Suzie is poured from family's mold

By Jerry Robinson

Meet Suzie Burke. The Iron Lady from White Center, schooled at Holy Family Elementary and Holy Names and now Queen of Fremont.

Eldest daughter of Joe and Florence Burke, she is poured from the same mold.

Charming, affable, a mind honed on a razor strap, Suzie was born to play keeper of the Burke legend.

I met Joe, now deceased way back in 1950, when he was living at the mouth of Salmon Creek, where it flows into the Sound in the Shorewood community of Burien.

He owned the water system for the whole area. It was an array of leaking wooden pipes held together with wire. The water percolated from springs in the hillsides along Marine View Drive and Ambaum Boulevard. It wasn't meant to serve more than a few homes.

The water system was the crux of local growth and sometimes there was not enough for Shorewood kids to fill a tub on Saturday night. Nobody felt sorry for Joe when he wanted to raise water rates so he could fix his rotting system. Needless to say he was not very popular.

To correct a supposed wrong, this writer, new to the area, decided to use the White Center News as a public forum and air out the debate with popular radio personality and resident Bill Mosier acting as referee.

It was one of my dumber ideas that ended up with everybody mad at me.

I remember the happy day that they buried the hatchet and smoked the peace pipe and I still had my scalp. And Shorewood had its water.

Joe worked as a millwright at a lumber mill on the shore of Lake Union below the Aurora Bridge in the 1930's until it went belly up in the depression.

With his tough, can-do spirit, he took it across the street, hired everyone who would have been laid off and three years later moved the business to a corner near the Fremont Bridge in 1939. He named it Burke Millwork and made a small fortune.

The Burke family is devoutly Catholic (Joe gave Father Ailbe McGrath enough money to build the bell tower on the new Holy Family church in White Center in 1953). Florence and Joe felt a Catholic education was paramount to raising a child. So much so that sometimes the rules had to be broken to meet the objective.

Holy Family School was simply too far to walk and Joe went to the mill quite early. That left it up to Florence.

I'm certain everyone prayed for her. She learned to drive a car just enough to take the kids to school. One of the millwrights showed her how to shift the gears. No one told her about the rules of the road or the legal paperwork. Who needs a license if they're only going a couple of miles each day?

Suzie began working for her dad as a fill-in secretary in the 1960's, but left to get married and raise a family. As her dad got older, he decided to call Suzie back to run the company. She has been there ever since.

She's not apologetic about her will to improve Fremont from those days of empty buildings. She used an iron hand in a velvet glove.

Her 1986 land purchase involved the building that housed the Fremont Tavern. It took some doing, but in 2001 she prevailed by moving the entire building one block west to preserve its historic craftsmanship rather than tear it down for a new development.

Today her office headquarters shars a building with the Red Door Ale House.

The Burke waterfront between White Center and Burien was once home to a pioneer sawmill and favorite landing spot for rum runners in the 1920's and 1930's. Joe called it Smugglers Cove.

Real old-timers remember gaffing huge salmon when the creek ran across Ambaum Boulevard near Schick Shadel Hospital at 122nd Street.

Salmon no longer can get up the creek any farther than a culvert under the road at the base of the sewer treatment plant, built in 1958, but do gather at tidal waters each spawning season.

It was our good fortune to live on the bluff overlooking Salmon Creek in the 1950's. The creek had a number of small tributaries so all the Robinson boys cherish the countless summer days they roamed the dense hillside fishing for small trout and playing explorer.

But they never did see Suzie. Being a visionary requires staying way ahead of the crowd.