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Ye Olde Curiosity Shop: Curiosities galore keep luring people to waterfront

Thursday, October 7, 1999

By ROBERT L. JAMIESON Jr. Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Also see: "A shop where mummies are celebrities."

You are born curious and collect everything: ivory trinkets, totem poles, shrunken human heads -- even gag gifts.

You have a quiet, well-preserved family: mummies Sylvester and Sylvia, child Gloria and Petri-Fido, a mummy dog.

You keep fleas in dresses, have the Lord's Prayer on a grain of rice and house a freaky pig with eight legs, three eyes and two tails. Not to mention the Siamese twin calves, joined at the hip, from Montana.

Some people find you interesting, in a strange sort of way. Others find you strange. But people, by the droves, come to Seattle's waterfront just to find you.

Now you are turning 100. What to do?

Throw a big party. Invite Seafair's King Neptune. Blast the salsa music.

Tomorrow's private centennial celebration for Ye Olde Curiosity Shop marks a milestone for the Seattle landmark on Pier 54 that is part hub for Northwest culture, part center for bumper-sticker kitsch.

Mayor Paul Schell has officially proclaimed "Ye Olde Curiosity Shop Day" in honor of the store that has 27,000 items, from blue nameplates to sculptures made from Mount St. Helens ash to the preserved family of mummies.

All the items sardined inside the 5,000-square-foot building are real -- except for the blue mermaid dangling from the ceiling; she was made by an artist who fused the head of a monkey onto the body of a seal and attached a salmon tail.

But even living people have offered their bodies for the sake of shop art.

"This one guy called and said he was going to have himself mummified and wanted to be put in the shop," recalled store employee Veronica Shiels, shaking her head. "He said he'd already cleared it with his family."

The shop was born when J.E. Standley arrived in Seattle in the late 1890s during the Yukon gold rush -- a period that attracted prospectors, traders and wide-eyed businessmen bent on fortune in the Pacific Northwest.

Standley loved curios from a young age.

(When he was 9 his teacher presented him with the book "Wonders of Nature" for keeping the cleanest desk in his Ohio grade-school classroom; the book spurred the boy's growing inquisitive nature.)

Standley wanted to be his own boss.

(As a young adult he worked for a grocery store and felt his employer was dishonest. He vowed never to work for anyone again.)

Owning a curiosity shop was the best of both worlds.

Remarkably, the shop stayed in the family through the decades.

It also survived the march of progress -- movies, shopping malls and, more recently, the Internet. Although the shop, which is named after the store in Charles Dickens' story, moved more than a half-dozen times, it never strayed far from Seattle's waterfront.

Over the last century, the store stayed true to its founding mission -- to provide fun curios and souvenirs in an environment that educates patrons. Standley trumpeted a literary motto: "Beat the Dickens."

"We never really had anything people have to have," muses Joe James, 75, Standley's grandson and the shop's president, who marvels over the longevity of the family business. "Guess it goes to show you that curiosity is innate to us all."

Indeed, the store is one of the first places tourists and newcomers visit in Seattle, a place guide books label a "must see."

One woman, Shelly Stovall, wrote a letter to the store this year. She said it was the place where her boyfriend proposed to her, saying he "was curious" about one thing. He popped the question; she said yes.

Zachary DeWitt, 9, of Spanaway was walking through the store this summer and was the first person to be shown the two-headed sheep, which was not on public display. "It was the coolest thing I have ever seen," he said.

Mummies are a hot draw. "Mummy man!" declared Kathy Pulliam, who was visiting from California this week with her husband, Trent.

But the shop also is remarkable in the Northwest because of its far-reaching historical and cultural contributions, according to Kate Duncan, an associate professor of art history at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Duncan recently finished a book about the store; it will be published next year. During her research, she was pleasantly surprised to learn that items from Standley's shop shelves had ended up in museum collections elsewhere.

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto bought several items from the shop, including a Haida stone totem pole and a mammoth tusk engraved with scenes of Eskimo life from an Arctic village.

An important walrus ivory collection from the shop was purchased in 1916 by George Heye, a private collector, and today is part of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. The Newark Museum in New Jersey features a collection from the shop, including tools and baskets woven by the Tlingit, an Alaskan tribe.

As part of her research, Duncan also found that the early fathers of Palmer College of Chiropractic, an academic center in Davenport, Iowa, sought out the shop's items.

In the early 20th century, Bartlett Joshua Palmer, the son of the school's founder, bought totem poles from Standley's shop as part of an indoor amusement grotto his family created out of rocks, shells, tropical plants and alligators. Such man-made attractions were vastly popular in the Midwest during the 1920s.

A national museum in Sweden bought from Standley what is believed to be one of the longest pair of prehistoric mastodon tusks -- more than 13 feet, the James family said; other items made their way to museums in Cleveland, Portland and to the University of Washington.

Princess Angeline, the daughter of Chief Sealth -- after whom Seattle is named -- made baskets for the shop. Duncan learned that Standley got some of his items from traders who stopped in Seattle on their way to and from Canada, Alaska and Asia.

The mounting collection became popular entertainment for locals.

The defunct Seattle Star newspaper in 1933 named Ye Olde Curiosity Shop one of the "Seven Wonders of Seattle" -- followed by the harbor, Ballard Locks, the Boeing airplane factory, the Seattle Art Museum, the Public Market and the University District's Edmund Meany Hotel.

In 1939, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoted a local policeman who said most tourists asked directions to the shop. It attracted dignitaries and celebrities including Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Jack Dempsey, Red Skelton and Katharine Hepburn.

Standley kept a logbook in which he jotted down anecdotes about visitors and their purchases. Some samples: Louis Tiffany -- "The old jewelry gent," he wrote. "Curios, idols and a mammoth tusk"; Countess Vanderbilt -- "Pearls"; Queen Marie of Romania "sat in the Chinese chair."

One of Standley's favorite visitors was Robert Ripley, who bought totem poles and other crafts for his estate in New York. Ripley was an American cartoonist who became famous for his cartoon panel "Believe It or Not," which chronicled news of the weird. He died in 1949.

The store has been the site of adventure. In its early years, someone stole a giant clam shell that was sitting outside. Later, during the mid-1980s, the shop made headlines when the state gambling commission asked Seattle police to confiscate Black Bart, a one-armed 6-foot-5 inch wood and cast-iron model of a Wild West bandit.

The state said the machine was an illegal slot machine, even though the machine dispensed plastic tokens with images of the Space Needle, Kingdome and other local attractions.

Black Bart was back in business a month later when the commission conceded the machine did not meet the criteria to be a gambling device. The store owners taped a sign to Black Bart: "On parole. Out on good behavior."

"It's about fun," said Andy James, 42, the shop's vice president, who is the fourth generation of family owners. "This is a place for the whole family."

The shop had 1 million visitors last year. It would take a week to see everything in the store, the owners say. And though items run from dime-store prices to $10,000 for a totem pole, the most culturally significant ones (most of which dangle from the ceiling) are not for sale.

Andy James said he is prepared to pass the store on to the fifth generation of owners, his sons Neal, 9, and Justin, 7.

In school Justin was recently asked what he wanted to do when he grows up.

"He answered, 'I want to be a famous shopowner,'" his father said.

P-I reporter Robert L. Jamieson Jr. can be reached at 206-448-8125 or robertjamieson@seattle-pi.com

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