The pandemic has us getting vaccinated and wearing masks to boost our personal sense of security, but there are still pesky irritants trying to threaten our home security. We have invited Joseph Elenbaas, our Community Crime Coordinator, back for a refresher course on home security. He has good tips and even offers a personal assessment of your home. (Please note that this is one week later than our usual monthly meeting) Sep 8, 2021 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86329321030?pwd=a3ZXNmRWTTczVFB5NktEUk9jQWlNUT09 Meeting ID: 863 2932 1030 Passcode: 847560 One tap mobile +12532158782,,86329321030#,,,,*847560# US (Tacoma) +13462487799,,86329321030#,,,,*847560# US (Houston) Dial by your location +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) +1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose) +1 646 558 8656 US (New York) +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/k9qvUC8Mz

Join the Leschi Community Council for a candidate forum featuring mayoral candidate Bruce Harrell 7–7:30pm. (Lorena Gonzalez has a conflict and is unable to join us.) Council Position 8 candidates Teresa Mosqueda and Kenneth Wilson 7:30–8pm Council Position 9 candidates Nikkita Oliver and Sara Nelson 8–8:30pm City Attorney candidate Nicole Thomas- Kennedy 8:30–9pm. (Her opponent did not respond.) Join Zoom Meeting: Oct 6, 2021 7pm Pacific Time (US and Canada) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87981024531 Meeting ID: 879 8102 4531 One tap mobile +12532158782,,87981024531# US (Tacoma) +16699009128,,87981024531# US (San Jose) Dial by your location +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 646 558 8656 US (New York) Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kZ5GLrxtP

You’re just starting to fix dinner for your family and removing the ingredients from the refrigerator and ZAP! The power goes out! Not again! Why is it always Leschi? Let’s find out! The Leschi Community Council has invited a speaker from Seattle City Light to explain it all to us! Join us December 1 at 7pm by Zoom for an “enlightening” program! ZOOM to our December 1st Meeting at 7pm Pacific Time (US and Canada) : https://us02web.zoom.us/j/ 83283699619?pwd=Unp6U0ZadFNGMTZzMnVoTjlMMlJudz09 Meeting ID: 832 8369 9619 Passcode: 183992 One tap mobile +12532158782,,83283699619#,,,,*183992# US (Tacoma) +16699009128,,83283699619#,,,,*183992# US (San Jose) Dial by your location +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) +1 646 558 8656 US (New York) +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbqupzOLw

Please join us at our June meeting! We are honoring residents who have made a difference! We have suspended this event for the two years of pandemic shutdown and it feels good to reinstate this recognition event. There are so many doing so much! June 1, 2022 at 7pm Pacific Time (US and Canada) Please join us online at Zoom. If you are joining manually: Go to https://zoom.us/join Meeting ID: 831 3380 3021 Passcode: 487365 If you can only join us by phone dial +1 (253) 215 8782 and enter the meeting ID and passcode above at the prompt.

The Leschi Community Council will hold a Meet and Greet at the Grace Methodist Church on Wednesday, December 7 at 7pm. We meet on the lower level in the hall and enjoy some goodies and music. We will want to know your wishes for 2023 programs as we begin to plan the new year. Photo credit: Annie Spratt Grace Methodist Church, 722 30th Ave S.: Go south past the Senior Center and look for a short street on the left; turn left there and park in the church lot. Walk leads to the entrance of the church which faces 30th Ave S.

TO BE RESCHEDULED (originally March 1st, 7pm) Grace Methodist Church (downstairs meeting room) 722 30th Ave S, Seattle, WA 98144 We are sorry for any inconvenience, but we will be rescheduling Lawrence Pitre's exhibit. Please watch the Leschi News for more details or sign up at the bottom of the page to join our email list. This is going to be a wonderful event that you won't want to miss. A unique opportunity awaits you where you will be guided through an art exhibit by the artist himself rather than a docent. Local artist Lawrence Pitre will show more than 30 original paintings in his We Are One series. Lawrence, who studied under Jacob Lawrence, tells about his entrance into the art world on page 4 of the March issue of Leschi News.

We will be joined by Greg Spotts, the Director of the Dept of Transportation. We’ll discuss topics relevant to Leschi, including speeding on Lakeside Ave and Lake Washington Blvd, the plan for lane closures on Lake WA Blvd, and how the Leschi community can effectively partner with SDOT moving forward. Meeting agenda: Review agenda (2 min) SDOT Intro (10 min) Leschi concerns (40 min): Speeding, stop sign adherence, Lake WA closure plan, business district lighting, traffic circle maintenance. Will then open to floor for questions. SDOT/Leschi partnership & next steps (10 min) Leschi community updates & any new topics (10 min) Thank you to the folks who submitted questions and concerns to inform this meeting agenda. Please email leschicouncil@gmail.com if you have any meeting questions. Wednesday, May 3rd, 7pm Grace United Methodist Church 722 30th Ave S, Seattle, WA 98144 We will meet in the large meeting room downstairs.

