Transplants -- A New Cast Of Characters -- Getting To The Root Of The Transplant Movement

Xenophobics, listen up. Since Arthur Denny, the man from Illinois, stepped off his schooner at Alki Point that rainy November day in 1851, Seattle has been a city of transplants.

Civic and political leaders, the famous and the ordinary folks. It seems most everyone has come from someplace else. Seattle Mayor Norm Rice hails from Denver, sports promoter Bob Walsh from Boston, Congressman John Miller from New York.

They came for jobs. They came for school. They came to get as far away from their hometowns as they could. And many stayed.

Over the past century the growth has been phenomenal and the 1980s were no exception. The 1990 Census figures show Washington state grew nearly 20 percent in the past decade, twice as fast as the rest of the nation. The population now tops 5 million; half of the new people in the state are migrants.

It's not surprising, then, that this corner of the country has developed its own character and characters. For better or worse, some of these carpetbaggers have made significant contributions: We are nationally recognized for our medical research, our local theater, our rock music. Even those dreaded Californians aren't all bad.

Here are just a few of the transplants who have made their mark in the '80s.

CYRIL MILLER, FOUNDER OF SEATTLE SUPER SMOKE

OK, Cyril, everyone knows you're a sucker for those stories of sick and underfed kids. But to put all 200 pounds of you into a skirt and cavort around at charity gig?

Cyril Miller leans back and roars at the image, a bear of a man with a salt-and-pepper beard in drag. "The community's been extremely good to me and I try to give something back," says Miller, who donned his unusual costume for a Leukemia Society benefit.

Miller is the founder of Seattle Super Smoke, a gourmet smoked-poultry business - or what Miller calls the "smoke boutique" of the city. In eight years it has grown from a fledgling business to a $1-million operation.

Miller, 54, was born in Nassau and moved to Florida as a child. He started his own construction business and, by 1975, had a payroll of 50 people.

"But it got to the point it wasn't fun anymore. The business started to follow me home," Miller says. He left his company and became a consultant.

It was a consulting job that first brought him to Seattle.

"I just loved the city. This is where I'm going to die, right here in the Northwest."

In 1983 Miller and his wife, Renee, took a trip to Minnesota, where Renee's father lives. He was smoking chickens in the back yard.

"I smelled them and I tasted them and said, this is it. This is exactly what I'll do," says Miller, who still makes deliveries in his bib overalls and rubber boots. Soon customers discovered the funny little company that operated out of a Ravenna trailer and the word spread. Now Miller has a new building and dreams of $40 million in sales.

Miller credits much of his success to his education. That's why he donates 20 hours a month to speak at public school, emphasizing the importance of finishing school. "Please stay in school," Miller tells the students. "Then you have choices. Don't let this opportunity slip by."

PATRICIA WOODS, DRUG-ABUSE EDUCATOR

Wearing a bright red suit and high heels, Patricia Woods seems out of place as she strides through the dingy drop-in center on Second Avenue. Her office, up a flight of stairs, is filled with boxes of chips and cans of soda.

"Bleach and condoms are fine but when you're hungry you don't think about bleach and condoms," Woods explains, apologizing for her cluttered office. "People can't change if they're hungry, if there's no place to get hooked up to counseling services or health care."

Woods, 37, runs a street outreach program to help drug abusers who are at risk for AIDS. It may be something as simple as offering a cup of hot coffee and a roof to escape the rain, or Metro tickets for a bus ride across town.

"I saw a need to do more," says Woods, about her decision to move to Seattle two years ago. "This is just a natural."

A New York native, Woods came to Seattle in 1989 on vacation and, like many transplants, decided to stay. "I had lost my best friend to AIDS and I needed to take a break," she says. "I heard Seattle was such a livable place."

But unlike most vacationers, what impressed her wasn't the Space Needle, the waterfront or the majesty of Mount Rainier. It was something as unlikely as the downtown needle exchange for drug addicts.

At the time, Woods was working for the city of New York in a substance-abuse program for addicted women at risk for AIDS. That city's attempt to start a needle-exchange program was sidetracked by politics.

Woods, herself, opposed the New York program. "I didn't think it was helpful, but then I saw how it worked in the streets in Seattle."

While visiting, Woods learned of a job through Group Health Cooperative doing street outreach for drug users at risk for AIDS. She applied and was hired. Within six months she had set up Street Outreach Services, operating out of the center on Second Avenue.

