1910-1985: 75 Years of Citizenship

The Municipal League of King County - A History by Walt Crowley

This article was published by the League in1985.

Foreword

Creating the Civic Ideal

At the turn of the century, American capitalism was bursting at the seams with new markets, technologies, products, and frontiers, and the national scene was being rapidly and permanently transformed from a rural into an industrial landscape.

Nowhere were these changes more dramatically visible than in the cities of the East Coast, with their waves of immigrants, teeming tenements, and soaring skyscrapers and smokestacks. In the West, too, the arrival of the railroads and the opening of the great markets of the Orient turned frontier settlements into metropolises virtually overnight.

With these economic changes came social dislocations. The gap between the owners of industry and property and the men, women, and children who toiled in the factories and fields widened. Between them rose a new middle class of mechanics, managers, professionals, technicians. and merchants. As clashes increased between the prosperous and the poor, this new class began to find its own voice.

The fledgling middle class espoused a broad and energetic reform movement. bracketed by the twin virtues of Victorian morality and technocratic efficiency. Some turned to the Socialists for guidance, other joined the largely rural Populists, but most middle class reformers assembled under the banner of "Progress."

These urban progressives championed a host of causes, not all of them necessarily complementary: prohibition. public education, improved sanitation, women's suffrage, breaking up the industrial trusts, construction of public parks, comprehensive planning, slum clearance, child labor laws and improved working conditions in the factories. Their heroes included Lincoln Steffens and Uptown Sinclair, but it was Theodore Roosevelt's progressivism which best embraced the middle class' dreams for a decent society created out of and guided by the enlightened self-interest of its members.

In what Steffens called "the shame of the cities," the reformers found their greatest challenge. The movement added organizational muscle with the founding in 1894 of the National 'Municipal League, led by Teddy Roosevelt, and the proliferation of "Municipal Research Bureaus" in major cities, including Seattle's first, short-lived Municipal League. The weapons wielded by these reformers included civil service to break the back of patronage-peddlers, ambitious plans for civic parks and redevelopment such as those designed by the Olmsted brothers, and citizens' leagues to close the Red Light Districts and build settlement houses in their place. They fought the ward-based systems of government graft, such as New York's "Tweed Ring," and by 1900 ,the reformers were scoring impressive victories in the courts and at the ballot box.

In retrospect, many of this early movement's dreams must appear quaint or naive, but the truth is that much of the structure and philosophy of modern government owes its existence to the successes of these municipal reformers. More broadly, they helped to redefine the American Dream, replacing the traditional, rural ideal with a modern civic ideal. In this way, the rise of the middle class, it can be argued, helped to save" America by prodding it to define a more realistic future. It certainly helped to blunt the class antagonisms that gripped the rest of the industrialized world at the start of the Twentieth Century, and thereby led to the creation of a more humane and uniquely American brand of industrial society.

It accomplished this by interposing a new, vital, self-defined "center" in society, and it reinvigorated the ideal of selfless, creative and nonpartisan citizenship. Often invoking the example of Cincinnatus, the citizen-farmer who laid down his plow to defend Rome in the Fifth Century B.C., this movement pioneered the middle path of progress between the antipodes of reaction and revolution.

As such, it is the antecedent of contemporary drives for public disclosure of campaign contributions, for community planning, for responsible public budgeting, for citizen participation in decisions, and for open and accountable government at all levels, which are chronicled in the following chapters.

The history of the Municipal League of Seattle and King County embraces and exemplifies the remarkable saga of the American middle class as it built a creative new center for urban society by promoting the civic ideals of efficiency, and decency.

No doubt inspired by Teddy Roosevelt's example with the creation of the National Municipal League in Philadelphia, 49 of the leading citizens of Seattle met in the offices of the Commercial Club to create their own "Municipal League" on March 17, 1894. Seattle had only been settled 43 years earlier and it had been incorporated as a city for barely a quarter of a century, so it is not surprising that this gathering included many of the city's founders, including Arthur Denny, Morgan Carkeek. Dexter Horton, and John McGilvra. As written in the group's constitution, their aims were "to separate the administration of municipal affairs from party politics" and otherwise "to vigilantly watch over, criticize, approve or condemn" the city government.

