City says no but 'godfather of monorail' still thinks yes

But on this day, because the tourists know nothing about the Little Train That Could, the big, blunt man who "loves this city like a woman" keeps the story homey.

In a thunderous voice that could scare a hen off her egg, Seattle tour guide Dick Falkenbury announces that he is "A LOSER!"

There are a few tentative chuckles from the back as he spins the yarn.

It begins in 1997. He's a cabbie with a transit idea in a city hungry for one. He writes a petition to extend the Monorail, and 18,000 people sign it. Voters pass the darn thing, surprising everyone. There are three more votes, all support the monorail. "But the staff really screws things up, they run the price through the ceiling," he tells the tourists.

So he decides to run for a seat on the Monorail Project Board, to try to fix things up. The vote comes in Tuesday. He's third out of three. Most votes go to a candidate who wants to kill the project.

"Please," he booms inside the Customized Tours van. "No tears. I'm OK with that."

He doesn't look it. Defeat weighs heavy on the bulky 6-2 frame of the man who describes himself as "Ernest Borgnine in drag." His jowly, jolly face is uncharacteristically hangdog. He's bummed for the city, not himself, he says on a lunch break, lacing the statement with a few expletives over five-star phad thai. "This is crazy. The monorail should have happened by now."

Reporters call. "They keep asking, do you feel BAAAD? Duh. How do you THINK I feel!"

"Heartbroken" is the adjective the 52-year-old finally comes up with.

Still, by Friday, when the City Council pulls permits for the project and the monorail board hopes to save it by slicing 3 miles off the route, he's cooking plans, looking for alternatives. "It's obviously looking pretty dark," says Falkenbury. "I'd be a lunatic to say otherwise -- and I've certainly been called that.

"But remember, the City Council voted to kill the Pike Place Market, too."

The thing is, see, "I've got a scheme. ..."

Ideas sometimes veer off

Falkenbury -- a voracious reader who talks a torrent, tromping all over a conversation -- is an idea machine. Thoughts crash around in his head like bumper cars on an oil slick. A quote from Mark Twain can lead to a joke by Zero Mostel, a mini-treatise on Dick Nixon to a shout at a baffled waitress.

"Hey! Did you know I'm actually Paul Allen?"

A few ideas stick in the goop, but many veer off at weird angles, leaving a debris field of unfinished sentences.

His work life is testament to the process. He has driven cabs, landscaped yards, remodeled houses, generally skirted the humdrum 9-to-5 world and lived with the consequences. "I've got a long list of failures."

His current abode -- after leaving his mother's basement -- is a funky North Seattle duplex he shares with his best friend, an Australian shepherd named Claire (or Clare or Clar or ... he's not into spelling). The carpet looks like a monochromatic Jackson Pollock painting, his desk's in a closet, socks sprout from boxes, and the wardrobe's Goodwill.

"If I had a burglar come in here, they'd leave $10 and say go buy yourself something," says Falkenbury.

The back yard's telling. Next to a patch of corn decimated by squirrels are the abandoned birdhouses Falkenbury built but couldn't sell, the hand-framed mirrors nobody wanted, the scavenged windows waiting to be stripped, and piles of found lumber waiting for a new building project.

And there's always a new project. Especially in politics.

He was first drawn into the political world at Roosevelt High School, where he played football ("badly"), served on a mayor's advisory committee and helped put out an alternative newspaper, writing about "drugs and the Vietnam War."

Even back then, Falkenbury had a commanding presence, says his best buddy, Tyler Page, also 52. "He always had a strong sense of self, a feeling that his ideas were worthwhile."

Falkenbury's less polite. Ask him what drew him into politics and the college grad (B.A., economics) will boom out "EGO!" "There's something sweet about people walking up to you and thanking you for your hard work."

Falkenbury got lots of kudos after unveiling his scheme to stretch the 1-mile futuristic elevated built for "Century 21" across the city like a big X. Monorails, he repeated again and again, don't get stuck in traffic. Plain and simple.

After Falkenbury's '97 initiative passed -- based on his study of the Public Development Authority at Pike Place Market -- he waited for the supportive phone calls from political heavyweights -- and waited. "We needed somebody to stand up and say, 'I'll take it from here. I'll make it work. ...' "

Critics weren't kind. They blasted the plan as "silly," the new monorail as "an expensive toy" and supporters as "Kool-Aid drinkers." But Falkenbury threw himself into the project, serving on various monorail boards until 2003, when he quit, saying he needed to try to make a living.

"He gave his heart, soul, energy and time to this project. He was living a very low-budget life just to work full time on the project. It was a tremendous public service, in the truest sense of the word," says Tom Weeks, former board chairman, who stepped down with Director Joel Horn in July, following outcries over a financing plan that would have required debt payments of $11.4 billion.

Eight years after Falkenbury, the "Godfather of the Monorail," put the project in motion, he's trying to figure out how it spun out of control. He wonders if some project leaders set out to sabotage it. He wonders why he couldn't get behind closed doors, get into closed records.

He wonders how many on the board have read the 400-page price contract he's going over with a fine pen. "This is just sloppy," he says, marking up pages, looking for places to make cuts. "I could get this down to an affordable price, come up with a plan, and do it in a week."

Many, pro and con, wish he had. That includes longtime monorail critic Henry Aronson.

"Dick understands the value of a dollar, he understands accountability, and I believe if he had been on the board, the monorail would not have gotten into the train wreck it's in," says Aronson.

The Market as example

Falkenbury wheels down First Avenue toward Pike Place Market. "Aren't these hanging baskets nice?" he asks his vanload of tourists. "I put them there myself this morning."

His three-hour tour is verging on four as he pulls into the market, describing its near-death to visitors from Montreal, Cleveland, Missouri, California. He tells how politicians scorned the plan to preserve the place, how experts testified that no one cared a bit for family markets any more, how the City Council voted 7-0 to tear it down, how preservationists persevered.

"The Seattle process is to ask the experts -- then do the opposite," says the bushy-browed man with a political hangover.

Bold ideas have shaped the Seattle he shows his visitors. The Ship Canal was gouged out by ambitious men who lowered a lake and emptied a stream to create a grand canal. The Space Needle was built in less than 400 days for a World's Fair many argued should be planted in the suburbs. The waterfront was filled in with millions of tons of dirt scraped off city hills.

The big thinker runs his fingers through his disheveled hair, pondering the nature of democracy in a changing city. Is there still a place for the guy on the street, for anybody, somebody, somebody like him, to pop up and make a difference?

"We're in a terrible place. People are shaking their heads and saying, 'What the hell has happened to this town?' "

Yeah, pundits predict the monorail -- that elevated railcar that could zip passengers from Ballard to downtown Seattle in seven minutes -- is headed to oblivion.

But Falkenbury's not along for the mental ride. Not yet.

"About the only good thing I got out of college was a class in Chinese history. They look at things over a really, really long term," he says, his mind already churning up possibilities.

"Say this thing dies and three years from now, Sound Transit announces the tunnel's not going to work, or the price of gas goes up to $10 a gallon, or we learn the absolute No. 1 cause of cancer in the world is automobile fumes ....

"People might say: 'Remember Dick Falkenbury and the monorail?' "

And about that new scheme?

"I'll let you know. ...."

P-I reporter M.L. Lyke can be reached at 206-448-8344 or m.l.lyke@seattlepi.com.

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