Like clockwork, Tom’s alarm rang at 6:00am on Sunday July 13, 2025 – and I was still standing on the dining room table in our VRBO rental in Bellevue, Washington. I was excited to hit the road, albeit not a yellow brick road, as the three of us were headed into downtown Seattle; also known as the Emerald City. I was all set to strap on my ruby slippers and be whisked away in our Jeep somewhere over the rainbow where I expected to be filled with ahs; and a few oohs, as well.
The morning sky was filled with sunshine, along with a handful of scattered clouds, when we left Bellevue and headed across Lake Washington via the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge at a few minutes past eight o’clock. Our first stop of the day was scheduled to be Lake View Cemetery, where Tom and I planned to visit the graves of actor Bruce Lee and his son Brandon Lee. But when we discovered that burial ground in the Capitol Hill section of Seattle didn’t open until nine o’clock, Vicki continued to drive for another quarter mile when she pulled into the large 48-acre public park known as Volunteer Park.
While I had been all set to pay my respects to the Lee’s that morning, our visit to Volunteer Park was a horse of a different color. That park was the first of four different Presidential sites we had planned on visiting in the Seattle area, and I was excited when Vicki stopped the vehicle along one of the park’s roadways just South of a large botanical garden known as the Volunteer Park Conservatory. As Tom carried me towards a large statue, which was in close proximity to the conservatory, I wondered which President had been cast in bronze. From a distance, the life-sized figure standing atop a large granite pedestal resembled Millard Fillmore – but as hard as I tried, none of it made any sense to me. After all, the 13th President was never overly popular while in the White House, and he had never visited the state of Washington.
Seconds after my photographer had set me down onto a circular granite pad in front of the statue, I realized the metallic man above me wasn’t a President at all. It turned out to be William Seward, the Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, and the man responsible for the purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867.
While the statue to Seward has stood in the same spot since 1910, it became a Presidential site on July 27, 1923 when Warren G. Harding arrived at Volunteer Park to dedicate a plaque that had been added to the statue. President Harding had just been in Alaska for three weeks as part of his famed ‘Voyage of Understanding’ tour. When Harding left Alaska, he made a brief stop in Vancouver, British Columbia before he ended up in Seattle on July 27th. Even though the President wasn’t feeling well during his time in Washington state, nobody consulted a crystal ball to realize Harding had only six days left to live. President Warren G. Harding went into cardiac arrest in his hotel room in San Francisco and passed away on August 2, 1923.
During his visit to Volunteer Park, President Harding greeted a group of Camp Fire Girls at roughly two-thirty in the afternoon before he dedicated the statue’s plaque. As I stood in Harding’s footsteps at the base of the statue, I thought about the courage he must’ve had to meet with the children and keep a smile on his face; even though he likely knew the sand in his life’s hourglass was about to run out. It was obvious those little munchkins were important to him, and Harding didn’t want to disappoint the kids.
Our time in Volunteer Park lasted about twenty minutes, and for the most part, the three of us had that area of the large park to ourselves. While Vicki spent her time admiring the flowers in the park’s nearby Dahlia Garden, Tom and I paid tribute to our 29th President Warren G. Harding during our visit. As I posed near the base of the statue, I thought about President Harding and anguished over the fact his heart was failing during his time at Volunteer Park. For one brief and fleeting moment, a famous quote popped into my resin brain, “Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.” When my photographer and I walked away from the William Seward statue and rendezvoused with Vicki at the Jeep, my heart felt as though it could break in two.
From the Capitol Hill section of Seattle, the three of us continued on our journey into the heart of the Emerald City. A few times during the two-mile drive, I heard Tom say how surprised he was at not seeing the Space Needle, considering how close it was to us. In fact, he said to Vicki, “When we’ve gone to Toronto, you and I have spotted the CN Tower from at least twenty miles away. We’re only a mile or two from the Space Needle, and I haven’t been able to spot it yet. I don’t claim to be a Doctor of Thinkology, but I thought we’d see that darn thing by now. Could the Space Needle be a lot shorter than the tower in Toronto?”
