-Good afternoon, everybody.
I'm Sean Lanksbury.
I'm Special Collections Services Manager here
at the Seattle Public Library.
I do want to take this moment to acknowledge
that we've gathered together at the Central Library,
which occupies Indigenous land,
Seattle being traditional unceded territories
of the Coast Salish people,
specifically the Duwamish people, and we strive
to honor their elders past, present, and future.
And we thank them for their stewardship of this land.
The library welcomes you all
today to our book launch for A Will to Serve.
We're so pleased to bring tonight's
esteemed panelists to you,
and we thank our co-sponsor, HistoryLink,
for making this important book, and this event a reality.
We also want to acknowledge
the Seattle Public Library Foundation,
who support programming and resources for the library,
and its patron year-round
through tireless advocacy and fundraising.
We want to thank the Foundation
and the generosity of Foundation donors.
-So whether you knew Jim Ellis or not,
or even knew of Jim Ellis,
you have almost certainly benefited from his legacy.
This man transformed our region further
than almost any other individual in the 20th century.
He was a remarkable citizen. Just consider this,
if you swim in Lake Washington or you fish in Lake Washington,
or you boat in Lake Washington,
you had Jim Ellis to thank for it being unpolluted.
If you have ridden on our buses,
you are prospering from a system he helped create.
If you enjoy some of our grandest parks,
Luther Burbank, Marymoor, Discovery, Pratt, Gas Works,
you have done so because of Jim Ellis.
If you have hiked some of our best nature trails,
you are walking quite literally on his work.
The downtown aquarium,
that's Jim Ellis.
Freeway Park, that's Jim Ellis.
The Kingdom and the wonderful sports teams
it brought to our region,
that was Jim Ellis.
We also owe him gratitude for the farmlands
he helped preserve,
the convention center he helped build,
and that amazing green corridor from the Mountains to Sound
that he helped protect.
And all these, they are just his highlight reel.
Jim Ellis can be found almost everywhere you look.
Now, many of you here today know the rough outlines
of his legacy,
but now decades after that extraordinary work began,
we finally have his full story in his own words.
And it is, we can surely say,
his final achievement,
a book that recounts all of his service with fun color
and even sentimentality,
but that also supplies a blueprint for how it was done.
And that is key to all of this.
We study Jim Ellis to be awed, yes.
But we also study Jim Ellis quite simply
because we want more of them,
and his book is meant to be read and to be followed.
Certainly, our distinguished panelists today are
examples of that.
They represent the direct and indirect
civic offspring of Jim Ellis and this marvelous man.
Some of them knew him, all of them embody him.
And it is a treat that they are here to bring this leader
and this legacy to life. But before that,
a couple other openers to help set the table this afternoon.
First off, a voice,
who also typifies the civic spirit we salute today,
Marie McCaffrey is the recently retired
Executive Director of HistoryLink.
She has been in service to all the communities
she's lived in her adult life, including this one.
In fact, she was on the board of this very institution,
the library, for 10 years and served a term as its president.
Marie was, without doubt,
the central force and inspiration
behind the entire Ellis Project.
Without her foresight, without her sweat,
this book never would have happened.
And it was harder than it looks as you'll learn.
Indeed, it is a fitting irony
that it took Jim Ellises perseverance to bring
about the Jim Ellis book.
Ladies and gentlemen, Marie McCaffrey.
-I'm really pleased to be here in this cathedral of knowledge,
Seattle Public Library,
one of my favorite places in the entire city.
This book was a long time coming.
I shouldn't play favorites, but this is the thing
that I am most proud of that
I have done in the whole time that I have led HistoryLink.
Over six years ago, the Chairman of the Board, Bob Royer,
and his friend Christopher Bailey came to me with an idea.
They had discovered that Jim Ellis had written a memoir
and they believed HistoryLink should publish it.
Now, today, I stand before you with this book.
[ Applause ]
I won't bore you with the whole story of how we got here,
but I want to tell you why.
When my late husband, Walt Crowley,
and I founded HistoryLink with Paul Dorpat in 1997,
the driving motive was the civic health of our community.
We believed then, as I do today,
that understanding the past makes an informed citizenry,
which is critical to the functioning of democracy.
At the top of the list of those citizens
that Walton held in the highest regard was Jim Ellis.
Always dreaming, always fighting.
Jim Ellis never surrendered to defeat.
Changing the place we live in incrementally and profoundly.
To quote Cassandra Tate,
"Jim Ellis never held public office
and never headed a major corporation.
Yet, as a citizen activist for more than half a century,
he left a bigger footprint on Seattle and King County
than perhaps any other single individual."
Walt learned by watching Jim Ellis
and applied what he learned to make a change.
Creating HistoryLink was his last civic contribution.
Thanks to the Ellis family,
to Sally Jewell, Jared Smith, Jen Hahn, Elisa Law,
Peter Beck, and many others
who were able to honor Walt's hero in the news
with this book and project,
which I know he would have loved.
And as my final act for HistoryLink,
I get to share with you the lessons of Jim Ellis.
My hope is that they will be put to use.
-Hi there, I'm Jennifer Ott.
I'm the incoming Executive Director at HistoryLink,
but I was also lucky to be one
of the contributors to this book.
I was able to write the last chapter about the mar
to Sound Greenway Trust, which was a beloved project,
of course, of Jim's.
And so I want to speak a little bit to the process
of being involved in this book.
I wanted to talk about what a remarkable experience
it was to get to work on.
I got to know Jim Ellis through his writing.
I had never got to meet him in person.
And so, to be able to dive into the draft of his book
and see how he thought about things
and how he connected things was a really fascinating experience.
And I learned about what was important to him
and how he viewed his life.
And I love a good biography
because there's nothing like that sense of
how do all these pieces come together.
And how does somebody view the successes and failures
of what they've done?
I also have got the amazing opportunity to work
with Sally Jewell and Governor Gary Locke
to put the book together
and to learn from their personal connections to Jim
and their lived experience, and their leadership,
how they enhanced Jim's message
when they added their sections to the book
was a really remarkable experience and I appreciate it.
I have to thank Peter Beck with Documentary Media,
who I just saw come in.
He is our publisher and he's an absolute joy to work with.
And he shepherded this beautiful book to publication.
He just knows how to create a work of art
out of words and pictures.
And I have to thank our editor, Tori Smith also.
She did an amazing job putting this manuscript together
to edit without having the author there
to ask questions of, it's quite a challenge.
And she just has a very adept hand and intuition.
I have to thank the Ellis family,
who are just the most lovely people.
It was amazing to get to know you through these several years
we've worked together and I appreciate that.
And the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust community,
I think I interviewed about 20 of you,
and I've gotten the opportunity to meet and talk with you,
and it's such an inspiring group.
I was just at their event on Friday,
and you can't help but want to jump in
and join their cause because they are doing great things.
But this book, I want to talk about,
is an excellent example of one of my favorite things
about studying history, is you hear about big ideas,
you hear that they happened or they failed,
but you don't often hear in the general discourse
about how it happened.
What are the actual mechanisms of going from a big idea,
a vision to making it work?
