Gordon Bowker, who died recently at 82, was a Seattle treasure — twice over. Before he was 40, he had co-founded two national brands, Starbucks and Red Hook Brewery. After that, my friend of 57 years focused on the art of living — for family, friends, and travel. He had a tremendous impact on the town and on his friends and family. Unlike most entrepreneurial successes, he remained rooted in Seattle and the Ballard of his Norwegian mother. He made his money and his fame and then turned to more lasting things.
Gordon used to tell me that he started Starbucks (with two decades-long friends Zev Siegl and Jerry Baldwin), simply because he wanted to give Seattle really good coffee. He led with his exacting standards of what he called “product-driven” companies, rather than “market-driven” firms that exist to exploit a niche. (Product-driven means the person in charge really knows a lot about the product and is a perfectionist about it.) As Starbucks grew from its first Pike Market store in 1971, it absorbed Peet’s of Berkeley (which was the real start of artisanal coffee in America, and where Bowker learned the exacting trade as an unpaid intern). All these enterprises got too much for Gordon to keep it all in his head, and he “hit a wall.” Soon he sold Starbucks to Howard Schultz, the hard-charging marketing dynamo reluctantly hired in 1982.
The first Starbucks was not about serving coffee, but was limited to selling dark-roasted beans and equipment (also spices and teas). Eventually, the company stumbled upon Italian cafes, which Schultz imported from Italy, and realized the global spread of the idea of “coffee-flavored milk drinks” (not exactly Italian). That turn away from Baldwin’s “worship of the bean” under Schultz’s advocacy drove two founders (Siegl and Bowker) out of the business, with Baldwin staying on to run Peet’s.
Not entirely out of the specialty coffee business, to be sure. After the non-compete clause expired, Siegl started Quartermaine in Washington DC, as an encore that didn’t work out when Starbucks countered by opening stores across the street. Nor did Red Hook prove long-lived, since many other microbreweries glutted the market, and the business turned out to be an undignified wait for competitors to run out of money and die.
I first met Gordon as a fellow writer for KING’s high-standards Seattle Magazine, and Bowker was a well-read, exacting writer who had been a film maker. When the magazine went out of business in 1970, he joined up with the magazine’s brilliant art director, Terry Heckler, to form an advertising agency, Heckler-Bowker, that brashly undermined staid advertising with jolly, mocking ads for Rainier Beer and K2.
I think of Gordon in those days as a pre-1960s figure out to shock the establishment and follow his subversive, contrarian instincts. The city grew such figures then, and just as Bill Gates detonated IBM, so Starbucks demolished Folger’s and other “industrial brews.” That was the Seattle style, and Gordon became an iconic figure of that creative explosion.
He didn’t like being a celebrity, being a shy, slow-to-speak thinker. I still remember when he was on the Seattle Weekly board, which he had helped me to create in 1976, that he would slowly lower his forehead to the table the better to think about the issue or to protest all the conventional wisdom being uttered. He was always a good listener and the last person to speak — memorably. I think he wanted after all that business success to regain his inwardness, independence, and creative spark.
Many times, I tried to get him to write for the periodicals I was editing, but he always begged off. It turns out that he kept diaries for his many trips to Southeast Asia, where his father’s submarine was sunk, and to China to drop off his grandfather’s rare Asian-coin collection, and to Italy. And Oahu, where his mother and father conceived him. (He was born in Oakland, about the time he lost his father at sea.) These diaries, full of philosophical reflections and precise observations, he left to his daughter Rosie at his death.
“I never lost a friend,” Gordon would tell me, and he was an attentive friend to many, including many artists such as his wife, Celia Petrich Bowker. These friends spanned a wide range of ages and backgrounds, and Gordon was fond of annual ceremonies like the Christmas lunches Gordon, his attorney Doug Raff, climate expert Eileen Quigley, and I would have, dispensing considered gifts. Another ritual was his annual trip to Rome. The poet Jed Myers accompanied Gordon on such a trip, writing a poem “I’m Shown Rome in Early October,” about a last walk and meal with Bowker at a favored restaurant:
“My friend’s eyes are wet
With lastness. Age thins the blood,
A man’s marrow will flag
though he steeps it in all he loves.
…The whitehaired waiter bends closer
to hear. For us both my friend asks
for the vino della casa, rosso.”
In the end, haunted by the fatal blood-marrow disease that he lived with for 12 years and the father he never knew, Gordon Bowker led a life artfully lived by a connoisseur and dispenser of life’s deepest pleasures.
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I remember hanging out with Gordon and Zev in the early 1970s at the original Starbucks, where I bought whole beans and ground them at home. They had a wide variety of beans from all over the world, and could expound in detail about every one.
My lasting impression of them was that yes, these guys were in business to make money, but at the same time, they were going to have fun doing it. And, from all appearances, they did. A far cry from the execrable Schultz.