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Mainstream On Main Street

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COURTESY OF JOHN COOPER This 1937 look east on Edmonds' Main Street through its intersection with Fourth Street reveals many of the stock establishments of Main Street America. The list includes a bakery, tavern, grocery, drugstore, general store, theater, real-estate office and several cafes. JEAN SHERRARD The most substantial buildings on the right still hold their corners at Fourth and Main.

FOR SOME reason, in 1921 J. Boyd Ellis forsook the life of a high-school principal in Marysville and bought the Photo Art Studio in Arlington, his hometown. In the more than half-century that followed, he and his son, Clifford, visited every niche of Washington state making postcards to sell in local stores.

As "real photo postcards," Ellis cards are not screened prints but actual photographs. Therefore they can be "read" in detail, and the Ellis legacy to his home state amounts to a prolific civic lesson in its growth through most of the 20th century. Intrepid Ellis collector John Cooper explains, "No one covered the state like Ellis, because he was no specialist. He went everywhere. His first series of street scenes dates from the 1920s. Late in the 1930s he went around the state again, and in the late '40s he did it a third time."

About two years ago when Cooper was recuperating from knee surgery he counted more than 5,000 Ellis cards in his stock. The Cooper Collection includes hundreds of cards with Seattle subjects, but also many hundreds of other communities including Eatonville, Elma, Ellensburg, Electric City, Ellisport and this 1937 look east on Edmonds' Main Street.

We take the date from a magnified reading of the real postcard itself. Farther east on Main Street is the Princess Theatre, which is still around as the Edmonds Theatre. Enough of its marquee is showing to extrapolate "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round." Released in '37, the movie is well-stocked with singing cowboys, gangsters and radio stars. It also has baseball. For Joe DiMaggio's part in it, one critic advised that the sophomore Bronx Bomber "stick to your day job."

We may give thanks that Boyd and Clifford Ellis also stuck to theirs.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.