WHERE'D YOU GET THAT BALL CAP, BARTON?

The cap at the left was purchased online several months ago, in a nostalgic effort to get in touch with my roots.

The logo on the cap is for Rainier Beer, naturally brewed since 1878 by the now defunct Rainier Brewery in Seattle, named, of course, after Mt. Rainier.

I was born in Renton, southeast of Seattle, the home of the Boeing Aircraft Company, but largely raised in Kent, about 10 miles further south.

From either town, actually all of the Puget Sound area, you could always look up on a clear day to see Mount Rainier.  It lended a feeling of stability, like a big security blanket and on warm days of 75 or 80 Farenheit, a cooling effect.

Mount Rainier, only the third highest elevated peak in the United States, actually has the highest topographic prominence in the world.  Prominence, according to wikipedia "characterizes the height of a mountain or hill's summit by the vertical distance between it and the lowest contour line encircling it but containing no higher summit within it. It is a measure of the independence of a summit."

Grandpa Barton in 1982, playing the saw
as a musical instrument, accompanied on
piano by Grandma Barton

So, there was Rainier Beer, but also, the more popular Olympia Beer from Tumwater and something called Lucky Lager.  I was a teenager before I realized it was not "Lucky Logger," since I didn't know anything about how beer was made and my paternal grandfather, Lawrence Barton, was a logger.

In my youth the Rainier Brewing Company was owned by Emil Sick, who also owned the Seattle Rainiers, a Pacific Coast League baseball team that played at Sick's Seattle Stadium.

For you historical purists, Mount Rainier is the "white man's name."  Native Americans, the Puyallups, referred to the mountain as Ta.ho.ma, meaning "mother of waters" with the Carbon, Puyallup, Mowich, Nisqually and Cowlitz Rivers all beginning in the mountain's glaciers.