Young Bruce Ramsey's Seattle

The doldrums of summer — a time for memories. I think of downtown Seattle 45 years ago, just after the Space Needle was built. The Smith Tower, then 50 years old, was the tallest building in a brick downtown.

I lived in Edmonds. I didn't start to know downtown Seattle until my dad set me up with a year of kung fu lessons at a place near First and Pike. At age 12, I was expected to take a bus downtown, get off at the right spot, find my lesson, find dinner and then take the bus home. Dad walked me through it once. That was the beginning of my mental map of downtown.

First and Pike was a questionable neighborhood for a sixth-grade boy, even one being instructed in the Chinese art of kicking men in the groin. But my folks saw nothing inherently dangerous in pawnshops, peep shows and drunks, as long as I minded my own business, which I did. Parents were less protective in those days.

Dinner was in a place at Third and Seneca called the Missouri Bar BQ, but which I called the Mule because its sign was a mule's head bobbing up and down. The Mule's specialty was the French dip sandwich, price $1.25. The chef had a roast of beef and would cut any part, from "blood red" to "burned ends," slap it on freshly toasted and buttered French bread and serve it au jus. I could add Tabasco, sliced onions, pickles and extra juice myself. The final product could not be consumed with good table manners or without joy.

Since then, I have lived through decades of spongy and flaccid French dip sandwiches. I miss the Mule.

A few years later, I was coming to downtown Seattle with my friends to go to movies at the Blue Mouse or the Coliseum — the latter is now the Banana Republic store — and to buy cigarettes. I'm not sure whether sales clerks downtown were more willing to sell butts to underage kids than clerks in Edmonds, or whether it was just easier to ask. Often we would ride back to Edmonds on the Great Northern. It had a smoking car, empty for the taking.

By 16, I had developed an interest in political books, and would comb the musty shelves at Shorey's on Third Avenue. Downtown Seattle also had a couple of radical bookstores — one run by the Birchers on Third Avenue, and one by the commies, on the block now occupied by the U.S. Courthouse.

It was called Co-op Books, and looked untouched since the 1930s. It had the collected works of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, some of them stamped by Customs with disapproving notices. At the counter was a sign-up sheet for a mailing list.

On the way home, one of my buddies mentioned that he had filled it out, and I said, "Larry, you've just given your name and address to the Communist Party." He made a special trip to ask the clerk to remove it, and the man wanted to know why. Had Larry been contacted by anyone? "No, no, no. Just take my name off. Please take it off." The man did.

The only time I got in trouble downtown was when I was a sophomore in high school. I found out about a day in which Edmonds kids had to go to school and Seattle kids didn't, and devised a scheme for playing hooky. My buddies and I caught a bus to Seattle, where we figured the truant officers — we imagined there were many of these — would have the day off. We were just leaving a pool hall in the block south of the Bon Marche when two of us got arrested — for jaywalking.

The cop, who had no idea we were skipping school, said he would mail the jaywalking tickets to our parents, including a requirement they take us to the Police Department for a safety class.

We were stunned, ruined, doomed — until one of us thought of a way out. On Saturday, we went downtown again and announced that we'd been busted that day for jaywalking. When the official notices arrived in the mail, none of our parents noticed that the date of our infraction was actually for a weekday.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera