I don't know how to write this. My friend and business partner of fifty years died last week. He was Al Sneed. He had been a young go-getter not long out of an Air Force uniform where he had been a P-38 fighter pilot during WW II.

A lot can happen in fifty years, particularly if there was never a serious disagreement, ever, in all that time.

Arguments? Debates? Of course. But never an angry pillow to punch. That is hard to believe but true.

My introduction to Al Sneed was facilitated by another prominent area citizen.

John Muller was a legendary Highline banker, building contractor of luxury homes on Marine View Drive in Arbor Heights and Seahurst and also a banker in Alaska in the forties until he got the publishing bug. A newspaper owner in Cordova fell on hard times so the bank took it over and asked Mr. Muller to run it.

When he retired up there he came to early-day Burien and bought a tiny weekly paper called the Glendale Highline Gazette.

Burien was just starting to blossom and White Center was the booming home of six taverns and a movie house, five grocery stores and three furniture stores and one bank. It had a tiny weekly also.

I lived in McMicken Heights with a wife and three sons and I sold ads for a Kent paper. Mr. Muller bought the White Center News in 1951 and asked me to run it. .

That year Mr. Muller also needed somebody to help him run the Highline Times and I had heard of a whiz-bang ad man in Renton. Mr. Muller hired Al Sneed. That was when I met Al.

The Highline Times had a clankety clank letterpress in the building next to Burien Books on 152nd Street and I printed the White Center News on it.

The press was ancient and I was unhappy with the ugly printing.

I learned of a paper in Portland that was printed on a process called offset that was so much more attractive and I went to visit the plant.

That did it. I told Al Sneed about it. I showed him some papers printed offset and he called Mr. Muller in Paris where he and a new wife, the former Marcella von Gortler, were honeymooning.

Al told Mr. Muller about a new press being built in Philadelphia.

Mr. Muller cut his honeymoon trip short and met us in Philly where we bought the press and formed a new company called Rotary Offset Publishing. We put the new offset press in a remodeled pressroom next door to the Ding How restaurant in Burien.

Then the dynamic partnership began traveling all over the state seeking users wanting the vivid product. We had customers in Port Angeles, Lynwood, Renton, Tacoma, Buckley. You name it.

Burien, before Southcenter and the burgeoning airport, was wall-to-wall with new businesses. We soon ran out of press capacity and moved a huge new press to a great new building near the White Center field house.
By the early 1970s, we had outgrown our space again so we joined a group of East Coast investors and ordered a monster new press. We called it Rotary Offset. We rented a monster building in Tukwila from Mario Segale.

About 1973 the lights went out in Seattle

We were borrowing operating capital from the bank at 22 per cent. The airport was buying up thousands of residential houses for a second runway and moving our subscribers away from the community.

All the businesses that had left White Center in the sixties went to Burien (there were five men's stores, five dress shops) and the Port even took the tennis club.

Al Sneed was beleaguered with the dramatic demise of Bell's department store, which became Lamonts, which became Gottschalk's. Even the ice rink, the movie house, the shoe stores, the men's stores, the ladies shops slowly went belly up as Southcenter drew away shoppers.

Al went on to run a newspaper in Smokey Point, later selling out. After leaving the Northwest, Al and his wife moved to Nevada. Al became a land developer until he sold out and retired, returning to Enumclaw. His wife, Bobbie, preceded him in death in 2004.

So much for his business life.

I took Al on many trips seeking steelhead and salmon on the Olympic Peninsula.

One time we were on the Hamma Hamma hiking up to the famous Blue Hole.

We had waders so when we had to cross to continue our quest, he announced that he somehow had ripped a big hole in his boots. Nearby was a makeshift gondola allowing a person to pull himself hand over hand across the stream on the cables. Al got in. I just stayed in the water and waded in the two-foot deep stream.

No problem, but he was puffing hard when we got across and finally arriving at the spectacular Blue Hole we tried our luck for ten minutes.

I made a cast into lovely riffle, got lucky and hooked a silver beauty of seven or eight pounds. I yelled at Al to come up from his spot downstream from me. Al declined. We eventually made our way back to the gondola. Al climbed aboard again while I walked beneath with one hand on the platform and the other holding fish and rod. I yelled encouragement while Al pulled us both across the stream. It was tough enough when Al came across the first time. Now he had to pull me, too.

At the far side he was actually pulling that huge box car up hill.

He never complained.....We've recalled that moment over the years and recently he muttered something about carrying me for fifty years...he was right.