The term "skid road" originated in the 1800s in Seattle, where a road was worn into the side of a hill by logs being skidded down to the mills. Many of the laborers in this process took up squalid lodgings alongside this "road".

Today we speak of people being on "skid row" when they have "hit the skids" in their life. Well, Seattle has its share, and did also in the late 1960s when a ministry for such people was begun on 1st Avenue.

Herb Dimock, a minister and one of its first Directors, kept track of those beginnings, recounting monthly trials and triumphs in letters to his son, Larry, who was away at Harvard Divinity School. An account of true events at the First Avenue Service Center, Skid Road Letters reads like a war diary, but is really about the nitty-gritty of love in harsh circumstances.

EXERPT:

Friday, January 31, 1969

Dear Larry:

You'd never believe what we've been through since Christmas. It's Trial by Ice at the Center. Seattle's Great Snow has us in deep freeze. I've lost count of the days.

The word around the Avenue is that five men have died from exposure. I thought I knew what survival was all about. Here are some new dimensions. Hundreds of men crowded the missions; slept on the floors. Others jammed the all-night Green Parrot Theater (locally known as the Dirty Bird). How many more huddled in boxcars, under the bridges and deadend streets off Western Avenue nobody knows...

During the day our pitiful facilities at 1009 are taxed beyond capacity. People stand around the sides of the room, trying to keep out of the cold and the wet. Walls drip with our condensed breath. The dirty wet floors won't dry out...

Too many bodies.

I'm convinced we must find larger quarters. That's what I told the Trustees and last night's Second Annual Meeting of the contributing memebership. It really is impossible to do a job in the 10 by 10 glassed-in goldfish-bowl-office that serves as phone-booth-counselling room-medical-dispensary-storage-closet-job-dispatch-headquarters-Grand-Central-Station-power-and-status-symbol for the favored few that gather closely around the Director.

$15 U.S.    220 pg pb