(upbeat music) - In the frontier days, settlers coming out on the Oregon trail came to a place where the trail split, one way led to California, the other to the Pacific Northwest, As someone told that they were faced with a choice between gold and sunshine or the apple and the pine.

It took a different kind of person to choose pine instead of gold and sunshine.

The Northwest is full of folks who March to their own tune, originals, one of a kinds.

People today often find themselves choosing affinity groups or being categorized according to which social media niche they fit in to.

Well, the hell with molds, let's hear it for those who break them.

(upbeat music) I'm standing in front of the Smith Tower, Seattle's first skyscraper, a building that broke records.

It was built by the Smith family, famous for making shotguns and Smith Corona Typewriters.

It was built in a small, but growing city where skyscrapers weren't really needed.

We weren't New York or Chicago, it was a statement of optimism.

When the Smith Tower opened in 1914, it was the tallest building west of the Rocky mountains and remained that for nearly 50 years.

Architecturally, it's one of a kind, and one of his former owners was one of Seattle's most, one of a kind characters, Ivar Haglund.

Ivar like selling seafood, but he bought the iconic tower out of love for the community at a time when its future was in doubt.

Ivar grew up here and the tower meant something to him.

It was our space needle before the space needle.

At that time, our future was much debated as it is now.

There was one newspaper columnist who challenged Seattle's booster ego, its desire to be greater Seattle.

He stood for something more than beating the drum for bigger is better.

He stood for something lesser.

After World War II, local boosters were looking to put Seattle on the map and also make Seattle a much bigger deal.

The central city of Puget Sound.

So they came up with an organization in a tagline called greater Seattle.

And as part of that, they created events like Seafair.

It was a chamber of commerce type organization that was constantly tooting Seattle's horn, but every action in Seattle creates an opposite reaction.

And by the late 1950s, there were people who were tired of the ceaseless boosterism.

And so an organization in formal organization was launched called Lesser Seattle unincorporated.

Lesser Seattle was really driven by a lot of people who didn't like this sort of boostarish promotional bombast about how great Seattle was.

They wanted to pop the balloons of those people who talked in big terms.

They wanted Seattle to stay its kind of isolated cozy self.

People didn't like all the Californians moving in.

They didn't like tourists coming to town.

They were wanted Seattle basically to stay a small provincial town in the Pacific Northwest that it had been.

The unofficial leader of Lesser Seattle was a newspaper columnist named Emmett Watson.

Emmett Watson was a local born and raised in the area.

He went to local high schools.

One of the reasons I'm wearing this jacket.

Emmett Watson was a member of the Seattle Rainiers, which was our Pacific Coast League baseball team.

He said he couldn't hit a curve ball, but he was a Rainier and in old Seattle, the Rainiers were, bigger than the Mariners and the Seahawks combined.

Emmett Watson in his newspaper column embraced the idea of Lesser Seattle.

He encouraged people to be rude to tourists.

He developed a slogan, KBO, keep the bastards out.

And that was particularly aimed at people from California who were moving up here.

Emmett Watson in his day was the must read columnist.

And he actually at one time or another wrote for all three of Seattle's great daily newspapers, The Star, the Seattle PI and the Seattle Times.

Watson believed in Lesser Seattle, but only to a point, part of it was tongue in cheek.

Part of it was really just to get at the ego, the civic ego that he felt, Emmett Watson promoted the reign.

He wanted other people to promote the reign.

He didn't want any good publicity about the city to get out.

He would praise countries like Liechtenstein, which he claimed was a very progressive country, yet it didn't grow.

Emmett Watson was not just a civic grump, he had a great sense of humor.

His column was a blog before blogs were invented.

He did the typical daily three dot journalism, kept you in touch with what was happening in town.

But a lot of people haven't heard about Lesser Seattle because it's kind of died.

Lesser Seattle was overtaken by change, by time, by growth, Seattle developed world class city ambitions, which Emmett Watson would never have approved of.

If you read Emmett Watson's memoirs, you can see that he drew on his experience as a Seattle native.

His name was on an Oyster Bar in the Pike Place Market.

What gets more Northwesty than an Emmett Watson in an Oyster Bar, cozy secluded corner of the Pike Place Market near the old Starbucks.

