A visitor to the Seattle Room at the Central Library, which houses many of the Library’s special collections, recently asked to see a 1921 copy of Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.
As I was putting the book away, the inscription in the front caught my eye:
Sept 8 – 1922.
Dear John- This is your ninth birthday. In San Francisco I have purchased for you this book. My heart’s desire for you is that when manhood’s time comes books mean as much of pleasure and development as they have to me. With love,
Your Dad
John F. Dore.
Touched by this handwritten note, and curious, I did a little sleuthing to see what I could learn about either of the Johns.
The elder John F. Dore was mayor of Seattle 1932–34 and 1936–38. His son, John F. Dore, Jr., was a Seattle attorney. Through the America’s GenealogyBank database I uncovered John, Jr.’s obituary, from the Seattle Times of December 5, 1995. The obituary suggests that he took his dad’s advice to heart:
“Johnny was born 150 years too late, because he would have been a great captain of one of those tall sailing ships,” said Bob Lampson of Seattle, a longtime sailing friend of attorney John Dore…
Mr. Dore started sailing on Lake Washington as a teenager, having built a mast for the family canoe and using a sail his mother sewed from a bedsheet in the family’s Leschi home. He progressed through a series of seven boats in his lifetime…
“Johnny was a romantic, really,” Lampson recalled. “I think he had read every sea story ever written. And he was a great storyteller. When we were sailing together, the whole fleet would turn and look at us because we were laughing hard at the stories Johnny told.”
Books and stories bring meaning to our lives. And when we pass them on, we pass on stories about what they meant to us. The remnants we leave behind—in the margins of an old book or in the memories of a friend—make that meaning reappear for those who encounter them years later.
~ Bo, Central Library
Leave a Comment