booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

the divorce, was also mourning a daughter he had rarely seen since she was 3. Booth’s
loss was probably the most profound. “That event had a greater effect on me than
anything else in my life, before or after,” he says. “I felt alone in the world and that I was
somehow responsible for all of this.” The mother he had rediscovered was dead, together
with the sister he never really knew, the one he had “tormented” when they were preschoolers.
When he had a daughter of his own he named her Gail. Booth was never really
comfortable with the sizable trust-fund inheritance he received when he turned 25.
However, it did allow him to follow Norton Clapp’s example and “try to help others.”
Steve Merrill recalls that his dad, Lee, went over to offer his condolences to Brick.
After they’d talked for a while, Brick said, “Well, Booth will never have to work again.”
* * *
Ironically, the funeral notice in the P-I on April 10 included the standard boilerplate:
“Please omit flowers.” It was either a misprint or an oversight. In any case, no one paid any
attention. “Flowers banked the walls” and “the orchids with which Mrs. Clapp had won
prizes” graced the altar of the Church of the Sacred Heart in Bellevue, which was packed
with mourners. Monsignor Theodore Ryan, who had married Brick and Evelyn in 1933, was
on hand. The Mass was followed by private interment.
“It was my first funeral,” Merrill says. “I remember seeing the two urns with their
ashes. I wasn’t sitting with the family, so I did not see Booth until after when we went to
someone’s house on the edge of Broadmore golf course. Booth and I went and played
golf – like a couple of orphans. The adults just sort of let us out and thought it good if we
played golf, so we did. Of course, it is difficult to deal with death, but the adults were no
help at all.”
Merrill says he was raised to always write thank-you letters – “I think we called
them ‘bread-and-butter’ letters in those days.” After the ski trip, “I wrote one to Evelyn
right away and mailed it. I wondered if she’d got it” before leaving for Santa Barbara.
“Norton told my parents she had.”
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