Only Abrams' address survives, 5819 W. Horton. It is on the mailbox. Below, from left, Ivar and Maggie Haglund and Ted Abrams.

The Haglunds were so taken with Abrams that when his club fell victim to the wrecking ball, they invited him to move in with them in West Seattle. Abrams first distinguished the old Haglund home with decorative brickwork, then built his own home - shown here - from salvaged materials on a lot that Ivar gave him "across the alley." Maggie described the home with loving detail in her unpublished memoir, "Wash Your Hearts With Laughter," concluding, "in a very short time it looked as though it had been there for generations. It belonged in the landscape."

A visit to Abrams' charmed home became a kind of pilgrimage for members of Seattle's bohemian community in the 1930s. In his memoirs, artist William Cummings recalled: "The house was crammed with paintings, drawings, sculpture, etchings and first-edition volumes signed by names famous and infamous. Ted managed to live just above the alleged level of poverty with an aristocratic grace that seldom showed the strained and stressed crevices of daily life."

Abrams lived here to his end in 1942 - craftsman, antiquer, raconteur, gifted mime, chef and collector. "When he was in a good mood," Maggie Haglund recollects, "he was an absolutely hilarious companion."

Paul Dorpat's two-hour videotape on Seattle's early history, "Seattle Chronicle," is $29.95 from Tartu Publications, P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.