It turned out my wise cameraman was absolutely correct. While the CN Tower rises up some 1,815 feet above the streets of Toronto, the Space Needle was only 605 feet tall. While I don’t pretend to be a math Wizard, that made the tower in Toronto exactly three times taller than Seattle’s needle, which made me wonder if that was done intentionally.
The Sunday morning traffic in downtown Seattle was a non-issue, and finding a parking place close to the Space Needle was very easy as well. As a matter of fact, when Vicki parked the Jeep in a paid lot along Broad Street, we were almost in the shadow of the famous landmark. To most visitors, the Space Needle is nothing more than a tower that was built for the 1962 World Fair and a place where they can get a grand look at the city and nearby Mount Rainier. To Tom and me, this was a Presidential site – and has been since Vice President Lyndon Johnson visited the Space Needle on May 10, 1962, and former Vice President Richard Nixon went to the observation deck with his family three months later.
Once my photographer’s wife had purchased tickets for the elevator ride to the observation deck, the three of us were crammed into the small space for the forty-second ride to the top. There were windows in the elevator, which gave us a great view of the city as we ascended 520 feet above the ground. In fact, the ride was so smooth, it felt as though we were floating in a hot-air balloon, especially when my resin ears popped from the pressure a few times.
The view from the Space Needle’s observation deck was breathtaking. When I was held up to the window on the Southern side of the tower, I was afforded a spectacular view of Mount Rainier rising up above the city. On the Northern side of the deck, I not only had my first good look at Puget Sound, but I also saw Mount Baker – a volcano on the horizon that was roughly 82 miles away.
Then out of nowhere, I heard my photographer tell his wife that he planned to set me near a small opening where he wanted me to pose. When I saw the spot he was talking about, I thought to myself, “I’ll stand there when monkeys fly out of my butt. That’s a five-hundred-and-twenty-foot drop to the ground!”
Seconds later, there I was, only a few inches away from certain death. I kept my composure and tried my best to draw every last ounce of courage from my small resin body just so I wouldn’t freak out and fall. Tom has put me in some precarious situations in the past, but this time he went too far. That stunt made me wonder if his head was filled with straw instead of brains; or perhaps he had become wicked, which worried me even more. My photographer had thrown caution to the wind, and he knew our journey together would have ended if I had slipped. Thankfully, that never happened.
While the view of Seattle from that height was incredible, there were times during our 45-minute stay I thought about Nixon and LBJ as they looked at the same scenery with their own eyes. I realized the city and its buildings have grown in the past sixty years, but the water and the mountains wouldn’t have changed. And while Tricky Dick still had seven years before he sat in the Oval Office as President, Johnson only had a little over a year following his visit to Seattle before he ascended to the highest office in the land when JFK was assassinated in Dallas.
Please take a moment and look at the images my photographer captured in and around Seattle’s famous Space Needle. For nearly an hour, I was truly over the rainbow – in more ways than one.
It was only 10:30 in the morning and the temperature was rising when we returned to the Jeep. Just as Vicki drove out of the parking lot as we headed for our next Presidential site, it was easy to see the Emerald City was coming alive. Traffic was heavier on the streets, and there were pedestrians everywhere.
Our next destination was a donut shop on 5th Avenue in downtown Seattle. At first, I thought my rotund photographer was in need of a morning snack, but it turned out that President Barack Obama had purchased two dozen of the fried delicacies at Top Pot Doughnuts on October 21, 2010. I love standing in the footsteps of our Presidents, and Tom does too, especially if those footsteps are covered in powdered sugar.
The historic donut shop was only a half mile Southeast of the Space Needle, but once we had made it to that area, parking was difficult to find. After my photographer’s wife circled the block several times without any luck, she got fortunate and found a nice spot along 4th Avenue – which was still within easy walking distance of Top Pot.
Once Tom opened the door of the Jeep, we stepped out from the refuge of our vehicle and into a world we weren’t accustomed to. I looked up at my photographer from the camera case and thought, “Oh Tom, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
And that feeling grew stronger during our one-block walk to Top Pot. The area appeared to be very trendy, and the young folks we saw on the sidewalks seemed to be very proud of their unique look – and unfortunately, none of them were very welcoming. Some of the youngsters looked at us as if we had suddenly dropped out of the sky and were infringing upon their lifestyle. Our only hope was to get safely to the donut shop without a confrontation, because it felt as though eyes were watching our every step.
Top Pot Doughnuts first appeared in the Seattle area in 2002 and today feature coffee and donuts in a cafe setting at several locations throughout the city. But when Tom carried me under the rainbow flag and through the front door of the cafe along 5th Avenue, we were instantly immersed in the ambience of President Obama. It was easy to feel the pride oozing from every nook and cranny of that donut shop; but it was even better to see a large, framed photo of the President taken during his visit to Top Pot on October 21, 2010.
I figured my photographer wasn’t going to simply shoot photos of me inside the cafe and then leave. Throughout our dozen years of traveling together, he has never passed up too many donuts. But that nearly changed when the male employee behind the counter said with a smile, “Hi love, what can I get for you.” For the first time ever, Tom was at a loss for words. My stunned camera guy quickly turned to his wife and said, “Please order for me. I’ll take a lemon-filled donut with powdered sugar. I know you like the cream-filled donuts, but you might want to reconsider that option.”
As Vicki waited for her donut order, Tom placed me in several locations around the lobby where Obama had reportedly stood during his visit. I knew my photographer wanted to set me on the floor so I could stand in the President’s footsteps, but he was afraid to bend over in front of the clientele. And quite frankly, I couldn’t blame him – although I didn’t think it had anything to do with putting stress on his new belt. Not only did I notice several women in the cafe who may or may not have possessed XX chromosomes, but I also saw several guys who I wanted to douse with a bucket of water just to put out the flames. The three of us were a long way from home and definitely felt out of place.
Then, just as I was about to click my heels with the hope of being instantly swept back to the Jeep, I discovered there was nothing to fear but fear itself. The customers weren’t a threat. Some may have dressed differently; and had different ideals than us; but they were at Top Pot to eat donuts and drink coffee. I had suddenly found the courage to accept people for who they were, and it only took a journey under the rainbow to realize that.
There wasn’t anywhere for us to sit inside Top Pot, and that was okay with Tom and me. But before we high-tailed it back to the Jeep, however, my photographer stopped to capture a few images of me in front of the cafe. I was extremely proud, in my own way, to pose where President Obama had visited fifteen years earlier. After all, during his eight years as our 44th President, he faced the same scrutiny and challenges as anyone else who marched to the beat of a different drum.
The hike back to our vehicle didn’t seem as harrowing as our earlier walk along the Emerald City sidewalks. And there were no butts about it, that stop just might go down in the anals of history as one of my most unforgettable Presidential sites ever – and that was all because the staff members at Top Pot Doughnuts had bent over backwards to make us feel welcomed.
Back inside the Jeep, I laughed when I watched my photographer devour his donut. With each and every bite he took of his lemon-filled confectionary, powdered sugar flew everywhere. Tom looked like a cocaine addict during an Earthquake. Thankfully, my sloppy picture-taker was able to clean himself up before we headed to the fourth and final Presidential stop of the day – the Orient Express. And after getting a glimpse of the SODO section of Seattle, which was where the Chinese Restaurant was located, the last thing my photographer needed was to impersonate a drug dealer.
Roughly one mile after Vicki drove our vehicle South past T-Mobile Park, which is the home of the MLB’s Seattle Mariners, and the Seahawks NFL football stadium known as Lumen Field, she pulled into the parking lot of the Orient Express. The entire neighborhood surrounding the restaurant appeared to be industrial and gave my photographer and me the vibe that it was on “the other side of the tracks” of the Emerald City. Gone were the trendy buildings and flamboyant pedestrians – they were replaced by a more blue-collar, rough-around-the-edges clientele. And for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why any President of the United States, or a bobble head for that matter, would ever visit that area. In my eyes, the landscape around me appeared dirty; run down; and possibly dangerous – and those were the better of its characteristics.
