booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

one because he’s very smart. And I like this one because he’s handsome.’ Then Brick came
along and apparently he embodied all of those characteristics because away they went.
She just ran off and married him.”
Lt. Cmdr. Gardner and the ex-Mrs. Blethen were married on May 26, 1944, in
Tacoma. He was 38, she 35. Joan was 11, Booth, 7. Both had been thrown another curve ball.
Reclaimed by his father, Booth now had a stepmother and a stepsister. Joan, likewise, was
uprooted and tossed in with two strange males. “We had to leave my wonderful school that
I had been in for seven years and move to Tacoma,” she recalls. “And as we’re driving along,
Brick said, ‘OK, we’re almost there. There it is – right over there. See? Gosh, the roof is falling
in but we’re going to be able to fix that.’ And he thought that was hilarious. I was just like,
‘Ugh.’ ” It was in fact a “very nice house” on fashionable Gravelly Lake Drive south of Tacoma.
Brick was now the Cadillac sales manager at Tacoma Auto Sales Co. A Cadillac, as Bob Dylan
once observed, is “a good car to drive after a war.” Brick sold a lot of Cadillacs, but not enough
to support a lifestyle that featured household help.
Booth says it’s possible that his father inherited
some money from his parents. However, it was
common knowledge in Tacoma society that Brick
received a settlement or stipend from Clapp to not
make trouble over the divorce. Brick acknowledged
it to Millie, according to Joan. Several others
corroborate the story, adding that Brick apparently
threatened an alienation-of-affection lawsuit. The
whispering made Brick’s mercurial nature worse.
Clearly embarrassed for his father, Booth doesn’t
want to talk about it.
* * *
Joan Blethen’s first vivid memory of her
new stepbrother was that “he was just sitting
there, across the dinner table from me, declaring,
Brick and Millie on their honeymoon.
‘I don’t eat on-dions! And I don’t eat peas!’ I don’t Photo courtesy Joan Blethen.
eat this, and I don’t eat that. I thought he was a spoiled brat. And I thought, ‘Wow, I could
never have gotten away with that. Someone ought to slap the crap out of you!’ For the
next couple of years, I knew to just kind of leave him alone.” His passion was baseball. “He
played baseball all the time,” painstakingly recording statistics on all the Major League
teams and players. In the spring and summertime, they’d all go to the Gardner getaway on
Vashon Island, which had been in the family since the 1890s. “Booth would do his statistics
or he’d be focused on something, but never in a group activity,” Joan recalls. “I used to try
to drag him in, but he wouldn’t go for it. He’d get very mad at me.” As Booth grew older,
however, “he got more gregarious. He was doing well in school, and he did well in track,
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