The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

the chAnge Agents 29
writer characterized as a brawl between a Fifth Avenue minister and a
First Avenue longshoreman. 4
Any way you cut it, 1956 was a disastrous year for the GOP in Washington
State. Gorton and the Pritchards, together with Jim Ellis, the attorney
for Seattle’s influential Municipal League, took some comfort in the election
of Dan Evans, an upstanding young engineer, to the House of Representatives
from King County’s 43 rd District.
Gorton joined the Young Republicans of King County and the Evergreen
Republican Club. He was flattered to be invited to meet once a
month at Bob Dunn’s used car dealership with the Pritchard brothers and
five or six of their progressive friends. At one strategy session, he wondered
if they could muster any support from the old guard:
“What do they think?”
“There is no they,” Joel shot back. “It’s what we want to do. We’re the
change agents.”
They all smiled and nodded. “I’ll never forget the way Joel said it,”
Gorton says. “I knew I’d made the right choice in coming to Seattle.”
settLing in As the RooKie AssociAte at Grosscup, Ambler, Stephan &
Miller—six attorneys in all—Gorton was also mentored by one of the
partners, Pendleton Miller. The scion of a pioneer Washington family,
Miller’s father went to Yale, came back home, practiced law for a few
weeks, decided he really didn’t like working and turned instead to tending
his investments and a life of leisure. “Pen Miller reacted by feeling
there was an absolute obligation to work and contribute to society,”
Gorton says. “He was a wonderful person, still working in his mid-80s
the week before he died.”
Early on, Gorton also joined Jim Ellis’ campaign to create a “Metro”
superagency in King County to clean up Lake Washington, which was
absorbing 20 million gallons of raw and only partially treated sewage
daily. Regional problems required regional solutions, Ellis said. Traffic
and sprawl would only get worse if myopic fiefdoms were allowed to
persist. Ellis advocated land-use planning, new parks, greenbelts and
rapid transit. It would take years to achieve, in fits and starts, but he was
a resilient visionary. Opponents on the far right called his plan “communism
in disguise.” The suburbs were especially suspicious of the
dogged young bond lawyer and his button-down followers.
“One of the charms of democracy—and one of its exasperations—is
that each town council, each committee, each city government, is an ego
unto itself,” Emmett Watson, Seattle’s favorite columnist, observed as Ellis