Woods also works for the University of Washington as a substance-abuse education specialist, training people about AIDS issues.

Her real love, though, is her work in the streets: Finding counseling and health care for drug abusers. Talking about AIDS to those who come in out of the cold. Setting up self-esteem groups for addicts.

"Drug addicts have a horrible self-image," she says. "People say, `If I don't love myself, why should I participate in safe-sex practices?' People are getting high because they feel they have no other option."

Woods' private time is spent in her Capitol Hill apartment studying the writings of black nationalist leader Malcolm X and devouring works on black history. She hopes to go to Africa in a few years to work with women with AIDS, but she has no plans to move permanently from Seattle.

"When I came out here I didn't know a soul," she says. "But I knew it was right."

BOB ROSNER, SMOKING-IN-THE-WORKPLACE CONSULTANT

Bob Rosner figures if he does his work well, he'll be out of a job sometime next year.

"We're going to go out of business and declare victory," says Rosner, 34, the immodest entrepreneur known in Seattle as the scourge of the tobacco industry.

It's a long leap for the man who once served vegetarian food in a Philadelphia restaurant. Today, under the Rosner-rules-of-world-order, that restaurant would certainly be smoke-free.

Rosner has put Seattle on the map for his work to create smoke-free workplaces.

That his business, the Smoking Policy Institute, has been successful is as clear as the framed newspaper articles in his Capitol Hill office. Or the stack of magazines that bear glowing testimonials to his no-smoking programs. And there's the plaque that calls him the "Jimmy Swaggart of smoking policies."

Bob Rosner is not a bashful man. He says: "I've basically learned this issue cold."

Born and raised in New Jersey, Rosner moved to Seattle in 1980 after graduating from the University of Puget Sound.

"I knew the East Coast and decided there was life beyond Amtrak," he says. "And I wanted something different than a big East Coast city."

He landed in Seattle with an education but no job and founded a nonprofit agency to train the elderly to help with crime prevention. Looking for something else to do, he stumbled upon smoking.

It was a time when anti-smoking fervor was raging through corporate boardrooms. Rosner held, as it turned out, a smoking gun.

He designed a no-smoking policy for Group Health Cooperative and then formed his own company. He's worked for clients from U.S. West to the American Cancer Society and his one-person firm has become internationally known.

"I'm not anti-smoking. I'm not against tobacco," says Rosner, who shares a Broadway office with his wife Robin Simons and Malamute-Airedale dog Thurber.

"We learned from the Exxon Valdez that it's a lot easier not to put oil into the water than to get it out," he says. "It's like smoke in a ventilation system. In Bob's perfect world, smokers would have a place to smoke and not harm the people around them."

Rosner, who has never smoked, is finishing a report for the Environmental Protection Agency on second-hand smoke. He figures the findings will be so compelling he'll be out of a job.

Then what? He shrugs. Maybe he'll write a book. He and his wife hope to adopt a child. He's finishing an MBA program at the University of Washington.

"After smoking I want something cool," Rosner says. "Being in the hot seat is tough."

DAWN MASON, SCHOOL ACTIVIST

It was a test. Would the parents trying to mend the brittle Seattle school system venture to the Rainier Valley - a place EVERYONE knows swarms with gangs and violence - to meet in Dawn Mason's living room?

"The district was fractured with different interests," says Mason, who with other parents formed a group to try to bring peace to Seattle public schools. "I invited them to the Rainier Valley. It was my test of them to see if they would come out of their comfort zone."

They came. The new Parent Education Union was alive and well.

This is just one chapter in Mason's life as an advocate for parents in the Seattle school system. "I see a teacher-parent coalition as the strongest thing you can do to get education rolling in this state," says Mason, 46, an analyst in the Seattle Water Department. "It always has to be about the children. That's what it's all about."

Mason is a re-rooted transplant. Born and raised in New Jersey, she came here on vacation in April 1968. When she saw the rhododendrons in full bloom she fell in love with the city. "I thought that God must have made this place. I'm staying."

Mason turned in her return airline ticket and used it as a down payment for an apartment. She stayed here for five years, married and moved to Chicago. When that marriage soured she moved to Los Angeles and worked for an airline. Mason returned to Seattle 10 years ago.

