My Illustrious Cousin Charlie

[Jeff Higgins]

Finally landed in jail. He is in for 30 days on multiple felony charges stemming from the hazardous waste violations incurred on his ten acre property known locally as "Iron Mountain". He has been running an illegal dump there for over 20 years that I'm aware of, if not longer. He has defiantly challenged the local authorities the entire time, but they finally caught up with him.

Kind of a long read, and now ten years old, here is the best write-up of cousin Chuck that I could find:

Seattle News and Events | King of Iron Mountain: A Trip Inside the

He is kind of a local legend. I hesitate to say "hero", but he is to many. An anti-hero to just as many, if not more, I'm sure. Charlie has fought government "idiocracy" for as long as I've known him (my entire life); his heart has always been in the right place, with his sole mission in life being to help other people. Granted, his junkyard got out of control, but he has done far more good than harm in his community, and all of it on his own dime, on his own time, and under his own terms.

Read the article - it's very interesting. From a career as a Seattle cop fighting the city's drug epidemic (and continuing to do so today, 20 years after his "forced retirement" or "firing" depending on who is telling the story or how many beers Charlie has in him), to building his own widened intersection / turn lane on an accident prone section of his rural road (went from an average of 63 serious accidents per year to none recorded since his improvements), to dredging a choked off designated salmon spawning stream, to many other acts of "civil disobedience", all in the name of helping his community in the face of bureaucratic government inaction, Charlie has led a busy, interesting life.

He now sits in jail. They finally made something stick. He has embarrassed and humiliated the wrong people for far too long. Charlie is getting kind of old, though (he's about 77) but has not given up his fight. They will likely now take his land, clean it up, and do their best to forget about him. We need more guys like Charlie. Maybe without the junkyard, though.

[pwd72s]

It's our loss...society having no room now for individuals like uncle Charlie.

[DanielDudley]

Originally Posted by pwd72s

It's our loss...society having no room now for individuals like uncle Charlie.

Local legends or gross polluters ?

[brainz01]

Fascinating story. Thanks for sharing. Best wishes for Charlie.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by DanielDudley

Local legends or gross polluters ?

You know, I hesitated for over a week - since cousin Charlie's sentencing - to post this. I hesitated because I know PPOT all too well, and knew full well the kind of self-righteous, make-me-feel-better-about-myself-by-putting-someone-else-down sort of responses that are endemic to this forum. Small minds looking for the negatives about others so they can feel better about themselves. I hesitated, then figured, in my cousin Charlie's best spirit, to just "eff it, do it anyway". This place never fails to meet my lowest expectations - two replies in, we have the first winner. Guys like you couldn't carry cousin Charlie's water.

[fastfredracing]

I enjoyed that read, thanks

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by brainz01

Fascinating story. Thanks for sharing. Best wishes for Charlie.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by fastfredracing

I enjoyed that read, thanks

Thanks guys. Yes, cousin Charlie is kind of unique in this day and age. He rolls his sleeves up and helps, in spite of our officials' efforts to stop him.

And yes, he does have an illegal junkyard. What low intellect critics fail to consider, however, is that the junk on his property would be out there, somewhere, regardless of his efforts. Leaking and rotting away on some poor schmuck's property, some poor schmuck who, because of government regulation, could not afford to "properly" dispose of it on some "licensed" site. A licensed site that, in spite of the fact that they pay the government for the privilege, is still leaching the same crap into the environment that Charlie's property is ostensibly leaching.

The government has never proven that a single molecule of hazardous waste has ever escaped Charlie's property, much less has impacted the environment off of his property in any measurable way. No dead fish, no dead animals, no dead plants, no dead or impacted flora or fauna of any kind whatsoever. They scream "environmental impact" yet are under no obligation to prove a god damned thing. Governmental behavior like this should concern all of us.