But there we were at about twenty-five minutes before noon, two of us throwing caution to the wind as we stood outside of several bright yellow railroad cars. Although a total of seven decommissioned railcars, each connected to each other, made up the dining space of the Chinese Restaurant, the Southernmost car was in the crosshairs of our visit. That particular car was billed as the ‘Presidential Limited’ and was reputed to have been used by Franklin Roosevelt while the President was in the midst of his 1944 whistle-stop tour during his fourth and final re-election campaign. But something didn’t seem right.
I posed for several minutes on and near the railcar, even though I wasn’t convinced of its Presidential authenticity. There were several reasons for my skepticism. One was due to the fact that the historic Ferdinand Magellan train car used by FDR was on display in a museum in Miami, Florida. And a second reason was the car in front of me didn’t appear to be well-preserved for being such a historic railcar. Not only was there a broken window that had been replaced with wood, but I also noticed the entire car seemed very dilapidated and unfit for a hungry patron, let alone the President of the United States.
During his first two terms, the Pullman Company had provided President Roosevelt with six railcars for his personal use to travel around the country. It’s highly possible that the railcar I stood on, the one that’s now part of the Orient Express Restaurant, was in fact used by FDR at some point during his Presidency.
My photographer and his wife were hungry, but there was no way in heck-fire the two of them were going to wait twenty more minutes for that restaurant to open, which was music to my resin ears. So instead of a lunch which consisted of sea gulls and little dogs, too, my companions opted to dine at a place near and dear to Vicki’s heart – Spud’s Fish and Chips, which was located near the Eastern shore of Puget Sound at Alki Beach.
Throughout the five-mile drive to Spud’s, I listened as Vicki reminisced about her first visit to the diner in 1977. My camera guy’s wife was an innocent twenty-year-old, swept away above the clouds to a land far, far away known as the Emerald City where she spent time with her aunt. No, it wasn’t Emily – the aunt was Vicki’s favorite, Sally Knight. On one particular day during that memorable childhood trip, Sally escorted her niece to Alki Beach where the two of them dined on what Sally had described as the “best fish and chips I’ve ever had.” Now, 48 years later, Vicki was on her way back to Spud’s, and she was excited about the homecoming.
The Sunday noon traffic was horrible as we neared Puget Sound, and by the time Vicki turned onto Alki Avenue where Spud’s was located, we immediately realized only a magic spell could help my photographer’s wife find a place to park the Jeep. With no wizards or good witches in sight, and after fifteen minutes of a fruitless search for parking within close proximity to Spud’s, Vicki’s demeanor suddenly turned wicked. Tom’s wife could no longer tolerate the traffic, pedestrians, poor drivers, and narrow streets near Alki Beach and she begged her husband to find a way out of the area.
Fourteen miles later, in a puff of purple haze and well away from the hustle and bustle of the Emerald City, Tom had clicked the heels of his Siri app to help guide us into Greenwood Memorial Park, which was a large cemetery located about two miles East of Renton, Washington.
Just as Vicki pulled the Jeep into the burial ground at roughly 12:45pm, I was bewildered when I heard my photographer say we were in search of the final resting place of Jimmy. I knew it couldn’t be Carter, because he was laid to rest in Plains, Georgia. And I didn’t think it was Hoffa, because he’s buried in – well, never mind; that’s a secret and I don’t want my resin kneecaps broken. It turned out the memorial of interest wasn’t Jimmy, but instead was Jimi Hendrix, the legendary guitarist who died from a possible accidental drug overdose on September 18, 1970.
At the time of his unexpected death, Hendrix was only 27 years old. A little over a year earlier, Rolling Stones’ founder Brian Jones drowned on July 3, 1969 at the age of 27. On October 4, 1970, just two weeks after Jimi had died, 27-year-old Janis Joplin passed away from a heroin overdose. And exactly two years after the death of Brian Jones, the frontman for The Doors, Jim Morrison, died in Paris on July 3, 1971. The Lizard King was also only 27 years old. Four deaths of young Rock and Roll legends, all in a span of two years, created what is known today as the 27 Club.
