Originally published Saturday, November 29, 1997

By SCOTT SUNDE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The airport, noise and smell of jet fuel are facts of life in SeaTac. People get used to them or they move.

"If you have a barbecue, you might have to go inside if you want to have a conversation," says Bill Rus, who lives at the airport's northern end with his wife, Peggy.

It can get to the point where silence can be bothersome.

"If it's foggy at night, it wakes you up," says Peggy Rus. "There are no planes landing then."

The airport gives, and it takes. Marilyn Thulin and her family have lived next to the airport for 34 years. "If you particularly want to watch something on TV, you have to make sure all the doors and windows are closed," she says.

The port tries to mitigate problems by paying for sound insulation in nearby homes. It estimates that about 1,160 of about 2,500 homes eligible in SeaTac for the insulation have received it. The city has more than 5,500 single-family homes.

The insulation works, residents often say, to a point.

"When the windows are closed," says Marylin Thulin, "it's wonderful."

On the west side of the airport, the days of listening to the jets are numbered. The airport has already begun to make offers on houses that will be demolished to make way for the third runway.

Some people have sold out and moved in the first buyout zone, which includes South 155th Street, Ninth Place South, 10th Avenue South and 12th Avenue South, whose route the runway will follow.

Houses will be torn down shortly after they are vacated.

Luis Rivera has yet to sell but is in the first neighborhood to be demolished. He'll have to find a new spot for his elegant concert grand piano and the photographs that remind him of his days on movie sets and on television's "Northern Exposure."

Still, he understands what must be done.

"There's just no place for the airport to go. They need the third runway," he says.

Airport officials say they need the third runway to avoid landing delays during bad weather. The federal government has given its approval for the runway, though lawsuits from South King County suburbs other than SeaTac are trying to stop it.

Though sympathetic to the need for a third runway, Rivera isn't about to leave without a good price. "They're going to deal with me right," he says. "Or they're going to have to drag me out."

Nearby, Howard Kehrer is resigned to giving up the house in which he and his wife, Tillie, raised three children and have lived for 47 years. "You can't fight it. So we'll have to accept it."

Still, he says it's "kind of traumatic" to give it all up. There is the back yard that looks out on a pumpkin patch. Soon to disappear are the garden rooms that Kehrer built and the basement with the cozy fireplace and the photos on the wall of himself and Tillie when they worked together in a European evacuation hospital during World War II.

(For more on displaced neighbors, see related story.)

When Sea-Tac opened in September 1947, the airport was in the country. There was fresh air and country living. Newspapers noted its location by saying it was near Bow Lake, a peat bog now hidden from view by the hotels on the airport's east side.

The land around Sea-Tac became a launching pad for young families. Veterans fresh from World War II found land to put up houses and a location convenient to Seattle and Tacoma.

PJ's Pet Ranch reflects that time with its assortment of dogs, cats, birds, sheep and horses. Although P.J. Scidenstricker bought the business two years ago, it's been in the same location since the 1930s.

In the back yard of Howard and Tillie Kehrer's house west of the airport is a little shed. That's where their daughter used to keep her horse, Howard Kehrer says. Truck farms were everywhere.

"It was a lovely place to raise a family," he says.

Continued:

• Welcome to city of planes, pains and automobiles
• Surface traffic also a problem area