Thanks for the memories

History lives in boxes on metal shelves.

Archivists salvage human stories from the dry government documents in those boxes.

Do you know Seattle's official song, "Seattle, the Peerless City?" Rapture flows freely in lines such as, "her bosom's gemm'd with pearly lakes," and "greater far than ancient Rome."

How was it chosen? Not after lengthy deliberation. Seattle city archivist Scott Cline said the songwriter asked the City Council to adopt his ditty.

It was 1909, and the council said sure — if Councilmember Frederick Sawyer would sing it right there in front of everyone.

A notation on the back of the sheet music in Seattle's archives reads: "As sang by the peerless soloist Sawyer."

Cline gave a talk this week as part of Washington State Archives Month, a celebration of the people who keep our public records and of the stories those records tell.

Wednesday, I took a tour of The Vault, the room where King County keeps its history in documents and photographs.

I asked Deborah Kennedy, the county archivist, how she chose that field.

"I was studying history at Boise State University, and had decided teaching wasn't for me, so if you're not going to be a teacher, what do you do with a history degree?"

She found out when she did an internship processing former U.S. Sen. Frank Church's papers. Among the weightier stuff, she saw that the Idaho senator's staff had a pool on when Richard Nixon would resign. "It was the tangible evidence of how people interacted with what I think of as history." Those human nuggets breathe life into old documents.

Karisa O'Hara's job at the county archives consists of organizing and labeling. She was clicking at her computer when she came across records of Chin Wing Mow's effort to prove he was a citizen in 1897. There was a picture of a very young man, and "affidavit after affidavit of people saying, 'Oh yeah, we know him.' "

O'Hara isn't a historian. But through her interest in Chin, she learned about the Chinese Exclusion Act. (The act shut down Chinese immigration from 1882 until it was repealed in 1943 by legislation from a young Washington state congressman, Warren Magnuson.)

And she's been going through old coroners' scrapbooks. "It showed me things back then were not all, like, peachy-keen." There was some nasty violence in old Seattle. "It puts it in perspective," she said.

Yes it does. Cline, the city archivist, displayed plans for a light-rail system. The description sounded a lot like what we are building now, except it was proposed in 1920 and would have cost $600,000. The City Council filed it away.

"A lot of the really tough issues that the City Council and regional government are dealing with today," Cline said, "really are not new issues, but they are issues that there was a failure of foresight and of imagination to deal with at other times."

Homeless encampments? The city mapped 687 shacks around town in 1941. Then it took them down.

In those archives, we can see how the world has changed and how it hasn't.

Now let us sing, "Hail to the Peerless City. ... "

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.