Many of the historic images on Sports Press Northwest are provided by resident Northwest sports history aficionado, David Eskenazi.
A Seattle native, David has amassed an extensive archive of Seattle, Northwest, and West Coast historic sports photographs, artifacts and ephemera. We draw from this archive to illustrate stories in The Vault, and our weekly Rotation feature, The Wayback Machine. Youll see many unique and evocative representations of our sporting past, many of which have never been seen publicly. You are in for a treat!
David enjoys sharing his collection and zeal for Northwest sports history. His historical showcase activities have included displays at numerous museums, historical societies, and community events, including an annual Northwest baseball history display at Mariners FanFest, and working on baseball-themed fund raising events for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Since the early 1990s, The Seattle Mariners have enlisted David to help recognize and illustrate Seattle and the Northwests 120-year baseball legacy. This collaboration has produced historical displays at Safeco Field, including seven 35-foot long historical storyboards surrounding the Safeco Field main concourse, Fred Hutchinson seat end stanchions, and classic early photographs on the suite level, all created for the opening of Safeco Field in 1999. From its opening in 2007 to the present day, David has provided thematic ideas, design elements, images, and scores of original historic Northwest baseball artifacts for the Baseball Museum of the Pacific Northwest at Safeco Field.
David also contributed visual materials, historical consultation and on-screen interviews for documentaries on The Seattle Rainiers, The Spokane Indians, and the Seattle Pilots, and provided images and other inputs for a multitude of books, magazines, web-sites and other media focusing on Seattle, Northwest and West Coast sports history.
Recent books he contributed to extensively include SABRs Rain Check: Baseball in the Pacific Northwest, and Dan Raleys Pitchers of Beer: The Seattle Rainiers Story.
David has a keen ongoing interest in sharing stories, expanding and enhancing his collection, and broadening his knowledge and archive of Northwest sports history and memorabilia.
If you have questions, memories to share, stories to suggest, or would like to talk to him about selling or trading Seattle and Northwest sports artifacts, please contact him at (206) 441-1900, or at seattlesportshistory@gmail.com
By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
This is going to sound like blasphemy, especially after the Seahawks strutted off with an ESPY award last week for Best Team in America for 2013. But the most compelling victory by a team in state history was not Seattle’s 43-8 clobbering of Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, or the SuperSonics’ triumph over the Washington Bullets in 1979 for the city’s only NBA Championship.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
In its afternoon edition of May 15, 1955, The Seattle Times printed a headline on the first page of its sports section that blared, “Colleges Drool As Tacoma Ace Adds Track Laurels.” Sans byline, the story reported without equivocation, “Luther (Hit and Run) Carr, Lincoln High’s greatest athlete, is the biggest sensation in Tacoma since the collapse of the Narrows Bridge.”
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Seattle's Lincoln High School dates to 1907, when it opened with 900 students, who came from the fast-growing University, Latona, Ravenna, Green Lake, Fremont, Queen Anne and Wallingford neighborhoods. Until 1981, when the school closed due to declining enrollment, Lincoln ranked among the most important educational/athletic institutions in the Seattle area, a segue into the exercise at hand.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Jack Wayne Lohrke did not have a distinguished major league career. He spent seven seasons in the National League between 1947-53, mostly as a utility third baseman, shortstop and second baseman with the New York Giants and Philadelphia Phillies. But Lohrke, a Los Angeles native, was fortunate to have had a career at all, after escaping death at least six times during World War II.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
As head of Howard S. Wright Construction Co., founded by his father, Howard S. Wright Sr., and uncle, George Schuchart Sr., in Port Townsend in 1885, Howard S. Wright Jr. made an astonishing impact on Seattle’s landscape. During a career that spanned the 1960s through the 1980s, Wright was involved in the construction of the Space Needle, 76-story Columbia Center, 50-story Seafirst Building, Washington Mutual Tower and Sheraton Hotel & Towers.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
It is impossible to say exactly why Spencer Haywood hasn’t sailed into the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame long before now. The Springfield, MA., gallery has a non-transparent selection process, one of the most secretive in American sports, in which neither the voters nor the vote totals are revealed. Haywood’s exclusion could be the result of many factors, but house politics are likely a contributing factor.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Before 1984, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament never inspired office pools and side wagers or compelled network television to splurge billions of dollars for the privilege of providing wall-to-wall coverage. Before 1984, “Selection Sunday” didn't exist. Nobody talked about the Sweet Sixteen and the Elite Eight, much less seeds and bracketology.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Born out of a lawsuit stemming from the loss of the Seattle Pilots, the Mariners had a long slog to respectability. In their first six seasons (1977-83), they lost 90 or more games four times, including 100-plus twice. Given the local novelty of major league baseball then, fans never expected much out of the early Mariners, a good thing because they didn’t get a whole lot more than misadventures.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Hockey historians rank Frank Corbett “The Flash” Foyston among the greatest hockey players in the first quarter of the 20th century. Also among the most decorated athletes ever to wear any Seattle uniform, Foyston enjoyed the sort of celebrity in his time (1916-24) that Russell Wilson does today.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Established in Canton, OH., in 1963, the Pro Football Hall of Fame includes 287 individuals who played, coached or otherwise developed the NFL into the colossus that it is today. With the addition of former Seahawks tackle Walter Jones (1997-2009) Saturday in the Class of 2014, those with significant ties to the state of Washington number 11.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
A Seattle tradition now in its 79th year, the MTR Western Star of the Year, which begins at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at Benaroya Hall and is hosted by ESPN's Kenny Mayne, began with a simple question posed by Royal Brougham in his popular Seattle Post-Intelligencer column, “The Morning After," published Feb. 23, 1936.