From this initial Saturday evening session came a successful campaign to rewrite Seattle's City Charter in 1896, but by the time of the election, the nascent League had already ceased meeting.

Fourteen years elapsed before serious efforts began in the fall of 1909 with the aim of reviving the Municipal

League. This time it was a different kind of group which met to ponder the state of Seattle-lawyers, physicians, managers, and other professional men, many of whom had been drawn to the burgeoning metropolis only recently. They met in the law offices of Herr, Bayley, Wilson & Smith for months before consolidating a cadre of leaders bold enough to frame a constitution for a resuscitated Municipal League.

They finally unveiled their proposals at a public meeting on May 23, 1910. and to the surprise and pleasure of the organizers, 120 men promptly signed on as charter members, electing Hugh N. Caldwell (later mayor of Seattle) as the president of the new Municipal League of Seattle. They dedicated themselves to the ideals of active citizenship, competent officials, wholesome legislation, scientific investigation, full publicity, and constructive solutions."

In the Seattle of 1910, they had their job cut out for them. Thanks largely to the Klondike gold rush of 1897, the city had exploded with new wealth and population. Within its then 59 square miles of land (since more than doubled through successive annexations) lived 237,194 men, women and children served by a little over 1,000 acres of parks, 67 public schools, and one University boasting 2,000 students. People and goods traveled along 140 miles of paved streets and 101 miles of planked streets, with the other 522 miles alternating between dust and mud, mostly the latter. Eight transcontinental railroads and 57 steamship lines carried 546 million in annual exports and almost 550 million in imports, and over 13,000 building permits were granted in 1910 alone.

With such growth and prosperity came graft, patronage, crime, prostitution, racial tension, poverty, and all the ills of modern city life. For the Municipal League and other reformers such as the Public Welfare League, these evils were personified by the incumbent mayor Hiram Gill who supported an "open town" policy of tolerance toward the city's thriving Red Light district, gambling, and other vices. In October of 1910, the League and its allies petitioned for Hill's recall and the voters ousted him at the next election (Hill would return to office three years later as a 'reform candidate.")

"Throwing the rascals out" was not the sum of the League's agenda, however. It also campaigned for a variety of positive programs, including a municipal telephone service and creation of a Municipal Plans Commission. The latter retained the services of Frederick Law Olmsted's protégé. Virgil Rogue, who drafted a visionary

comprehensive plan calling for, among other improvements, creation of a San Francisco-style Civic Center in the then incomplete Denny Regrade, a trolley tunnel under Lake Washington and acquisition of Mercer Island as a city park. The plan elicited determined opposition from the city establishment, excoriated by the League as the "Downtown Trust," which feared Bogue's Civic Center would devalue the central business district. Despite a valiant campaign led by such notables as city engineer R.H. Thompson, the Bogue Plan was crushed at the polls in 1912, landing the fledgling League its first defeat.

Undaunted, the Municipal League continued to press for reforms. In 1912 it conducted its first evaluation of candidates, and in 1913, it made the first use of the new power of referendum to repeal an ordinance it perceived as "tying the hands of the police." It pressed for creation of a Port Commission, for pasteurization of milk, for civil service examinations for city and county workers, for competitive bidding for public works contracts, for nonpartisan elections, for annual budgeting, and a host of other reforms we now take for granted.

During these early years, the Municipal League also sided more often than not with organized labor and social reformers in calling for the 8-hour day, child labor laws, health and safety regulation of working conditions, and relief for the unemployed. It campaigned for slum clearance, editorializing "Greed held cause for building congestion," and for emergency housing in 1915 for an estimated 5,000 "home-less men." In these and subsequent campaigns. the League joined forces with other organizations-its victories were invariably shared by kindred groups.

Railing against election frauds and political graft, the League agitated in 1913 against construction of the City-County Building (now the King County Court House) as a "humbug" and for consolidation of county and municipal government. Despite such grand crusades, the League also found time to advocate music in the parks to "exert an uplifting moral influence which will help [the people] bear their burdens with less grumbling," and to propose a system of public "comfort stations" to replace the restrooms in some 300 bars expected to be closed in 1916 by the advent of Prohibition.