And with Jim, there were several layers to how he did that.
There was, of course, his family and Mary Lou in particular.
There was also the more mundane,
everyday sort of work part of his life,
that he was a municipal bond lawyer.
And my personal favorite thing for history
is civil engineering, I'm a cement buff.
And I love to see how you can take expertise
in a particular area and apply it to an idea,
and use that base of knowledge to make something happen.
And if you look at the projects that Jim realized,
a lot of them have that connection of building trust,
making sure all the details are carefully attended to,
and knowing that you're building a relationship
of trust with people.
I also -- sorry, lost my spot there, I get to talking.
And so the adage that knowledge is power is so, so true.
With knowledge, we have more tools in our specific toolbox.
We have the knowledge to join
and have the confidence to join the civic conversation,
and we can use that knowledge to be confident voters.
That's such a key part of HistoryLink's mission
is to inform the electorate
and have people make informed decisions
about what we've tried to do in the past
and what we want to do in the future.
And so, Jim's story shows us a path forward for
how we can make this place a better place
to live for our own community,
but also for future generations to come.
And I hope that you're as inspired
when you read it as I have been. I want to encourage you,
this is just one part of the LS project
that we've been working on.
Please stop by our table of information
and learn more about the other elements,
including the archives here that we'll talk about later.
So thank you again for being here today,
and I will pass it back to CR.
Thank you.
-Okay, before we summon our panel to the stage,
there is one more voice to present today
that will certainly focus us all directly on our subject.
Jim Ellis sat for many interviews over the years,
including one with me.
And so, it's very apt that beyond hearing about him today,
we also hear from him today.
Of the many projects Jim led over his productive life,
none was as comprehensive as Forward Thrust.
That was in the late '60s and early '70s.
Indeed, that phrase has woven itself
into our civic vocabulary.
Today you will hear Jim Ellis chronicle that effort,
he also shares what inspired him to commit to
not just a lifetime of service,
but to -- not just a series of services,
but to a lifetime of them.
It wasn't one-off activism.
His was a decades-long pattern of rinse and repeat.
And it was all born of a personal tragedy as you'll hear.
So, on this special day where we gather to praise Jim Ellis,
you can imagine what a treat it is for me to present Jim Ellis.
♪♪
-Forward Thrust was an extraordinarily ambitious effort
to bring to the people a program of capital improvements
that would cover almost everything.
The idea was we wouldn't just have a bond issue for one thing,
we would have a series of them,
covering all the capital needs
that were becoming apparent at that time.
♪♪
This is in the '60s and we were in a huge Boeing boom
and we needed almost everything.
And it looked like a good time to be planning as a whole
instead of taking one and doing it.
We knew it was risky.
We also knew that the magnitude of it was exciting.
And the possibility of uniting the different advocacy groups,
you know, some folks want swimming pools,
some folks want golf courses,
some folks want transit, highways, parks.
We thought if we could get these put together,
we might unite them in a one-for-all kind of campaign.
It was a time of optimism and of confidence in leadership,
business, civic, and political leadership.
It wasn't divided by party,
and that was one of the exciting things
that happened during that period of time.
We went to double the borrowing capacity of the county,
for example,
because we felt the county was the logical borrower
for so many of these things
which stretched across the cities
and included the cities,
and rather than have 20 separate votes,
we thought we'll have a county vote,
and then we'll divide up the projects according
to the taxable values of these cities,
and we'll spell them all out.
♪♪
If you can imagine,
this thing was endorsed by all of the cities in the county.
That's amazing.
Unanimously by the county council,
unanimously by the metro council.
These were huge expressions of unanimity.
♪♪
"Why don't we take part of our life
and do something that you and Bob
would have wanted to do for him?"
And I said,
"You mean like take a quarter of our time
and do projects that Bob would have wanted to do?"
She says, "Yes, like conservation."
She used that word.
And I said, "You know, honey,
that's a hell of a good idea."
♪♪
We need to figure out ways
that we can live with this beautiful natural setting
without killing it.
We have to learn to get along with the natural environment,
and that means finding those environments
that can accept heavy use and finding those environments
that can't, and matching our use to what they can handle.
And then we'll have them over time.
The things you build that you think are going to last forever,
and they may be torn down.
They may change. They almost certainly will.
And I think if you really look at this experience,
it tells me that it isn't the trees planted,
or the people helped, or the buildings built,
or the water cleaned,
it is rather that citizens cared enough to do it.
That's what I've learned, and that we can't ever do without.
♪♪
-You certainly get a sense of his style
and his warmth and his commitment.
And I want to say that those wonderful moments
that we just saw Jim,
by the way,
were taken from a larger documentary co-produced
by none other than John Arthur Wilson,
your King County Assessor.
John, in his former incarnation,
was a journalist, and he is here today.
And we thank John for preserving those wonderful moments.
And John had nothing to do with the video glitches.
They were -- -We saw my own earlier.
-Yeah.
The library has been a victim of a sabotage hack,
and so that may be the problem,
that the internet here is down, actually.
So, anyway, on now to the main attraction, finally.
Our very noteworthy panelists this afternoon
are extremely well-known in this community and beyond,
and thus hardly require any description from me.
Complete bios are included in your programs
of their impressive work and of their lofty positions.
They have risen up through somewhat different professions
and somewhat different pathways,
but there is a sameness that brings them together today.
A deep regard for the man we are honoring
and for the kind of service he rendered.
Gary Locke worked with Jim Ellis.
Sally Jewell was mentored by Jim Ellis.
Eric Liu was inspired by Jim Ellis.
And Girmay Zahilay is helping to manage Jim Ellis,
his Metro government, that is.
Please welcome them all.
Gary Locke, you worked with Jim Ellis
on a number of projects over the years.
You wrote the forward to this book,
as it's been mentioned.
You go into some detail about the Convention Center.
Describe that project a bit
and your interaction with Jim Ellis on that.
-Well, thank you, C.R.
But first of all,
let me just thank all the supporters of the book project.
I see a lot of folks that worked with him and his law firm,
Preston Gates and Ellis, now K&L Gates Pacific Law Group,
and the generosity of the Ellis family
and so many other individuals,
civic leaders from across the region
have been very generous
in making this book project possible.
I was in the state legislature.
I had always learned and heard about Jim Ellis
but had never met him.
I actually did in the sixth grade a report about Metro,
the formation of the clean-up of Lake Washington,
going -- coming here to the --
-You're a true policy nerd
that you were doing that at sixth grade.
-Coming to the Seattle Public Library
and looking up all the microfiche of the construction
of the sewage treatment plants
and seeing these huge concrete pipes
that trucks could actually go through.
So from then on, I was just mesmerized by the name,
in awe of the name Jim Ellis.
But I did not meet him until I think it was in the late 1980s.
The Convention Center was being proposed over the freeway,
and it was going to be a public-private partnership
between the State of Washington
and several for-profit companies.
But the project went into trouble.
The construction company went bankrupt,
and some of the financial institutions backing
the construction company also went under.
And so, Jim came to the state and we were about to adjourn,
and he came to the state and said,
"Hey, can the state provide some bridge financing?
