City grew up with the Seahawks

Starbucks was a single coffee shop at the Pike Place Market. Microsoft was a year old, and T-bone steak was on special at Tradewell for $2.09 a pound.

In Seattle, on Sept. 12, 1976, teachers marked the sixth day of their first strike against the Seattle Public Schools.

But much of the community's attention focused on a mammoth concrete dome which, in the words of the late Hy Zimmerman of The Seattle Times, "adds an arc of majesty to the skyline."

Inside, 58,400 watched as the Seattle Seahawks began their quest that culminates this weekend in Detroit. And though the home team lost that day, 30-24, fans were encouraged that their new team almost upset the heavily favored St. Louis Cardinals.

Three decades later, the community yearning for its first Super Bowl win is much different from the Seattle of 1976. Its economy has a broader base; its population has spread out and become far more ethnically diverse. But in some ways its spirit is strikingly similar.

"Seattle has always had a funny inferiority complex," historian Walt Crowleysaid. "Back then it was how do we become a big-league city? That was the inferiority itch that we scratched. Now it's world-class, and are we a world-class city?"

In the early 1970s, Seattle had one big-league team, the SuperSonics. Civic pride was still bruised from the loss of the city's first Major League Baseball team. The Seattle Pilots had played just a single season — 1969 — at Sicks' Stadium on Rainier Avenue before scooting off to greener pastures in Milwaukee.

It took a protracted lawsuit against the American League to force the creation of the Seattle Mariners, which debuted in the Kingdome seven months after the Seahawks.

But Seattle had bigger problems than a hunger for sports, chief among them being the loss of tens of thousands of Boeing jobs that prompted the wry 1971 billboard, "Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?"

"Seattle was the incredibly shrinking city," said Crowley, director of Historylink.org, an online history encyclopedia. The city lost 37,000 residents between 1970 and 1980 as families headed for the suburbs and young, childless couples bought up in-city homes.

Even so, with characteristic resilience, Seattle was bouncing back by mid-decade, seeing the results of "Forward Thrust" park improvements, reaping benefits from federal block-grant funds and the flow of jobs and dollars created by the Alaska oil pipeline.

In 1975, Harper's named Seattle the national "most livable city," praise soon echoed by other publications.

It was during this budding euphoria that Greg Nickels, then president of the Washington State Young Democrats, got his first job at City Hall, buyer-trainee in the purchasing department. Though not a big sports fan, Mayor Nickels remembers the optimism and pride of 1976.

"The Kingdome was the ninth or 10th wonder of the world, this great new facility that was going to last 100 years," Nickels said. When the Seahawks surprised skeptics with a winning record in their second season, "we thought the Super Bowl would be right around the corner — and look, here it is."

Nickels said he's witnessed a tremendous civic transformation. "We were a simple, quiet town on the edge of things, and now in a lot of ways we are international leaders," he said, citing Microsoft, Starbucks, a bustling waterfront and burgeoning biotech industry.

But he also sees constants, including a pioneering spirit, an appreciation of the natural surroundings, and the University of Washington's role as a stabilizing and energizing force.

Meanwhile, there's been a fundamental change in who "we" are.

"The city is so much more diverse," Nickels said. "If you go around town there are more people who were born in foreign lands today than there were in the 1920s, which was a peak of immigration."

That diversity is not confined to Seattle's borders.

In King, Snohomish and Pierce counties, people of color went from being 7.5 percent of the population in 1970 to 24 percent in 2000, said Chandler Felt, demographer for King County's budget office. In that time, Asian and Hispanic populations increased about sevenfold.

The area's population continued to move outward. When the Seahawks were created, 44 percent of King County's residents lived inside the city of Seattle. Now, fewer than a third do.

Wes Uhlman, Seattle's mayor in 1976, still wears his Seahawks hat from the very first game and was at Qwest Field with his 7-year-old grandson to see the Seahawks defeat Carolina to earn a trip to the Super Bowl.

The Seattle he governed might have shown more "irrational exuberance" over a Super Bowl trip, Uhlman said, noting that inside the city, the populace is now more "blue" — political code for liberal.

"I happen to be very excited about this, but I know some people aren't. I think a lot of folks in the city drink their Chardonnay and go to book signings."

While the Seattle metropolitan area offers a much wider array of cultural offerings than in the 1970s, at least one indicator shows we haven't entirely forsaken our past.

Three months before the first Seahawks game, a crowd of 67,000 jammed the Dome to see Wings, featuring Paul McCartney, the same artist who packed KeyArena three months ago — as a 63-year-old.

The area's current diversity of interests, activities and priorities makes it more cumbersome to achieve consensus on major public projects, said former Gov. John Spellman, who as King County executive oversaw the dome's completion through delays, cost increases and contractor disputes.

"We were more united back then. It took a while to get people behind something, but once you got them there you really had them," Spellman said.

Although the arrival of big-time sports to the Dome helped Spellman win the governor's race in 1980, he feels it also delayed his quest for the job.

Running for governor in 1976, Spellman lost to political outsider Dixy Lee Ray, who criticized the project. "She maintained we could never pay for it and it wouldn't work out," Spellman said.

Even as it was completed, however, the Kingdome was described as a compromise, designed to host as many activities as possible. That, and sports teams' desire for venues with more top-dollar accommodations, ultimately led to its demise, and the stadium for the ages was demolished in 2000.

KING-TV anchor Jean Enersen agrees that in today's cosmopolitan Seattle, "It's harder to rally the troops around one point of view." And that's exactly why she finds the present enthusiasm for the Seahawks significant.

"It's all about pride in our community, pride in our team and pride in our hometown," said Enersen, who is heading to Detroit for the big game.

Enersen had been at KING eight years when the Seahawks were born, and since then, she and her husband raised their children and saw them through college.

Meanwhile, Enersen has remained a Seahawks fan, believing someday she might see them compete their quest for the Super Bowl.

"It's like raising kids," she said. "Patience pays off."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com

Researcher David Turim contributed to this report.

Comparison figures highlighted in the story came from government and corporate records. Microsoft's 1976 revenue came from the book "Gates," by Paul Andrews and Stephen Manes.