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Tea And Cowboys

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COURTESY OF JOHN COOPER THEN: Joseph Standley built this charming Japanese teahouse for his daughter, Ruby, in the backyard of Totem Place, the family's West Seattle home. The posing children are not identified. PAUL DORPAT NOW: This backyard prospect at Totem Place required a slight move up the bank from the historical photographer Otto T. Frasch's position.

ONE OF THE great "originals" in the history of this city is Joseph "Daddy" Standley, the founder in 1899 of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop on the Seattle waterfront. The grounds around Totem Place, the Standley family's West Seattle home on Palm Avenue, were appointed with a great variety of artifacts, including 12 totems mixed in an exotic landscape of fruit trees and berries. Two other parts of this Northwest Eden were a miniature log cabin and this teahouse made exactingly authentic with bamboo imported from Japan.

The teahouse was built for Ruby, the collector's teenage daughter, and it was playfully named for her "The Rubydeaux." (The rustic identifying sign can be seen hanging from the roof.) In the mid-1930s the Rubydeaux was "inherited" by Standley's namesake grandson, Ruby's boy, Joseph. Today Joe James recalls how the teahouse was "converted into a kind of den for me with a cowboys-and-Indians theme. They redid it in white pine, and I had the cutest little iron stove in there."

Joe's play, however, was soon cut short when his mother contracted tuberculosis. Rather than being committed to the local sanitarium at Firlands, Ruby was confined to her Rubydeaux. She was kept in isolation, her meals left at the door. After three years of this regime Ruby was cured. After, that, Joe recalls, "she pretty much stayed out there. She enjoyed the fresh air."

After "Daddy" Standley's death in 1940, Totem Place was sold, and the teahouse survived for a few years more. Recently, Erik and Katie Wallen purchased the old Standley home. Erik's mother, Anne Barnes, was for 25 years a favorite employee at the shop, and the shop's recent publication "A Curious Alphabet, Amazing Oddities from A to Z!" is dedicated to her.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography. He can be reached at paul@dorpat.com.