And I'm sure we'll figure out all the financing
and of the bankruptcies and get underway."
There was huge hostility to this proposal
and huge hostility to Jim Ellis specifically and individually.
I was stunned.
There were legislators,
prominent members of the state senate
who actually called for an investigation
and a criminal investigation of Jim Ellis,
saying he was a crook, he was conniving the state,
it was a boondoggle, and that there should be no funding.
At the very last minute,
the legislature did agree to provide some funding
and I volunteered to head up a task force
to really look at all the issues surrounding it.
And Jim Ellis then --
I remember when Jim was in the legislature
trying to get funding,
we were in the speaker's office
and he pulled out the blueprints
and the schematics of the Convention Center onto the floor
and he was actually on the floor himself
on his hands and knees pointing out this and this and that.
I was just so stunned that this guy had so much passion
and was willing to just do anything.
And then we crawled around the Convention Center
which was where construction had stopped.
There were rats in the Eagles Auditorium
which is now ACT Theater and we went through it.
In the end,
the task force decided
that the Convention Center public-private partnership was
a bad idea because the state would have owned
and run all the losing portions of the project
and the private sector would have all
the profit-generating portions of the project.
And we said that's not a good idea.
So I actually met with Jim Ellis
at the end of our task force in the Sheraton Hotel
in the coffee shop and he sat over there
and I sat over there, separate tables.
I kind of doodled out a proposal.
Jim came on over, handed it to him.
And the idea was the Convention Center as planned was too small.
It was going to be outdated
and really incapable of hosting all these conventions
from the very get-go,
so I proposed that we significantly expand it,
and it would be 100% state.
And Jim agreed.
Then we had to go to the legislature
and convince people that this was a good idea.
Because this was more money
and we were taking on what many people thought was an albatross,
but we were able to prevail
because we had Democrats and Republicans
on that task force and they had credibility in the legislature,
and that's how it is.
-And what are the two, three traits
you remember most about him in those negotiations
and in that project?
-Well, he loved the idea of expanding the Convention Center.
-He was big-pictured.
-Because subsequently the Convention Center
has been expanded many more times.
What I remember about Jim is that nothing was beneath him.
I mean, he's willing to crawl through the rafters
and walk through the dark,
dingy parts of the construction in his infamous trench coat.
I don't know if it's a London fog or whatever,
that tan trench coat.
But nothing was beyond him, and he was so humble.
He didn't have errors about him,
given all the success of Forward Thrust
and all these other initiatives.
He was just constantly coming up with new ideas
and pushing them forward and willing to work with people
and even take the personal arrows aimed at him.
I don't know how much of a toll it had on him,
but outwardly, it didn't faze him.
He was just focused on the end goal.
-Sally Jewell, you worked closely with him
on what was his really last project,
The Mountains to Sound Greenway. I'm happy to say it's been noted
that you wrote the forward to this book
talking about that experience.
Describe that in more detail.
What did you learn from working with Jim Ellis on that project?
-Just about everything that I've used since that time.
You know, I was 34 when I met Jim
who was 68, which is my age now.
So when he took on the Mountains to Sound Greenway,
he was this age,
which is pretty extraordinary because it's a big project.
And I remember saying to him,
"Well, Jim, this seems like it's -- you know,
it's like at least a 25-year project."
And he said, "Yeah." So, I became involved.
And this was consistent throughout Jim's
talking to the titans of industry.
And of course, he ran with the titans of industry.
When he asked them for money for the Mountains to Sound Greenway,
and he asked them for $75,000, this is back in 1991.
And to a person,
they said -- and this was Frank Shrontz at Boeing,
George Warehouser. Anyway, he called John Mangles,
who was running the bank that I was with.
And they all said,
"We'll give you $75,000,
but we don't have time to join your board,"
which he also asked them to join.
And each of them offered up someone, and I got offered up.
And that's how I got to know him.
And I was a baby executive.
They promoted me quickly, but they said,
"Well, you seem to like hiking in the outdoors.
Why don't you do this?" So what a gift that was.
What a gift.
As Gary explained about the Convention Center,
Jim was just a font of enthusiasm.
Continuous, infectious enthusiasm
who really did like to get his way.
But he did it in such an enthusiastic and positive way,
and he wasn't always right,
but he was mostly right, and he did listen.
What struck me the most was,
as he was assembling the Greenway Board,
which, you know,
I had the privilege of joining in those early days,
as did a number of other people.
How many of the original board members are in the audience?
Bill Chapman, Doug McClelland.
Just a handful, but there's a few of us around.
We were all babies,
actually almost exactly the same age in our low to mid-30s.
And he insisted on having people on that board
who were citizen activists,
who were known, best known in North Bend,
having a young banker from Kittitas County
that had the unfortunate nickname for a long time
after joining this, Terry Walgren of Mr. Green Belt.
Because he was in a,
you know, pretty conservative part of the Greenway.
He brought in, you know,
just local civic leaders and people, and activists.
And one thing he insisted on, and I see Nancy Keith there,
who was the Executive Director of the Greenway,
and I saw Donna McBain up there.
You guys raise your hands.
These are the first
and the second executive directors of the Greenway.
Donna as an employee of the Trust Republic Land which was,
you know, the sort of entity
that hosted the Greenway until it flew on its own.
Jim always insisted on buying people dinner
and he knew that if he sat the titans of the industry
across the table, and he insisted on round tables,
from the Citizen Activist in North Bend,
or Charlie Reigns with the Sierra Club,
who was so instrumental in the wildlife crossings
that we now have,
and in sort of the whole tenacious focus
on cleaning up the checkerboards along I-90.
When they sat down together, they got to know each other.
So you had Warehouser and quadrant homes,
which would have developed that entire ridge, Rattlesnake Ridge.
This was Donna's first project.
If you go to North Bend and, you know,
the main exit to North Bend,
if you look to the right,
it's green and it's growing and it all would have been houses.
And people do need a place to live.
But do we really have to have every intersection developed?
Do we really have to have every hillside
that's closed in, full of houses?
And Jim helped us understand that no, we don't.
So when I was secretary of the interior,
I thought of Jim all the time.
About, you know, how would Jim do this?
How would he get the right people around the table?
What people should I have around the table?
How do we create an environment
where they build a relationship across political divides,
across, you know,
geographic divides as we work together in service of
not just today and the current generations,
but the generations that are yet unborn?
So that's, I mean, I can go on and I will stop.
-You'll have a chance to go on, that's great.
Girmay Zahilay,
you came of age long after Jim Ellis' legacy heyday.
And yet, you're unique on this panel,
as I mentioned,
because you're actually connected
directly to his legacy.
You are a King County council member.
Jim Ellis,
so much of his efforts built the base of King County,
the sewage and wastewater treatment facilities,
the bus system, parks, trails, growth management principles.
How important was all that work to the work
you're doing now at Metro? -It's everything, you know.
I'm not like the governor or the secretary,
I didn't get a chance to work directly with Jim Ellis,
but I had heard the name before,
and then when I got invited to this panel,
I did more research, and I was like,
oh my god, King County Wastewater, King County Metro,
King County Trails, King County Parks.