My photographer carried me up to the 20-foot-tall gazebo-like memorial, which sported an interior that featured laser etched portraits of Hendrix and some of his lyrics etched in Jimi’s handwriting. A larger-than-life bronze Fender Stratocaster guitar, which was erected atop Hendrix’s original headstone, marked the final resting place of Jimi and his father, Al. Numerous members of the Hendrix family, including Jimi’s mother, were buried beneath a circular pattern of headstones just outside of the memorial.
When Tom placed me next to the Strat where I posed for a few photos, I couldn’t help but think about all the times in the past when I heard my photographer verbally condemn Jimi Hendrix as a singer. In fact, I once heard Tom say to his wife, “If Jimi Hendrix appeared on The Voice, I don’t think any of the judges would turn their chairs but instead would run for the exits when he began to sing. Jimi could play a mean guitar, but his singing voice sounded like someone in agony.”
Our visit to Greenwood Memorial Park Cemetery had lasted nearly thirty minutes, and at one point during our photoshoot, I thought I heard Tom’s stomach growl. And no wonder – the only thing my chunky photographer had to eat all day was a single donut from Top Spot.
While Vicki still hankered for fish from Spud’s, neither of my companions wanted to make another attempt to eat at the diner near Alki Beach. But since there were other fish in the sea, and three other Spud’s in the Seattle area, Tom and his wife decided they would attempt to have an early dinner at the Spud’s Fish and Chips diner in the Juanita neighborhood of Kirkland, Washington. The best part of choosing that particular diner, which was located eighteen miles North of Renton, was my companions could avoid the traffic in downtown Seattle, which by two o’clock in the afternoon, was likely chaotic.
Following what seemed to be a very lengthy and time-consuming journey, Vicki parked the Jeep on the West side of Spud’s Fish and Chips. When Tom carried me into the eatery, it reminded me of some of the places my companions and I have visited that were featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives show. My first impression of the place was somewhere between diner and dive, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Vicki knew what she wanted to order right away, which was the same classic fish and chips meal she had with her Aunt Sally in 1977. But for my photographer, on the other hand, he took a little longer to decide. I heard him say over and over, “Halibut, or prawns, or cod, oh my. Halibut, or prawns, or cod, oh my.” When Tom finally made up his mind, I heard him tell his wife, “I’m going to order the cod, just for the halibut!”
When the meals arrived at our table, I knew my photographer was eager to sink his teeth into the piping hot fish, primarily to see if Sally Knight was correct in her assessment of Spud’s fried fish recipe. When Tom had finished devouring the three pieces of cod, however, I heard him say to Vicki, “Sally needs to come back to Michigan and eat a meal of lake perch. This cod was okay, but it’s still just cod. Nothing beats a perch dinner fresh out of the Great Lakes.”
Just as the three of us were about to leave the restaurant, my photographer became engaged in a conversation with a middle-aged guy who had admired the Teddy Roosevelt baseball hat Tom was wearing. The guy turned out to be Larry Marion, the owner of that particular Spud’s diner. That simple conversation between the two quickly transformed into a thirty-minute story telling ordeal which featured my photographer talking about some of our incredible paranormal sightings over the past dozen years. While Larry seemed to be glued to every word that came out of Tom’s mouth, Vicki rolled her eyes as she patiently sat in our booth – after all, she’s heard each and every one of my photographer’s stories a countless number of times.
Back in the Jeep with full bellies, my companions had a decision to make as to where we would head next. At three-thirty in the afternoon, the day was still young; but the parking situation in downtown Seattle was a deterrent. As I stood silently in the camera case on the rear seat, I heard Tom say he wanted to visit the grave of Bruce Lee at Lake View Cemetery, because the burial ground wasn’t open when we drove past it earlier in the morning.
The eleven-mile drive took us back across Lake Washington via the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge as Vicki retraced the exact route she had driven before. But this time, when we reached the cemetery, the gates were open.
