By Eric Brotman

Location: 1041 – 7th Ave. S., between Pine and Fir streets

There are Seattle Mariners and there are Edmonds mariners. Larry is one of the latter. When he was a mariner with the Merchant Marine in the mid- to late 1940s, he didn’t play games.

“We left Olympia,” he says, “and went to Japan, Okinawa, Hong Kong, and Saipan. We were on a slow boat to China, cruising at 10 knots at best.”

He spent some time sailing in the English Channel near the end of World War ll, nervously watching for loose mines of the explosive kind. He remembers one shipmate, a self-proclaimed marksman, shooting bullets at the mines’ protuberances with the intention of having them detonate harmlessly. It was a futile, even foolish, exercise — but understandable, given the fact their ship was carrying munitions.

Other adventures weren’t as stressful, and what may have been irritating or tedious 65 years ago has taken on a romantic cast over the passing years.

Once, after loading up with a cargo of oil drums, he headed for South Africa to deliver them. The long journey caused the ship’s fresh water supply to dwindle and it had to be carefully managed and rationed, so he and his shipmates were compelled to shower with salt water. Larry chuckles as he recalls the scene.

He remembers his stories while sitting on a couch at home. The oil painting on the wall is a fitting backdrop for the telling of sea tales, as it shows a sampan with billowy sail moored by a coastline with mountains in the distance. The sky is a furnace of pastel colors: blazing reds, oranges, and yellows. Coolies wearing broadly conical bamboo hats work in the foreground, toting on their shoulders lengths of wood from which hang water buckets on opposite ends.

Today, Larry—he prefers to go by his first name only—is several weeks from his 85th birthday. Back in 1944, after finishing high school, he considered serving with Naval Aviation, but his older brother advised him to join the Merchant Marine, arguing that “the armament protection is the same [as the Navy’s] and the pay is two or three times better.

“Besides,” his brother added, “if a torpedo hits you, it doesn’t matter what ship you’re on.”

More than four decades later, with the call of the sea still in his imagination if nowhere else, Larry was working in Ballard. He regularly passed a large anchor a fisherman had salvaged from Puget Sound and installed at the entrance to an Elks Club. Frequent rains made the anchor rust and the Elks were growing tired of the resultant discolorations on the sidewalk in front of their meeting place. In the early 1990s, they gave the anchor to Larry’s employer, who eventually gave it to Larry. And, because he had an idea to display it in his yard, he was happy to take it.

“If the anchor hadn’t been looking me in the face every day, I probably wouldn’t have built the project,” he says, shaking his head good-naturedly. He also acknowledges his wife as deserving some of the credit and blame, because “she leaves the yard work to me.”

The anchor is 7 feet tall. Larry says it’s at least 100 years old. He doesn’t know how much it weighs other than “a lot.” The timbers are Seattle City Light poles, which used to be given to the public for free. The seagulls are made of ceramic (a second gull, unseen in the photograph, is behind and below the visible one). His wife purchased the ceramics and was looking for a place to put them. Larry figured his maritime tableau was “the sort of spot seagulls would want to be.

His wood-crafting skills enabled him to replace the rotted spar atop the anchor and to make the multi-colored floats seen hanging above the coiled rope, next to the circular-shaped block (as in block and tackle). He based the sea chest’s construction on a traditional design, older than that of the luxury liner steamer trunks of the early 20th century, and more like the sort of chest filled with pirates’ booty. Larry’s daughter acquired the authentic ropes from a container ship company.

Larry doesn’t sail these days. He looks to be in good shape for a man in his mid-80s, so health isn’t the reason. He calls boats “hay burners,” explaining that having a boat is like having a horse. “They’re a lot of work and a lot of expense.”

As for his impressive maritime tableau, he shrugs with modesty when complimented on all the work and skill needed to create it.

“Anybody can do something like that,” he insists. “You just start it and, before you know it, you have a finished project.”