Archives West Finding Aid

The Seafair Festival began in 1950. Seattle's previous summer festival, Potlatch, ran intermittently from 1911 to 1914 and from 1934 until 1941. Festival organizers were interested in reviving the tradition and hired Walter Van Camp, director of St. Paul's Winter Carnival, to create a new maritime-themed summer festival for the city. Seafair featured many events including parades, music, waterskiing and hydroplane competitions, and other festivities. In addition to the main events, neighborhood activities and parades were also held throughout the city in areas such as Lake City, the Central District and the International District. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Aqua Theatre on Green Lake also hosted music and comedy events as well as swim and high dive performances by the Aqua Follies. In the festival's first year, the downtown parade alone drew crowds of 150,000. In 2022, the festival celebrated its 73rd year with events reaching an estimated two million people.

The festival also featured a royal court including a king, queen and princesses whose responsibilities included acting as spokespeople for the fair, attending Seafair events, greeting dignitaries and promoting the spirit of the festival. The queen and princesses were selected from beauty pageant winners from local communities based on a range of criteria. In earlier years, they were judged based on poise, beauty, speaking ability and general conduct. In the 1960s and 1970s, additional criteria such as community service, academics, leadership and talent were added.

The Seafair Royal Court was supplemented with visiting beauty queens and pageant winners from communities throughout the Pacific Northwest. Contestants would gather in Seattle at the start of the festival and stay at the Olympic Hotel. They participated in events throughout Seafair including the Torchlight Parade.

Lana Kurtzer (1908-1988) was an accomplished pilot and instructor. He grew up in Seattle, attending Roosevelt High School and the University of Washington. He first soloed a plane in 1927 at the age of 19. Kurtzer received his commercial pilot's license in 1930 and attracted newspaper headlines the following year when he safely landed his plane and two passengers on Copalis Beach after his engine caught fire.

He began Kurtzer Flying School at Boeing Field circa 1933. (Newspaper accounts mention the business for the first time in 1933 and it first appears in the Seattle City Directory in 1934.) By 1937, Kurtzer was operating another flight school location offering seaplane instruction and charter flights on Lake Union at Terry Ave. N. and Valley St. By the end of 1941, the school was solely operating out of the Lake Union location. In addition to offering passenger flights, Kurtzer Flying Service was one of the largest flying schools in the country, training thousands of pilots.

In January 1942, all private flying businesses were forced to shut down due to a wartime prohibition on private flying in the Puget Sound and broader coastal defense region. During the war, Kurtzer relocated to Yakima where he taught Army Air Corps cadets how to fly. He also flew scouting missions over Alaska and Yukon Territory for the Corps of Engineers to help identify a route for an inland railroad to be established in the event that the Japanese captured the Pacific coast.

In 1946 Kurtzer returned to Seattle and reestablished Kurtzer Flying Service at 950 Westlake Ave. N. Kurtzer continued offering flights at this location until he was 77 years old, stopping only when required by the Federal Aviation Administration medical examiner. At the time of his retirement, Kurtzer had logged 36,000 hours of flying.