Read Politics Never Broke His Heart - Washington Secretary of State

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CHAPTER TWO
Growing Up
Lela Spellman was busy fixing lunch. She turned her back to the stove
for a few seconds. Johnny toddled over and on tippy toes reached for
the handle of the pan on the front burner. He let out a horrifying wail
as the boiling water splashed over his head and shoulders. Don Palmer, the
UW team doctor, hurried to the Spellman home and slathered the sobbing
child’s scalded skin with paraffin. The only scar that remained 84 years later
was a small splotch on Spellman’s right bicep. “I remember nothing, thank
God, because it must have been intensely painful.” Some memories from
his early childhood are vivid. Knute Rockne, the legendary Notre Dame
coach, died in a plane crash when Spellman was 4. “I can remember exactly
where I was in the house when we heard the news.” That’s how important
college football was in the Spellman home.
Seattle in the 1920s was a growing city of 365,000, basking in the boom
before the gloom of the Depression. Major new buildings sprang up downtown
where Bart was now the insurance manager for Henry Broderick Inc.,
one of the city’s largest real estate and mortgage brokers. A community
bond sale financed construction of the grand Olympic Hotel, christened in
1924 with a gala party that drew 2,000, including Bart and Lela Spellman.
Future lieutenant governor Victor Aloysius Meyers’ dance band could be
heard six nights out of seven in a lower-rent rendezvous, the Rose Room
of the Butler Hotel at 114 James Street. From the tony Rainier Club, where
Broderick’s friend Bill Boeing sipped his highballs, to blue-collar joints and
living rooms humble and grand, Seattle snorted at Prohibition. Palms were
greased from City Hall to the precinct house. Raids by federal agents “did
little to slow the river of hooch gushing southward via land and sea.” 1 A
cop-turned-rumrunner became a legend in his own time.
Seattle underwent a temporary housecleaning by the first female mayor
of a major American city, the redoubtable Bertha Knight Landes. October
of 1929 put a damper on the backsliding as reverberations from the Stock
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