M Event 2015 - "If These Walls Could Talk": tour of the home of Joseph Standley, founder of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop - A Southwest Seattle Historical Society Event

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Sunday, June 28, is your chance to see the place J.E. ‘Daddy’ Standley called home

By BRAD CHRISMAN

Today, the home at 1750 Palm Ave. S.W. blends in inconspicuously with its surrounding neighborhood. To most who pass by, it would appear to be just another gracefully aging turn-of-the-century house on a sloping, tree-lined street.

For decades, though, it was a place where tour buses stopped and flashbulbs popped. It probably was the most gawked-at, talked-about residence in West Seattle.

“Everybody wanted to see it,” says 90-year-old Joe James, whose grandfather – Ye Olde Curiosity Shop founder Joseph Edward “Daddy” Standley – built the house in 1906. “Sightseeing buses used to stop there on their tours and let people out to look at the yard. He had everything in there you could think of, from whale jawbones to whale vertebrae to totem poles to shell mounds.”

Often, visitors were allowed to venture inside.

“He had a lot of curios in the house, things that he had collected,” James says. “He had a miniature collection and an ivory collection and all of that. People would come up to the fence, and he’d invite them into the house and show them what else he had. My mother never knew who was going to come into the house. He was very friendly to these people and very proud to show them his collection.”

On Sunday, June 28, 2015, the home will be the site of the Southwest Seattle Historical Society's third-annual “If These Walls Could Talk” home tour, to run from 3 to 5 p.m. Tickets, available at the door, are $10 for members, $15 for non-members.

You will have an opportunity to tour the residence (now owned by Katy and Erik Walum), view historical photographs of the house and property and learn about the remarkable life of Standley.

SEE CURIOS, FAMILY KEEPSAKES

In addition, you will see a selection of curios and family keepsakes on loan from the Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, including a variety of Indian baskets, a 3-foot totem that greeted shop visitors in the early 1900s, and an antique cradle that has rocked five generations of Standley children.

You also will be able to meet Joe James, his son Andy and other members of the Standley clan, who for 116 years have welcomed curiosity-seekers at their iconic Seattle waterfront store.

(If you would like an invitation-only VIP experience earlier in the day, including presentations by Joe James and King County Archives’ Greg Lange, plus hors d’oeuvres and wine, please call 206-938-5293 or e-mail clay.eals@loghousemuseum.info.)

If the walls at the 109-year-old home could talk, they would regale visitors with tales about the days when it was a veritable museum inside and out – a showplace decorated with so many treasures that some said if the Ye Olde Curiosity Shop ever burned, it could be reopened the next day with items from the Standley house.

Covering a large, hillside lot that stretched from Palm Avenue to Ferry Avenue, the property included a 6-foot high shell mound composed of “shells of all 7 seas,” giant whale bones, a Japanese tea house made of bamboo, a log cabin playhouse, a Chinese Mandarin sundial and reflecting pools. Perhaps most famously, the grounds – which Standley dubbed “Totem Place” – featured an impressive collection of totem poles that were carved by native people of the Northwest, British Columbia and Alaska.

“I think at one time he had 17 totem poles there in the yard,” James says.

STANDLEY’S ROOTS IN OHIO, COLORADO

Born Feb. 24, 1854, Standley grew up as the son of a Steubenville, Ohio, grocer. In 1876, he moved west to Denver, where he operated a store that specialized in tobacco, confectioneries, groceries, imported delicacies and, increasingly over the years, curios such as Native American artwork and trinkets.

In October 1899, Standley and his wife, Isabelle, moved to Seattle. At that time, the young frontier town was in the midst of an epic boom, its streets teeming with men hoping to strike it rich in the Klondike.

Standley, it seems, had no desire to join the hordes of prospectors on their way to gold country. Instead, he exercised his entrepreneurial muscles by appealing to people’s curiosity about strange things, exotic cultures and distant lands.

In late 1899, Standley established what he called a “Free Museum and Curio” at Second Avenue and Pike Street. Over the next few years, he experimented with locations (82 Madison St., 813 Railroad Ave., 809 Second Ave.) and names (The Curio, Standley’s Curio, Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and Indian Curio) before settling on the name and location that would endure for decades: Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, at Colman Dock on Pier 52.

THE STANDLEYS RELOCATE

In 1906, the Standley family relocated from an apartment in Seattle to their new craftsman-style home in West Seattle, which was then a separate town with its own mayor and city council. (West Seattle would annex to Seattle in 1907.)

Standley, whose boosterish attitude would one day earn him a reputation as a “one-man chamber of commerce,” fell in love with the neighborhood he would call home for the remainder of his 86 years.

From the house’s upstairs windows, Standley could see across Elliott Bay to his waterfront shop. It was “the grandest view in the world,” he said. “It’s like a tonic, and anyone with a love of the beautiful and nature at her very best should certainly live to be a hundred on Puget Sound.”

Joe James recalls his grandfather’s house as a magical place to grow up, remembering that it had a magnetic effect on youngsters in the area. “The kids all came and played in our yard,” he says. “It was a great yard to play in. They came from all around.”

For several years running, in fact, Totem Place won a local “best home play yard” competition. “Finally,” James says, “they told us, ‘Look, you’ve got the best one, but if you win it again this year everybody is going to lose interest, so you guys come in second.’ ”

Today, the totem poles, tea house, log cabin and other novel features are just memories. But “Daddy” Standley’s West Seattle legacy lives on, if you know where to look.

One such place is Belvedere View Point, the spectacular lookout at the top of Admiral Way. In the 1930s, Standley lobbied the city to fix up the spot, which up to that time had languished as an overgrown, underutilized parcel of city-owned land. Finally, induced by his offer to donate one of his prized totem poles, the city created the mini-park in 1939.

That colorful pole stood watch over Elliott Bay until 1966, when it was replaced by a replica pole which, in turn, was replaced by the current, unpainted Duwamish totem pole (more accurately called a story pole) in 2006. The 1966 pole – carefully restored as part of a campaign led by our historical society – now graces the yard at our “Birthplace of Seattle” Log House Museum.

CURRENT OWNERS ‘LOVE THE STYLE’

The Walums, who bought the Standley house in 2005, say that it’s a comfortable place to raise their school-age children, Olivia and Henry. The yard is smaller than it was back in its Totem Place days because the property was subdivided and a separate residence was built to the east where the Japanese tea house once stood. But the house still sits on a double lot, and the Walums say they plan to keep the space open.

They say that their decision to buy the house was an easy one.

“We both love the style. We both favor old homes,” says Katy, noting that previous owner Galen Wilson did an excellent job when he undertook a major renovation project in 1992. “I’m really pleased. I feel like he really honored where the house came from and what it was before, while also bringing it a little more up-to-date and fresher feeling.”

But what clinched the sale for the Walums was discovering that they had their own family connection to the place. Erik’s grandmother, he explains, was one of the Ye Olde Curiosity Shop’s longest-serving employees, having worked there for more than 25 years.

“When we found out there was a Curiosity Shop connection to the house, knowing that my grandma worked there for all those years, it seemed like it was kind of meant to be.”

[Brad Chrisman is a former board vice-president and longtime volunteer for our organization.]