Читать книгу Spooked in Seattle - Ross Allison - Страница 19

On August 8, 1936, Washington Democratic representative Marion A. Zioncheck fell to his death from this building. Zioncheck’s life was a very colorful one prior to its sudden ending. He was born December 5, 1901 in Poland, only to be relocated to Seattle four years later. He was the son of poor immigrants who resided in the Beacon Hill neighborhood. He started out taking on many odd jobs, such as a logger, a cowboy, and even sold rat pelts on a bounty during the plague scares in which rats were targeted as carriers. These and the other twenty odd jobs helped him and his family get by before he was of age to graduate from high school. Later he struggled to complete his schooling that led him to a law degree from the University of Washington.

Marion was indeed a radical, a charmer, and a fighter. He was the first public defender for the dispossessed and the homeless. He had Seattle mayor Frank Edwards recalled in 1931, and he was the first to represent Washington’s congressional district as a Democrat.

It was during the Great Depression that Zioncheck was elected to Congress at the age of thirty-two and served from March 4, 1933 until his death. While in office, he was making headlines mostly for extracurricular antics and drunken escapades with his new wife Rubeye Louise Nix, whom he married within a week a one-night stand. One late-night frolic in the Rockefeller Center fountain led to an arrest. He even drove down the sidewalk and then parked on the White House lawn. He was also known to sneak into hotels and hijack the telephone switchboard to wish guests a Happy New Year. At one time, after he had received an eviction notice from his DC apartment, he refused to leave and forcibly dragged his elderly landlady out of her building. Once he himself was tossed out of a formal dinner party for lapping up his soup like a dog. He was known to start and even get involved in student riots and even fights. He and his wife were caught throwing coconuts at people from their hotel window in Puerto Rico while on honeymoon. Some may have found him an interesting character, but others believed he had sanity issues. In fact, he was committed at Gallinger Hospital in DC, but later escaped on Independence Day in 1936.