November 20 -- LeMay Auto Collection

The big activity of the day was the LeMay Collection of automobiles in Tacoma, about 45 minutes south of Seattle.

Harold LeMay started a garbage hauling business with one old truck when he returned from WWII. This grew into America’s 10th largest waste hauling company and made LeMay spectacularly wealthy. He started collecting cars, and at his death in 2001 had the largest privately owned car collection in the world – 3500 vehicles in at least 20 locations around Washington State.

Much of this collection is now held in the 501(c)(3) organization which runs the LeMay Museum. LeMay collected Cadillacs (one of his favorites) Rolls Royces, Pierce Arrows and the like, but distinguished himself by accumulating low-end cars and trucks too – Chevrolets, Fords, and other brands that are not usually considered collectibles.

The most remarkable car in the collection is a blue 1948 Tucker (above). The 1988 Francis Ford Coppola movie, “Tucker,” starring Jeff Bridges, tells the story of Preston Tucker’s ill-fated bid to build a world-beating car. Only 51 Tuckers were ever built; 47 remain, of which this is supposed to be one of the finest examples. I believe it.

There were too many interesting cars at the museum to discuss all of them, but I include pictures of some fun ones.


The Flintstone’s car (from the movie)!


A 1970’s vintage Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.


A Lincoln Continental and Ford Mustang.


A red Pierce Arrow made for a South American strongman.


A 1930’s Model A Ford painted in original factory colors!


And remember those funny square steering wheels that were popular for a time?

The most exotic car at the museum.

The museum is funny. It’s housed at an old Catholic military academy for boys tucked away behind a Home Depot in an undistinguished part of Tacoma. Each part of the school is used to house vehicles, including the gymnasium (the Tucker’s in that), the old swimming pool (English car collection), and the shower room (the beautiful Kaiser Indian Ceramic pictured below is wedged into that!).

The cars are parked too close to allow free roaming, so one must take a tour. There were eight people on mine, and a very knowledgeable docent. The cars are parked so tightly that it’s very tough to take photographs. A new $90,000,000 facility to replace this one is scheduled to open in downtown Tacoma in 2010. That will allow this fabulous collection to be shown to its best advantage.

I drove back to Seattle – there’s a great view of the city coming north on I-5.  I had a drink with Jake and Martha at Deluxe on Broadway, and then dinner with Jenny at a place called the Hopvine on Capitol Hill.

November 19 -- Everett

Zanny, Skip and I drove up to Everett after breakfast to tour the Boeing wide body plant in Everett, WA. This is the factory that make Boeing’s biggest jets, the 747, 767, 777, and the brand new 787. Security was very tight and cameras prohibited, so I don’t have pictures of the tour.

We started by viewing a promotional video, and were then bussed to the factory building past a group of brand spanking new planes undergoing final air testing and waiting for delivery. We saw airplanes with Qatar, Air India, Cathay Pacific, Air Canada, Emirates, Korean Air Lines, Lan Chile and Jet Airways livery sitting on the apron.


The building where the planes are assembled is the largest in the world as measured by interior volume. 30,000 workers labor in it, 1,000,000 million lights illuminate it, 911 basketball courts could fit on the floor; and each of the big hangar doors is almost the size of a football field. In the picture above, the building looks much smaller than it really is.

Inside, we saw the 777 and 787 assembly lines; the two 787’s in front of us were the first two ever to be built! The feeling of the place was totally different from Ford’s Rouge plant: the pace of the workers seemed less frenetic; almost phlegmatic. Also, while the planes do move on a sort of line, the assembly goes much slower than in a car plant. It takes a 777 something like 6 weeks to get from the beginning to the end of the line; it’s a three-day process for the 787. Compare this to Ford’s factory, which spit out pickups at a rate of 1100 per day.

After seeing the assembly plant, we went to the small museum there. Once we were finished, we had a lunch of fish ‘n chips at Ivar's, a Washington seafood institution. This particular restaurant was right next to the ferry, which we could see coming and going, loading and unloading.

Once we returned to Seattle, Skip gave me a tour of a Volunteer Park, an Olmstead green space not far from the house. We started out walking up a watertower there for a terrific view of Seattle, and then walked by the Asian Art Museum and the Arboretum.



At dinner, I met up with my friend and former paralegal Jake and his girlfriend, Martha. We ate a very good artisanal/Washington State ingredients restaurant called Crave on Broadway. It was great to spend time with them, and Jake had the great news that he will be a summer clerk in the San Francisco DA’s Office this summer.

November 18 -- Museum of Flight & Friends

The day started with breakfast in our PJs with Skip and Zanny. I had a good time catching up with Skip, who I had not seen in about 20 years, and getting to know Zanny, who whipped up a perfectly delicious frittata.
Immediately after, I met up with Jenny at Seattle’s Museum of Flight at Boeing Field.

WOW! This is a great place!

Jenny had arranged for Craig, a friend of the family who is on the board of the museum, to meet us there and give us an overview. It’s an awesome place. Craig gave us the highlights, walking us first through the Great Hall; then on to the Personal Courage Wing, a WWI and WWII hall; wrapping the tour up in the Red Barn, Boeing’s first factory building, before setting us loose.