These are eight elevators inside the Smith Tower.

Remind us that the city has always had big ambitions.

Seattle didn't stay small, but did it get better?

Making civic improvements can be hard and it takes tough people to push for it.

Especially when going up against tough institutions.

Seattle has had those too, like the first woman mayor of a major American city, Bertha Knight Landes.

She definitely marched to her own tune for reform and for cleaning up corruption.

Seattle was still a frontier town in the 1920s.

Vice was a huge piece of Seattle's economic prosperity, prostitution, gambling, illegal booze.

The money went upstairs and everybody got a little piece of it along the way, including Seattle policeman.

(siren wails) This is William Severance, the police chief, is wearing a badge and gee, it's the same badge that we have over here.

- [Jim] Within his first couple of days in office, he was presented with a solid gold chief's badge with a diamond in the middle of it.

They were trying to say welcome to the police department.

You're the chief, but you're really not in control.

- [Narrator] She was determined to clean that up.

Bertha was elected to city council.

She became president of the city council.

And during the time a mayor was out of town, Bertha became mayor in his place.

The police chief had not moved quickly enough on police reform for Bertha, she fired him.

The mayor raced back to Seattle, reinstated the police chief, and that helped fuel her campaign two years later.

She said she would shoot without benefit of clergy, anybody calling her mayor arrests.

She was elected mayor in 1926, the first female mayor of a major American city.

One of the things she did was fire Severances, the police chief.

So she fired him twice.

What fascinates me about Bertha is how thick that glass ceiling was, it's not until 2017 that we elect the second woman mayor.

This is the Smith Tower's telephone switchboard room.

Similar to what it looked like in 1914, it was undoubtedly busy during Bertha Landes's term.

Bertha Landes's reform wasn't entirely popular.

She was soon voted out.

Change is hard.

Civic reform is especially hard.

The Northwest has thrived despite disappointments.

One reason is that our naysayers are outnumbered by innovators people determined to make something new.

For example, we all know about Boeing and the aerospace industry, but what about those inventors and storytellers who saw an opportunity in the Klondike Gold Rush to fly to the gold fields?

Yes, fly, before Boeing was a blip on the local radar long before there was radar.

These magnificent men and women dreamed of flying machines.

It's true, gold powered the dreams of controlled flight innovation, all eyes were on the skies as people fantasized about ways of getting people in material to the Klondike and getting gold back.

In the modern era of the 1890s though, flight seemed very possible and even necessary.

In late 1896, and all throughout 1897, people began seeing cigar shaped airships in the night sky.

Many of them were illuminated.

They speculated that inventors were working on airships or that they might even be from another planet.

Soon, they scene all over the West Coast.

It started in California near San Francisco.

Then they were seen up in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, we saw them in Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, people thought that inventors were finally solving the problem of controlled flight, creating maneuverable airships or aircraft that could carry them where they wanted to go, whenever they wanted to go there.

Prospectors by law had to carry hundreds of pounds of supplies all the way to Alaska and the Klondike, just to get to the gold fields.

What a wonderful solution to airship would be carrying these heavy loads?

The New York times egged on the idea of aviation innovation, "Supposed an airship to be now perfected and practical, the riches of the Klondike would like patent to mankind.

The difficulties of reaching that lonely valley would vanish at once."

Inventors leaped to the challenge.

Thomas Edison was interviewed talking about airships, wireless communication, even trips to Mars, Hyram Stevens Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun, opened a shop in San Francisco that he said would build an airship to the Klondike.

Inventors from all over the world announced that they were building airships, Germany, Canada, Ireland, a woman named Eola Lee was said to be planning to sail an airship to the Klondike that was described as an immense aerial houseboat.

At last, none of these fantastical ideas actually came to fruition, the airship sighting ceased, and no one came up with a workable airship for the Klondike.

In fact, a workable airship didn't appear until about 1900 when the first German Zeppelin flew.

The poet of the Klondike, Robert Service wrote, there's strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who (indistinct) for gold, but the were few ideas, stranger than sourdough dreaming of Zeppelins to haul their supplies and newfound wealth.