-He did everything I'm working on.
-He did everything.
So I feel like I'm a steward of his legacy,
but also I feel like I have a job because of him,
so I'm a big fan.
I'm a big fan.
-How is at fairing, do you feel like,
you know, he always said what his work was a beginning
and not an end,
that he started things but that it was never --
well, you saw the Kingdom, right?
They weren't going to last forever.
The spirit was but not every project.
How is some of the infrastructure
that he's responsible for faring?
-It's great.
I feel like these are the projects
that he worked on for King County are the most direct ways
that we touch people's lives. And so,
I feel like he is allowing everyday citizens to know
that if you are active,
if you engage, that you can make a difference.
You can actually touch people's lives.
And so, I'm just so grateful
and I hope more people learn about him
because I think the more they learn about what he's done,
the more it can inspire them to feel like
if there's a problem out there,
that is a creative puzzle
to solve that I can rally the right number of people
to do the right things to get an outcome.
I think that's the most powerful message you can share.
-And you are doing some of that work,
which we're going to get to a little bit later.
But let me bring in our final panelist, Eric Liu.
You have been doing Ellis-like things
in this region for 25 years.
I met you, I think when you first got here.
When did you first encounter his legacy
and what does it mean to you? -Well, first of all,
I actually want to answer that question kind of indirectly
in a way that is human.
Marie mentioned that we're in this cathedral of democracy.
When I first came -- I didn't grow up in Seattle.
When I first started coming here in the mid '90s,
one of the first people
I met was then I think county executive Gary Locke,
who among other people like David Brewster
who had founded Town Hall and Seattle Weekly
and other institutions,
said you really ought to know about this guy Jim Ellis
if you want to understand what this town is about
and what the culture of this place is.
And those conversations led me to meet
not long after Greg and Sharon Nichols when Greg was mayor,
and Greg put me on the library board here in Seattle,
and that's how Marie and I met.
And there are just all these different cross-connections
that aren't even about institutions,
but they're just about people,
and just about relationships, and about trust, and about,
you know, we got a little glimpse of it in the video.
And when you read the book, which I hope you all will do,
and you read the passages,
not only about the death of Jim's brother, Bob,
but his relationship with his wife, Mary Lou,
and the depth of that love and that partnership was love.
It was civic love.
It was just this kind of thing
that was a beating heart of what we're talking about here.
And I think, you know, when you get two,
three generations on from a big bang legacy set
of projects like that, you can get --
I'm sure you're finding this all the time --
you get very bureaucratic.
It can just be about moving the pieces
and turning the dials and stuff like that.
And seeing the Ellis family in front of me here,
it's like, no this is about the beating heart of people
and their commitment and their love and their relationships.
And when I first got to town,
it was people who said you ought to understand
that this is not just a place where stuff happens,
this is a place where there's a culture
in which somebody like Jim Ellis can be formed.
But then someone like Jim Ellis will raise his hand and say,
"I think we could do better than have a polluted lake.
I think we could do better as we're growing than sit in long,
you know, forever traffic jams.
I think we could do better than just tearing down hillsides
and filling up with,
you know, insta-housing and all that stuff, right?
I think we can do better."
And that that was a culture that was different from
where I'd grown up in the East Coast where,
you know, the vibe was, "Who sent you?
Have you paid your dues?
And nice idea, wait 25 years
and maybe you can put it in the mix."
Rather than this culture,
this culture that Jim Ellis both embodied
and kind of accelerated,
a culture of civic entrepreneurship.
You know, I think we think of ourselves here in Seattle
and the Northwest as being this capital
of business entrepreneurship, and we are.
But I'll tell you,
my work at Citizen University
brings me into contact with people all around
the United States, big cities, small towns,
red places, blue places,
and we remain exceptional in the country,
not just for our business entrepreneurial culture
but for our civic entrepreneurial culture,
the way in which on a Sunday afternoon
people will show up to a gathering like this, you know.
And when it starts raining harder think not,
"Oh, I'm going to stay home," but think,
"I better dig out my raincoat, right?"
Because I'm going to this thing
because it's part of a set of relationships and a legacy here.
And, you know, so I just wanted to kind of name that
from the beginning, like just the human side of this.
Our work at Citizen University
is all about trying to foster a culture
of powerful responsible citizenship.
And we talk about that culture in ways that --
you know, culture is a very abstract word,
But if you kind of set it against structure,
you know,
one way to measure the legacy of Jim Ellis
is to point at buildings, parks, freeways,
and, you know, greenways and the rest.
And that is a built infrastructure.
It's a physical infrastructure.
But culture is a spiritual infrastructure.
Culture, the norms, the values,
the story we tell about who we are,
and what kind of place this is.
That stuff can disappear a lot faster than 25 years.
That stuff can evaporate, you know,
we can still have buildings and theaters and the rest,
but that -- those habits of the heart,
as Alexis de Tocqueville called them,
have to be renewed a whole lot more often, right?
And so we're gathered here today,
not just to kind of like go down that list and be like,
"Holy cow, that was one guy who catalyzed all that."
And here are among the people who are his mentees and legacy
and so forth and steward. But also like,
"Holy cow, I'm not sure our culture today is
as strong civically as it was
in '68, '69, '70, '75, '82,
all those years when these things were happening.
And what's our responsibility for actually fortifying it?
How should we show up in a way
to understand things about how you get stuff done,
about when you see a problem,
how you raise your hand to deal with it?
And again, that's why this book is indispensable.
It's not just -- I mean, with everything with history,
like it's not just -- why do we study history?
Why do we read a biography? Right?
Not just to kind of lose ourselves in another time,
but actually to think about --
to hold a great multi-faceted mirror up to our own times
and ourselves and to face ourselves.
And if we face ourselves honestly right now as a city,
as a county, as a state, as a country,
we're not fully living up to the spirit of Jim Ellis as a people.
And I think, you know, we in this room are, I guess,
but we, the people are not.
And I think that's, you know, to me,
that feeling, it's a feeling, and it's the same feeling I got
when Gary first told me over a coffee,
probably at the Sheraton actually,
where you and Jim kind of,
you know, scribbled your proposals
for the Convention Center,
you ought to look up this guy Jim Ellis.
-Sally, let me --
[ Applause ]
Sally, one thing that was sort of legendary
within the Mountains to Sound Greenway
were those Greenway dinners.
And talk about how that gives us more light into Jim Ellis' style
and what we can learn from them
if we want to do projects like that.
-You know, there's a phrase
that I love that I didn't hear from Jim,
but Jim embodied.
And that is that progress moves at the speed of trust.
And breaking bread with someone,
sitting across the table from someone you don't know,
and getting to know them is incredibly important
when it comes to building trust.
And what I saw emerge were labels, for me,
Rainier Bank, you know, for somebody else,
it was Warehouser,
it was civic activist, it was elected official,
but when you got around the table,
it was Jean and it was Charlie.
And you built a relationship that became far deeper
where the labels fell away.
And that's when you begin to listen to each other.
And when you listen to each other,
you realize that the assumptions you made were incorrect.
And it doesn't take long at all to find common ground.
