BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

and he just sort of came out of it. … He came out a very serious, very hard-working young
man who was also charming.”
Along the way, they became best friends. Booth needed an insightful big sister and
she had grown protective of him, loathing Brick’s relentless put-downs. They had another
thing in common: Both of their parents were alcoholics. “He drank downtown, and she
drank in the afternoon with the Gin Rummy or whatever crowd, and they were both tight
by the time they got together in the evening,” Joan remembers. Weekends were one big
party in the Lakes District. The war was over, life was good. Walter Hatch, who covered
the state capitol for The Seattle Times in the 1980s, interviewed many people who knew
Brick Gardner during the post-war years for a profile of the governor. They told him that
“every night was like a Friday night on fraternity
row,” with Brick Gardner in the thick of it – a
free-spirited “overgrown child with a mean and
destructive streak. Dressed in a silk suit and
seated behind the wheel of a silver Cadillac, he
played the part of a wealthy rogue – even while
he ridiculed the rich.”
Booze transformed Brick Gardner into a
Jekyll and Hyde character – “funny and warm one
minute and then just downright ornery the next,”
a friend recalled. Booth invariably ended up on
the receiving end of his sarcastic digs: Brick made
the kid feel as if he was wimpy, inept and unlikely
to ever amount to much. Many who knew the
family at that time believe Booth became Brick’s
emotional punching bag because Evelyn had left
him for “a rich guy.” Booth says Brick rarely let
him see his mother, his sister or his half-brothers,
Booth around 10. Gardner family album.
Bill and Steve, the two sons Evelyn had with Norton Clapp. One time when he returned
from a visit to the Clapps in their posh Lake Washington neighborhood, Joan recalls Brick
sarcastically inquiring, “What did the Chinese cook fix for you over there at Medina?”
Millie, a good-hearted person, was also getting fed up with Brick’s bitterness. She
felt sorry for Booth and always treated him well. “Brick was just mean,” Joan Blethen says.
“He had all that alcoholism and depression and everything to live with” – maybe even posttraumatic
stress from the war, she adds, knowing what we now know about the disorder.
“But he was terrible. … Came home, sat in his chair and went to dinner, went to bed. We’d
be upstairs in our rooms and he would shout at us, ‘Turn off your radios up there! Booth,
Joan, turn off those radios!’ We might not even be playing them.” One night, the adults
were having a party. “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” the popular Glenn Miller tune, was the last
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