped. Dad rowed across the canal, collected his bride, caught the streetcar down to the County City Building and got married. The newlyweds moved to Friday Harbor where Art Hoeck became a fish buyer for San Juan Fish and Packing. By day that was. This was during Prohibition, of course, and like many a Northwest mariner his late-night hobby was running contraband liquor from Vancouver Island. When my mother discovered booze in the basement, she just raised holy hell and said ‘You get out of that business right now or I’m leaving you. He complied and the pair soon moved back to Seattle where they settled in with her father and her two sisters at the family home on the south side of Salmon Bay. I never did know how my Mom got to Seattle. Her mother died early, maybe childbirth. There were three sisters, my mother was the middle girl. Their father was a guy named Ben Hoffeld, a wonderful character. He was a trackman on the Seattle Transit Line and raised those three girls by himself. They lived over by the railroad cut just down from Lawton School, right at the end of the pedestrian trestle."

Gerald Arthur Hoeck put in his appearance in 1921.

Dad still worked for San Juan Fish down here when I was little, because I remember as a kid, I would ride with him up to Hadlock where they had a fish trap and his job was to unload the fish, and we’d stay overnight at the little camp there with the guys who ran the fish trap and in the morning, we’d load up and we’d haul the fish back down to downtown Seattle and unload at the San Juan dock. After Art Hoeck left San Juan Fish he became a tugboat skipper for Foss Tug and Barge Company, hauling sand and gravel from the Steilacom pit down south of Tacoma. And sometimes in summer, Jerry would get to go along and ride the barge back to Seattle. "I’d play in this huge pile of sand chugging along in the middle of the sound. And we’d come in through the locks and unload at the same dock that’s still there today, Salmon Bay Sand and Gravel. I couldn’t have been very old. Must have been nine or ten.

"We lived in my grandfathers house the first eight or nine years of my life with my grandfather and my mother’s other sisters. Inga, the oldest, never married, became a Christian Scientist and tried to enlist me in the church when I was a little kid. She died of breast cancer which nobody knew she had, and when they opened her up she was completely eaten away. She had shown no pain, a tribute I guess to Christian Science and mind over matter. My mother’s younger sister, Bertha was just a delightful, wonderful woman, laughing all the time, a lot of fun. During the Depression the guys who were riding the boxcars would jump off near our house before they got to Interbay and were knocked around by the yard dicks. They’d climb up the bank and come to our back door to get a sandwich.

My mother and father always had a thing about education because they didn’t get any themselves and By God their kid was going to get educated, the old immigrant story. The grandparents had a rule in their home that you did not speak Norwegian. ‘You’re an American, speak English!’ After starting out at Lawton School, my parents got me into Magnolia Grade School and I went there for seven years and part of the time my dad would put my bike on the running board of the car and he’d go up Dravus Street and drop me at the top of Dravus and I’d ride down 28th to school, and then I rode my bike back home coasting from the top of the hill.

After he graduated from grade school, Jerry’s folks moved to the Wallingford district at 40th and Meridian so he could go to Lincoln High School and be close to the University of Washington after he graduated.

When I started Lincoln in 1934, I was a still real short, about five-foot-two or three and weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds. And I was a frustrated athlete. So I tried out for the baseball team but I was too small even to play second base. So the baseball coaches let me keep score and sit on the bench and be part of the team. So did Bill Nolan the football coach. He was a very tough guy, who yelled at everybody, kind of like Bobby Knight. Then I got to be sports editor of the Lincoln paper and wrote a column called ‘Sports Before Your Eyes’. I had no shame.

Working on the paper, Jerry got to be friends with his future partner, Jim Miller, who was the editor. After graduation, the tall, handsome and extremely bright Miller went on to Whitman College where he was both editor of the paper and student body president.

"In my senior year I edited the Lincoln yearbook. Our advisor was Elizabeth Graves, an English teacher who was marvelous. Had a literary background and started a lot of kids writing, including me. We actually had no books or magazines in our own home which was interesting. But my father’s sister, Ruby—an impossible woman, very hard to get along with—finally married an Englishman named Tom Pratt who was quite literary and introduced me to Rudyard Kipling. So the first author I really read was Kipling and he turned me on. And that’s how I really got interested in reading and in learning.

"I was pretty lost my first year at the University. I was still only five foot three, but I grew almost seven inches as a freshman although I still didn’t put on much weight. As time went on I got more and more involved in Lewis Hall which was the Journalism School hangout and was sort of a clubhouse. I worked on the Daily and then for Lynn Scholes who was the editor of Columns, the campus humor magazine. I wrote all kinds of stuff, met some great guys. My future partner, Marlowe Hartung. Irwin Caplan, the ace cartoonist for the Saturday Evening Post. Jaque Rupp, the cartoonist who went with Disney. On the editorial side, Ed Guthman who won a Pulitzer, Bill Fowler who edited the Bellingham Herald, Don Brazier and Lenny Anderson of the Times. I didn’t meet Emmett Watson at Lewis Hall because he was smart, he majored in English. But he was was catcher for the ball team when I tried out—unsuccessfully—as a pitcher."

