BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

Chapter Six: Orphaned
Booth Gardner became a father not long before he lost his own. Doug Gardner
was born in Massachusetts in 1962, Gail in 1963 at Lakewood General Hospital. Booth
brought his young family back home to Tacoma after receiving his masters of business
administration degree from Harvard. He took a position as assistant to a division president
with Day’s Tailored Wear, a long-established clothing manufacturer in Tacoma. Then he
spent a year in Southern California with the Bowie Pie Company. Brick Gardner had sold
his two radio stations, completed his master’s degree at the University of Hawaii and was
teaching at Kalakaua Intermediate School in Honolulu.
“He didn’t tell anyone he was going back to school – not me or anyone else,” Booth
says. He hoped his father was on the wagon and rolling toward stability. One of their
conversations gave him pause. Brick said that in grad school he had to cite an example of
a behavioral problem and tell how he’d deal with it. “It was the toughest part of the year,”
Booth recalls him saying. Sometimes he’d just blurt out, “You just shove that kid to the
wall, keep him there and don’t let him move.” Booth says Brick conceded that his son knew
“more than his professor about dealing with human beings.”
Jean Gardner says she “got along fine” with Brick, “but he had a streak in him
that wasn’t very nice, and he hurt a lot of people just by words,” especially when he was
drinking. Still, “a lot people really, really liked him. There was just a real close bond with a
lot of his cronies from his early Tacoma days. Brick would do anything for them and they
would do anything for Brick.”
Booth vividly remembers telling his father, “Your drinking is causing problems for
not just yourself but for everybody around you. Why don’t you quit?” They argued a while.
“OK then,” Booth offered, “if you can’t quit for someone else, quit for me.” Brick looked at
him intently for what seemed like minutes. “I can’t do it for you,” he said. “I’ve got to do it
for myself. And I’m going to try again.” He did try. Most binges would be followed by a few
months of sobriety, “but he always went back to it,” Booth says sadly. A former disc jockey
at Brick’s Honolulu station recalls Brick stopping by with his “snippety” little dog “when the
Waikiki bars shut down at 2 a.m.”
* * *
Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, January 25, 1966, the doorman at the new
10-story Kahala Hilton Hotel “heard a noise resembling an object falling against the plate
glass.” He looked around and saw something on the sidewalk near a corner of the building.
It was a man, sprawled on his back, showing no signs of life. The doorman asked the hotel
operator to call an ambulance and summoned the security guard and hotel manager. When
they checked his ID, they recognized him as a recent troublesome visitor. They decided
they also needed the police.
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