SKID ROAD

It must be ten years since Archie Binns' Northwest Gateway in Doubleday's Seaport series set a high standard of regional writing. Now comes another memorable story of the city, Seattle, and of its growth from a handful of settlers on a spit of land jutting into Puget Sound, to a major industrial community. In this period it has had fully as colorful a history as San Francisco, with many parallels, and the title here given it bears close comparison, on a lower glamor scale, to San Francisco's gold coast. Skid Road served as an accent to successive periods in Seattle's history, from its gawdy boisterous uncontrolled days as the takeoff for the Alaskan gold fields, to the settling down to a staid respectability. Many factors have played their parts:-Indians in the early frontier days; Chinese when the erratic ups and downs of railroad building made them now a necessity, now a menace; the railroads themselves, boom or bust; the Wobblies and successive labor troubles, with culmination in Dave Beck of the Teamsters, whose system has been termed ""Labor Fascism"". There were days of questionable ethics, in journalism, in politics. There were reformers. And throughout, the exceptional personality of the city itself dominates its story.