Luckily for him, and for us, Emmett Watson’s beat as a columnist for The Seattle Times required him to stay in touch with his beloved native city. In his daily meanderings, usually accompanied by his miniature poodle, Tiger, Watson saw much that is invisible to the rest of us. Of course, he was around longer than most of us, too—over eight decades, five of them as a newspaperman whose happy fate it had been to assay the crooked timber of humanity and reassure us of its worth.

As he looked at Seattle, Watson discerned, with a geologist’s eye, human fossils buried in layers of history here, there and everywhere.

In this volume, a companion to his Digressions of a Native Son, published almost three decades ago, Watson brings to life some of the citizens Seattle should not forget, and, along the way, reminds us that a city is a human habitat whose history can properly be told only in the tale of its people.