Every society needs mental and physical lubricants to keep going.

That point was made during prohibition.

Folks wanted their traditional beverages, even if that meant obtaining handmade booze, artisanal or not from their local bootlegger.

You've heard about bathtub gin and corn liquor, but some folks wanted specially made traditional cultural beverages despite the law.

One example, the Japanese moon shiners who made booze from rice.

One flourishing moonshine sector catered to the Japanese community where illicit Saki was sold to quench the thirst of towns with large Japanese populations like Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver, BC, and Spokane.

In his landmark book on the first generation of Japanese in the Northwest "Issei" author, Kazuo Ito, talked about Japan town gambling clubs, like the Toyo, wherever there were Issei, there were Saki women in gambling, he wrote.

Clubs like the Toyo paid a price to the police to stay open about a 1000 dollars a month.

That's a lot in 1920s dollars.

For that generation, Saki was not only a traditional drink for Shinto rituals or special occasions.

It was the beverage of choice for social recreation, especially among the abundance of cannery boys and sawmill workers who were encouraged to drink and gamble on payday iterate.

The greatest of Japanese in Seattle at that time were employed as laborers.

Saki is called wine, but it is actually brewed from especially milled white rice and transformed with a fungus called Koji, which is also used in making staples, like miso and soy sauce.

By prohibition, California had a thriving commercial rice growing industry in the Sacramento valley.

In other words, Saki ingredients were readily available.

In addition, a hard liquor called shochu, could also be distilled from Saki ingredients, with the addition of other things like sweet potatoes or barley a drink was sometimes referred to as Japanese whiskey.

The process of Saki brewing can be elaborate with many steps.

Illegal Saki was often made in outlying rural areas away from the prying eyes of the city's dry squad, consisting of officers who raided with axes and smashed and confiscate what they found.

Some operations were large.

A rice whiskey operation was busted by the feds between Washelli Cemetery and Edmonds in 1918, that was the largest ever discovered in the area.

Confiscated where an elaborate still 3000 pounds of rice and laundry and garbage containers designed to conceal the booze in a delivery truck.

A raid by Seattle dry squatters in 1919 at a Ravena truck garden resulted in the arrests of four Japanese men with a 500 gallon mash tub and bottles labeled grape juice.

The breweries and stills had to be hidden, but so to their points of distribution.

In Seattle's Chinatown, a bust at fifth and Maynard Avenue resulted in 2000 gallons of Saki and rice whiskey being seized, but one of the men escaped through a secret underground passage.

A rooming house on King Street had attached their sinks faucets to two 20 gallon copper bats of moonshine and Saki, hot and cold running booze.

It was detected because when the police raided, the land lady had left the faucet on.

I'm in the Smith Tower Museum on the ground floor of the building, during prohibition, many of the offices in the Smith tower look just like this room.

Now there's another son of the Northwest who really worked up a thirst and used his unique skills to change Hollywood.

Know he wasn't a famous actor, though we influenced one you've heard of with his unique way of walking a talking.

He was a rodeo cowboy who could do amazing stunts and he revolutionized what we expect to see in the movies.

"The Fast and Furious Western" There was no one else like Yakima Canutt.

Canutt's real first name was Enos, just as John Waynes was Marion, not very cowboy.

He was born in the 1890s on the edge of Washington's frontier.

Whitman County back then was still a place where cattle was wrestled and the citizens occasionally strung up supposed bad guys from the upper floor of the county courthouse.

Enos Canutt's family were Oregon pioneers in the 1850s and moved to a spread in the Snake River hill, south of Colfax to farm and ranch.

The land of the Palouse country was fertile.

Canutt grew tall and was surrounded by family.

His uncle was county sheriff for a time.

As a child, his family moved for brief time to Seattle where he attended Green Lake Elementary School, his only education.

But Canutt was born to ride horses, busted broncos, and bring down steers.

His first rodeo was in 1912 here at the Whitman County Fairgrounds, where he won the bronc riding contest.

He was a tall lad who could take the punishment dished out in the rodeo arena and he thrived on it.

He was the Gretsky of the saddle, the Griffy of bulldogging steers.