Lake View Cemetery was established in 1872 as the Seattle Masonic Cemetery, but its name was changed due to the beautiful view of Lake Washington to the East. The large and scenic burial ground is known by locals as Seattle’s Pioneer Cemetery, and that’s because some of the city’s earliest settlers were buried there. But we weren’t there to visit members of the historic Denny party, the pioneers who had established Seattle. Instead, our sights were set on finding the grave of Bruce Lee and his son Brandon.
When we reached an area near the center of the cemetery, the high ground gave us a breathtaking view of nearby Lake Washington. But we weren’t alone. There were several people standing near a pair of four-foot-tall headstones that were surrounded by iron guardrails. There were also a few additional tourists waiting in line along the concrete pathway leading to the plot. We had made it – we were at the final resting place of the Lee’s.
The three of us waited in line for about five or six minutes before it was our turn to traverse along the pathway and into the plot where Bruce and Brandon Lee were buried. While my photographer was never an admirer of their movies, he was a fan of Bruce Lee’s character Kato on the TV show The Green Hornet, which premiered on September 9, 1966 and ran for one season. Kato was the Green Hornet’s masked crime-fighting sidekick on the show, as well as the Hornet’s alter-ego’s manservant in civilian life. That show launched Bruce Lee’s adult television and film career.
During our visit, my photographer set me on the two side-by-side gravesites where I posed and paid my respects to the famous actors. Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong at the age of 32 after suffering a likely seizure from ongoing bouts of cerebral edema. Brandon Lee, who was only eight years old when his father passed away, was accidentally killed on March 31, 1993 while filming a scene for his movie The Crow.
As I stood on the 28-year-old actor’s grave, I took a moment to read the epitaph etched into the monument below me. In an interview just prior to his death, Brandon Lee quoted a passage from Paul Bowles’ book The Sheltering Sky, which he had chosen for his wedding invitations.
“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
I didn’t know for sure what to expect at the gravesite of Bruce and Brandon Lee. I knew they had been actors, and I had heard they both died at very young ages and by questionable means, at least according to some conspiracy theorists. While I try to not get caught up in conspiracies, except for the JFK assassination and a handful of others I won’t talk about here, the time I spent standing on the tombstone of Brandon Lee had a profound effect on me. The inscription etched on Brandon’s marker forced me to think about my own mortality, and more importantly, the mortality of my photographer. How many more trips are in our future? How many more Presidential sites will we visit together? While there is no crystal ball for Professor Marvel to see what good or wicked things we have in front of us, there are a few things we have full control over. And that is to greet every sunrise as a fresh start to the future; to treat and respect every person we meet the same way we expect to be treated; and to cherish every sunset as though it were our last.
I’ve heard Tom say numerous times in the past few years, “Life is short, but if everything was to end this very second, I have no regrets. I’ve met a ton of amazing people; I’ve experienced some incredible things that most people have never had the chance to experience; and I have four grandchildren who can carry on my legacy. What more can anyone axe for?”
When Vicki drove the Jeep out of Lake View Cemetery, I had a new outlook on life; and I think my photographer did as well. Every once in a while, it’s good to pause and smell the fields of poppies; or sit and watch an impending storm roll in; or maybe even go for a long walk with a few friends and a small dog.
Once my companions had picked up some needed supplies from a supermarket near Bellevue, the three of us retuned to our VRBO rental at roughly 6:20pm. Unlike our multi-day stays in hotels, there wasn’t room service to straighten and clean our room while we were gone. As a matter of fact, the place looked as though it had been struck by a cyclone.
Tom and Vicki were completely exhausted after our day in the Emerald City. When my photographer and his wife collapsed into bed at roughly eight o’clock, I stood alone on the dining room table with only my thoughts to keep me company.
I had spent the day over and under the rainbow and experienced a city that’s far different than our own. Although we had danced our way into the dark and wicked side of Seattle to visit one site, the remainder of our time in the city was filled with lollipops, bubbles, donuts, and all of the goodness the Emerald City had to offer.
As the room around me grew darker, one thought popped into my hallow resin head, “Oh, Aunty Sal, there’s no place like home!”
Nice photos!
Thank you Joanne, I’m happy you enjoyed them.