And I think when the setting is the Preston Community Center,
which I think is now also named for Jim,
which is very close to the Raging River Cabin
that you will read about in the book,
which is just a super fun story
that Jim liked to tell over and over again.
It's still in the hands of the family.
When you're out of the city
or you're driving over from Kittitas County and meeting
in this little community hall,
you get to know people as people.
And there are a number of you out there
that I got to know in that way.
And, you know, we change because we listen,
we change because we understand
a different person's point of view.
And what we find --
and Jim is just the master of this --
is that there's always common ground.
There is -- we focus on the intersection of those interests,
not on our points of difference.
And he was so good at that.
I will say that, you know, Jim was a lifelong Republican.
And I remember that we had tremendous support
in Washington DC. In fact, we used to say,
Greenway's better known in Washington DC
than it is in Washington State.
Because we were early recipients of lots of Forest Legacy money,
which helped permanently protect and put in DNR's hands things
like Rattlesnake Ridge that I mentioned.
I didn't support the candidates Jim asked me
to support on a few occasions.
-I hope he supported me.
-I supported you and I'm sure he did too.
But he and Slade Gorton were close friends
and I was supporting Maria Cantwell who knocked him out,
felt a little bad about that
because he'd done so much for the Greenway.
But it didn't matter to Jim.
What mattered to Jim was making sure
that everybody understood how the system worked,
thanked people that made a difference within that system,
no matter what their contributions were.
And it was those dinners, which were usually Italian food,
which is a good way to bring yourselves together.
-And those dinners, if I remember right from the book,
they were your monthly Mountains to Sound Greenway meetings,
your board meetings.
It was a whole group of very diverse people,
and you ate before you met. -Yes.
-Is that correct? -That's right.
-To develop those ties, to develop those connections.
-And they were not just the Greenway board members,
they were technical advisory committee members,
they were community members, they were tribal members,
all getting together to know each other.
And that's the way Jim operated.
And, I mean, the board itself was, I don't know,
at least 60 members, probably more,
and then the technical advisory committee even more.
And so these were large gatherings,
large gatherings of people that really got to know each other.
And it's a place where people came to prevent --
to prevent -- to present,
many times walking away with more ideas
than I think they hoped that they would have.
But they changed the nature of the work
they were going to do because of those meetings,
and it became kind of the good housekeeping seal of approval
for those old enough to remember
that for projects within the Greenway
because people had come and they listened
and they reshaped and they came back with renewed proposals.
And that's why we have so much of what we have today.
-Girmay Zahilay, Jim Ellis, as we've noted,
did not seek elected office pretty deliberately.
He was tempted many times,
and he was pushed many times to do it,
but he always felt it was easier to focus on these projects
from a private citizen perspective.
You chose to be an elected representative.
You chose to serve in that way.
You have served before you got elected,
but this is now your role, your perch.
What's the upside and downside of trying to change
and be a civic activist from elected office
versus a private citizen?
-So, let me answer that in a little bit of a different way.
What Eric was talking about in terms
of cultural infrastructure,
I thought was such a profound point
because one of the most shocking statistics
that I heard when I first got on the King County Council
was a study that was released by the CDC.
And the CDC found
that the percentage of high school students
who today are experiencing levels of depression,
anxiety, disconnection has skyrocketed since 2010.
And we can all hypothesize about what those reasons are.
You know, some people say social media, war,
lack of economic opportunity, etc.
But anecdotally,
when I go and talk to the high school students in my district,
one of the number one things that they tell me
is that I feel like problems keep getting worse
and I am powerless to stop that from happening.
I feel like I'm powerless
and that leads to a sense of depression
and a sense of powerlessness.
So, I feel like teaching young people
that problems are not a fixed inherent thing.
They are a creative puzzle to solve.
And if you identify the right tools,
you can use those tools to solve those problems.
But it's so hard to find what those tools are,
because I feel like the civic education
that they're getting is not as strong as it should be.
I actually don't know what the education landscape is today,
but I know when I was in school,
I didn't have a lot of civic education.
And so, what I try to share with young people
now is that you are not powerless.
You are powerful.
You just haven't been given the right tools
to solve those problems.
So I started an organization like Build the Bench
to teach young people that through civic activism,
through civic engagement,
that they can solve the problems
that they see in their neighborhoods.
And I also teach them that running for office
is only one of those tools.
You do not have to run for office to solve problems.
You should actually not start with the problem statement.
You should look inward and ask yourself, what is my gift?
And once you have identified what your gift is,
I promise you there is a way to use that gift to solve problems.
And that does not have to be running for office.
If your gift is writing books, your gift is organizing events,
your gift is art, your gift is music,
your gift is advocating to the state legislator to get money,
like those are all things that can solve problems.
And so that's my way of answering.
-I think that's a very important point.
I think Jim Ellis clearly knew his gifts
and that they were as a private citizen and using that perch,
he really excelled at that, obviously.
Gary Locke, we tend to think of his career
as a series of grand slam home runs.
That there were never setbacks,
there were never disappointments, you know.
I mean, it is an impressive list,
but when you go through each of them,
you described a little bit of the Convention Center,
it wasn't all smooth sailing. It required, it seems to me,
someone with an immense amount of optimism and perseverance
because there were setbacks.
We should say the Kingdome did not win on the first ballot.
The cleanup of Lake Washington did not win on the first ballot.
The bus rapid transit system did not win on the first ballot.
This man went back to achieve his ends a number of times.
Describe that kind of personality.
-Well, it's amazing that he would continue to persevere
and push forward despite these setbacks.
I think oftentimes, when a project fails,
the political leaders and the civic leaders
will scale down the project significantly in order
to get the support, reduce the costs, what have you.
But Jim didn't do that
because that would have been sacrificing the ultimate quality
and the ultimate objective.
I mean, sometimes it's better to have nothing
than to have a fraction of something
that really doesn't serve the needs of the community
or meet the aspirations of the community.
I think one of the biggest disappointments,
at least from a citizen standpoint,
from my personal standpoint, was the failure of rapid rail.
And in those days,
ballot measures seeking funding required a 60% vote,
not a simple majority of today.
And even today, with a simple majority,
we're having a lot of projects
that are being turned down by the voters.
So think of how daunting a task
it was to try to get 60% of the voters to approve something.
We came so close.
And think of what the region would have been like
if we had had rapid transit.
And this was going back many, many decades.
And that money ultimately -- and it was mostly federally funded.
That was the irony of the thing.
It was almost -- what was it? -Ninety percent.
-Ninety percent federal funds
and we were just being asked to chip in 10%.
That money eventually went to Atlanta
and they have a really beautiful subway system.
And, you know, here we are with Sound Transit.
It's going to -- here's an aside.
China, since the Beijing Olympics in 2008,
has built over 16,000, 17,000 miles of high-speed rail,
that's enough to crisscross America six times.
And here we are struggling with Sound Transit,
and Sound Transit will not make it from Mercer Island
to Issaquah until 2040, going at, what, 30 miles an hour,
and it's only about a 10-mile stretch?
Anyway, I'm just so amazed that Jim would continue to persevere
and take on additional projects.