Greetings from the Leschi ArtWalk committee! We are busy planning our 10th ArtWalk for SEPTEMBER 9th, 2023, from 11am-4pm. Check back to this post for updates. What we need now are vendors with their arts and crafts. You are the ones that make the ArtWalk a success! Here's the application. Only $30 for a booth! Contact us at leschinews@comcast.net if you have any questions. Community members should mark their calendars for this fun, local event. We'll have music, food, unique vendors, activities for kids and more! We will need volunteers for the day of the event. We have many easy ways to volunteer. Contact us at leschinews@comcast.net to get more details about how to get involved.

Leschi is blessed with incredible outdoor opportunities. Please join us on September 6 where Seattle Parks Department representatives will discuss the current maintenance plans for Leschi Park, our natural areas, and other Parks maintained properties. The discussion will include updates on ongoing projects, maintenance levels and future planning. We are preparing the agenda and some initial topics are as follows: How to ensure adequate maintenance for our neighborhood parks and boulevards. This is a big topic, including how invasive plants are addressed, native vegetation, tree replacement, and general landscaping maintenance. The current status of the redevelopment of the Yesler Pier, adjacent to the BluWater Bistro. To view the drawings for the access pier, follow the link: https://web.seattle.gov/dpd/edms/GetDocument.aspx?id= 5654680 We will allow time for questions from the community. We encourage you to email them ahead of time to John Barber: barber-osa@comcast.net The September monthly meeting of the Leschi Community Council will take place at 7pm, Wednesday, September 6, Grace Methodist Church, 722 30th Avenue South lower level hall. ~John Barber

October 31, 2009, was a Halloween that Leschi won’t forget. Officer Timothy Brenton had just cited a driver in a traffic stop and was showing his trainee, Britt Sweeney, how to complete the paperwork when he was shot and killed. This occurred on 29th and Yesler and a group of residents quickly formed to plan a memorial for the officer. Donations poured in from around the city. The planning committee designed a plaque resembling an officer’s badge and a landscape architect designed the planting area. The plaque was the most expensive of the ideas, but the company hired to make it refused any payment. Thus, Leschi has been left with a sizable amount to pay for the rent on the area and any upkeep and replacement of plants. These funds are visible in the financial report as one of the restricted funds. These funds may only be used to keep up the memorial. The Certificate of Deposit at the end of the financial report consists of Brenton funds as well and may only be used for such. Unfortunately, members of the original planning committee gradually moved away from the neighborhood, and we needed a new caretaker. Leschi resident Bill Caldwell offered to take on this task and has been weeding and watering. He was met with some bad news recently: someone cut down the tree that had been valiantly surviving in this rather difficult spot with no water immediately available. This needs to be replaced and we hope that repeating the story of how this memorial came about will create more awareness among more recent residents and reduce the likelihood of something like this happening in the future. Bill discovered that someone from the police dept. had recently weeded the area and learned that it was Officer Britt Sweeney, the young woman who had been with Officer Brenton that evening. She was injured in the original attack but recovered. Officer Sweeney is now a member of the teaching staff at the Police Academy and her hope is that a similar plaque can be arranged for each officer killed in the line of duty. We think it is a good time to hold a remembrance ceremony at the site this coming Halloween and will ask the police to participate. For those new to this incident, the shooter was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to prison where he later died. ~Diane Snell

We try, on sunny summer afternoons, of which there have been countless this year, to catch a swim in the lake. Typically, it’s a paddle from the south end of the T Dock to the log boom at the Leschi Marina and back. Although commonly known as the Leschi T Dock, the 142-foot-long structure is part of Madrona Park. It was dedicated in November 1964 as the Leschi Fishing Pier, costing the city $6,100. It was renovated in 1989 when wood planks were replaced by Trex-like plastic material which gets burning hot in the sun. The closest public restroom is north of the dance studio (which does make one wonder where everyone “goes”). Each summer the scene on the T Dock takes a new twist. In the past few years, crowds of twenty-somethings have ballooned often arriving by Uber while fewer kids and families from the neighborhood frequent the dock. Getting to the end of the pier entails stepping over many tanning bodies. This year, what with the heat and the city’s population growth, the dock has grown so popular that we wonder if there are limits to how much weight the pilings can bear! What was once a neighborhood hangout has become a trendy meeting spot replete with more drinking, more topless bathers, more tattoos, more gender fluidity. The T Dock has become a reflection of the changing demographics of the city. Not everyone appreciates the change. This year spraypainted graffiti appeared in mid-August when the temperature in the water reached a balmy 74 degrees. Three lines painted in green just before the “T.” No Kids No Dogs No Tech $ A few days later: “Don’t Come Back” was written in large white letters to be read by sun seekers returning to shore. Then: “*@^%# Your Sensibilities” and another line which won’t be printed here. Apparently not everyone wants to share this public space. The protester didn’t leave a name. But visitors seem to be ignoring the demands just as they disregard the “No Swimming/No Diving” signage plastered on the east end of the pier. As the days shorten and the water cools the territorial tension will no doubt ease and the T Dock will return to its original purpose—a place where folks can go to fish, and where locals walk out and peer through the winter gloom to see snow on the Cascades and feel the gratitude for the resources the neighborhood is blessed with. ~Anne Depue