Her involvement in school issues began four years ago when her daughter, now 17 and a senior at Holy Names Academy, was expelled from Meany Middle School. When she went to complain, Mason says, she was told that if there were more intelligent and sophisticated parents as Mason the schools wouldn't be in such trouble. "I was outraged to think a child's education was based on a parent's intellect. I said I will be that intelligent and outspoken parent, that articulate parent."

Mason and a pediatrician friend founded Parents for Student Success, which trains parents in how to deal with the school system. "The missing resource in education was the parent," she says. "Too often parents get co-opted and schools disregard parents of children who may not be visible, especially if they're in an ethnic group with a history of oppression."

Today Mason's youngest daughter is a fifth grader in public school. So there are many years ahead for Mason to haunt the Seattle school system.

"This is a long trip from the irate parent sitting at Meany," she says. "My reward is hearing from parents who said I made a difference."

BOB AND MARGARET BAVASI, OWNERS OF THE EVERETT GIANTS

"There's the guy who blows himself up with dynamite. He says to me, `For $100 extra, I'll light myself on fire.' I said, `You've got it.' I'll do anything weird."

Recalling the conversation, Bob Bavasi leans back in his chair and laughs. Freak acts, like Captain Dynamite, sometimes upstage baseball at the Everett Giants' ballpark.

"I think baseball is something like Disneyland," Bavasi once said. "Everything is a little bit whimsical."

Bavasis and baseball. It's like rain in Seattle. Inseparable.

When Bob and Margaret Bavasi bought the struggling Walla Walla minor-league baseball team and moved it to Everett in 1984, they got a call from Bob's brother, Rick. "Dad tells me you've lost your mind," he says.

Dad is "Buzzie" Bavasi, former major-league general manager with the Brooklyn Dodgers, San Diego Padres and California Angels, and a well-known figure in baseball. Three of four sons followed him into the business.

Bob and Margaret Bavasi, both attorneys, gave up high-powered careers in San Diego to buy the Walla Walla team. It was Margaret who came up with the idea of a minor-league franchise.

"For me practicing law in San Diego was not very glamorous and it wasn't allowing us to have time together," she says. "It occurred to me one could own a minor-league team for not much money. And I figured, how bad could it be?"

Today the Giants are an institution in Everett. The games are good, the games are bad. But fans fill the 2,000-seat stadium. Why is the team so popular? Bob is a realist: "It's cheap and parking's free."

There's also the baseball purists who may drive from Seattle and farther to see baseball the way it was designed to be played, on real grass under the stars (or, let's be honest, clouds).

And you know those big-league players who shun the autograph-hungry fans? Not in Everett. Players, many with their first professional contracts, actually linger after the games to sign autographs. "It's really a scream," says Bob. "Here the kids aren't jaded."

When the Bavasis bought the team they figured they'd spend three years in Everett, then move on. "After the fourth year we decided we like it here," says Bob, acknowledging the team probably won't make him rich. "I don't want to work for a major-league team. Here we can still be in baseball and meet our emotional needs."

He's in the Rotary Club and chairman of the Everett Community College Board. Margaret is involved in school issues. They have two young daughters.

To Margaret, baseball, real baseball, isn't about salary disputes, ownership tangles, or big television deals.

"Baseball is tradition. I like nostalgia. I like antiques, I like old houses and I like baseball," she says. "I'm on a personal mission, at least in Everett, to preserve it."

SOOJOUNG KO, CO-OPERATOR KOREAN CABLE-TELEVISION STATION

The new U.S. Census numbers may tell the story. But people like Soojoung and Chong C. Ko tell it best.

The number of Koreans in Washington state more than doubled since 1980; of any single Asian group, the increase in Koreans has been the largest.

Meet the Kos. They fit the demographic image to a T.

The couple, who had emigrated from Korea, moved here in the early 1980s from Los Angeles. Chong Ko had worked in broadcasting in Korea and realized the void in Seattle for Koreans trying to move into the American culture.

There was one Korean newspaper. No Korean TV.

The Kos run KOAM television in Federal Way, a cable station that broadcasts Korean news, interviews, English language programs and - yes - even soap operas to about 35,000 people in the Puget Sound area.

Last January the couple started a radio station that reaches many more with its mix of news, analysis, religion, music and children's programs.