At the end of the day, he has embarrassed people of authority who have landed cushy government jobs and who are not doing them, nor even trying to do them. We are encumbered by far, far too many unaccountable bureaucrats sitting around with their feet up on their desks, collecting a paycheck. Charlie has spent a lifetime calling them on that. This is not about his messy property. This is about those bureaucrats exacting revenge. That junk would be out there anyway, quietly rotting away where no one could see it, having the exact same "impact" it is having on Charlie's property.

He did nothing to create these sources of "pollution" - all he did was collect them in one place. Get them off of others' property. Some are bright enough to see how that edges towards the common good. Others will, in their simple mindedness, call him a "gross polluter".

[island911]

Originally Posted by DanielDudley

Local legends or gross polluters ?

If you've been in downtown Seattle recently you would know who to call gross polluters.

[LakeCleElum]

Jeff - Had no idea you were related...........Me, working for the City of Renton, have several memories: Chuck had a brother named Ken who was a Renton FireFighter........Ken worked in his off time running a backhoe..........Ken was setting some rockery with twine hooked to his backhoe levers. It all went wrong went he dropped a rock on his neck and died.

Did a few drug search warrants with Chuck in North Renton/South Seattle....He lived on the edge is all I'll say..........

When traffic was a mess around his "estate" in May Valley, he took his track-hoe one night and built a "left Turn lane" on the state highway. That is when he started getting attention from building inspectors.....

Seattle Police Sgt David Orange lived next door and his kids (Daughter Shasta) were all legends.......(How would you like to grow up with a name of Shasta Orange?????).

Fun times we had.....Renton Fire still has the Ken Pillon Golf Tourney every year........Chuck has been gone from SPD at least 20 at this point....

[onewhippedpuppy]

Really cool story Jeff, thanks for posting.

[billybek]

Great read. Sounds like an interesting character...

[fred cook]

Great story! I especially like the turn lane story! I think every family has one like your cousin Charlie. In my case, it was a great uncle who was a gambler. At one point, he won a sternwheeler riverboat in a poker game, operated it for several years and then lost it in a poker game! From time to time, he would go by to see my grandfather in order to pawn his wife's jewelry to get a stake. A few days or weeks later he would come back around to pay my grandfather back and get the jewelry back for his wife. Funny how the horse thieves and ner do wells are always more interesting than the "honest" folks!

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by LakeCleElum

Jeff - Had no idea you were related...........Me, working for the City of Renton, have several memories: Chuck had a brother named Ken who was a Renton FireFighter........Ken worked in his off time running a backhoe..........Ken was setting some rockery with twine hooked to his backhoe levers. It all went wrong went he dropped a rock on his neck and died.

Did a few drug search warrants with Chuck in North Renton/South Seattle....He lived on the edge is all I'll say..........

When traffic was a mess around his "estate" in May Valley, he took his track-hoe one night and built a "left Turn lane" on the state highway. That is when he started getting attention from building inspectors.....

Seattle Police Sgt David Orange lived next door and his kids (Daughter Shasta) were all legends.......(How would you like to grow up with a name of Shasta Orange?????).

Fun times we had.....Renton Fire still has the Ken Pillon Golf Tourney every year........Chuck has been gone from SPD at least 20 at this point....

I was actually a lot closer to Ken when I was growing up. We would visit my aunt Evelyn and uncle Chuck at their place in Renton all the time when I was a kid, and Ken would often be there. He came over to our place quite a bit as well, often helping my dad with his many construction projects on our house. I didn't see Chuck nearly as much, at least not until I was all grown up and had started my own family. That was about the time Chuck started having our yearly family reunions out at his place, and I first really started getting to know him.

During those years, Chuck was, at first, still with the SPD. I think he got fired / retired around '86 or '87, so it's been all of 30 years now. I remember the year after he found himself unemployed, he got some scraggly little black and white mutt and went up to Dutch Harbor, where he employed his "drug sniffing dog" to help the fishing boats with the drug problems they were then experiencing with their crews. We always had a good laugh over his mangy little "police dog", but I guess it got the job done.

