Tourists Get An Earful About Seattle -- Truth Takes A Holiday In Many Tour Guides' Spiels

They come gripping guidebooks and waving travelers' checks.

Tourists, conventioneers, out-of-town relatives. Flocks of them, totaling a record-breaking 8 million visitors to King County last year.

Show me Seattle, they demand.

And with increasingly competitive gusto, the local tourism industry responds, stuffing the city's culture and history into a variety of tour packages that sell like lattes to the camera-toting crowds.

But as Seattle's famous mix of natural beauty, clean living and espresso - the city's "magic formula" according to the "Let's Go" guidebook - gets translated into a commodity tailored for tourists, truth sometimes taking a back seat to product presentation.

Did you know that a car was crushed when the Hammering Man sculpture fell?

That there's a three-year wait for slips at the plush Elliott Bay Marina?

That the city's high suicide rate is a direct result of SAD, or seasonal affective disorder?

Neither did some tourists until they took a Seattle tour. But these bits of trivia, and many others spit out by the city's tour-guide force, are not true.

"I don't think we're selling seriousness," said Michael Rogers, a guide for Show Me Seattle Tours, who admits that he sometimes stretches facts and makes up answers to tourists' questions. "People are on vacation."

Show Rogers the money - $29.50 to be exact - and he'll pick you up at your hotel in a brightly colored Show Me Seattle van and whisk you around the city for three hours, dropping juicy tidbits of local lore along the way.

Rogers gets it right most of the time. Like other Seattle tour guides he recites the height of the Space Needle like it was yesterday's weather (605 feet from base to tiptop.) And he knows that Jimi Hendrix is a native son, that the great Seattle fire was in 1889, and that yes, that is a real Volkswagen Bug in the Fremont Troll's left hand.

"Everything on the tour is pretty much the truth or near truth," Rogers said. "The rest I just made up."

His approach is not uncommon in Seattle these days, where there are now walking tours, boat tours, bus tours, underground tours - even a land and water tour called Ride The Ducks that migrated to Seattle last year after breeding successfully in other big-time tourist cities.

The King County Convention and Visitor's bureau estimates that $3 billion was spent by the county's visitors last year.

More than 50,000 people bought tour tickets from Grayline, Seattle's largest tour operator, in 1998, and new companies have been springing up in an effort to tap the tourism market. A Ride The Ducks competitor, Duck Tours, opened this summer.

"The pie's getting sliced more and more," Rogers said. "I think the word's out that this is a tourist hot spot."

The combination of hot days and clear skies had a lot of people touring the city early last week, many of whom were on tours that spewed out some dubious data.

On a Ride The Ducks tour - which uses refurbished World War II amphibious landing vehicles to navigate both the waters of Elliott Bay and the city's streets - a guide who called himself Captain Short played polka music as he proclaimed the vessel's arrival in "the Scandinavian neighborhood."

But the captain had not landed in Ballard. He was motoring down Stone Way North in Wallingford, although his polka-blitzed passengers never knew the difference.

On an Argosy cruise on Elliott Bay, a guide pointed out the pristine views of the Olympic Mountains and noted that the entire range is below 7,000 feet in elevation. In fact, Mount Olympus rises to almost 8,000 feet.

On an Underground Tour, visitors were told that in early Seattle spouts of sewage would shoot from city toilets when the tide came in, a result of poor plumbing. A guide later admitted that the toilets were probably only percolating and that talk of geysers was for entertainment value.

"The actual geyser concept - technically there's no way it could be a geyser," said Andrew McMasters, Underground Tour guide.

On a Grayline Trolley Tour - which drives in a loop around the downtown core - a guide told his passengers that the population of Seattle is 3.25 million.

He was way off. Although the city is "growing by leaps and bounds," as the 1999 Fodor's Guide says, Seattle's population is 540,500.

In all of King County there are about 1.7 million people - that means last year there were about five visitors for every county resident.

Jeanette Fox of Arlington, Texas, was riding the Grayline Trolley this week with her husband, Charles. The two were carrying a 25-pound halibut bought at the Pike Place Market and a bag of clothes from Nordstrom, and neither seemed to be checking the guide's presentation for accuracy.

"I don't care if the numbers or the dates are right," Jeanette Fox said. "To be really honest, I'm not going to remember it in about 10 minutes anyway."

Tour guides often assume their patrons have attitudes similar to hers - and they're often right.

