Neary-Sighted

So this is why I will be taking flowers to a grave in Seattle next Thursday.

They will be for the gentleman at the left there, Thomas Prosch.

At living history events, I portray Charles Prosch, a real-life guy who published a newspaper in Lakewood and Steilacoom in the 1850s and 1860s.

Living history grows into you, I think. When I become Charles, I inherit a proud family legacy. I also, for those few minutes, inherit one of his sons, Thomas.

Thomas Prosch was the founding editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

My character, Charles, is full of bluster. I get the biggest laughs from people when I brag how I will build Steilacoom into the next San Francisco. Today, we know it didn't turn out quite that way. Charles was like that. I love the man, but he drove several newspapers and a couple other businesses into the ground. That was his style.

The other laugh I get from folks is when I insist they should move to Washington because it hardly ever rains here. I'm dead serious. Charles would say that. He insisted those stories of rain were trumped up by the California press, trying to prevent people from settling in Washington.

Thomas was different. He learned from his dad what not to do in terms of business. He bought the family press out of bankruptcy and founded the Tacoma Tribune before later moving the family to Seattle.

Thanks to his foresight, they all died well off. By what I've seen in his writings, he was much more earnest and serious than his father.

Thomas was also a gutsy journalist. Example: He printed that the Seattle police chief was going to brothels.

The police chief sued Thomas for libel.

Thomas' response to the lawsuit? He printed the names of the prostitutes and the places the chief was visiting.

I admire his courage. This was a guy who had to walk seven blocks up the downtown Seattle hillside from the newspaper to get home every night.

To prepare for living history, I've spent a lot of time in various places digging up information about this family. Call me stupid and silly, but when I dress up in my wool suit I love Thomas like a son.

Years ago, Richard Talcott, of a longtime Olympia family, showed me an album that Thomas had put together for one of his daughters. She died of TB in 1912 when she was 19. It was a beautiful album, full of loving memories of the girl. There were all sorts of things in there, like letters the girl had exchanged with the wife of one of Seattle's founders, Doc Maynard.

Two people wrote deeply loving letters to the girl after her death, addressed to her afterlife, and put them in the album: Her father, Thomas, and her grandfather, Charles.

So call me stupid and silly again, but after I read the album, I took flowers to the girl's grave.

The album shows the girl's grave as quite lovely, with an angel sailing over a large marble tombstone. That's long gone. Clearly, there was vandalism. Thomas, Charles and Virginia all lay there with plain simple concrete plates covering them. But I didn't mind. Vandalism happens. I left flowers for the girl, and prayed thanks to her and her family for what they were and what they had done.

So now Thomas's newspaper is gone ... at least in the form he would have known.

I have to drive past Seattle Thursday on business. So I am going to Lakeview Cemetery a second time.

This time the flowers will be for Thomas.

I wonder what he would think. He would have seen so many papers come and go. The idea of only one or two newspapers in a town would have been foreign to him. From the broadsheets of old England, to the blogs of today, the normal state of the printing press is to have many, many voices printing in one community.

Would Thomas understand? Would he accept his paper's fate? Or was he a hard-nosed-enough businessman to find it astonishing the paper lasted as long as it did? Would he be impressed that a group of spunky folks is trying to make a go of the P-I as an online paper?

I dunno. I only know we failed his legacy. We couldn't keep his tombstone standing. We couldn't keep his little girl's tombstone standing. We couldn't keep the printed edition of his newspaper standing.

Somehow, I feel like we failed Thomas. Yet ... this is how life and history work. And I'm betting he knows it's all part of the grand cycle of history. I hope he does.

I'll think on all these things at the grave. And leave flowers shining bright for Thomas. The lesson of his life enriches me. The lesson of his life humbles me, and humbles all we strive to do.

The flowers will fade. Things do.

But the memory will survive as long as I breathe.


More information about Thomas at a UW site and at Historylink
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