booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

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Brick had moved up to sales manager for
Pennsalt Chemicals. The Gardner name meant
something in Tacoma society, and Evelyn’s charm,
style and Seattle pedigree made her a popular
figure. On her a pair of bib overalls looked chic as
she posed with some cornstalks for a photo in The
Tacoma Times to publicize the 1937 Halloween
Barn Dance at the Country Club. Evelyn was
elected to the executive board of the Tacoma
Junior League in 1939, posing with the likes of
Helen (Mrs. J.P.) Weyerhaeuser in the garden at
Camille Pessemier’s home. The Gardners were
an upwardly mobile couple with a downwardly
spiraling marriage. Evelyn intimated to friends
that life at home was getting unbearable.
She might have met Norton Clapp
at the Barn Dance. Six-four, 230 pounds and already a multi-millionaire at 31, Clapp
was an imposing man. Although not handsome, he
was personable and masculine in a way that was
simultaneously rumpled and refined. He liked his Scotch
on the rocks but he had the self-discipline to never get
drunk. He exuded confidence. Women found all that very
attractive.
Norton Clapp, like Booth Gardner, carried an
important family name. His maternal grandfather,
Matthew G. Norton, was a pioneer lumberman in
Winona, Minnesota. In 1855, together with his brother
James and their cousin, William Laird, Matthew Norton
founded the Laird Norton Company. In 1900, they were
key investors as Frederick Weyerhaeuser saw a fortune in
vast stands of great-girthed Douglas fir and moved into
Washington State.
Clapp “was born atop a mound of wealth, which
he then turned into a mountain,” writer Nick Gallo
observed in the 1980s. Clapp began buying stocks in
1927 when he enrolled in law school in Chicago. “The
stock market was beginning to go wild,” he recalled
years later. “I decided I’d like to buy some. I used to go to
Winona on the Milwaukee Railroad in big, comfortable,
Booth and Gail Gardner in 1948.
Laird Norton Company Archives.
Eveyln wears overalls to the Halloween Barn
Dance at the Tacoma Country Club in 1937.
Photo from Richards Studio Collection Series,
Tacoma Times, Tacoma Public Library.