You know, you asked the question to remind about
whether or not -- you know, why he wasn't an elected official.
Unfortunately, I think in today's political climate,
a person like Jim Ellis,
if he were in office,
would not be able to get the community support
that he was able to get back then.
Because today,
if you're identified as a Democrat or a Republican,
you have automatic barriers of opposition and people
who close their eyes and, you know,
and don't listen
and aren't willing to even consider the project,
even if you have a meal beforehand.
So, going back to Eric's comment about the institution
of culture, cultural institution,
I think that's what we really need now to focus on.
We need people to step forward and dream.
You know, what do we want this region to be
like 30 years from now?
And it's more than just infrastructure now.
It's the issue of affordable housing.
It's about mental health services.
It's about education, a high-quality education.
It's about-- -Climate change.
-Yeah, it's about so much more.
And those are going to be harder to achieve because, you know,
a freeway, a park, a swimming pool, very tangible.
When it's done, you see it, you enjoy it.
How do you know when you've reached the goal
of better education,
or of adequate mental health services,
or reducing homelessness? So, anyway.
-Eric Liu, you talked about at Citizen University,
you are trying to really create more Jim Ellises,
and Jim Ellis wanted more Jim Ellises.
Part of this whole project is to help spread the word
and create another generation of those kinds of folks.
You've got Citizen University, you're trying to do just that.
What are you doing, what are the challenges,
and what are the hopes?
-You know, I think what we're doing is actually a bit
of what we've already been hearing on the panel.
One of the ways
that we think about our work in trying
to foster this culture of powerful responsible citizenship
is to invite people, both young people,
as Girmay was describing having worked with,
and people our age who are the product of a system
which didn't give a sufficient civic education,
but are still in the world as citizens.
And one of the most basic things we teach in our work,
in our programs is that -- is a simple equation
to understand what we mean by citizenship.
And that equation is power plus character equals citizenship.
That to live like a citizen --
I'm not talking about documentation status,
passport, I mean, to be a member of the body
requires both a literacy and power
to understand what power is, who has it, who does not have it,
how it flows, through what channels, formal and informal,
how you move things in order to kind of direct the flow of that.
And to gain that literacy both in the reading of power
and being able to understand a situation,
but also the writing of it.
How do you actually put forth a plan?
Get on your hands and knees
if you have to and kind of map out what the plan would be
for mobilizing money support, idea support,
political support,
vote support for an idea that that's one half of the equation,
literacy and power.
And a lot of what Girmay were talking about
when we encounter young people in our lives,
this was, you know, a book I wrote recently called,
You're More Powerful Than You Think,
Citizens' Guide to Making Change Happen,
and it's speaking exactly to that sense
of learned helplessness, of kind of overwhelm.
The problems are too big,
they're too complicated, I'm too small.
This whole age is meant to make us feel small
and inconsequential, this age of -- you know,
that's the other thing that's changed
since the age of peak
Jim Ellis is that we are so much more unequal society,
county, state, and city.
There is no strong core in the middle anymore from which
these kinds of -- this culture of common ground can emerge.
When you get a society that is materially that unequal,
where wealth, power, voice,
and clout are concentrated the way they are today,
you're going to get a politics that's more raw, more angry,
not wanting to make friends
and, you know, have spaghetti dinners with people,
but kind of think it's a zero-sum world.
I got to destroy you in order to save me.
That's the vibe we're in right now, right?
And so that half of the equation of being literate
and power is part of what we teach in our programs,
and again, to people of all generations.
But the other half of the equation
is super important, too.
And that's Jim -- you know,
both of these are in the Jim Ellis book.
That book is a -- I mean, it's not framed this way.
He probably would have -- I didn't know him.
But I bet he would have felt a little bit awkward
about being that explicit about power and naming it,
even though he was a master at the framing and use of power.
But it is an incredibly instructive guide
in what it means to practice civic power.
And at the same time,
if all we have is a super-high literacy in power
and we know how to manipulate people and ideas and money
and social norms and media to get what we want,
but we have no moral compass or moral core,
then all we are --
then all we're getting to be is really skilled sociopaths.
And that is our culture today, too,
of highly skilled sociopathy that gets rewarded and elevated.
And so, the other half of that equation of civic character,
of a set of norms and values and habits and rituals
of the kind that, again, are described in this book,
that are described in the way that the Ellis family grew up.
Right? I mean, rewind a bit.
A lot of people had brothers die during the Second World War.
I don't mean to be kind of coarse about it,
but a lot of people had brothers die.
Not everybody had a family culture, a spouse,
a civic culture around them that said the way
to honor them is not to -- you know,
and part of what you'll read in the book is that initially,
after his brother's death, Jim Ellis,
you know, was trying every which way
he could to get himself into combat,
trying every which way he could to kind of,
you know, take the risks and put himself in physical danger
and as Mary Lou said to him, you know,
why throw your life after his?
The way to honor his life is to cultivate the values
that he embodied in work, that that kind of civic faith,
like any kind of faith, is made manifest through works, right?
And so he chose that path of cultivating civic character.
And that was a family culture
and that was a wider culture here that I think
if we pay attention to that side
what a civic character looks like.
You know, Jim Ellis didn't have to deal with the city
whose success was so great that we would have tons of people
no longer able to afford living here
and have a widespread problem of being unhoused, right?
That was a different time.
This is a different time right now.
And so our culture today -- you know, Gary's absolutely right,
that it's, you know, forget about Republicans and Democrats,
you can't even get Democrats in King County or, you know,
in Seattle to agree on the right solution to homelessness.
But I think to the extent that we only think
that this is a problem for Girmay and -- to solve.
He'd be like, uh-uh, no thank you, right?
The question is what's our part of this, right?
And that's part of what we're trying to teach as well
in our work at Citizen Universities,
that the coupling of power and character ultimately leads --
ultimately leads you to ask, what's my piece of this?
What's the small piece --
so when you talk about making a lot of Jim Ellises,
maybe, Jim Ellis is, you know, maybe, you know,
as they say in baseball, he's a generational talent, right?
That comes along once every 25, 50 years.
But everybody could learn about adding a dose of Jim Ellisness
to the way that we move in our communities, in our society.
And that too isn't just a matter of being inspired
and reading stories about him.
That is a matter of literacy and practice.
You got to like sign up and decide, okay,
I'm going to be part of the group
that figures out what are we doing here
with this pop-up encampment of migrants
that have come from Guatemala, you know,
in our district, in your district.
You know, I'm one of your constituents, right?
That's around the block from where I live.
What are we going to do? What are we going to do?
It's gone now already, right?
But for a few weeks,
the question was is that someone else's problem,
or is that my problem?
And I think part of the Jim Ellisness
that we could kind of all carry in us a bit more,
in addition to literacy and power and understanding,
okay, Girmay one person we got to talk to.
This network of churches is someone else we got to talk to.
You know, these philanthropies we got to talk to.
We got to get people together to figure out --
you know, we got to get REI to donate tents
and, you know, everything else like that,
you know, to the people.
-We're getting tight on time
so I just wanted you to wrap that up.
-Yeah, all I'll say is this,
this idea here is that it's our problem too.
