Traveling with the Governor

Despite being heir to a fortune, Booth Gardner was a humble soul

Almost a quarter century ago I worked as a public in- formation officer for the then Department of Trade & Economic Development in Olympia. Among other things, I wrote news releas- es, newsletters and briefing materials about the agency's activities. These included in- ternational trade promotion, small business assistance, tourism, film location servic- es, economic development and business retention.

John Anderson ran the department, but my ultimate boss was Booth Gardner, whom I had the pleasure to meet and travel with on sev- eral occasions.

Gardner's death earlier this month brought back all those memories of being on the road with him from a trade visit to Japan and Taiwan and to the eastern Washington set of a movie shot by Steven Spielberg.

The first time I met Booth was at an emergency briefing following the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown in Beijing. A high- level Chinese delegation was visiting Washington State on a preplanned trip and the governor wanted to consult with Anderson and with me about the best response to media questions about the visit and the actions of the visitors' government.

Booth seemed concerned about the fallout of the visit, about our image as a state hosting delegates from a na- tion abusing human rights, but also keenly aware of the influence that can come from being one of its largest trad- ing partners. I got to know him im- mediately as a pragmatic but deeply caring individual despite his many personal setbacks as a child. Born in 1936, Booth's parents divorced when he was very young. Through his mother's remarriage, he became heir to the Weyerhaeuser fortune, but his mother and his sister - his only sibling - died in a plane crash when he was 14.

Booth came to office in 1985 after unseating incumbent John Spellman. He was re-elected to a second term before I joined the Department of Trade.

Aside from politics, Booth had a personal inter- est in soccer and owned the Tacoma Tides in the mid 1970s. He also loved movies and helped fund the 1987 movie Harry & the Hen- dersons, a fantasy comedy about Bigfoot, starring John Lithgow.

In the summer of 1989, I accompanied him on a tour of eastern Washington, where our agency's film office had arranged for a visit to the set of Always, a romantic drama about fire jumpers starring Audrey Hepburn, Richard Drey- fuss, Holly Hunter and John Goodman.

In a wheat field near Sprague, us star-struck Northwesterners got to meet director Spielberg, the ever- energetic and surprisingly short Dreyfuss, and the regal Hepburn, who, like me, grew up in the Netherlands, and was one of my mother's Hol- lywood idols.

Booth and I were like kids in a candy store. In the hot sun under the endless blue sky, he picked Spielberg's brain about film making and I spoke to Hepburn in Dutch, a Tinseltown tale I knew my mother was going to love hearing about.

Despite the financial priv- ilege with which he grew up, Booth was a staunch sup- porter of the poor, signing into law a program to pro- vide state medical insurance for working low-income families. He also backed environmentally-friendly growth management legisla- tion and steered hundreds of millions of dollars to state universities in his bid to improve higher education in Washington.

I kept in touch with Booth after he left office in 1991 and went to visit him in Geneva several years later when I covered international business news for the Seattle Post Intelligencer and he was ambassador to GATT, the predecessor of the World Trade Organization.

I saw him once more after that at a downtown Seattle function before the Parkin- son's Disease, with which he had been diagnosed, had become too debilitating. His hands were already shaking at that point, but his spirit was unshakable.

Booth went on to file and spearhead the campaign for Initiative 1000, Washing- ton's "Death With Dignity Act," and he remained in- volved in its implementation after it passed late in the last decade.

During the few times I traveled with Booth to gov- ernment palaces in Asia and the back roads of eastern Washington, I marveled at his ease in any place and any social setting. People here in the wheat country may not have agreed with some of his politics, but they still liked Booth as an individual and an advocate for the state as a whole.

He could relate to anyone at any level and displayed a Clintonesque empathy - heartfelt and genuine in my eyes. I never thought he felt that he was better than anybody. Why else would he take under his wing and stay in touch with a low-ranking upstart like me?

You'll be missed, Booth.