WOMEN: In Seattle

Fifty-eight years ago a girl child was born in Ware, Mass., and christened Bertha Ethel. Her father was Charles Knight and her mother Cordelia Cutter Knight (the Cutter family came to Massachusetts in 1630). Little Bertha’s brother is named Austin M. He is now a retired admiral. Her sister, Jessie L., grew up and married a widower named David Starr Jordan and is now wife of the chancellor emeritus of Leland Stanford Jr. University. Among the girls who lived in her little town was Rose Casey, now Mrs. Hayes, who is a member of the city council of Northampton, and also Ruth Baker, now Mrs. Pratt, the first Alderwoman on the New York City Council.

But fame was slow in coming to little Bertha. She went to Indiana University and completed a four-year course in three. Then she taught in the Classical High School of Worcester. About that time Henry Landes, a Hoosier who had been a student with her, took his A.M. in geology at Harvard. A few months later, on the day after New Year’s, 1894, they were married. He had a job as assistant to the state geologist of New Jersey. The next fall he was made principal of the Rockland (Me.) High School and a year later was appointed professor of geology at the University of Washington. There he has remained ever since and is now Dean of the College of Science. They had a son and a daughter, who grew up and got married.

In 1921, being 54 and not having anything very exciting to do, Mrs. Landes ran for the city council in Seattle and was elected. Two years later she ran again and was re-elected by the largest vote ever recorded for her post. For the last two years she had been President of the City Council, and in that capacity functioned as Acting Mayor in the summer of 1924 when Mayor Edwin J. Brown went to Manhattan for the Democratic convention. While he was away she ordered the chief of police to clean up the city. He refused and she removed him from office and started a clean up of her own. Mayor Brown left Manhattan in haste and returned to Seattle to restore his police chief.

It so happened fiat Mrs. Landes went on to announce herself as a candidate for Mayor in 1926. The two nominees turned out to be Mrs. Landes and her old friend Mayor Brown, and the incident of 1924 was recalled. Some 40 bootleggers were being tried in court and the Federal prosecutor brought out that they had tapped the telephone wires in June, 1924, and passed the word around, “Lay low until ‘Doc’ Brown comes back to town.”

The election took place last week. Some 95,000 votes were cast and little Bertha, now big Bertha, got some 6,000 more than “Doc” Brown. The total vote was larger than it had ever been.*

A few days after her election, Mrs. Landes was riding with the Dean and he ran their automobile into a man by the name of Silvie Langlon, who was riding a motorcycle. Only the motorcyclist was hurt, however, and he not badly.

Some of Mrs. Landes’ utterances :

“If the men will not show enough interest in their city government to get the right kind of candidates in the field, the women must.”

“I have gotten a lot of fun out of the campaign. I filed for Mayor because it seemed to me there was a clear-cut issue between law enforcement and opposition to law enforcement, and I stood for law enforcement.”

“I suppose some of the politicians believe I should merely stay at home and darn my husband’s socks. Darning socks for one’s husband is a laudable occupation, no one will deny, but I found that my husband got along very well after I became a member of the City Council.”

* Another famed Mayor of Seattle in recent years was Ole Hanson. He drove out. to Seattle from his native Wisconsin in a wagon about a quarter of a century ago. He became in turn a grocer, an insurance man, a real estate man, a member of the state legislature, a candidate, (unsuccessful) for Senator on the Bull Moose ticket. From 1918 to 1920 he served as Mayor of Seattle and dealt drastically with an I. W. W. strike which paralyzed the entire city. This incident gained him a national reputation. He has nine children. Some of their names: Theodore Roosevelt Hanson, William Taft Hanson Lloyd George Hanson, Bob LaFollette Hanson. Eugene Field Hanson.