By the close of the First World War, however, the League had taken a more conservative turn, aided undoubtedly by the chaos of the Seattle General Strike of 1919 and the Red Scare that swept the nation. Many of the League's members were now themselves part of the "Establishment,” and they focused their attention and energies on a narrower scope of political and govern mental reforms.

In the Twenties, the League campaigned doggedly to institute a city manager form of municipal government, reluctantly abandoning the cause in 1926 after losing the second vote on the issue by a mere Ill ballots out of 90,000. Its efforts to promote land-use planning and zoning met with more success when the City Planning Commission was established in 1924. During this decade, the League's interests touched on themes that would recur later in its history, including a proposal for a privately financed pontoon bridge across Lake Washington, creation of a tri-county Sewage Commission to combat the increasing pollution of Lake Washington and Puget Sound, and advocacy of a special property tax to subsidize the city's trolley system.

Despite the hiring of an energetic and ambitious young attorney named Warren G. Magnuson as its secretary in 1930, the fortunes of the Municipal League, like the rest of the of the country, plummeted as the Great Depression took hold. Membership declined from over a thousand to bare 300, compelling the League to take two major steps: it hired its first full-time executive secretary, Glen Eastburn, and it finally voted to admit women as members. The latter proposal had been "on the table' since 1913, but League elders repeatedly dodged the issue through many of the same sort of parliamentary maneuvers they deplored in government. On March 6, 1937, a full 17 years after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the board of the Municipal League voted 18 to 7 to install its first female members.

Despite its depleted numbers and the distractions of Depression at home and war clouds abroad, the League kept busy during the Thirties. It advocated the permanent registration of voters to replace the extant system under which citizens registered anew for each election, and it continued its campaign for city-county government consolidation, improved public budgeting, and long range capital planning. In 1934, the League even dallied with promotion of a political slate, endorsing "The Order of Cincinnatus" candidates who swept out the incumbent Seattle City Council in that year's elections.

By 1940, League membership had begun to rebound, reaching 682, under the guidance of then secretary Murray Morgan, now a respected historian. Morgan was succeeded by Ewen Dingwall, who would later make his own mark as director of the 1962 Century 21 World's Fair. Despite the demands of World War II, the League remained active, successfully arguing in 1943 for a Freeholders election to draft.

a new City Charter for Seattle and in 1945 for new state law mandating centralized county purchasing. Following the end of the war, the League won passage of the new City Charter in 1946, which remains the city's basic organic law, and the adoption in 1948 of state law permitting "home rule" county charters.

The Fifties brought new growth and influence for the Municipal League. Its rolls swelled to 5,206 members in 1952 (before a dues increase trimmed them back to almost 4,000 by the end of the decade) and the League undertook what would become its greatest achievement, the creation of the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle, or as it is better known, "Metro."

The seed was planted in a speech by a young attorney named James R. Ellis, who called in 1953 for a "metropolitan government" for greater Seattle. The proposal was formally embraced by the League in its 1955 report "Metropolitan Seattle - The Shape We're In” authored in large part by Ellis. At the time scientists were predicting that Lake Washington had only a few years "to live" before it choked on algae fed by the raw sewage pumped into it by neighboring cities. With its report and these warnings, the League won passage in 1957 of a state law to permit creation of a county-wide "municipality" for water quality, waste management, transit, and parks super-vision. The issue was taken to the voters in March 1958 but failed to pass. A revised proposal was put on the fall ballot, and met with voter approval, launching the initial 5135 million program "to clean up Lake Washington."

If Metro was the League's biggest undertaking during the Fifties, it was hardly its only. The League campaigned hard but unsuccessfully for a new County Charter in 1952, championed creation of the City Transit Commission, led the fight to expand the Pert Commission from three to five elected members, secured the election of municipal and traffic judges, prodded the Seattle School District into reforming its civics and social studies curriculum, arranged for the first evaluation of municipal finances and operations by an independent private accounting firm, drafted Seattle's first noise control ordinance, and promoted the installation of sprinklers in the city's older, wood-framed schools.

