booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

A few days later they had his birth certificate changed. “Frederick” is crossed out
and “William” written in, obviously a nod to his grandfather. There were lots of Williams in
the family, but no Fredericks to be found. Even the governor doesn’t know what that was
all about. One thing is for sure:
No one ever called him William,
Will, Billy or Bill. He was always
Booth. His childhood friend,
Stephen Merrill, tells a wonderful
story about Booth’s genteel
name. When they were in ninth
grade at Clover Park Junior High,
“we had a substitute teacher
one day and had some sort of an
assignment to keep us busy. We
all had our heads down. It was
very quiet. Booth was sitting right
in front of me. He gets up and goes to sharpen his pencil, and when he sits back down he
immediately jumps and says, ‘Ouch! Ouch!’ like he’d sat on a tack. The substitute teacher
looks right at me, but I hadn’t done anything and had an innocent look. So she looks at
Booth and says, ‘What’s your name?’ He pops right up like a little soldier and says, ‘Bryson
William Edward Norman Gordon Ross Booth Gardner the fourth!’ The whole class just
roared.”
Everyone liked Booth, according to Merrill and their pal Jim Griffin, because he was
funny and nice, not because he seemed to be well off. “He never put anyone down and
he went out of his way to make his classmates feel good about themselves,” Griffin says.
A lot of kids at that school were from well-to-do families. Many of them – like Merrill and
Griffin, whose dad was one of Brick’s drinking buddies – knew that Ozzie & Harriet and
Father Knows Best were fairy tales.
“Behind those stone fences, down
those long, forested driveways”
and inside those handsome homes
there were dysfunctional adults and
children suffering from the fallout.
A great story-teller, Gardner
has a repertoire of homilies he
can tweak to fit his audience. He’s
passionate about education. Talking
with young people never failed to
recharge his batteries. He loved
Evelyn brings Booth home from the hospital in 1936. Gardner family album.
Brick and 10-month-old Booth at Burton Cove on Vashon Island. The Gardner
family has had a vacation home there since the 1890s. Gardner family album.
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