That Jim Ellis embodies the spirit of
there's no such thing as someone else's problem.
And that's really palpable with pollution,
but it's also palpable with everything else
that we're living through right now.
-Okay.
A couple more quick questions,
and then we are going to open up to the audience
to ask a few things before we close today.
Girmay, let me just ask you to briefly give
a little more color on Build the Bench
because this strikes me as a Jim Ellis project.
What are you trying to do?
-So when we talk about the problem of people
not being civically engaged,
I think Eric brought up so many good points.
Part of the problem is the how-to guide.
How do I even engage?
You have Citizens University, you have Build the Bench,
you have Mr. Ellis's book which provides a profound example of
how to engage and solve problems.
So that's part of what Build the Bench does
is provide people the how-to guide of
how to engage in local politics,
how to run for office, which levers to pull.
And then there's the second piece
that I think is sometimes missing,
which is representation.
Feeling like even if there are the tools out there
and I know about them, can I be --
can somebody like me be the person to participate?
And I have a quick, funny story
that I just wanted to share real quick.
You know, Governor Locke shared about
how when he was in sixth grade, Mr. Ellis inspired him.
When I was in sixth grade,
I remember a certain president from South Africa
came to visit Seattle. And, you know,
some people out there who have a more clear memory,
I was young, so if I get the details, fuzzy, forgive me.
But I remember sitting in a big auditorium
and Nelson Mandela walks in
and I remember feeling like, oh, my gosh,
somebody of African descent can be a president
and can lead to so much change.
And then I remember a governor being up there too,
who my teacher leans over to me and says,
"You know, that's the governor."
I was like whoa, that's the governor.
And he doesn't look like anybody
that I've known to be a governor before.
And then they told me he went to Franklin High School.
And I'm like I'm going to go to
Franklin High School one day too.
So somebody from South Seattle
who doesn't look like the typical person
who is a governor,
can be governor and can create so much change.
And I remember every couple of years
I would go on Wikipedia and search,
okay, what did Gary Locke do after this point,
what did Gary Locke do?
And so that's just --
-Speaking about a how-to guide.
-You're going to need ambassadors in your future too.
Sally Jewel, what is timeless,
and what is of the period when we talk about Jim Ellis?
-Timeless is that progress moves at the speed of trust.
I think that's who we are as human beings.
And learning how to listen and respect others,
especially people with different points of view,
and the commitment to finding the common ground quickly
and working on the things that you have in common
as opposed to the things that you disagree on, is timeless.
I think, as I said to Jim on many occasions,
it's not -- today is not like what it was
when you were kind of at the height of your work.
Organizations don't just make decisions because the CEO says,
"I want my big contribution to go here."
I can't get six people in a room from large corporations
and get them to support something like the Mountains
to Sound Greenway, the way you did back in 1991
when we first got it started,
because they all were of your era.
So now we have processes in how we decide who gets money.
We have, you know,
more of a desire to listen to different points of view
and to decide what our focal areas are
that we're going to spend money.
And it's not just because of who asked.
So, I think that has fundamentally changed.
And I think that's a good thing
because I think we are now listening to voices
beyond those voices of the titans of industry,
or people like all the governors that you were thinking of,
maybe with the exception of Dixy Lee Ray,
who was very different in a variety of different ways.
But I did take atomic energy from her
at the Pacific Science Center, by the way, as a 12-year-old.
Anyway, I think those are -- you know,
it's fundamentally a different time
and we need to know what the power structures are of our time
and how to work within them. And we need to listen to voices
that did not have a voice in the past.
And I think that that is fundamentally different.
But so much of what Jim taught us, it's in the book,
is going to be as true two generations, three, four,
five generations from now because it is about human nature
and how we work together.
And I will also say, you know,
we haven't talked much about Mary Lou,
but when Jim got knocked down,
if you read the book, it's always Mary Lou
that's like, you know,
dusting him off, like let's get going, okay,
what can I do, even when she was sick, getting out and saying,
"Nope, let's go do this," with that touch
that he learned from in terms of how you build trust
and how you listen to people from where they are.
You don't try and push them around.
You try and listen.
And she got a lot of things done
that Jim was able to take to the next level.
But he would have given up, as you will hear in the book,
as some of the things that he worked on failed.
And there's a lot of those.
-And Gary Locke, my final question to you
before we open it to the audience.
What -- we talk about creating the next Jim Ellises,
but what are the next Jim Ellis projects
that are kind of screaming for our attention
that someone and some groups should be thinking about?
-Wow.
I think many of the problems that we're facing now,
first of all,
is how do you fund the continuation of some
of these infrastructure projects?
You know, when someone gives you a new house,
well, it's going to work great for the next 25, 30 years,
but pretty soon you're going to have to come up with the money
to update the plumbing or replace the roof
and everything else.
And so, we're facing some of those issues
now in terms of the maintenance of many of these projects
that were started under Jim's vision and dreaming.
The other thing is that primarily the big projects
and the daunting things that affect the quality of life,
the essence of the Puget Sound area are more the social issues,
which cannot be measured, which I mean,
cannot be defined and it's not something
that people can grab a hold of and walk around and say,
"Yeah, I like this building, I like the design,
I like the architecture."
It's housing, affordable housing, homelessness,
mental health issues, drug issues, drug abuse,
and those are going to be really, really hard,
really, really hard to tackle
and to define a measure of success.
What is success? What is success?
And, you know,
Jim was always telling us that we have to think long-term.
We're not going to achieve it overnight.
The vision for Puget Sound under Forward Thrust,
you know, was all just part of a chapter
of even more projects from Convention Center to Mountains
to Sound, and everything else.
So we need to think long term what do we want
this region to look and feel like 25,
30 years from now for future generations.
And then we've got to get people together
and start attacking that.
It may not be as grandiose
as Jim was able to bring people together to accomplish.
But we've got to move forward as Eric said, you know,
what can we do in our own community
and how do we contribute?
One thing about Jim's approach,
and Sally has kind of touched on it,
is that not just bringing people together,
but people of even opposing viewpoints to bring them
into the process
and to also try to address their needs and their objectives.
Not trying to steamroll them,
because he could have done that.
With the titans of industry,
with Boeing and Warehouser and the politicians say,
"We're going to do this,"
they can just ignore some of the people who might be affected.
But he really tried to make it a win-win for all the folks
that were connected.
And one big example of that was the Eagles Auditorium,
which is now ACT Theater.
ACT Theater wanted some funding to renovate that.
It had been --
even after the Convention Center was completed, it was dormant,
it was vacant, and it was filled with rats.
So the idea was to turn that into a theater,
get some money for that,
but to commit --
the theater really wanted also to raise money
for the project to go higher in terms of height.
And Jim committed to having some of that money,
not just going for the renovation of Eagles Auditorium,
now ACT Theater,
but actually going into senior housing in the areas nearby.
Trying to make sure that the community felt accepted
and had their needs addressed. That's the type of win-win
that we need to start thinking about as opposed to
it's a zero-sum game, as Eric was talking about.
-Okay. We have time for a couple of questions.
We've got microphones, one running at this aisle.