It's not been an easy adjustment in Seattle, says Soojoung Ko. It's too rainy and the traffic can be miserable. Still, the station is filling an important need, she says.

"We let American people know about Korean culture," says Ko, "and we help the local community to adjust in the United States."

JOEL JUNKER, ATTORNEY, INTERNATIONAL TRADE LAW

Six mornings a week Joel Junker rises before the sun and most of Seattle to slice the waters of Lake Washington in his light racing scull.

It is a time for reflection and peace, a respite from the fast-paced world of international trade law.

"You're up, you're alive," says Junker, an Iowa native, in explaining his passion for early morning rowing. "It's important to my body, my mind and my soul."

Tired of being a bureaucrat with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., Junker, 41, moved to Seattle eight years ago to practice trade law. He is not a man to make decisions lightly: He researched law firms up and down the West Coast, settling in Seattle because it seemed to be an exciting place with a burgeoning trade industry.

"I wanted to go from a place where values were regulated to one where values were created," he says of his decision to leave D.C. "This looked like a good pond in which to be a fish."

Indeed. In his brief years in Seattle he's participated in nearly every trade-related group in town. He helped organize the Northwest textile and agricultural industries, he represented Washington apple growers in a dispute with Canada, and is helping a Chinese-owned corporation sell its interests in a Ballard aircraft-parts company.

Junker was a member of the 1985 class of Leadership Tomorrow, a program sponsored by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce to encourage civic involvement among the city's young leaders. Today he is on boards for the Woodland Park Zoo and the Center for Wildlife Conservation. Having traveled the world, Junker was only too aware of the fragility of the planet's living creatures.

Five years ago Junker lost his wife to cancer. Even now, it's difficult to talk about and is something he is private about. Junker hopes to set up a widowed persons support group for people such as himself - a place for comfort and sharing questions from sexuality to child care.

While Junker has had job offers from places as far from Seattle as London, he has no intention of leaving.

Where else could he rise at dawn from his Lake Union houseboat and, within minutes, be gliding across the water in his rowing scull? He works 10 minutes from his houseboat door, in a downtown office tower.

"When I'm on the water it's like I'm 50 miles out of the city - the smell of the water, the birds, the boats. Having a quality professional life and personal life is probably not matchable anyplace else in the world."

ELIZABETH HUDDLE, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR INTIMAN THEATRE

As Elizabeth Huddle peers out the window of her third-story office, the Seattle Center International Fountain explodes into view. Even now, years after she moved to Seattle, she is still awestruck by the image.

"I could not be in a more miraculous place to do theater," says Huddle, 51.

In the five years she's been in Seattle, Huddle has steered a theater once on the verge of collapse to one that not only has a new home but a budget in the black and soaring subscriptions.

A California native and former actress, Huddle came here in 1981 to direct a production at Intiman. She fell in love - with the city and her future husband - and when the job came open at the Intiman she jumped at the chance to move to Seattle.

"I didn't know it was bad to be from California until I came up here," she jokes.

Huddle, who was a member of the original repertory company at New York's Lincoln Center, gave up acting over the past decade to produce and direct. It was something, as a child, she thought was off limits to women.

"As a girl I knew only one woman director," says Huddle, who now works as a mentor for women who want to learn the business. "It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I started directing and I discovered I loved it."

Huddle credits the Intiman success to a number of things: good management, exciting productions and her personal affection for Intiman's audiences. Before each play, she writes to theater subscribers, explaining the production. She hosts a dinner and talks about the play. "I feel a very personal relationship with the people," Huddle says.

Huddle still dabbles in television acting, and recently appeared in the TV series "Northern Exposure," filmed in Roslyn, Wash.

Take away the theater and you'll her find her other passion, gardening at the log home she and her husband, Leif Bentsen, built on the Kitsap Peninsula. "We always had a fantasy of living in a log house, so we did it. We built one." It's the perfect place to escape from her high-stress job. "I may leave the theater, but I'll never leave Seattle," Huddle says. "I'm doing what I always wanted to do."

CHARLES RICE, SURGEON, HARBORVIEW MEDICAL CENTER

Dr. Charles Rice has a gruesome collection of photographs in his Harborview Medical Center office.

They picture children who have been rushed to the hospital with gunshot wounds, often victims of family violence. "Someday I'll put them together in a collage and call them my NRA (National Rifle Association) poster children," says Rice, 46, chief of surgery at the hospital.

