Earth Mother Said Farewell To Friends, Life

Seattle's favorite earth mother, Jackie Philbrick, traded bearhugs with more than 200 friends at an outdoor picnic held in her honor Saturday.

Jackie, 52, longtime owner of the waterfront Shanty Restaurant, held court from 1 to 9 p.m. from a favorite lounge chair transported to a friend's house in Magnolia for the occasion. Jackie clasped hands, hugged and said goodbye.

She knew it was a final farewell. At 2:12 a.m. yesterday, she roused, struggled to a sitting position, spoke to her family and succumbed to liver cancer. The diagnosis had come less than a month ago.

Just last year, the seemingly indestructible Jackie - never sick once in 20 years - had arranged to sell the Shanty, the blue-collar cafe she'd owned and operated for more than 20 years. She told friends she had to sell to help her ailing husband, Phil, with another family business.

Jackie was, without a doubt, one of the most loving, caring and giving citizens this city has known. Rare was the day at the Shanty when she wasn't bantering with the regulars, feeding down-and-outers and plotting ways to fill empty shelves at food banks.

Jackie's hospitality and home-style cooking lured governors and mechanics, police and nuns, famous and not-so-famous into her humble cafe.

Her customers like to swap Jackie stories. They tell about the Christmas morning when, unbidden and unexpected, she rose at dawn to deliver doughnuts and hot coffee to a group of half-frozen Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild members.

The union members were picketing outside the Seattle Post-Intelligencer building because management had refused holiday pay to staffers working on Christmas. (The holiday fell on Sunday. But P-I management declared Monday a holiday and said those working Sunday wouldn't receive holiday pay.)

Jackie, who prized the Shanty's reputation as a blue-collar lunch counter, invariably sided with working stiffs.

For example, when the Legislature considered raising the minimum wage, other restaurateurs squawked, saying it would put them out of business. But Jackie was already paying her staff more than minimum wage.

Obviously, she remembered the years she waited tables at Ivar's, the Black Angus and the Sky Room at Boeing Field. Those were the days when she had squirreled away tips, dreaming of buying a place of her own.

Jackie set aside a day before Christmas when she served lunch for free to all comers. The catch? No bill, but all donations went to Northwest Harvest. She raised tens of thousands of dollars.

That was before Jackie discovered her time was limited. After hearing the bad news, she told her four sons. Then she said to husband Phil, "I don't want anything afterward. But I would like to see my friends now."

Phil, voice cracking, describes Jackie's picnic, saying, "She was so gracious to each of her friends. She was a very special lady."

The family is making arrangements at Bleitz Funeral Home (details to come). But friends perhaps can best remember her by contributing to Northwest Harvest. Jackie, bless her, continues to feed the hungry.

Jean Godden's column appears Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the Local News section of The Times. Her phone is 464-8300.