Before Microsoft And Starbucks, There Was Westin

Of course, we're hot stuff, aren't we? Sometimes we have bank accounts to match our egos.

We claim bragging rights to proclaim ourselves America's most innovative city.

We're famous, we are. I don't mean baseball; that's going on right now.

I mean, this is a city of Northwest Scandinavians, a dominant leviathan in the retail business. Nordstrom.

I also mean that almost every time somebody flies, he or she does so "in that plane they build in Seattle."

We are also the nation's coffee jag capital, and to prove it we have Starbucks, founded here by three young guys who just wanted to brew a good cup of coffee. There are now some 500 Starbucks outlets across the nation.

Eddie Bauer and REI, local midgets, became big national concerns in outdoors toggery.

There's another one here that somehow gets overlooked in our civic chest-beating tournaments. Long before Bill Gates was born, long before Microsoft began to monopolize the Earth's software - there was . . .

Well, a little outfit that called itself Western Hotels. One of the surviving pioneers of his hostelry giant is Gordon Bass, an easy, laid-back friendly guy in quiet retirement.

"We changed our name from Western Hotels to Western International Hotels," Bass says, smiling. "We swung a deal to take over the Georgia Hotel in Vancouver, B.C. Very international."

The original "second-generation" geniuses of Western Hotels were Bass, at 85; the late great Eddie Carlson, who, had he lived, would now be 84, and Lynn Himmelman, now 83.

Himmelman, a tall, courtly gentleman, is still very much among us.

After becoming Western International, it went into its present name contraction, Westin Hotels; now it is formally known as Westin Hotels and Resorts - a company celebrating its 65th birthday.

The original founders were S.W. Thurston and Frank Dupar. Dupar got into the hotel business because he had a plumbing-supply company. When the then-new Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee couldn't pay for its plumbing fixtures, Dupar took the hotel over and joined up with Thurston.

Early on, Carlson managed the President Hotel in Mount Vernon. He worked nights as a fry cook at Bellingham's Leopold. He hopped to bells at the Roosevelt. Bass was a room clerk at Seattle's old Ben Franklin.

Elsewhere in the cutthroat universe of high finance, these guys might have been regarded as Northwest yokels. But not after 1974.

That was the year they bought the famed New York Plaza Hotel for $25 million. They later sold it to Donald Trump for $400 million. Some yokels.

This tiny company they helped build now covers every continent and almost every major city. The last count was 75 hotels and resorts.

"Eddie was always the natural leader," Bass says. "From the beginning, he envisioned a worldwide chain, assigning each of us to specialties."

"Eddie was the gambler," I said.

Bass shook his head. "He wasn't a gambler, he was a risk-taker. I was the conservative one.

"He said something to me once that I treasure. Before he died, Eddie said, `Gordon, we owe you a great debt of gratitude. You made us prove every deal we ever went into.' "

Emmett Watson's column appears Tuesdays in the Local section of The Times.