Jenny and I went first to see the outdoor commercial jets. We walked inside a supersonic Concorde passenger jet as well as a former Air Force One 707, complete with a safe to hold top secret nuclear missile launch codes, a conference room, and a dog door into the president’s state room! We also had a chance to see, up-close, the first 737 and 747 jumbo jet.

Then I went back into the Great Hall, a vast, impressive glass-enclosed structure. Many of the aircraft there are suspended from the ceiling; many are parked on the ground floor. It features a Blackbird reconnaissance plane (fastest plane in the world), a number of WWII and post-war fighter aircraft, as well as a variety of commercial and other aircraft. There’s also a replica of Spaceship One, just like in Oshkosh.


On to the Personal Courage Wing. It contains splendid, restored aircraft suspended or displayed creatively in scenes on the ground.
The WWII planes include a Thunderbolt, Lightning, Mustang, Spitfire, ME 109, and others; the WWI planes include the Fokker and Sopwith Triplanes (Germany’s famous ace, the Red Baron was killed, was killed in a Fokker), the Fokker Eindekker, Sopwith Camel and Pup, and a number of Nieuport aircraft. In addition, the museum has the world’s first fighter plane, an Italian Caproni monoplane from 1914, that was stored in a monastery for many years and is kept in its original condition at the museum.

In addition to the planes, there are excellent small exhibits, videos and displays around the aircraft about the men and women who flew them, and the wars themselves. There is a particularly affecting display about trench warfare in WWI. There was also a fun exhibit about mascots. I include the a picture of the U.S. Navy identification card for “Mr. Chips.”
One total surprise, and a real treasure, is a recently donated collection of 400 scale (1/72nd) models made by one man, a surgeon, starting in the ‘90’s. These represent just about every WWII aircraft. There is a video screen that allows you to learn about each one. The models are displayed along two walls where they are easy to see up close, and I could easily have spent an hour looking at and learning about them all. There’s a picture of some of them at the Museum of Flight website, the link to which is at right.

After the WWI and II hall, I went to see the red barn, Boeing’s first aircraft factory, which the museum has transported to the site. This wooden building is meticulously restored. Exhibits in it show the ways in which aircraft were designed and manufactured in Boeing’s very early years, and also give a history of the company and its planes up through the 707 passenger jet’s development in the late 1950’s. These are accompanied by remarkable videos about Boeing flying boats, bombers and post-war civil aircraft.


After the museum, Skip’s three daughters, Jenny, Liz and Hilary, came over for potluck dinner at Skip and Zanny’s.

Jenny’s boyfriend Rob also was there, as was Craig, who had showed Jenny and me around the museum in the morning. It was a great time, high energy with old and new friends, as you can see from the photos.


During the evening, Craig offered to fly me in his experimental plane up to the restoration center in Everett, where the museum is refurbishing my favorite airliner and the first commercial jet passenger plane, the de Havilland Comet. Unfortunately, the weather the next day was heavily overcast, and we couldn’t do it – but what an amazing opportunity!! There’s a picture of a model of the museum’s Comet below.

November 17 -- Made It to the West Coast!

When I woke up, I looked out the motel window and was amazed at the view. Mountains! With this dramatic backdrop, the Inn provided a breakfast of pancakes and sausages in the parking lot prepared by a cowboy with a grill!


I hit the road at 7:30, in order to make it to Seattle in time for dinner. The highway through the rest of Montana, past Butte and Missoula to the Idaho border, was mountainous and pretty, although hard fully to appreciate after a while because of clouds and rain.

The drive through Idaho was very short. For part of the time I was driving above the clouds! Coeur d’Alene , the only major Idaho destination I drove through, seemed a very attractive place; I later came to learn that it’s a center of Neo-Nazism, so perhaps it’s a superficial beauty only.


From Spokane to Seattle, via towns such as Cheney and Fishtrap, the weather was very bad. Heavy rains and dark clouds created night-like conditions at times. The water puddled on the roads and one car hydroplaned right off the highway. With all the water, it looked like I was driving though broad, green farmland. I now understand that normally the landscape is desert!

A big surprise was the incline on the last set of passes through the Cascades. The Mini pulled strongly up the mountain roads despite the grade; sharp eyes were important because there were, in fact, large fallen rocks in the “Fallen Rock” zones. Yikes! The snow beside the road at the top of the pass and the heavy rains made me glad it was not just a few degrees cooler, in which case the range would have been impassible.


The downpour stopped a little more than an hour from Seattle. The skies became clear and the lights of the city twinkled, arrayed in different colors on hills and around the water.

I was fortunate to be able to stay in Seattle with a family that had lived right around the corner from mine when we were in London in the 1970’s. I had no trouble finding the house that Skip (the dad) shares with his partner Zanny.

When I arrived, Jenny, my exact contemporary (within 10 days), and I went out to a terrific Vietnamese restaurant, Tamarind Tree, and then on to a place called the B&O for coffee and sinful desserts. We hadn’t seen each other in four years or more, and it was great to catch up.