In 1940 when Jerry was a sophomore, he laid out spring quarter and went to Alaska to work in a gold mine. "I went up on the Aleutian, one of the old Skinner ships, and then took the train up from Seward to this Indian village east of Denali. This was the first of April and there was snow on the ground and we flew in a bush pilot plane into this placer mine about seventy five miles away. My first plane ride.

"I was with a pal of mine from school and when we got off the plane we went right to work and it was a hell of an experience. Sixty cents an hour, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. There were about 20 guys in the camp. There was still snow on the ground and the creek was frozen, so the first thing we had to do was go out on the creek and break up the ice. Nothing is harder than breaking up ice with an ice pick. It’s awful, vibrates your whole body. Then after we got the creek flowing again, we all worked to get the lumber mill going. Cut down trees and sawed up lumber to patch up the flume which was damaged during the winter. That took all of April. Then I had two jobs. In the morning I worked in the pit which had been hosed all night to expose fresh rock. Then they’d use dynamite to bust it up into small rocks and gravel that we loaded into wire nets that lifted them out of the pit. Then we’d go up and down the wooden flume keeping the rocks and gravel moving all day, going back and forth that’s where the gold is. The guy running the hose was the big expert. He had his son with him, kid about ten or eleven. He didn’t have anything to do so he went down below the flume, panned tailings and made thirteen hundred dollars in three months while we were struggling and making a hell of a lot less. I briefly went down in the deep mine . . . 160 feet straight down. You’d go down in a bucket. At the bottom there were rails along a tunnel where they were digging the sides and opening up more tunnel and laying two by fours across the top. The tunnel was five feet high so you’re stooped all the time and there was rail car and my job was to push the rail car up to the end of the shaft and the guys would fill it with ore and I’d push the rail car back and dump it in the bucket and ring the bell and they’d lift it out. I did that for about a week and I don’t know how I got off that job but it was awful. But talk about gold, I actually saw walls where guys could get a nugget big as your thumb, just pull them out. A hell of a mine, but they couldn’t get in or out, no way to get equipment in, no way to build a decent shaft. It was quite a summer.

Then in my Junior year, it was solid Journalism, working hard on publications, mainly Columns. That’s when I met Rosemary. One day early that year they brought the freshman journalism students into the office where we’re all sitting around. They’re all standing there and my friend George Salvege is sitting next to me, and I spot Rosemary and I said, ‘That one’s for me.’ And it turned out she was. She later applied for a job on Columns and I was the one who got to decide whether she got the job or not, so she ended up working for me. We really started going around when I was a Senior and she was a Sophomore. By that time I had my Model A roadster, bright blue with a rumble seat. Beautiful car, it just glistened. So then in my Senior year it was 1941 and December 7 came. I heard about it when I was home, about eleven in the morning. All of us on publications had the same idea—go to Lewis Hall and put out a special edition of the Daily. We finished up at eleven that night down at University Printing, putting out that special Pearl Harbor edition.

At that point, college-boy Hoeck was eager to join the Army Air Force, but he happened to run into a friend one day who talked him into studying Japanese. "So that’s what I did starting Winter Quarter. Then along about April of ’42, a Commander Hindmarsh, came to town. He was a career Navy officer who had served in Tokyo and spoke Japanese and he was trying to recruit a hundred and fifty guys to go to the Navy’s first Japanese Language School at the University of Colorado starting in June. He’d already been to Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Berkeley and UCLA, places where they taught Japanese. Then when he finally came to Seattle he set up shop in the Olympic Hotel and started interviewing guys so I went down and had my interview. I didn’t make much headway at first because my grades were lousy because Rosemary and I had been chasing around so much, but I explained to him that I had been straight A as a Junior and I was just having a pretty good time as a Senior. He understood that and signed me up. So I showed up in Boulder, Colorado on June first with 150 other guys from all over the United States. We went to school there for a year with the rank of Yeomen Second Class in the U.S. Navy. That October, I called Rosemary from Boulder and proposed and she came down to Boulder with my parents and her parents and we were married. We lived together in Boulder for nine months. Then when the class graduated in June of ’43, we were given the choice of either Navy Ensign or Second Lieutenant in the Marines. Thirty of us chose the Marines and the rest were Navy officers and were sent all over the Pacific. None of us who picked Marines were real Marines. We’d been commissioned, but we weren’t Marines by any stretch. So the Corps figured, we gotta do something with these college boys, so they set up a separate camp, called Green’s Farm, which was about ten miles outside Camp Elliot down in San Diego and they sent out some drill instructors to whip us into shape and we lived in this camp for about eight weeks while they tried to make Marines out of us—teach us how to shoot, disassemble weapons, creep and crawl and get down landing nets—all of that stuff. And they succeeded about thirty percent I’d say. But at least we could talk the talk.