Reflecting on his six years in Seattle, much of it spent in Harborview's emergency room, Rice says softly, "The children. The hardest to take are the children."

Rice, an Atlanta native, came here in 1985 after he was recruited from Chicago by the University of Washington. He was impressed by the ease in which the city's scientists and clinical doctors co-existed without the divisiveness he experienced in other cities.

Today Rice is involved with those scientists in a new high-technology drug, composed of special antibodies grown in mice, that could save the lives of thousands of trauma patients each year. The drug, still in experimental phases, could combat the multiple-organ failures that often occur after an injured person has lost a lot of blood.

It is an exciting prospect, says Rice, a Bellevue resident, who is modest about his accomplishments at a hospital that treats about 3,600 trauma patients each year.

A year ago Rice, recommended by the American College of Surgeons, accompanied President Bush to violence-torn Colombia for a drug summit. "I drew the short straw," Rice laughs. He was one of a handful of surgeons aboard a floating trauma center that steamed up and down the coast practicing for a crisis that never occurred.

Next month Rice begins a year-long sabbatical in Washington, D.C. He won a prestigious fellowship to work on health-policy issues with either the U.S. Senate or White House.

"In trauma, sooner or later, you butt up against public-policy issues," he says. "Whether it's firearm control, automobile design or motorcycle helmets, much of it evolves into public-policy decisions."

Hence his interest in gun control. In Charles Rice's perfect world there wouldn't be children with bullet wounds tearing at his heart.

"People say guns don't kill people, bullets do," he says. "That's true. If I were to tackle this as a public-policy issue, I'd put an enormous tax on bullet manufacturers. Make guns cheap, but bullets enormously expensive."

STEVEN MURRAY AND TIINA NUNNALLY, PUBLISHERS, FJORD PRESS

The names Tove Ditlevsen and Jens Peter Jacobsen may not ring the same bell here as, say, Ernest Hemingway.

But that doesn't particularly bother Steven Murray and Tiina Nunnally, whose small literary publishing business has a modest mission: to cultivate and preserve Scandinavian literature, and to convince people to buy, and read, the European classics.

"I think Americans need to read something more than American books," says Fjord Press founder Murray, 47, who moved his company to Seattle from Berkeley, Calif., seven years ago.

Today the acclaimed press, which operates out of a small house in West Seattle, is the largest Scandinavian publishing house in the country. Many of the authors Fjord introduces to American readers are unknown because they have never been translated or have been translated poorly.

Murray began a typesetting business in 1976 in California and established Fjord Press in 1981, publishing Finland's first Modernist poet.

He and Nunnally met at a Scandinavian literature conference, discovered they shared a love for the Scandinavian classics and Murray moved his business to Seattle. Today the two are married and together translate the classics, one reading aloud to the other to assure the work is true to the author's intent. That's one reason why Nunnally won the 1990 West Coast Pen Award for translating "Niels Lyhne," Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen's literary masterpiece.

"Readers are hungry for good novels, well-told stories and finely wrought nonfiction," says Nunnally, 39, who moved here from Wisconsin 19 years ago. "The list of Scandinavian books is wonderful, and many have never been done."

ANDY STAHL, ENVIRONMENTAL FORESTER

Spotted owls, the inflatable kind, share the top of a file cabinet in Andy Stahl's Pioneer Square office. Until a brief encounter years ago in a Northern California forest, Stahl had never seen the real version of the much-aligned creature.

But that hasn't stopped the forester from embracing the owl and all that its survival depends on.

Stahl, 35, an Oregon native, is an analyst with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, an organization whose lawsuits to protect the northern spotted owl helped lead to millions of acres of old-growth forest becoming protected, which, in turn, led to the livelihoods of thousands of loggers being put in jeopardy.

This group, which opened an office here four years ago, blocked the government's plans to log the ancient forests and forced the government to declare the owl a threatened species, proposing up to 11.6 million acres as critical habitat for the owl.

Stahl, who had studied forest planning at Oregon State University, proved to be a key person in helping assemble the arguments, statistics and a lineup of sympathetic scientists who supported the environmental argument in court.

It was a long ride for the man from Eugene who once thought he would be a doctor. A pre-med major at the University of Oregon, Stahl decided a career change was in order when he received a C in his father's class.

