I enjoy reading your Now and Then column in Pacific Northwest magazine each Sunday.

When I was a kid we used to cross the Ballard Bridge ("To Ballard or Bust," Oct. 31) to get from our house in Broadview to my dad's purse seiner at Fisherman's Terminal (or Fisherman's Dock as we used to call it). We moved to Bellevue in 1960 when I was 8 years old. My dad remembers when the original wood approach trestles to the Ballard Bridge were replaced by the concrete and steel approaches around 1940. The Now photo shows the 15th Avenue bridge over Leary Way or Leary Avenue. The bridge replaced a traffic signal at 15th and Leary. I remember seeing this bridge while it was under construction around 1958. The interchange at the south end of the Ballard Bridge replaced a traffic signal at the intersection of 15th, Emerson Street and Nickerson Street around 1960.

I believe the nickname for Ballard is Snoose, not Snooze Junction. The word snoose is a slang term for chewing tobacco. I remember fishermen of Scandinavian descent chewing Copenhagen when I fished on my dad's boat in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Although he has not done much fishing in recent years, my dad still keeps his boat, the Antarctic, at Fisherman's Terminal.

Mark Bozanich
Tacoma

A shot of knowledge

I found the article about the 1918 influenza crisis ("Killer Flu," Oct. 24) personally interesting because I was born in Seattle on Nov. 2, 1918, at the height of the flu pandemic.

As the article mentioned, hospitals were full and turning people away, so I was born in an assisted-living facility on Capitol Hill. The attending physician was Dr. Tiffin, who at one time had been the county coroner. My mother had worked for Dr. Tiffin before her marriage. The day after my birth Dr. Tiffin came down with the flu, from which he fully recovered.

Some years later my mother worked for the law firm of Preston, Thorgrimson and Turner. Mr. Preston was the grandfather of (writer) Mary McCarthy. I heard the tragic story of Mary McCarthy's parents from my mother. One of Mother's duties as bookkeeper was to prepare the checks that were sent for Mary McCarthy's schooling.

The Pacific Northwest article provided many details about the influenza pandemic that I had not known about before that I found interesting and that indicate a good course of action should such a flu outbreak once again occur.

Eda A. Anthony
Seattle

Right to the point

I always enjoy reading Steve Johnston's Sunday Punch columns. Yesterday ("The Heights of Hubris," Oct. 24) my husband read it first and handed it to me saying, "This sounds like something me and my brothers would do." They also had arrows with metal tips.

It made me think of the game "Mumblety Peg," which I was surprised to find in the dictionary today. It says "a game in which the players try to flip a knife from various positions so that the blade will stick in the ground."

Well, yes, but when we played it in the 1950s, the goal was to flip it so that it landed as close as possible to the others' shoes! I was not usually a risk-taker as a little girl, but I remember playing this with my brothers. Is this how others played it, or did we make up the shoe part? I don't know. I say shoe, instead of foot, because I never remember playing it barefoot! I wonder if my parents knew we were playing it, and if so, why they let us continue.

Amy Perkins
Camano Island