Old Seattle's Plucky, Proper Daughter -- Frances Green Burnett Mixed Privilege With Community Service

Perhaps she'd rather you didn't know, but Frances Green Burnett was known to smuggle flasks of the hard stuff in her girdle on cruises back from Victoria, B.C., during the arid days of Prohibition.

And in later years, her son recalled, she barreled up and down West Coast highways behind the wheel of her Packard Clipper at 100 miles an hour. With her kids in the back seat.

This is not the behavior to be expected of a proper daughter of Old Seattle.

That is why her recent passing is worth noting. A Seattle era did not exactly end, and she built no sober downtown towers to posterity, but another unique window to an age of privilege has been forever closed.

"She couldn't boil water," said her son, Charles P. Burnett 3rd. "But she could throw a party for 500 people, and it would be just like a professional had been hired to do it."

When Mrs. Burnett, 88, died July 12 at her Bainbridge Island home from complications related to several strokes, she departed a life that could have been invented by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

She balanced sadnesses and a cultured frivolity, and although she never earned a paycheck a day in her life, she volunteered thousands of hours to those less fortunate than she.

She had gritty pluck, but she used a knife and fork to eat a sandwich. She gave freely to good causes, such as Children's Orthopedic Hospital. She was athletic when few people cared if women were athletic.

But hers was foremost a life of Seattle's upper class - and all the money and manners such a station implies.

Frances Green Burnett was born in Seattle on Dec. 22, 1903, to Joshua and Laura Green.

Joshua Green was invariably described by newspapers years ago as a "capitalist and sportsman."

This was to distinguish him as a leading citizen who also liked to hunt big game.

He was a steamship tycoon, then a banker. He was so big in Seattle that the newspapers reported whenever he left or returned to town.

He was 105 years old when he died in 1975.

Green and his wife had moved to Seattle from Jackson, Miss., and their Southern sensibilities affected their family life.

This meant Mrs. Burnett would spend much of her childhood in the company of governesses. She was tutored at home until she was 10 years old.

She attended boarding school - first in California, then in New York. Because her father thought college inappropriate for young women, she was sent to a finishing school - Madame Paysen's - in Paris.

There she learned to speak French and acquired her appreciation for art. She spent whole days visiting the Louvre, and was frequently invited back by the staff to view parts of the collection not on public view.

"Growing up, we would go to museums wherever we went," said another son, William Burnett.

Mrs. Burnett returned to Seattle in the early 1920s. In 1925, she embarked on one of her most important experiences - a round-the-world cruise accompanying the U.S. Navy fleet on a goodwill tour.

She traveled with her cousin and her aunt, who was the wife of Robert E. Coontz, the fleet commander.

By all accounts, the trip showcased Mrs. Burnett in her youthful prime. Australian cities declared holidays when the ships steamed in. Balls and dinners were held almost every night.

At one function, Mrs. Burnett, described in one newspaper as a "flapper, full of energy," sat across from the governor-general of Australia.

One day in Australia, locals took the fleet's dignitaries to the country for a boomerang exhibition.

"Every member of the party threw boomerangs, Mrs. Coontz taking the lead," reads an account in The Daily Telegraph. "The surprise of the morning was the excellent showing made by Miss Frances Green."

A photograph of the "surprise showing" depicts Frances, an expression of purest determination consuming her face, about to send the boomerang skyward.

Family members say the photo captures some of the Frances they knew.

Mrs. Burnett returned to Seattle and met the man she would marry, Charles Pye Burnett Jr. He was an attorney in town and the son of a pioneer real-estate broker.

The two married June 22, 1932, in the chapel at St. Mark's Cathedral.

An Army reservist, Burnett was sent to Washington to work for the office of the judge advocate general when World War II began. During the war, Mrs. Burnett volunteered for the Red Cross.

Burnett was killed in a plane crash in July 1944 in the South Pacific. At the time, he was traveling on behalf of Gen. George C. Marshall to meet Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

"Her heart just broke," said a friend, Prudence Trudgian of Bainbridge Island. "She spent the rest of her life with a broken heart, but she was very gallant about it."

Mrs. Burnett suddenly found herself a war widow, 41 years old, with three young children. It was a turning point.

"She became, I guess, a more serious person, who realized she had responsibilities to live up to,"said Charles Burnett.

Mrs. Burnett established a winter home near Tucson, Ariz., where her children attended school. She summered on Bainbridge Island, where one year she helped build the country club's new swimming pool.

Beginning in the early 1950s, she lived with her aging parents in their now-famous house (the Stimson-Green mansion) at 1204 Minor Ave. She did not remarry.

"She had several opportunities to do so," said her daughter, Laura Gowen. "She just didn't ever think that she could be as happy with anyone else as she was with Father. She kept his memory very much alive with her children and her grandchildren."

In her later years, Mrs. Burnett became involved in many activities. She taught Sunday school, once hosted the Christmas Ball, and supported the Cornish School of the Arts, the Seattle Symphony and the Progressive Animal Welfare Society.

Foremost among her many associations - the Sunset Club, the Seattle Golf Club - was her Washington state leadership role in the Robert E. Lee Memorial Association, which administers Stratford Hall, Lee's plantation estate in Virginia.

She followed her mother's footsteps with her Stratford involvement, traveling back East for meetings twice each year.

Mrs. Burnett's survivors include her daughter, of Belmont, Mass.; and two sons, Charles of Edmonds, and William of Bellevue, 13 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Burnett, the last of Joshua and Laura Green's three children to die, will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.

Although Mrs. Burnett spent her last years debilitated by strokes, she managed to come up with a few surprises. Not long ago, a young relative brought a friend from France to meet her.

Somehow, Mrs. Burnett summoned her lessons from long ago and spoke in fluent French.