When I arrived in Seattle, Wash., in 1956, I had left the U.S. Geodetic Ship as a Hydrography recorder and landed a position as a Fire Insurance Surveyor for an insurance firm in California. My job was to bring insurance maps up-to-date, so I walked Seattle, Wash., alley to alley and block to block, covering the entire city information.
My first area was the Alaska Way Viaduct on the waterfront. It was still being built, so I took information direct from the diagrams while they were working on it. This is where I learned they decided NOT TO BUILD a tunnel down First Avenue, because the engineers told me the soil was sand and gravel, thus a tunnel would suffer the G-32 pull and everything from Fourth Avenue would slide into Puget Sound and that the Peninsula was already moving away from Seattle thus no tall skyscrapers were between Fourth and the Sound; Otherwise earthquakes made a tunnel down First Avenue would be part of the slide …. This was proven years later when the Public Library did begin to slide.
Where the Space Needle now stands was “low-income housing” until the Century 21 Fair. The Seattle Transit at the time cost a quarter to ride and for 50 cents you got three tokens to ride the Transit buses. The rent in a private home cost $35 a month, but today the same room costs $80 a month so later I rented an apartment on Capital Hill, until a Canadian firm bought the complex and my rent went up o $1,500 per month, so I moved to Kent. Wash., 39 years ago. Coffee used to cost 10 cents a cup in Seattle but now a cup of coffee costs $1.75 a cup in many cafes … The costs of gasoline used to be thirty-nine cents a gallon, but today it may cost over $3 a gallon.
Postage used to cost 3 cents a letter, but today it costs 44 cents a letter. Postcards used to cost 1 cent, but today they ask 17 cents a postcard to mail. Other grocery items have grown beyond reason, but our nation has begun overseas trade which increases prices while it also lays-off employees who need the jobs they are doing away with an “Hooverville” has become “tent cities” over all.
When I was in service in Japan 1947-49 I met an elderly Mongolian religious man who was 114 years old and a direct descendant of the GREAT Genghis KHAN and odd as it seems, he predicted these very things we suffer nowadays…He stated that GREED would change not only the West but ALL NATIONS, and other things he predicted are slowly but surely coming about. By paranormal practice he seem to know or understand things I never did, but his accuracy was fantastic. He did say there were things to correct this, but would not say what they were…This is only the beginning he would say, but Socialism was what he said caused it. I now wonder why he thought it …
Leon Thompson
Kent
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