Guides are adept at playing to crowds of Seattle novices, whose knowledge base can be built on as flimsy a foundation as the movie "Sleepless in Seattle," the TV show "Frasier", or Nirvana lyrics.

On one of Rogers' Show Me Seattle tours last week, a woman asked him, in apparent seriousness, where Frasier lives.

Rogers told her that Frasier lives on Queen Anne Hill, both of them glossing over the fact that the sitcom is filmed on a set in Los Angeles where fake windows look out on a fake Seattle backdrop.

And, along with several other tours, Rogers' tour includes a stop at the houseboat where "Sleepless in Seattle" was filmed. On Tuesday tourists in Rogers' van - who hailed from New York, Ohio, Philadelphia, and Florida - eagerly snapped pictures of the houseboat.

The drive to present visitors with a fusion of illusion, pop culture and Seattle arcana is behind many of the tour-guides' mistakes.

"They made me do it," said Captain Short after he pretended to catch a Ken Griffey home run hit out of Safeco Field, using canned sound effects and a glove with a ball already inside to perform the stunt.

When Captain Short "caught" the ball he was parked at the intersection of First Avenue and South Royal Brougham Way.

"Not gonna happen," said Mariner spokeswoman Rebecca Hale, who checked the stats and found that no homer ever hit by a Mariner - even by Griffey - in either the Kingdome or the new stadium would have made it over Safeco Field's left-field wall and into Short's mitt.

To do so, the ball would have had to practically hang a left in midair.

"Give us a little bit of poetic license here, please," said Brian Tracy, manager of Ride The Ducks.

Tracy, a former local television personality known for his work on "Evening Magazine," said the tour is designed to entertain.

"We sell ourselves as a party on wheels," Tracy said. "We've created an entertainment package."

Rogers of Show Me Seattle said he tries hard to be factual. He reads guidebooks, watches history videos and keeps abreast of local news. He says that when his anecdotes are factually flawed, it is often because he is trying to keep the passengers entertained.

"It's sort of like bubble gum," he said of his spiel. "They don't digest it. They just chew on it for a while and then spit it out later."

Seattle Times library researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.

Eli Sanders' phone message number is 206-748-5815. His e-mail address is esanders@seattletimes.com

-------------------------- Could you be a tour guide? --------------------------

Do you know something the tour guides don't?

Try to separate the bogus from the bona fide with this true/false quiz.

1. Elvis once stayed at the Edgewater Hotel. - Argosy Tours.

2. The "Sleepless in Seattle" houseboat was bought by a couple from New Jersey. - Ride the Ducks.

3. The Kingdome is the world's largest free-standing concrete structure. - Grayline Trolley.

4. The Port of Seattle is the fourth-busiest container port in the United States. - Argosy Tours.

5. Part of the fortune of a brothel-running madam who died in 1903 was taken by the city and used to fund the fledgling Seattle School District. - Underground Tour.

6. The Space Needle Restaurant used to rotate once every 30 minutes, but the speed of rotation was unnerving diners and had to be slowed down. - Argosy Tours.

7. The Fremont Bridge is raised an average of once every 10 minutes. - Ride The Ducks.

8. There are 325 parks in Seattle. - Show Me Seattle Tours.

9. Glass artist Dale Chihuly is a living National Treasure. - Ride The Ducks.

10. It rains an average of 250 days a year in Seattle. - Grayline Tours.

------------------- Answers to the quiz -------------------

1. False. "Definitively no," said Stacy Martin, Edgewater general manager.

2. True. Loretta Metcalf and Jim Healy bought the house in 1993 after seeing it in the movie and falling in love with it.

3.True, but not for long. The Kingdome will soon be imploded to make way for a new football stadium.

4. False. It is the fifth largest container port, behind Long Beach and Los Angeles, New York-New Jersey and Oakland.

5. True. According to William C. Spiedel's book "Sons of the Profits," Lou Graham was Seattle's "hostess with the mostest."

6. False. The Space Needle has always rotated once every 58 minutes, says Spokeswoman Mary Bacarella. Two years ago, when needle officials were testing a new control panel and "wanted to see what it could do," they sped up the rotation speed to once every 45 minutes. But that was temporary.

7. True. Seattle Bridge Operators Supervisor Joann McGovern confirms it.

8. False. There were 397 parks at last count, according to the Parks Department.

9. True. In 1992, the Institute for Human Potential at the University of N. Carolina at Wilmington awarded him the prize.

10. False. Seattle gets an average of 151.1 days of measurable precipitation a year according to the National Weather Service.