Late last November, along with hundreds of others, I attended a celebration at the Museum of History and Industry of the 80th birthday of Jimi Hendrix. He may be the most famous person ever to emerge from Leschi. But until he was out of the army and his performing career took off, he was just known as Jimmy. At the festivities, the M.C. was his much younger sister, Janie Hendrix. After the show, I buttonholed her and asked if she could refer me to someone who was a childhood friend of Jimmy’s and would have experienced life in Leschi with him. She connected me with Tehran (Terry) Johnson, a Leschi School classmate of Jimmy, who stayed friends with him for years after. Terry grew up on 29th Avenue South at Lane Street, near the Hendrix family and not far from the home of Powell Barnett, profiled here earlier this year. Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Terry, who provided some of the information that follows. Jimmy Hendrix attended Leschi School with Johnson from the 3rd grade, graduating from 6th grade there in 1955. They went on to Washington Junior High (and Hendrix went to Meany part of the time, when he was living with his uncle and aunt). While at Leschi School, Jimmy tried out for football. His coach, Booth Gardner, was a UW student working a summer job for the Seattle Parks Department, coaching after school in the Central Area. Gardner remarked that Jimmy had no talent for the game. Rather, his interest lay in music and art. Jimmy became an international superstar, while Gardner went on to be Washington’s governor. Terry, Jimmy, and other friends grew up playing and swimming on the beaches of Lake Washington, from Seward Park to Leschi and Madrona. Their friend James Williams later wrote that he and Jimmy liked to play in Leschi Park, “a woodsy, hilly park with trails and dense vegetation.” (It sounds like he was referring to Frink Park.) “The winding road through the woods at the park was like our own backyard. … Leschi has a kind of wild beauty—deep dark greens, madrona trees, scarlet berries. There’s a lot of history there. We learned about it at school and somehow that made it all more magical.” Terry and Jimmy shared a paper route that went from the Hindquarter (now BluWater) all the way to McClellan Street. Jimmy’s friend Pernell Alexander wrote that he and Jimmy would ride their bikes all over Seattle. They loved the hydroplane races and would camp out near the pits. One time, Alexander says, Joe Taggart, the famed driver of Slo-Mo-Shun IV, gave them a ride across the lake and back. (Seems improbable, for every reason anyone could think of.) As a youngster, Jimmy plinked away on a ukulele. When he was 12, he and Terry started playing music together—Terry on the piano and Jimmy on guitar. Jimmy’s father, Al Hendrix, gave him a Fender Stratocaster, but it was a while before he got an amplifier. Terry describes Jimmy as a shy boy who bonded closely with a small group of friends who he played music with. He says Jimmy did not have much of a singing voice as a child, nor did he like to dance. He never had music lessons, at least not as a child. But he taught himself and became one of the world’s greatest. Even so, Terry says that in performance videos one can see that he wanted to get the singing over and get back to the guitar. A story has it that Jimmy, in his childhood Leschi bedroom, thought he heard a woman’s name being blown on the wind of a thunderstorm. And the wind whispers Mary. Jimmy’s father, after work, would drink the evenings away at the Mt. Baker Tavern, at 2504 Jackson Street. His mother was not much of a presence in his life. Jimmy, locked out of his house until Dad came home, spent the evenings playing guitar at Terry’s house nearby, with Terry on piano. As the boys grew into their teens, they got to play backup for visiting bands like the Shirelles and Jan & Dean. In high school, they joined the band The Rockin’ Kings, whose home base was the Yesler Terrace gym. A younger neighbor told me that, walking to Washington Junior High School, he would hear Jimmy practicing guitar at his home. After junior high, Hendrix and Johnson were reunited at Garfield. Years ago, I was friends with the son of Frank Hanawalt, who had been Garfield’s principal. My friend enjoyed telling anyone he met that “My Dad kicked Jimmy Hendrix out of high school.” A classmate told me that Jimmy would sometimes nod off in class, having been up all night playing in a band. But the expulsion seems to have been a mere formality, since by then Jimmy wasn’t coming around much anyway. John Boitano, Garfield’s highly successful football coach, later said, “The only time I ever talked to Jimmy Hendrix was one day at a practice when I told him to take his banjo [sic] and leave the ball field. I didn’t want him to distract my players.” After high school, Jimmy enlisted in the army in May 1961. Following basic training he was posted to Germany as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. But the next year he was discharged – a general discharge under honorable circumstances, because he was “poorly motivated for the military and has no regard for regulations.” Released, he went to England and formed a band, which needed a piano player. He wrote to Terry and asked him to join them, but Terry, in the air force in Thailand, had just re-upped for four more years and was unavailable. After that—well, everybody knows Jimi’s life story from there. He hit the big time and told us about the sweet love between the moon and the deep blue sea. Fly on, my sweet angel. Forever I will be by your side. ~Roger Lippman The author writes monthly about Leschi history and his experiences over his 47 years in the neighborhood.