One of the things Chuck did after this article was written was to get a few of those crapped out old Metro buses running, which he used to start May Valley Bus Lines. He had a couple of his "staff" driving them all around May Valley providing low cost or free bus service. With no business license or anything at all like that, of course.

As the years have gone by, and especially since Ken died, I haven't seen much of Chuck. His mom and my dad were two of thirteen siblings, all of whom have now passed. We pretty much only saw one another at family funerals for some time, of which there were far too many for awhile. Including, sadly, his youngest son John, who has been gone for twelve years now.

I'll run out there and say "hi" again once his 30 days are up. It's been too long.

[john70t]

In many ways it's what society does as a whole, slowly but surely.
(Not just one person on one piece of property.)

Holding onto mountains of metal could be compared to a big piggybank. eh?
It seems there is a little rebel, a lot of entrepreneur, and a little sad hoarding in that guy.

Getting permits and doing it all "legally" doesn't make it any better:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/20/fastest-growing-city-america-florida-cape-coral-215724
https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/10/17219434/hunters-point-shipyard-navy-cleanup-san-francisco-faked
We humans tend to build on the most ecologically valuable places and destroy them just by our presence.

[Bill Douglas]

I knew an old gent like that, Marty Hume. Marty was just wired differently, never quite the same after he came home from the war.

He had piles of broken down cars on his property, out of sight behind a row of plants (gorse). They decided they were noxious weeds and forced him to remove them, then gave him hell about the junk yard.

He had the most beautiful daughter I remember.

I mentioned to my mom that I'd met this eccentric guy called Marty Hume and she told me that he was a Battle of Britain ace pilot. Marty was a true gentleman and fun to hear his fighter plane stories from.

[wdfifteen]

Interesting character, glad he lives a couple thousand miles from me. I like my mailbox just fine and wouldn’t appreciate some jackass laughing about wiping it out so he could haul some piece of junk down our road.

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

Interesting character, glad he lives a couple thousand miles from me. I like my mailbox just fine and wouldn’t appreciate some jackass laughing about wiping it out so he could haul some piece of junk down our road.

The thing about cousin Charlie, and guys like him, is that if he did actually mow down your mailbox, he would return to build you a better one than you originally had. That's the difference between guys like him and guys like you. You wouldn't even begin to understand.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

The thing about cousin Charlie, and guys like him, is that if he did actually mow down your mailbox, he would return to build you a better one than you originally had. That's the difference between guys like him and guys like you. You wouldn't even begin to understand.

The difference between guys like him and guys like me is I wouldn’t drag a piece of junk down the road and wipe out my neighbor’s mailboxes and then laugh about it.
I must have missed the part of the story where he replaced everyone’s mail box. But as I said, I like my mailbox just fine as it is. I don’t want anyone wiping it out or building it back in a way they think is “better.”

[LakeCleElum]

For those interested, Some good reading about Sgt Chuck:

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/guest-seattle-needs-to-crack-down-on-street-crime-with-more-police/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1jaQVr0gNE&list=PLGoTFXEjRKxIaX6ejXZdBwT9EgZGZXryZ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um6er1ZNqvA

https://crosscut.com/2014/12/d-word-seattle-confronts-dilemma-depolicing

https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/PSCSC/Findings/Pillon_FFCLO_PSCSC_07-20-88.pdf

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

The difference between guys like him and guys like me is I wouldn’t drag a piece of junk down the road and wipe out my neighbor’s mailboxes and then laugh about it.
I must have missed the part of the story where he replaced everyone’s mail box. But as I said, I like my mailbox just fine as it is. I don’t want anyone wiping it out or building it back in a way they think is “better.”

Of course it never occurs to you that he would come knocking on your door to first apologize, then ask you what you would like in the way repairs or a new stand, and probably even offer you a beer while you talked about it. You might even make a new friend by the time all is said and done.