[The following article was originally published in the
Sunday Olympian, Mar. 23, 1958. Mr. Shacklett’s tenure as a reporter and editor for the paper included a lot of community service. I first met him when he gave me a personal tour of the
Daily Olympian facilities at their old location (SE corner of State and Cap) in the 1960s. I was earning my Boy Scout merit badge in journalism, and in hindsight I realize what a chunk of valuable time he sacrificed for little insignificant me. I later talked with him in their then brand spanking new building about the business of comic strips. Just walked in off the street and he answered all my questions in a friendly and direct way. Also, he visited my OHS journalism class and was a very informative and entertaining reality check in an amusing cynical smartass way (“People always enjoy reading who is getting divorced or getting thrown in the clink”), a quality demonstrated in the article below. Although I seldom agreed with his editorials at the time (and still don’t), I can recognize and salute his devotion to building Olympia’s community as he saw fit, and appreciate his willingness to hear the story of anyone who walked in. A note of interest is that Shacklett was one of the few mainstream newspaper editors respected by the singular
John Patric. It was especially nice as a young person at the time to have a community authority figure like Mr. Shacklett treat me seriously without being cutesy or condescending– and that was unusual. Dean, if you’re still out there (you must be in your 80s now), thank you for that. It made an impression.
Anyway, I stumbled across his engaging report on Little Hollywood and thought I would share it here for my fellow OlyBloggers. This makes me want to start tracking down Shacklett’s other feature pieces. Warning, his coverage would never wash in the 21st century, not only in allusions but also in journalistic focus– this not only reveals to us what Oly accepted as normal in 1958 but also demonstrates how far we’ve come in the last half-century. Bonus: catch the artesian reference, and the view of Little Hollywood as an entity totally apart from the Olympia community]
Little Hollywood Era In Olympia Recalled / by Dean Shacklett
Office workers in the Temple of Justice strained their eyes and peered down into the pall of smoke that hung over the tideflats below the Capitol buildings. It was the bleak Winter of 1938 and city officials were putting the torch to the shanty town section affectionally known as Little Hollywood. It took two years to finish the task, and, with the cooling of the ashes, the pages were closed on one of the more colorful chapters of Olympia’s history.
Little Hollywood leaned on the eastern shoreline of the tidal basin that became Capitol Lake in 1951 with the completion of the Fifth Avenue dam. The village started from the vicinity of Fifth Avenue and crowded south along the beach for about four blocks.
Ninety-seven houses there were, some standing on piling, some on dry land and others on float logs mired in the mud at low tide. A handful of the buildings were fairly livable, but most were shacks.
Drab the shanties may have been, but it was the characters living in them that gave the settlement its color, and perhaps its name.
Little Hollywood, like the pickanniny playing in the dust around Uncle Tom’s cabin, just grew. No one remembers the exact date in the 1920s when the first shack appeared on the scene, but the community reached its peak in the depression years.
Architecturally, Little Hollywood reflected that dismal building boom that followed the bursting of the financial bubble in the Roaring Twenties. Some of the dwellings were float houses, polled or towed in at high tide and left to squat on the mud flats when the saltwater ebbed. Others of the shanties were knocked together on piling from odd bits of lumber scrounged by the inhabitants.
Little Hollywood was populated by folks who were on the run– some from the depression, some from the law. All were down on their luck.
The mention of Little Hollywood evokes memories from many Olympia residents. Now, three decades after the village was at its peak, the bizarre events and the colorful and criminal characters are the ones recalled. The folks who tended to their own knitting while they weathered a financial storm have been forgotten. But that’s human nature.
Still recognized as an authority on the sinful and seamy side of Little Hollywood is Ray Hays, a practical lawman of the old school who was an Olympia police captain when he retired some ten years ago. Hays professional interest in the settlement is reflected in his recollection.
“Little Hollywood was a nest of immigrant lumber and forest workers and every type of character and bum,” boomed Hays in a voice that appeared to originate somewhere from his six foot, plus frame. “I’ve taken murderers, robbers, rapists and every type of stinking criminal out of there. There were some bad ones, all right, but as a whole the transients were pretty good old bums.”
It is Cap Hays who is credited with giving Little Hollywood its name. “I just called it that one day,” he said. “It was almost an idle remark. I picked the name because of the contrast between the bums in our settlement and the swells in California’s Hollywood. The name st