He went on to win numerous first place awards and competitions throughout the teens and the 20s.

By the age of 20, Canutt was a major rodeo star.

At the Pendleton Round-up in Oregon one year, he picked up the nickname Yakima, though he wasn't from there.

some say it was a reporter's mistake, but Yakima or Yaki, he became, typo or not.

The new silent film industry drew some Cowboys like Canutt to Hollywood in the rodeo off season, where guys like Yakima were being tapped for a new trend in pictures, action westerns.

He made his first film in 1915.

He got mixed up with early stars like Tom Mix and mostly acted in bit parts in dozens of movies, but he could do his own stunts.

And that proved to be Canutt's cowboy superpower.

He could leapfrog onto a horse, fall off of it, arrange a wagon crash and stage a convincing fight scene.

And he could teach others how to do it.

His stunt work took off, but Canutt's voice ruled out most acting in the talkies.

His vocal chords had been damaged during World War I, when as a Navy man, he suffered from the Spanish flu in Bremerton.

Not only could Canutt transition to performing stunts, he invented techniques and equipment that were new and allowed more realistic and more dramatic violence, Train crashes, wagon attacks, things done that goosed entertainment value, but also protected his fellow stunt men.

In the 1930s, he started working with a young John Wayne who was fascinated by Canutt and watched him carefully.

Wayne wasn't yet a big star and was just shaping his famous persona.

One biographer of Wayne said Canutt was a mentor and a model, an example of lanky macho without swagger.

Wayne later wrote that he spent weeks studying the way Yakima Canutt walked and talked.

He was a real cow hand, Wayne said, and he took his way of talking from Canutt, slow and stronger, especially as he got angry.

- Every time you turn around, expect to see me, 'cause one time you'll turn around and I'll be there.

- But it was Canutt's stunt work that bonded them.

In 1939, Yakima created and performed a spectacular stunt on a runaway stage coach in the movie of that name, "John Ford's Stage Coach", it's considered a Western classic, partly because of an action scene where Cannut jumps onto a running team of horses is shot by Wayne, then drops down, passes under the horses and coach only to come out alive.

Hard to believe someone actually did what was seen on screen, nothing digital about it.

He stood in for Clark Gable for parts of the famous burning of Atlanta scene of "Gone with the Wind".

He arranged classic stunts and dramatic sequences like the thrilling chariot race of Ben Heard Canutt worked with lots of great action stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn.

Much of his work was anonymous, standing in for other characters or for masked men like Zorro and "The Lone Ranger" As time went on, Canutt was credited with virtually inventing the profession of stuntman.

Canutt played tricks to pull off his stunts, but he wasn't the only trickster around.

Restaurant chair Ivar Haglund was one of the city's favorite pranksters and entrepreneurs.

When he bought the Smith Tower in the 1970s, he put a custom-made wind sock in the shape of a salmon on a flag pole on top of the building's pyramid, nearly 500 feet in the air.

The city ordered him to take it down, but the citizens of Seattle protested, the city backed down and the salmon sock continued to fly.

Ivar is long dead, but his tradition of civic mischief lives on.

(upbeat music) Seafood entrepreneur Ivar Haglund was a local celebrity and he was famous for his promotions of his seafood restaurants.

One time when a train loaded with syrup overturned outside his restaurant, he was filmed dipping syrup onto flap jacks that he made on the spot.

He sponsored the fourth of July's fireworks displays.

He died in 1985, but his reputation and his restaurants live on.

In 2009, the Seattle Times reported that Ivar Haglund, in the 1950s had planted his series of underwater billboards in Elliott Bay, anticipating the time when we would all be traveling by personal submarine, an expedition was launched to recover one of these signs, which was then hauled out of Elliot Bay and put on display.

Finding the billboard was the equivalent of finding the King Tut's tomb of Tom Foolery, a kind of bear treasure that was both ridiculous and classically Ivar.

Much as many of us wanted to believe that it turned out to be too good to be true.

It was part of a promotional ad campaign for the Ivar's restaurant chain.

Seattle Times columnist Paul Dorpat had been in on the scheme and fooled another Seattle Times columnist into writing about it.

Dorpat later explained that it was a good hearted hoax.