The League maintained this extraordinary level of activity into the Sixties. Again, it was James Ellis who laid down the League's most important challenge when, in 1966, he delivered a speech entitled "The City-A Cause Waiting for Rebellion." He challenged the community to take control of its own accelerating growth through a comprehensive program of capital improvements, including rapid transit and new parks, roads, and civic facilities. The proposal was soon augmented with additional ideas, such as that for a "county domed stadium," and became known as "Forward Thrust." $334 million of Forward Thrust bonds were passed by the voters in 1968 for virtually all of its projects, with the notable exception of rapid rail transit.

The year 1961 also brought success for one of the League's longest fought battles, the campaign to create a new charter for King County. The decade ended in a flurry of activity in behalf of a County Ombudsman's Office, a County hearing examiner system, a household tax to help subsidize Seattle Transit (remember 1921?), and as a token of the "good old days," a grand jury investigation into vice, graft, and payoffs in the Seattle Police Department.

Transportation problems headed the Municipal League's agenda for most of the Seventies, beginning with its research into proposals for the 1-90 bridge and the proposed Bay Freeway between I-5 and Seattle Center. The League scored a major victory in 1972 when the voters delegated management of a county-wide transit system to Metro.

Perhaps its best remembered accomplishment of the decade, however, was the revelation of massive irregularities in the design and budgeting of the proposed high-level West Seattle Bridge. The League's findings spurred a grand jury investigation that culminated in the conviction of the city engineer and two powerful State Legislators for corruption.

On other fronts, the League joined with many civic organizations to promote Initiative 276, which created the Public Disclosure Commission, open meeting laws, and the reporting of campaign contributions when it passed in 1972. Also in 1972, the League challenged a city proposal for 540 million in bonds to repair bridges, and when voters rejected the bonds, it helped the city to find 58 million in unspent funds to do the job with. It also investigated irregularities in Seattle’s attempts to acquire a computerized financial system, which led to sweeping reforms in city purchasing proposals.

In 1973, the League advocated election of Freeholders to draft a new City Charter, but the panel split over whether to create City Council districts (an issue which divided the League n 1911), and the proposed Charter failed. The League rebounded in 1977, helping to win passage of four out of five proposed amendments to update the 1946 Charter it had originally helped to write. As the decade closed, the League lent its support to the Seattle School District's desegregation plan and it promoted revision of Seattle's Comprehensive Plan, a process that it is still continuing almost ten years later.

Entering the Eighties, the Municipal League remained active but at a much lower pitch. By this decade, it was becoming a victim of its own, numerous successes.

The League had triumphed in fundamentally restructuring both city and county government and it had promoted creation of a successful Port and an innovative county-wide Metro with broad powers in water quality, waste management, and transit.

The League had secured adoption and major revision at a Comprehensive Plan for Seattle. It had promoted countless improvements in public procedures, practices, services, and facilities.

The League had helped to root out patronage hiring and graft at all levels of government, and through its candidate evaluations, had helped to promote the election of honest and able public servants. The League had made the idea of citizen participation respectable and it helped to secure the reforms to make it effective.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the League began as early as its 60th anniversary to question whether there was anything left for it to do. Given the myriad of single issue and special interest groups, it asked itself, is there a role for a centrist, progressive, consensus-based organization such as the Municipal League?

The question really answers itself. In such a context, there is more reason for such an organization than there has ever been before. The alternative is a community politics defined and dominated by its extremes. It is to give voice to the center that the Municipal League was created, has always worked, and remains an indispensable institution.

The challenges of growth, social need, incipient corruption, government waste, and the abuses of power are not artifacts of the past. The problems of mass transit, or urban sprawl, or environmental degradation, of poverty have not been solved; indeed, they have no permanent solutions.

Seattle and King County have experienced a remarkable 75 years since the Municipal League was established. The nature of the next 75 years will depend in large part on the region's ability to achieve and maintain agreement on a common set of values and goals for self-government, economic development, and social improvement. Such agreement can only come from the center. and that is why, if the Municipal League did not already exist, we would have to create it.

