A new anthology of short videos captures Seattle’s history from the time of the ice age to the present.
Seattle: A History in Short Stories is an ambitious compilation that includes 90 videos, each three minutes long. They have been curated into three episodes, the most recent of which was released this summer.
It is available for free online and is airing on Tacoma-based KBTC public television this month. Washington public school students will have the opportunity to watch the videos in their history classes beginning this year.
Producers John Forsen and Tom Horton began work on the series in 2015.
Forsen told KNKX’s Gary Davis the inspiration for the series was ignited by a documentary he produced about Seattle’s first world’s fair in 1909.
Interview Highlights
The project’s inspiration
The idea came when I started the AYP documentary for the 100th anniversary of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, Seattle and Washington state's first world's fair. I wasn't born here, but I've been here for 50 years, and I did not know we had a world's fair in 1909. Everybody knows about the 1962 world's fair. It brought us the Space Needle and Pacific Science Center, but the 1909 world's fair was historic. It brought hundreds of thousands of people to move here. So, when I produced that short series of an hour, with short films inside of it, telling different aspects of it, that gave me the idea of this whole anthology.
A “who’s who” of cultural icons
We did a few first-person scripts and narration. That was just fun to do. Like Ken Workman, the [great-great-great-great] grandson of Chief Seattle, wrote about his [great-great-great-great] grandfather. We had Mayumi Tsutakawa write about her dad, [artist] George Tsutakawa. We had Jill La Pointe telling the story of her grandmother Vi Hilbert, who really preserved the Lushootseed language. We had Dr. Lora-Ellen McKinney telling the story of her father Reverend Dr. Samuel McKinney, which was a really fun first-person story as well. So we had these documentaries done in different ways in these shorts. First-person, interviews with people, traditional documentaries with people on camera. So each writer came up with their own way of how they wanted to create the short.
As we got to episode three, I had things to show people. So Jean Smart, Sue Bird, Nancy Wilson, and Lily Gladstone.
As we created these shorts, the written words for Jean, she knew of Namu as important for her to read. She had fun. She was laughing. She was sad. Namu is a sad story. Lynda Mapes, the great Seattle Times writer, wrote that short. She actually did a huge profile on Namu years back and was so historically accurate with it and able to give that perspective of, “was this the right thing to do?” And, you know, gave that voice to Jean Smart. We've lost a lot of our killer whales and this was a tragedy.
On documenting Seattle’s history
Seattle's the biggest youngest city in the world. We were the last frontier to be developed, and we're only 150 years old. And I keep saying, “Why haven't we learned from our mistakes?” We should learn, as a young city, what works and what doesn't work, and we kind of keep reinventing that wheel sometimes.
Let's take transportation. You know, our great senators [Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson] got all this federal funding to put an amazing rapid transit system. That was a fully funded system back then [in the late 1960s], and now we're spending billions of dollars trying to catch up. We didn't learn from our mistakes there.
The series in public schools
That was my biggest dream. When I took Washington state history in ninth grade back in the day, we got a tour of underground Seattle and we read Murray Morgan's Skid Road. You didn't get excited about Seattle's history. So these shorts, I thought, would be so great. And again, because of how the teachers reached out to me — AYP — they wanted to use these short stories. I thought, “Okay, if I can get public schools to really use these in all the teachers' curriculum across the state, that was like the number one goal,” and it paid off. That's the dream come true.
