Last Ditch (7 page)

Opinions
differ
Sharply as to both what Peerless Price became and what became of
Peerless
Price. For a public life of nearly three decades to end on such an
uncertain
and tremulous note allowed for a wide range of speculation among those
familiar
with the story, and thus, lacking the comfort of ready answers,
unwittingly
provided the raw material of legend. Although the phrase has surely
fallen from
use among today's youth, few of whom are aware of anything that
transpired
prior to their last tattoo, to many of us ancient Northwesterners, the
phrase
"Pulling a Peerless" still referred to getting lost in a hurry and
staying that way.

Peerless
Price
was the only son of Tyler K. Price, a prominent local clothing
manufacturer
whose company, Peerless Products, had grown prosperous outfitting
starry-eyed
miners bound for the Klondike. After
graduating from Stanford, ignoring his father's invitation to join the
family
firm, Peerless Price instead joined the Marine Corps, where he
distinguished
himself in the Pacific theater of W.W. n. Peerless assuaged his
thwarted
literary ambitions through frequent letters to his father, vividly
describing
GI life and death on the Pacific front Tyler Price was understandably
proud of
his son's contribution to the war effort, and during a businessmen's
luncheon
at the Cascade Club one afternoon in nineteen forty-three, he casually
showed
one of his son's letters to his longtime friend R. C. Gamble, who was,
at that
time, editor in chief of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Whether Gamble
was
greatly impressed by the young man's prose or whether he perhaps
printed the
letter merely as a favor to his old friend will never be known. Either
way,
reader response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive, and so, for
the
duration of the war, every Sunday, Peerless Price became Seattle’s link
to life on those faraway front
lines.

Peerless
Price
returned to Seattle
in the rainy winter of nineteen forty-five with a bronze star on his
chest and
a stainless steel hand at the end of his left arm. In the closing days
of the
war, only weeks before VI Day, his luck deserted him when, in an
unthinking
moment, he tried to slip a booby-trapped codebook out from under the
arm of a
dead Japanese major. There are those who say that the remainder of his
life
could be traced directly back to the loss of his hand, but I'm not so
sure.
That he had returned disillusioned, embittered and no longer at peace
did not
significantly differentiate him from the thousands upon thousands of
other young
men and women who likewise shed their youth and enthusiasm on those
same
beaches. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that the war
gave
the young Peerless Price an insatiable appetite for contention and a
political
stance just slightly right of Atilla the Hun, both of which would serve
as
hallmarks for the remainder of his life and career.

R.
C. Gamble,
in his memoirs, would later claim that his offer of a full-time
reporting job
with the Post-Intelligencer had been purely a product of his great
faith in the
young Price's abilities rather than an act of patriotic Christian
charity, as
many suggested. Either way, old R. C. made out like a bandit.

Over
the next
ten or twelve years, Peerless Price ascended from an occasional
features writer
to the lead man in the metro section. From weekly first-person accounts
of dog
shows and charity auctions to a featured six-day-a-week column which
was the
first thing everyone in Seattle
turned to over coffee. By nineteen fifty-four, he had his own logo. A
caricature,
really. A little drawing of him with an oversized head, sitting at an
undersized desk, wearing an eyeshade, an old-fashioned fountain pen
wedged
behind his ear. Typing . . . with one hand.

As
is often the
case, his success was, to some degree, partially attributable to good
timing.
Peerless Price and the fifties were made for each other, or perhaps
more
likely, from each other. Like the strange decade which molded him,
Peerless
Price led a double life. On the outside, smug and self-satisfied, as
only the
victors of wars are permitted, but on the inside frustrated, perverse
and
paranoid. On one hand, fueled by an unquestioning belief in truth,
justice and
the American way. On the other hand, sufficiently self-righteous and
fearful of
change as to make one wonder if perhaps he didn't protest just a bit
too much.

Although
always
a staunch defender of the status quo, Peerless didn't truly hit his
stride
until he encountered the proper enemy. Sure, he was a Red-baiter second
only to
Joe. McCarthy. Sure he could find the makings for a Communist
conspiracy at a
PTA bake sale. Here was a guy who orchestrated a massive bonfire of
rock and
roll records, which were, he claimed, a cleverly disguised Russian
mind-control
technique intended to compromise the virtue of America's youth. All of
that,
however, was merely the pre-game warmup for the sixties.

As
luck would
have it, Tyler K. Price died in the spring of nineteen sixty-two
leaving the
family business to Peerless and his three younger sisters, Emily,
Justine and
Elizabeth. Having neither the necessary business acumen nor the
slightest
inclination to run a manufacturing operation, the children quickly sold
out to
a British firm. Each of the children received, after taxes, slightly
less than
three million dollars.