The preceding history is not merely a chronicle of the achievements of the Municipal League. This history is really the story of the contributions of scores of community organizations-the League of Women Voters, chambers of commerce community councils, environmental groups, churches, social action organizations, political parties, and more-and tens of thousands of volunteers from every class and walk of life who have given their time and money to make Seattle and King County a better community.

For the future of the Municipal League as an organization, probably the most important (and most positive) change since 1910 has been the rise of citizen participation in all levels of government. Where the Municipal League once shared the public podium with a handful of citizen groups, now hundreds compete for the attention of government and the electorate. Thus the Municipal League faces a most welcome challenge-the challenge of its own success in encouraging and sustaining creative and effective citizen participation in government.

The Municipal League recognizes that any mature organization. whatever its accomplishments. is either building upon its successes (and learning from its disappointments) or it is living off them, slowly depleting its reserves of reputation and draining its members energies. Equally, the Municipal League knows that it can-and should-only continue to exist by virtue of its new contributions to the public's well-being, not by dint of past glories. For these reasons, the Board of Trustees of the Municipal League has undertaken four major initiatives to reform the organization's procedures, to reinvigorate its membership, and to assure the continuing relevance and quality of its contributions to the community:

The Municipal League is reaffirming its commitment to strengthening the opportunities and processes for citizen participation, both within itself by improving its committee structures, and within the larger community by sponsoring evening seminars on public issues to promote both member and public education;

The Municipal League is modifying its procedures for the evaluation of candidates to assure objective and nonpartisan analysis of candidate abilities by initiating outside experts to participate in reviewing incumbents' past performance, and by expanding the checking of candidate references and backgrounds to balance subjective impressions created during candidate interviews;

The Municipal League is embarking on an annual “Public Agenda" process to aid both itself and the community. In understanding and forecasting emerging public issues. This undertaking will entail publishing a quarterly newsletter to track important issues and actors in the community; and

The Municipal League is developing new relationships with area graduate schools, broadening its financial base, and introducing modern management tools (such as full computerization achieved this year) to improve and streamline its own internal operations-something it's always been quick to chide government about doing but which it has been slow to undertake itself.

Through these initiatives and reforms, the Municipal League seeks to maintain the opportunity for citizens-who have no other "special interest" than to promote good government and a healthy community-to make their voices heard in the councils of government, and to continue to provide, as the Municipal League has for the past 75 years, a forum and a civic workshop for "the center" to make its own special contribution to Seattle and King County.

Theodore Roosevelt helps found the National Municipal League in Philadelphia. On March 17, A.A. Denny, Morgan J. Carkeek, John McGilvra, and 45 other leading Seattle citizens convene in the Chamber of Commerce offices to form a Municipal League and launch a campaign that will culminate in a new City Charter in 1896. Despite its ultimate election victory, this prototype League does not survive past its March 7, 1895 meeting.

The Municipal League of Seattle is formally established at a May 23 meeting of 120 charter members, all men and mostly professionals, climaxing an organizing effort that began in the fall of 1909. Hugh M. Caldwell who would later become City Attorney and Mayor, is elected to be the League's first president. On October 8, the League and allied citizen organizations file petitions for the recall of Mayor Hiram Gill and the league campaigns successfully for creation of a "Municipal Plans Commission."

Gill is recalled and voters approve Plans Commission. which hires Olmstead protégé Virgil Bogue. The League publishes the first edition of Municipal League News on June 24, in which it advocates a Port Commission and nonpartisan elections.

League conducts its first "evaluations" of candidates for local office. Voters reject Virgil Bogue's visionary city plan.

League membership tops 1,000. It launches Seattle's first referendum campaign, a successful effort to repeal a City ordinance relating to police powers. The League supports a new Charter reestablishing the ward system (repealed in 1910), but the proposal is voted down, as is the League's own first serious proposal to admit women as members. The League opposes plans for City-County Building (now King County Courthouse) and proposes merger of city and county governments.