Why forestry? "I didn't know anything about it," says Stahl, an avid biker who rides to work every day. "I'd never known a forester."

Stahl worked as a lobbyist for the Oregon timber industry before switching sides and joining the National Wildlife Federation. When the Seattle job came open, he jumped at it.

He, through the legal-defense fund, has taken on the Everett home port and won a huge judgment against a water polluter. And then there are the owls.

Stahl knew the issue touched a nerve when he went to his dentist in Portland seven years ago and heard her say how her heart ached when she watched big trucks rumble down the road filled with giant trees.

"Now my dentist is not an environmentalist, but this was enough for me to determine we had public support," Stahl says. "We were right on the science and people care. People like big trees and they don't realize that until they see them being threatened."

It bothers Stahl to hear people complain that he's responsible for the thousands of logging jobs in jeopardy because of the spotted-owl decision. "One thing I do regret is that the environmental organizations have been no more forward looking and helpful to finding an economic solution than anyone else," he says.

So what could be done to help the loggers? Stahl shrugs. "I don't know. But if we hadn't stepped in, all the old growth would have been cut."

KIM THAYIL, ROCK GUITARIST

Ask Kim Thayil to name his home town and you might get two answers. When the Chicago Bulls won the NBA title, he was from Chicago. When the Mariners are playing well, he's from Seattle.

To be honest, the guitarist for Seattle's hottest rock band is a pseudo-transplant. He was born in Seattle 30 years ago, but left when he was a child and his family moved to Chicago. Thayil returned 10 years ago, not because of any native yearnings, but because "it's far away from Chicago."

He moved here to attend The Evergreen State College but, after discovering it was difficult to find work in Olympia, moved to Seattle to complete a philosophy degree at the University of Washington.

"In the back of my mind the only thing I knew I wanted to do was play guitar and write songs," says Thayil who, with a friend from Chicago, in 1984 formed Soundgarden, an alternative, hard-rock band that has achieved national and international recognition. The band has had an international tour, released four albums, and helped make Seattle what one critic called the "breeding ground for alternative rock in the '90s."

"We've definitely been good for Seattle," says Thayil, whose quiet demeanor is a sharp contrast to the loud, thrashing sound of the band. "At first we were a novelty: Here's this town in the northwest corner of the U.S. that produces heavy-metal music. Seattle has always been stuck in a rent-a-culture mode. For once Seattle has produced something of its own, not mimicking what's happening in New York or London."

What Soundgarden proved is that it's possible to live and work in Seattle and make it big in rock music. Why not Los Angeles? "There's no reason to go to L.A. I don't like L.A.," says Thayil, sitting outside a quiet Seattle restaurant chain-smoking cigarettes, his long hair tied back in a pony tail. "We would not have gotten together anyplace but Seattle.

"Now we're outside the Seattle arena. Our audience is large enough nationally that it doesn't really matter whether we're from Seattle or not."

Soundgarden has performed in 14 countries. Thayil still marvels at the band's success. "People pay us for playing. It's pretty amazing," he says. "The important thing is the band's been together for seven years. The commitment to the relationship the members of the band have is the greatest indicator of our success."

When he's not making music, Thayil, who lives in north Seattle, says he likes to read, watch movies and drink beer. And he likes to watch the Mariners play baseball. The band has struck up a friendship with M's pitcher Randy Johnson and sometimes Thayil and other band members wear Mariner hats during concerts. "Obviously, over the last seven years we feel a certain pride out there promoting Seattle.

"I'm glad Seattle has established its own pop, alternative culture, but it did it almost in spite of itself," says Thayil, reflecting on his role in crafting the Seattle music sound. "I think so many people who are successful here are from someplace else. Everyone's a transplant."

SUSAN GILMORE IS A STAFF WRITER AT THE SEATTLE TIMES. SHE MOST RECENTLY COVERED THE 1990 CENSUS.

RETURN TO SENDER PLEASE FOLD, SPINDLE AND MUTILATE:

THE BOZ Terrible role model for kids who adopted that atrocious hairstyle.

KEN BEHRING His construction plan on the Eastside makes us gag.

LINDA EVANS Do we really need another blonde?

SEN. SLADE GORTON Back to the Gortons of Gloucester, where he belongs.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE Since she's selling her house, maybe we should just say: Returned to Sender, Address: The Unknown.