The hoax, not only fooled people, it sold a lot of clam chowder, sales quadrupled that September to 83,000 cups, sometimes fake news pays.

A good hoax is memorable and sometimes humbling.

So too the perfect crime or one, so wildly imperfect as to seem perfect.

What am I talking about?

I'm talking about a crime pulled off by one man that many have tried to copy.

To this day, no one knows who D.B.

Cooper was.

The Navy gave for his airline ticket was Dan.

The name D.B.

was said to be a media mistake, but it stuck.

For the last 50 years, people have been trying to find Cooper, not unlike Bigfoot Hunters:.

People have fingered their relatives and neighbors.

Deathbed confessions have been made, more than 800 suspects examined by the FBI.

There are many theories, but no definitive D.B.. Let's quickly retrace the crime.

Cooper, whoever he was bought a single one way ticket from Portland to Seattle for $20, on Northwest Orient Flight 305.

On the plane, he slipped a note to the stewardess saying he had a bomb in his briefcase.

This is back before airlines checked for such things.

Seeing what looked like a bomb, the flight attendant conveyed the captain, that the man in his mid 40s of medium height and build with brown eyes and a black suit wanted the airline to cough up 200K, refuel the plane, and fly him to Mexico City.

He wanted two parachutes with two reserve shoots, just in case, why?

It's thought that he wanted the authorities to think he might jump with a hostage, so they wouldn't sabotage the shoots.

The 727 landed in Seattle and the passengers and some of the crew were let off.

The money was brought on board, along with a parachutes and the plane took off with a refueling stop plan for Reno, Nevada.

Cooper insisted they fly no higher than 10,000 feet.

The remaining stewardists on board showed Cooper how to lower the aircraft's rear stairway.

Then she left the cabin for the safety of the cockpit leaving Cooper alone.

When they landed in Reno, Cooper, a shoot, it's back up, the bomb and the money were gone.

The hijacker had jumped mid-flight somewhere between Seattle and Reno.

He left his clip on tie behind.

A massive man hunting sued with focus on Southwestern Washington.

It was theorized that Cooper must have been a former paratrooper or military man, even an airline employee.

Searchers scoured the woods for his shoot and loot or his body.

It was speculated that he went splat, jumping at night in high winds during a thunderstorm with cloud cover, so he couldn't see the ground.

He could have landed in the deep forest or the Columbia River.

After the jump, the rest of us we're left looking for answers.

The FBI kept the case open, running down tips and leads.

In 1980, a boy digging a fire pit on the Columbia River beach on the Washington side, at a place called Tina Bar, dug up $5,800 in ratty, deteriorating $20 bills, who serial numbers match those on D.B.

's ransom money.

The money was still bound in rubber bands.

Cooper was a mainstay on the FBI's most wanted list, but in 2016, they announced that they were focusing their energies on other priorities, but he's still a wanted man.

If Cooper landed safely.

And if he's still alive, he'd be in his mid 90s by now.

If he came forward, he'd be flush in celebrity and facing his twilight years in Club Fed.

To me, the oddest thing about the D.B.

Cooper case is the public response to it.

After Cooper's, there were at least two dozen hijackings that featured copycat demands for ransom and parachutes.

So while some people wanted to catch D.B.

Cooper, many others dreamed of being D.B.

Cooper.

Back in 1971, when people first heard about him, he actually had a great deal of public sympathy.

Only four days after the hijacking, an article in the Seattle Times collected the thoughts of what the person on the street in Seattle thought about the crime attack.

A taxi driver told the papers reporter, you've gotta admit he was clever the way I see it.

Anybody smart enough to take $200,000 just like that ought to make a clean getaway.

An army private said, I hope he isn't caught.

Even our criminals like to be different, and D.B.

Cooper was, he is enigma of folk hero to some, a mystery to be solved for others.

Whatever you think of him, he is a reminder that we are a place that relishes the out of the ordinary.

Those folks who do and think things differently.

They remind us that conformity is often a dead end, that it's okay to be in a niche of one, the path of the apple and the pine will do us just fine.

(ethereal music) - [Woman] Mossback's Northwest is made possible by the generous support of Bedrooms and More.