One family's Seattle streetcar heritage

When the new South Lake Union Streetcar opens Wednesday, it'll be a link back to a past when streetcar lines crisscrossed Seattle.

And for the Daniels family, it also will link generations.

The other day Patrick Daniels was showing his father, John, and his mother, Nikki, around one of the streetcars at its maintenance base off Fairview Avenue North and Harrison Street.

Daniels, 47, is a lead mechanic on the streetcar line. His father was a mechanic supervisor for Metro buses. His grandfather Joseph Daniels was a mechanic on Metro buses. But before that, he drove one of the city's old streetcars.

"I remember going on the streetcar with my dad when I was little," said John Daniels, 65. "I remember the wooden seats," he said, before he toured the new streetcar with cloth seats that proved almost as hard as the wooden ones.

"They had the caps, and what were known as Eisenhower jackets. Like in the military, the drivers would stand at attention for inspection before their shifts," he said.

That was around 1940, he said.

"I didn't tell him about the crashes," Patrick Daniels told his father.

But John Daniels did. "One of my favorite stories was one time the brakes failed, and my dad crashed into a vehicle on the tracks. He got admonished for not filling out reports. So another time, he was coming down the hill, and there was a vehicle parked in the way. So he ran to the back and started gathering up the reports."

But his father was a character of sorts, John Daniels said. He'd owned a logging truck, until he lost it during the Depression. He'd run a gas station for a while. And there he met his wife. According to the family's story, she entered his life on the back of a motorcycle driven by another man. She left the gas station on the motorcycle, but married the owner of the gas station.

Soon father and son were in the front seat of one of the new streetcars. "These streetcars have compression brakes," Patrick Daniels said.

It was mechanic talk between father and son.

John Daniels learned to be a mechanic from working on automobiles with his dad. And, Patrick Daniels said, "I learned everything I know about mechanics from my dad."

Patrick Daniels and the other mechanics are working out the last bugs before the line goes in service. Wednesday is going to be stressful, he said. He doesn't want anything going wrong when the mayor takes the inaugural ride.

And as John Daniels got on, the doors closed on him. "Don't they have sensors?" he said.

"They do," Patrick said.

"Well, they don't work," his father said.

There's time to fix it, though. And John Daniels said of his son, "He's getting in on the ground floor."