CRIPS AND BLOODS 'Nuff said.

VICTORIA JAMES She formed the organization of harassed Californians.

HERSCHEL THE SEA LION

JACK ROBERTS He can't be undersold, but he can be shipped out of town.

MILFOIL The infamous water weed is not a native. Proof that trans-plants can take over.

The guy who cut in front of me this morning

DIARY OF A TRANSPLANT Day One Moves to Seattle. Caffeine free. No friends.

1 month Has a cup of decaf after dinner with only friend.

2 months Has cup of coffee in morning; another cup in afternoon. Both decaf with sugar and cream.

4 months Switches to caffeinated coffee. Two in morning, two in afternoon. No sugar, just cream. Two more friends.

6 months Cup before taking shower. Straight. No cream or sugar. Drinks coffee all day. Several new friends to share coffee.

8 months Starbucks discovered! Dozens of different coffees. Goes in for "Just a taste." Up to eight cups a day.

10 months Another discovery: Espresso!! It's sold on the street corner by "vendors." Even the police are drinking it. Many new friends, but who cares?

1 year Coffee capacity being measured by the gallon. Chocolate-coated coffee beans to chew when real coffee not available. Only java junkies for friends. - Steve Johnston

DIARY OF ANOTHER TRANSPLANT Day One Moves to Seattle. No rain gear. Just an umbrella.

1 month Umbrella explodes in the wind. Purchases a baseball cap. But refuses to wear it backward like natives do.

2 months Day starts sunny and then a sudden downpour. Buys a plastic rain cap. Bright blue.

4 months Day starts sunny and then a sudden downpour. Buys a plastic rain jacket. Bright blue to match cap.

6 months Feet keep getting wet standing in mud puddles waiting for street light to change. Buys a pair of rain boots. Bright blue to match outfit.

8 months Friends begin to make fun of blue rain outfit. Gets out baseball cap. Starts wearing it backward.

10 months Discovers Chubby & Tubby! Rain gear for every occasion. Buys a pair of heavy black rubber boots. Advertised as Dairy Farmer Boots. Drops the blue jacket.

1 year Dairy Farmer Boots now in closet. Baseball cap on backward only rain gear needed. Usually no jacket. People stop making fun. Nose is always wet.

A SOAPBOX FOR NEWCOMERS

Twelve years ago the inquiring mind came here to the Pacific Northwest. Now physical disability holds it here. Do I mind? Mind the lush green of the forest; the pristine, white peak of Mount Baker; the rich, dark fertility of the Skagit fields; the seductive glory of the salt water; the warmth of new friends? No!

I am not East of Eden. I am here. Patricia J. Nonnenmacher formerly from Missoula, Montana

It ain't good and it ain't bad...it just ain't sunny! Pam Hagerty formerly from Reston, Virginia

I don't like your weather, your traffic, your people, your taxes (especially property) or the Mariners...If my daughters and grandchildren had not moved to this state - I would not be here. Ray R. Taylor visiting from Wrangell, Alaska

What I like best of all? My relatives stayed where I moved from. Jeanne Scott formerly from Omaha, Nebraska

How disappointing to have so much "unswimmable" water. Randy and Nancy Kurtz formerly from Colorado

The biggest thing I) noticed when I moved here two months ago was the ridiculous amount of espresso bars that are spread around the Sound...I was shocked to find that espresso was found not only in quiet cafes, but also in department stores, grocery stores, gas stations, hospitals, on the sidewalk and God knows where else! Rachel Troutman formerly from Ann Arbor, Michigan

The constant media drumbeat about what transplants or natives think about life in livable Puget Sound is absurd. This is provincial narcissism at its best/worst. Can we give this topic a rest for a few years? E. Joyce formerly from Crescent City, California

DRIVING IT HOME

Last year, 161,294 new and returning drivers from other states and countries obtained Washington drivers licenses.

Between last Oct. 1 and March 31, 1991, an average of 3,106 out-of-state persons obtained Washington drivers licenses each week, while an average of 1,053 Washington licenses from those who left the state were surrendered and returned to the state.

And in the week of May 18, 3,151 new drivers were licensed in the state. By far, the most - 756 - came from California. Another 298 drivers came from Oregon.

SOURCE: WASHINGTON STATE DEPARTMENT OF LICENSING