BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

Brick Gardner had been at the hotel at 1:15 a.m. the previous Friday. Convincing the
night clerk that he was the husband of the woman in Room 917, he obtained a key. About
10 minutes later, the pair came down to the lobby. They talked heatedly for a few minutes
before the woman headed for the elevators, remarking to the clerk, “He’s a sick man.”
Gardner started a commotion, then departed in a black Cadillac when a security guard
ordered him off the premises.
The woman told police she’d met Gardner some five years earlier on a trip to
the islands. They had become “very good friends.” After the recent squabble, they’d
patched things up, and she visited his home earlier that night. She had made it clear to
him, however, that she did not share his “romantic inclinations toward her – that this was
goodbye.” She was departing for home the next day.
Detectives and the medical examiner took careful measurements. Bryson R.
Gardner, 60, had fallen 104 feet to his death from a narrow cement beam while attempting
to reach the balcony
lanai of Room 917. The
crystal on his Omega
wristwatch was shattered.
The watch had stopped at
12:18. Dust on the ninthfloor
beam “had been
disturbed.” Toxicology
tests revealed that
Gardner was extremely
intoxicated. There was no
suicide note. Investigators
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin story from January 25, 1966.
concluded there had been
no foul play. It was the
last tragic misadventure of Brick Gardner’s checkered life. His alcoholism was compounded
by the loss of his wife and daughter and chagrin at having extracted money from Clapp to
suffer in some semblance of silence.
“Booth didn’t talk a lot about the emotionally charged personal events in his life”
when they were kids, Steve Merrill says. When they grew older, however, he confided that
he had been haunted by the fear that Brick would kill himself. Merrill says Booth actually
took some comfort in the news that Brick’s death had been an accident.
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin put the story on the front page, together with a photo
of Brick, wearing a natty bow tie but looking older than 60. Back home in Tacoma, the
News-Tribune soft-pedaled the story under a one-column headline near the bottom of Page
One: Son of Pioneer Tacoma Family Dies in Honolulu. The story said nothing about the
circumstances of his death other than it occurred “in a Honolulu hospital.” Tacoma society was
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