WHAT HE SAID: Every once in awhile in our travels we run across graffiti that is all win. Today, we spied this on a retaining wall on the crest of Queen Anne hill.
I made sure to tell the kids about Coach V (Jim Valvano) and why this message was so poignant.
TREKKERS: We made time today to hit a couple of new-to-us spots in very familiar stomping grounds. Amazing how the 'unknown' is right under your nose sometimes.
We parked on Queen Anne, around Raye and Second Ave North. From there, we wound our way south and east. Along the way, we walked under a number of chestnut trees, some already throwing off their green, spiky pods with nuts inside. Before long, we found ourselves on the stoop of the original John Hay Elementary, on Boston.
From there, we continued east, toward the bluff over Lake Union, winding our way down to a lovely, undeveloped green space called MacLean Park.
From the city of Seattle's Web site, we learned the space is named after the MacLean family, who settled in the neighborhood around the turn of the 20th century. They built some of the neighborhood bungalows, and they owned much of the greenbelt property around where we were visiting, and all of the park site, which they sold to the city for preservation as public space.
Right now the park is mostly overgrown open space, but if you stand on the park benches on the plaza just west of this sign, you can see some really pretty sights.
Lake Union is in the foreground, and in the distance, you can see Lake Washington.
Look more closely, and you spy Gasworks Park (the rusty stuff up front), the University of Washington campus beyond (that tall building, and most everything around it), and the bridge that is Interstate 5.
For those not familiar with the area's attractions, there's a nice sign pointing them out.
How sad is it that the kids notice a street that's not full of pond-sized potholes and obstacles, as is the norm in this city?
We made our way back to the junction of Raye and Second Avenue North, which is where quiet little Mayfair Park can be found.
There's a nice little play structure ...
One of the more well known examples of this is the 'vanishing commissar,' Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov. Yezhov was a secret police official under Joseph Stalin. You can clearly see Yezhov in this photograph, just to Stalin's left.
But lo and behold, a few years later, in an official photo, Yezhov is obliterated, like he never even existed.
There are so, SO many examples of disappearing people in the Stalin era.
Check out this photo of "Uncle Joe," friend of the little children, and six-year old Gelya Markizova. The photo was cropped to eliminate the first secretary of the Buryat Mongol ASSR, M.I. Erbanov, and soon Gelya would be an orphan. Her father, Ardan Markizov, second secretary of the Buryat Mongol ASSR, was charged with spying for Japan and shot and killed. Her mother was also killed, as the wife of an "enemy of the people."
(The three images above are in the public domain in the U.S., because their copyright was expired.)
A lot of the material we were introduced to today was pulled from the 1997 book "The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia," by David King.
We also read an excellent article today on the Pulitzer.org site, "Uncle Joe Stalin's Very Dark Darkroom ... Retouching the Past" By: Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer. Allen made the point that "There's a touch of Stalin in us all, perhaps," noting that everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt had help via the airbrush.
