OF AND
RELATING TO
LABOR
I moved into my storefront about 25 years ago. At that time there were still a couple of independent hookers living in the second-floor boarding house above me. Sometimes they would stop in and talk. I remember one day, one of them came in and said, "I just had my best weekend ever!" There had just been a ministers' conference in the nearby Edgewater Hotel, so she had earned a lot.
The fellow who leased out the boarding house told me about its earlier history, during World War II, when the whole upstairs was a whorehouse. There were lots of sailors in town and Boeing was going strong, so the gals were making lots of money. On the first floor of the building there was a fur coat business, and often the hookers would want to buy the coats. Fur coats were not what they are now -people didn't throw ketchup on them then. The lady who owned the business would sell coats on layaway, which meant the gals would pay installments every month, but they wouldn't actually get the coat until they paid off the whole amount.
It turns out that often enough a gal would almost finish paying for her coat, and then she would get arrested by the police. Since the jails were full of sailors, the hooker would just get fined and kicked out of town.
|
If the guy was interested, he'd pay ten or twenty bucks, then she'd take him to the back room where the whole gypsy family was waiting. |
In those days, Seattle was what you called "a wide-open town", which meant that it was easy to buy the police, and everybody got their payoffs. Occasionally the police had to bust somebody to make it look like they were doing their job, so they could keep the "bluenoses" -the civic do-gooders -happy.
By the time I started my shop in the building, in the early seventies, the whole neighborhood had become a nondescript low-rent district, with a couple hookers left, and a lot of winos. Around the same time, the city first started having go-go girls and body painting. In the space where Wall of Sound records is now, there was the Judy Ann Body Painting Studio. It had live naked painted ladies in the window, which people weren't used to seeing around here. One guy was staring at the window while driving past, and ended up crashing into the corner of the building, which was made of wood. In order to prevent future damage, the owners repaired the corner with masonry, which you can still see there today. After this very accident, the city outlawed the ladies sitting in the window.
On the south side of the building, there was a Gypsy family who rented the first-floor space. I got to know them. They made their money with a couple types of cons, but they operated on the principle of "never cheat an honest man".
One of their cons involved the Gypsy men filling their tank truck full of used motor oil mixed with flour, to make it look like roof tar. They'd drive around and make friends with old guys doing yardwork, whose houses seemed to need roof repair. They'd say they just finished a roof job early, and were just killing time until they had to return to their "boss" to dump the excess tar. If the old guy suggested that they could bypass the boss and he could pay them directly to put tar on his roof, the Gypsies would "reluctantly" agree and then pump the oil/flour mixture onto the roof. During the next rain, the fake tar would all wash off.
As for Gypsy prostitution, there was no such thing, at least not if the woman still wanted to remain in her family. But there was a con that the teenage Gypsy daughters would play. They would send their little brother, about 11 years old, out to Second Avenue to ask sailors to shine their shoes. When he got a client, he would direct them inside their apartment and say, "My sister will shine shoes."
Inside in the front room, the daughter would start flirting with the guy and pretending not to speak much English. She would motion toward the back room and say, "Good time?" She would get the guy to believe she was a prostitute without actually saying it. If the guy was interested, he'd pay ten or twenty bucks, then she'd take him to the back room, where the whole Gypsy family was waiting. The daughter would then say to her family, "This guy want Gypsy good time!" and the family would pick up its fiddles and other instruments and start singing and dancing. Most of the guys would just get embarrassed and leave.
After the Gypsies moved out we had a new owner who rented that same space for $75 a month to a guy who said he wanted to open an antique store. But really the guy was a wino who had no intention of opening up a store. The city had just started passing ordinances that you couldn't drink on the streets, and this guy wanted a nice streetfront space to get drunk in with his buddies.
I was still working long hours in my shop in those days, and there was a young couple in an upholstery store which had taken the place of the body painting studio. They were working hard too, getting their business started. One night around eight o'clock I remember hearing the wino and his friends singing a song so happily over and over. It went like this:
SEATTLE PEE TESTS
The ACLU filed a lawsuit in King County on September 9 on behalf of eight Seattle residents challenging the city's program of requiring urine tests of all successful applicants for employment within the city government. The lawsuit seeks to stop enforcement of this program of suspicionless urine testing as an unreasonable invasion of personal privacy and an expenditure of public funds for an unconstitutional purpose. "People should not have to offer their body fluids to obtain a job for which they are qualified," said local ACLU executive director Kathleen Taylor.(ACLU News)
MINUMUM WAGE
Contrary to predictions of some economists, a raise in minimum wage does not create inflation and does not curtail employment. A year after the national minimum wage was hiked 50 cents to $4.75, a new study by the Economic Policy Institute found no inflationary effect and an increase - rather than a decrease - in teenage employment. The wage increased another step to $5.15 in September. (America@work)
CENTRALIA
A permanent labor-sponsored mural commemorating labor history is due to be finished in downtown Centralia by November 9. Call 206-282-6659 for info. The mural will deal with the infamous massacre of Wobblies in this western Washington city in 1919.
GUESS BOYCOTT
The organization Students Stop Sweatshops leafletted department stores and campuses in August, drawing attention to the poor labor practices of Guess brand clothing contractors. The Department of Labor has cited seven Guess contractors with violations of minimum wage and overtime laws. (America@work)
NAFTA ON STEROIDS
The world's 29 richest countries are negotiating the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which would give corporations powerful protections in all countries which sign the treaty. Critics from Global Trade Watch point out that the treaty will forbid any country from placing any conditions on subsidies or tax-breaks to corporations, and would give corporations the unprecedented right to act like a government and sue an entire nation for violating its rights under MAI. (Labor Party Press)
[Home]
[This Issue's Directory]
[WFP Index]
[WFP Back Issues]
[E-Mail WFP]
Contents this page were published in the November/December, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.