В Сиэтле пройдет мемориал в честь историка Пола Дорпата, создавшего легендарную рубрику Now & Then

A public memorial service for Paul Dorpat, the Seattle historian known for writing the long-running Now & Then feature in The Seattle Times, will take place this month. For decades, Dorpat helped Seattleites understand their city and state, authoring several books about Seattle and Washington history. The 87-year-old, who regularly juxtaposed historical images with current ones, died May 27 in Shoreline after a long illness. The memorial celebrating his life will be at 6:30 p.m., on Aug. 30 at the Museum of History & Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N. in Seattle, according to a blog post by his longtime friends and Now & Then collaborators Jean Sherrard and Clay Eals. “He was one of those rare individuals who reshaped how we understood ourselves,” Sherrard previously told The Seattle Times. “I think he created a way of understanding our regional world that took delight in the stories of individuals, not just the great swoops and warps and woofs of enormous events, but the details — the tiny, almost unnoticed portions of a photograph.” Dorpat wrote Now & Then’s first installment for The Times’ Pacific NW magazine on Jan. 17, 1982 — and continued working on the weekly feature for almost 38 years. (Sherrard and Eals have contributed to the series after Dorpat stepped away in 2019, saying he wanted to create more music and art.) Dorpat donated hundreds of thousands of photos, documents and historical artifacts to the Seattle Public Library. Slides and glass plates that have been digitized for the library's Paul Dorpat Collection, can be viewed online. Beyond Now & Then, Dorpat co-founded the Seattle underground newspaper The Helix in 1967 and was one of the founders, along with Walt Crowley and Marie McCaffrey, of HistoryLink, the online of encyclopedia of Washington history in 1999. He also was one of the organizers of the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair in 1968. Dorpat's memorial is free, but organizers are accepting donations to help cover expenses — estimated at around $4,000 — for chair rental and audiovisual gear at MOHAI. “That’s what will put Paul’s photographs on a big screen and his voice in the room, at a scale he would have enjoyed,” according to the blog post by Eals and Sherrard. Material from The Seattle Times archive was used in this report.