Anyone want to weigh in quickly?
-One right there in the middle.
-Right here in the middle? -Raise your hand.
There we go.
-Good afternoon. I'm Dick Sandaas.
I was one of Metro's Executive Directors.
And I'm so glad the book's been published
because quite a few years ago now,
Tom Gibbs and Dick Page
and I went over to Jim's home for lunch on several occasions.
And Jim would be writing his book.
And he would give us probably the full-blown
chapter every time we saw him. But I want to say one thing.
I want to say a phrase "better than promised."
And that was Jim's assignment for Metro.
And I'm going to read to you a portion of a letter
that he wrote me in 1989 when I was named Executive Director.
"The challenge, of course, is enormous.
Not only must Metro complete the projects
and operate the systems in an exemplary way,
but you must also undertake efforts
which will create a public perception of responsiveness.
We all need occasionally to be reminded
that an essential element of democratic responsiveness
is achieving what the voters have requested in a manner
which is better than promised. There is a simplistic idea
around that responsive government is simply one
in which a lot of people can be voted in or out.
There are many examples of such governments
that have never responded to public need
but have been simply operated a revolving door
of political posturing and failure.
" Well, that was my assignment. -Thank you.
-And I'm so proud to have been at Metro
with the great people that were there.
-Other folks? We have a hand up there.
No. Let me actually just -- yeah.
-Can I just -- I just wanted to respond to that a little bit.
I thank you for sharing that letter, first of all,
and, you know, it reminds me actually, back to Mary,
and how we've come to know each other.
To my knowledge, Jim Ellis wasn't super involved
in the bond measure that -- Libraries for All bond measure
that created this building and renovated
or created the 27 branches around the system.
But it was very Jim Ellis in spirit.
And one specific way that your sharing of that letter
reminds me of that is that I came on to the library board
after a lot of the big decisions had been made,
after the bond measure had passed,
which Marie and Walt helped to get it to pass,
after the city had agreed to this $200 million,
you know, effort,
and now plans are being made to actually build the thing.
In fact,
I came on after already the design had been chosen
for this building with Rem Koolhaas, the architect.
And one of the things that we got to remember here
is the other way in which we can't all be
Jim Ellis is we can't all have both the luck
and the gumption and the alignment of circumstance
to be the person who starts something.
But we are almost always all of us going to be the person
who stewards something and who is -- I mean,
the word we use for board members
at the Seattle Public Library is trustees.
We're all a trustee of something that somebody started
either a few years or a couple of generations before us.
And what Marie and I had to do in that moment was to make sure,
just in that spirit,
that now this thing was going to get built in the spirit
that was responsive to the public.
Not just, you know,
because -- you know, it wasn't just a matter of
whether Mayor Nichols was accountable at the polls,
it was a question of whether the library system was going to do,
listen to people in every neighborhood,
hear what their hopes and dreams
were about new branches and about collections,
and try to make something that felt like they were heard.
And that's a spirit in which all of us as stewards,
as trustees, can be doing.
You don't have to be even on the library board.
Just whatever role that each of us has in the community
to have that mindset is something
that I think is really powerful
and that letter really captured it.
Thank you. -Can I add one sentence?
-Yeah. And why don't we just go ahead and close out?
Let's just have all of you --
-Just building on the point of stewards
of Jim Ellis' legacy through King County,
I want to acknowledge my former colleague,
Councilmember Jeanne Kohl-Welles, is in the room.
If everybody want to -- Huge mentor of mine
and somebody that I've loved working with.
So, yeah.
-Okay, final thoughts, Sally Jewell.
-I Hope you read the book.
I hope you read it as a fun read,
as a love story, as a roadmap.
And also to say how do we apply this to the future?
With the generosity of a lot of people in this room
who supported the book to get it published.
Not only have all the archives been digitized
but we're working on a curriculum
that we hope will be used in public
and private schools using the book as its base.
Because I learned a ton from Jim Ellis
and I know how blessed I am to be in that position.
But we can all learn and shape the lessons of the future
by listening to his words, putting ourselves in his shoes,
but also, in our own shoes,
shape the kind of civic world we want for the future.
So, thank you to my fellow panelists, Eric,
for your work and professional work in trying to do this.
Girmay, for doing it and being the steward.
And Gary for being such a wonderful example
of political leadership as well as civic leadership in the time
that you have been here and what you continue to contribute.
So, we've all got Jim to thank for a lot of things
whether we know it or not and I am most thankful.
-Gary Locke, close us out here.
-I don't think --
I think we should just close with Sally's comment.
[ Laughter ]
-Okay.
We close today, appropriately enough,
with the literal offspring of Jim Ellis,
joining us this afternoon
are Lynn and Mary Lou's three children.
They will come forward now with their spouses Bob,
Steve, and Lynn joined by Jean, Karen, and Mark.
Come forward.
Let's give them a round of applause.
And they aren't the only ones.
Let's get a picture here. We got a moment for a picture.
Smile, grab each other's shoulders.
Okay.
And they aren't the only Ellises.
We have many extended Ellises and many generations of Ellises
all here in our first and second row.
Give them a round of applause.
And just to be clear, do raise your hands,
we have Steve and Karen.
We have Lynn, Jim's daughter.
Raise your hand, Lynn, and Mark, her spouse.
And then we have Bob and his spouse, Jean.
Now, as Sally just mentioned, today marks two big events.
The launch of this long-awaited book,
but equally important is the transfer
of the entire Jim Ellis archives to the public library.
So for now on,
Jim's letters, his papers, his notes, his interviews,
his speeches, you name it,
all of that will live here at this wonderful institution
for all the community to see.
And the book and the materials all
meant to inspire the next generation of civic leaders.
Now this box that Karen is holding,
it represents a fraction of that archive.
We're going to have the Ellis's pass it down one
by one in just a moment
so that they can each touch it for a final time
before the entire collection enters the public domain
as it is handed to Steve Lanksbury -- Sean,
I'm sorry, Sean Lanksbury.
Sean's going to be accepting the archive today
on behalf of the library.
But first,
we're going to start with some brief comments by Steve Ellis.
-Well, thank you very much.
And thank everyone who has worked in this,
it's an amazing project.
Our father would have been extremely pleased
with the effort so many of you,
his family, his friends,
and his supporters put into making this book a reality
after all these years.
Jim's family is so grateful to everyone
who worked on this project spearheaded by HistoryLink.
We are delighted to see Papa's book in print
and hold it in our hands.
We hope it inspires future generations
of leaders in service.
To use one of Jim's favorite expressions of appreciation
and a job well done.
-Good show! -Okay.
Here's the hand-off.
[ Applause ]
So there you have it. You can all proudly say you were present
at the birth of this great book, this important project.
Elliot Bay is here selling copies.
You can look at some of the archives on the tables.
As we close, we delight you with a song.
Oh, I'm sorry. Sean has something to say.
Sorry, sorry. -Oh, it's -- it's all good.
Just really quick, I just wanted to thank you all.
We're honored to have accepted the family archives and Jim's
archives, and I hope that he'd be tickled
that it'll be available for the public for generations to come.
It's a true treasure.
[ Applause ]