The League becomes involved in social issues, including child labor laws, establishment of the 8-hour day, prevention of slums, and housing for transients and unemployed workers. It also supports mandating the pasteurization of milk and opposes use of then new voting machines. Anticipating one consequence of Prohibition, the League proposes creation of “public comfort stations” to replace restrooms in the 300 bars to be closed the following year.

The League launches the first of several unsuccessful campaigns to adopt a City Manager form of municipal government.

Seattle creates a permanent City Planning Commission at the urging of the League.

The League provides a forum for the first proposal to build a floating bridge across Lake Washington (not achieved until 1940).

The League raises the first serious alarms over water pollution and campaigns successfully for creation of a city Sewage Commission.

The League makes the first proposals for tax subsidies for public transit, which is funded exclusively through fare revenues at the time.

Warren G. Magnuson, who will later become a U.S. Senator, is hired to edit the Seattle Municipal News, and is later promoted to executive secretary of the League. Other luminaries who will fill these slots over the following years include C.A. Crosser, historian Murray Morgan Seattle Center Director Ewen Dingwall, and William Massey.

The Depression takes its toll on the League as membership plummets (reaching a nadir of 345 in 1939). The League responds by hiring its first full-time executive secretary, Glen Eastburn, and by finally voting to admit women members on March 6-fully 17 years after the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution granted women the right to vote.

Despite the distractions of World War II, the League remains active, proposing a City Freeholders election that ultimately results in adoption of Seattle’s 1946 Charter.

Following on the success of its campaign for state law to mandate centralized County purchasing in 1945, the League wins passage of enabling legislation to permit adoption of "Home Rule" County charters. The League again advocates the merger of city and county governments.

An appointed City Transit Commission is created at the urging of the League. The League's membership nears 4,000.

A proposed King County Charter advocated by the League fails at the polls. Membership reaches 5,205.

The League successfully champions expansion of the Port Commission from three to five elected members. Attorney James R. Ellis gives a speech proposing a “Metropolitan Government” for Greater Seattle.

The League wins passage of laws providing for election of municipal judges. The League releases a report entitled “Metropolitan Seattle-The Shape Were In," which proposes creation of a metropolitan government for King County and is authored in large part by James Ellis.

After securing passage of enabling state legislation the year before, the League leads the battle to win voter approval of the "Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle," or "Metro” for short, on the fail ballot, (having failed in the spring) and a $135 million effort is launched to clean up Lake Washington. The League also champions the City's adoption of its first noise control ordinance.

The League helps to persuade the Seattle School District to install sprinklers in older, wood-framed schools.

In a speech to the League on January 21. James Ellis proposes a massive. comprehensive program of capital improvements for parks, mass transit. roads, and other public facilities. This program will later become “Forward Thrust”

King County votes pass the bulk of Forward Thrust bonds, with the notable exception of a proposed rail transit system, and they approve, at long last, a Home Rule Charter.

Buoyed by its victories on the County Charter and Forward Thrust, the League enters a new phase of hyperactivity, proposing a County Ombudsman, a County hearing examiner system, a household tax to support Seattle Transit services, and a grand jury investigation into gambling and police graft in Seattle, League membership peaks at about 5,000.

The first King County Executive and County Councilmembers are elected under the new Charter. The League becomes involved in community fights over 1-90, the Bay Freeway, and the high-level West Seattle Bridge.

The League is a leader in the campaign for Initiative 276 which establishes open government meetings, the reporting of political contributions, and the state Public Disclosure Commission. Locally, it successfully opposes a $40 million bridge repair bond issue as unnecessary, and it is a leader in the creation of Metro Transit.

The League "blows the whistle" on contracting irregularities for Seattle's financial computer system and for the West Seattle Bridge. The latter investigation will lead to indictments against the City Engineer and two prominent state legislators, The League also undertakes a major internal reorganization and hosts its first 'Election Night Countdown" party.

The League champions five major City Charter amendments (all but one pass), supports the Seattle School District's desegregation plan, and becomes involved in the revision of the Seattle Comprehensive Plan.

The League is a leader in successfully opposing a plan for King County government to absorb Metro. It begins evaluating judicial candidates for the King County Superior Court and launches a major effort to create a partnership between private interests and the public schools.