“Who,” Brougham queried his readers, “was the Man of the Year in local athletics in the past 12-month period?”
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Long before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders nationally and Nate Robinson locally, Donald Eugene (Gene) Conley reigned as the quintessential multi-sport athlete. For more than a decade spanning the early 1950s through the mid-1960s, the Richland, WA./Washington State product became – and remains – the only athlete to win championship rings in two of the four major American sports.
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By David Eskenasi and Steve Rudman
The University of Washington football team will participate in the Fight Hunger Bowl in San Francisco Friday night opposite Brigham Young University. This marks the fourth consecutive year the Huskies have qualified for the postseason and the 34th time in school history. The first was 90 years ago, when bowl matters were not determined by conference seeding, but by the educated whim of a committee.
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Queen Anne High School, a Beaux Arts-style structure with a commanding view of Seattle at Second Avenue North and Galer Street, opened in 1909, attracting students from Queen Anne Hill and the Magnolia Bluff. Enrollment peaked at more than 2,600 in the mid-1960s, but plummeted to fewer than 1,000 by 1980. A year later, in 1981, the Seattle School Board wielded the axe and Queen Anne High graduated its last class.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
The Washington-Washington State rivalry presents a marvelous opportunity to play, “Who Knew?” It’s unlikely, for example, that the 59,887 fans who froze throughout the 1985 Apple Cup at Husky Stadium (26 degrees at kickoff) had any inkling that they might be watching a future Super Bowl MVP, a College Football Hall of Famer, and 28 players who would be selected in two subsequent NFL drafts.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
The Feb. 5, 1959, resignation of University of Washington rowing coach Al Ulbrickson completed the withdrawal from active duty of an esteemed triumvirate of Washington coaches who, for 40 years, represented the best tradition of Husky athletics. In addition to Ulbrickson, the trio included Clarence “Hec” Edmundson Pavilion, for whom the school’s basketball facility is named, and Dorsett Vandeventer Graves, known to all as “Tubby.”
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
At 1325 Sixth Avenue at Union Street in downtown Seattle, on the same block as the 5th Avenue Theater, the Washington Athletic Club is working on its seventh consecutive 5 Star Platinum Club of America award. Last year, as it has many times in its history of more than 80 years, the WAC was also selected the best athletic club in the state and one of the top four nationally.
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Roosevelt High School dates to 1921-22 and is named after former President Theodore Roosevelt, whose famous military regiment, the Rough Riders, gave the school its nickname. From then until now, Roosevelt has ranked among the most important secondary education/athletic institutions in the Seattle area, a segue into the exercise at hand.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Former University of Washington football coach Don James (1974-92), who directed the Huskies to six Rose Bowl appearances and the 1991 co-national championship, left a Seattle-area hospital a week ago following two surgeries to rectify gastrointestinal issues. According to a statement released by the school on behalf of the James family, doctors believe the surgeries were successful.
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By David Eskenazi and Steve Rudman
Never in four decades (well, nearly four) has a regular-season Seahawks game stirred local masses quite as much this year’s Week 2 showdown with the San Francisco 49ers at CenturyLink Field. It has to do with soaring expectations. Several pundits have picked the Seahawks to reach – and win -- the Super Bowl, with the caveat that only the 49ers in the NFC, who lost to Baltimore in February, are standing in their way.
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