"We had some other friends, couples from Seattle, who were in the Navy in San Diego, so Rosemary and these four other gals rented a big mansion at Point Loma in San Diego. And the Navy husbands come in on liberty and I’d get away when I could and come down to Point Loma and we’d all have a great time.

"After Green’s Farm, the Marine Corps split us up, assigning guys each to the Second, Third and Fourth Marine Divisions as Combat Interpreters. I was assigned to the Fourth which was at Camp Pendleton but wasn’t scheduled to head out until January. So the Fourth didn’t know what the hell to do with us until then, so they sent all ten of us to the Army Language School in Savage, Minnesota. I lived in the Minneapolis Athletic Club until Rosemary got there. Then we lived with this other Marine couple in a motel in this town about thirty miles south of Minneapolis where the school was. The town was on the Mississippi and there was a shipyard. So Ray Luthi and I would trot off to Language School every morning to work on our Japanese and Rosemary and Ray’s wife would go to the shipyard where they had jobs as file clerks. Then after about six weeks, they finally shipped us back to Pendleton where they still didn’t know what to do with us so they made us API’s—Aerial Photo Interpreters. They showed us photos of Kwajalein Atoll and taught us how to recognize pillboxes and ammunition dumps and stuff. So we spent a couple of weeks sitting around with our magnifying glasses identifying military objects. By this time we realized we were the only Lieutenants in the whole Fourth Division who knew where we were headed. The rest of the camp had no idea, but we knew we were going straight to Kwajalein and sure enough we shipped out in January and hit Kwajalein on February 1. I went ashore about ten o’clock the first day and we were still pinned down on the beach. Sniper fire. It was my first combat and I’ll never forget some Major to my right called out, ‘I want a volunteer to go over to B Company and make contact with them. Who’ll volunteer?’ And not a man raised his hand. And that’s one thing about the Marine Corps. Give and order and they’ll do it—they’ll take any order, but just don’t ask for volunteers. I also saw officers who tried to show the troops how brave they were stand up and say ‘All right, men, we’re going to do this!’ And the first thing you know he’s got a bullet in his head. Picked off by some sniper. You just didn’t do that.

"Anyhow, by the end of the day, we’d taken Kwajalein. It was about a 24-hour operation. Then our job was to go around and look for documents. We were digging out pillboxes and command posts for about ten days and we did find a very important code book which made a hero out of Colonel McCormick, our division Intelligence Officer.

We had another Colonel, Evans Carlson, who was one of the most unusual men I ever met. Unlike any other Marine officer. Very tall, skinny guy who looked like a minister from Maine. Soft spoken, very easy, but tough underneath. The bravest man I ever met. I later saw him do things on Saipan I couldn’t believe. The top Marine brass didn’t like him because he wasn’t one of their breed. Not the VMI type. But in fact he’d been a Marine in China before the war and Roosevelt had used him as a source of information. He had met FDR in 1934 when serving as a Marine aide at Roosevelt’s Warm Springs retreat. We sat around on Kwajalein with him one night drinking the medical brandy that was left over and he told us about being on the long march with Mao up to Hunan. He said FDR told him,’I don’t trust my State Department and I don’t trust my goddamn military. I want you to come back here every two years and tell me what’s going on in China.’ And he did. He knew Mao and he reported back what was really happening and that Mao was gaining strength and everything else. When he formed Carlson’s Raiders, FDR’s son Jimmy became a Marine and was Carlson’s exec.

Carlson’s Raiders—a guerrilla force of some two hundred carefully chosen Marines—hit Makin Island one full month ahead of the full American invansion to harass and bedevil the Japanese garrison. They succeeded amazingly well. Later, on Saipan, Carlson went forward under intense enemy fire to rescue one of his wounded enlisted men. Because of his experience and contacts in China, Carlson came under Congressional suspicion after the war and never received the official recognition as one of America’s greatest war heroes that was so richly his due. He died in Portland. Oregon in 1953 soon after his retirement.

Back to Kwajalein:

By the time the Navy had got things turned around they loaded us back on ships and hauled us all the way back to Maui. We pulled into Wailuku and it was a funny scene because here we’d been in our first battle with the Japanese and as we went through Wailuku—twenty thousand Marines in trucks—the streets were lined with Japanese grown-ups and kids cheering and waving American flags. Hundreds of them.

The division was stashed in a camp established on the rainy side of the mountain toward Hana where they rested and trained for the next landing. "Because we’d found that code book on Kwajalein, we talked our way into getting temporary duty at the intelligence center