Overcrowding in the King County Jail prompts the Municipal League to propose solutions, and the League critiques the Mayor's proposals for reorganizing city departments.

The League proposes principles to guide the revision of Seattle's downtown plan, and it continues major efforts to educate the public about public school issues.

The Eastside Municipal League marks its first anniversary, having evaluated local candidates and sponsored forums on ballot issues and the disposition of surplus school property.

The League turns its attentions to planning for power rates and energy resource recovery, and it endorses Metro’s downtown transit proposal. 0n the Eastside, the League supports acquisition of a downtown Bellevue site for a major new park.

The League argues successfully for creation of City reserves to finance maintenance, establishes a task force to advise in the development of King County's Comprehensive Plan, and completes a six month study into the needs of Seattle's homeless mentally ill population, Thus, the Municipal League begins its anniversary year dealing with many of the same issues that motivated its creation 75 years ago: the prudence of government administration, the need for strong public planning, and the responsiveness of the community to pressing social needs. How much has changed since 1910, and how much remains the same!

• 1910 Hugh Caldwell
• 1911 C. J. France
• 1912 O. B. Thorgrimson
• 1913 James J. Haight
• 1914 L. D. Lewis
• 1915 George E. Wright
• 1916 Fred W. Catlett
• 1917 Austin E. Griffiths
• 1918 Laurence S. Booth
• Arthur H. Hutchinson
• 1919 J.W. Reynolds
• 1920 James T. Lawler
• 1921 Claude H. Anderson
• 1922 Julius Baldwin
• 1923 James J. Haight
• 1924 Edward W. Allen
• 1925 Harold Preston
• 1926 Nelson P. Anderson
• 1927 Norton C. Force
• 1928 Frank P. Helsell
• 1929 Frank J. Laube
• 1930 Sterling B. Hill
• 1931 E. L. Skeel
• 1932 Charles F. Riddell
• 1933 J. W. Clise
• 1934 Henry Elliott. Jr.
• 1935 Peter Balkema
• 1936 Arthur M. Hare
• 1937 Elvin P. Carney
• 1938 George LaFray
• 1939 George LaFray
• 1940 Wm D. Shannon
• 1941 Wm. D. Shannon
• 1942 Harry J. Markey
• 1943 Harry J. Markey
• 1944 Harry J. Markey
• 1945 Lawrence Bates
• 1946 Lawrence Bates
• 1947 Donald H. Yates
• 1948 John N. Rupp
• 1949 John N. Rupp
• 1950 Paul Green
• 1951 Ben B. Ehrlichman
• 1952 Ben B. Ehrlichman
• 1953 Myron C. Law
• 1954 Myron C. Law
• 1955 Pendleton Miller
• 1956 Harold S. Shefelman
• 1957 Harold S. Shefelman
• 1958 Paul P. Ashley
• 1959 Paul P Ashley
• 1960 E. L. Blame Jr
• 1961 E. L. Blaine Jr
• 1962 James R. Ellis
• 1963 James R. Ellis
• 1964 Fredric M. Kettenring
• 1965 Fredric M. Kettenring
• 1966 George Bartell Jr.
• 1967 George Bartell Jr.
• 1968 James Gay
• 1969 James Gay
• 1970 Don G. Abel Jr.
• 1971 Don G. Abel Jr.
• 1972 Ben J. Gantt Jr.
• 1973 Ben J. Gantt Jr.
• 1974 John F. Henry
• 1975 John F. Henry
• 1976 J. Shan Mullin
• 1977 J. Shan Mullin
• 1978 Jonathan Whetzel
• 1979 Jonathan Whetzel
• 1980 George M. Mack
• 1981 George M. Mack
• 1982 Lester (Larry) Kleinberg
• 1983 Lester (Larry) Kleinberg
• 1984 Phillip B. Swain

Mr. Crowley’s services courtesy of the Weekly, Seattle’s Newsmagazine, and City of Seattle Municipal Probation Service (Parking Violations Division)

Prepared for the web by Donna Gordon and David Bangs