While
his
sisters used their wealth to ascend to the very apex of Seattle high
society, Peerless lived simply.
He had no interest in fast cars or fancy houses. Yachts held no
fascination. He
never married, or, for that matter, showed any interest whatsoever in
the
opposite sex. What fascinated Peerless Price was power, and toward that
end, he
invested his newfound fortune.

Although
in
most things an arch-traditionalist, Peerless Price was in one respect a
forward
thinker. Much like his avowed hero J. Edgar Hoover, Price realized
early on
that information was power and set about making sure that he always had
more
information than the next guy. Seattle
in the early sixties was a city in a state of flux. The old-time
systems of
police payoffs and governmental influence pedaling were coming to an
end. All
aspects of the public sector had come under ever-increasing media
scrutiny and
were responding by mutating into the well-meaning but mostly
incompetent
organizations we've all come to know and distrust.

Peerless
Price
filled the graft vacuum. Every cop in town knew that a few extra bucks
would
miraculously appear every time he shared what he knew with Peerless
Price.
Every clerk in every city and county office knew where that new winter
coat
could be had. Every hooker, doorman, valet, bellhop, bartender, cabby
and
parking attendant knew exactly where talk wasn't cheap. And you didn't
have to
look the other way or drop your pants, either. All you had to look for
was a
phone booth, and all you had to drop was a dime.

The
Vietnam War
provided Peerless with precisely the sort of simpleminded dilemma best
suited
for his politics.

He
became the
hawk's hawk and began a systematic character assassination of any
public figure
who dared express opposition to the conflict. To incur the wrath of
Peerless
Price was to have that long-ago affair with your secretary plastered
all over
the Thursday edition, or to find an exhaustive interview with your
step-grandfather Ned, retired now and dabbling in bondage down in
Scottsdale, Arizona.
To some, Peerless Price became the last true defender of the faith. To
others,
he became the most feared and hated man in Seattle.

To
his lasting
consternation, the one guy Peerless Price could never make a dent in
was my old
man. By the time Peerless hit his stride, Wild Bill Waterman had been
in office
for sixteen years and twice run for mayor. Plenty of time for a man
with Bill's
nepotistic inclinations to have salted the bureaucratic mine with vast
numbers
of his family nuggets. While the rest of Seattle's movers and shakers
cowered
under a deluge of audits and investigations, the old man went about
business as
usual, just keeping it in the family, so to speak. Not only was he
insulated
from the nitpicking of Peerless Price, but he was also Seattle's most
visible and insistent antiwar
advocate. For most of the sixties, Peerless Price seldom referred to
Wild Bill
Waterman as anything except Hanoi Bill. If deflating those in power was
to be
Peerless Price's job, dethroning my old man became his obsession.

According
to
urban legend, their mutual animosity finally boiled over in nineteen
sixty-eight when, after a heated shouting match in the Green Parrot
Lounge, my
old man called Peerless out. Said if he wanted to keep running his lip,
why
didn't he step outside in the alley for a minute and settle the matter
in the
time-honored manner of men.

Peerless
Price,
who basked in a well-deserved reputation as a barroom brawler,
immediately
picked up the gauntlet, and out into the alley they went. I remember
the big
bandage on my father's head and how, for weeks afterwards, he stayed at
home,
conducting business by phone in his darkened study. My old man always
claimed
that he got the twenty-three stitches in his forehead when Peerless
sucker
punched him with the stainless steel hand and that the beating which
put
Peerless in the hospital on thirty-day medical leave had been
administered
purely as an act of self-defense.

Just
as an
entire generation of Americans can remember precisely what they were
doing when
John F. Kennedy was killed, a great many Northwestemers can likewise
recall
what they were about when Peerless Price disappeared. It was easy. It
was the
Fourth of July weekend and, for the first time in its history, the city
had
issued permits for not one, but two holiday parades. While the
traditional
patriotic pageant was scheduled to be prancing downtown, a massive
antiwar
rally, led by none other than old Hanoi Bill himself, had been planned
for
Broadway.

I
remember
sitting between my parents on the stage in Volunteer Park on the night
that
Peerless Price disappeared, listening to speaker after speaker deride
that
faraway conflict and call for the immediate withdrawal of our troops.
Sitting
until the wee hours, dressed like a miniature FBI agent, until,
finally, it was
my father's turn to speak. I remember the harsh yellow light. And being
too
tired to follow his words and becoming lost in the sea of faces.

In
the weeks
preceding the holiday, Peerless had viciously attacked anyone and
everyone he
deemed responsible for issuing the demonstrators a permit to march,
branding
them as fags, traitors and Communist sympathizers. So incensed was
Peerless
Price that, against the wishes of his employers, he cast aside any
vestige of
journalistic impartiality and publicly proclaimed his intention to
march at the
head of the downtown parade, right next to the mayor. Needless to say,
his
failure to show up for the parade did not go unnoticed.