Puyallup, part 1
by Jack Flint 


It all started with my father.  At one time, he was a photographer with a newspaper
and, when I showed some interest in becoming a reporter,  he told me that all
newspapermen were drunks.  That didn't discourage me.  I still wanted to be a 
reporter and even though I had to develop a taste for alcohol, I worked at it 
diligently until I was a complete, yet functional, lush.  The romance of it was lost 
on me...being a drunk is not as easy as it looks.  Without going into lurid details 
I will just say there is a certain amount of misery involved.  As the years went by, 
it turned out the profession was changing and if the drunks didn't just die off, 
they were shunted aside by younger, sober people and forced into the backwaters of 
the profession.  The days of the raving drunk city editor of, say,  the Washington 
Post were over.  Drunks remained simply scribes and worked for third or fourth rate 
papers as their livers turned to stone.

Why is this important?   Because if I wasn't a drunk, maybe I would have been an 
editor somewhere instead of a boozy beatman and I wouldn't have been assigned to 
cover the first annual Washington State Association of Female Bodybuilders competition 
in Puyallup (pronounced just as it looks, except the "y" is silent) that's why .  I 
came by this assignment by way of a pox being set on me by my boss, the sports editor 
of the Tacoma Herald-Times-Gazette who is a young woman of questionable character but 
unimpeachable sobriety.  She got word from some treacherous lout that I had spent the 
final game of the PCL  championship between the Tacoma Rainiers and the Nashville 
Blisters (or some such) passed out in the Rainiers' clubhouse.  The accusation, of 
course, was an utter fabrication since I had actually caught the last 3 innings and 
prior to that had simply been napping due to tremendous exhaustion from tracking down 
leads in various bars the night before.  Still, any hint of slumbering in the midst of 
a story is anathema to my editor and she figured she'd zetz me with a new assignment 
rather than allow me a few richly deserved days off.  The punishment wasn't quite as 
painful as she thought it would be because I was fairly certain that I could sleep 
through the Washington State Association of Female Bodybuilders just as easily as I 
had slept through the PCL championships but naturally, I couldn't let her know that.   
I hadn't survive all these years without having, and adding to, an instinct for what 
makes people tick, so I argued with her knowing she could never enjoy her vindictive 
triumph if there wasn't a fight involved.

"The what?" I asked derisively.

"Shut up," she answered.

"There is absolutely no way I'm going to Puyallup to cover whatever it is you said."

"Call me when you get there.  You're booked at the Sunset Home for Alcoholic Chowderheads 
right next to the Best Western on something called South Hill Park Drive."

"There is also no way I'm staying at no Best Western."

"Room 14 next to the ice machine.  See how I take care of you you rotten bastard."

"Ice machine?  OK, I should be able to call in in a couple hours."

"Just one more thing.  How is it that Nashville's in the Pacific Coast League?"

"Ha!  And you call yourself a sports editor."

And so I headed to Puyallup a name which I was only vaguely aware of due to a recurring 
radio jingle:

You can do it at a trot
You can do it at a gallop
You can do it at a walk
So your heart won't palpitate
Just don't be late
Do the Puyallup

This catchy little tune did not, as you might think, refer to some ambulatory act of auto 
eroticism named for the town of Puyallup and performed at various discretionary gaits.  No.  
It referred to a 17 day long fair that happens there every September.  Luckily, I had never 
been forced to cover anything at the fair so I knew absolutely nothing about it.  The radio 
was also ableat with the news that Puyallup was also hosting the AKC Northwest Regional 
Finals whatever that might be.

There was no mention of the WSAFBB.  So I figured I must be on the trail of a scoop.

Puyallup is a town of about 35,000 nestled in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, which means if the 
thing ever erupts Puyallup will be wiped off the face of the earth in a matter of seconds.  
Geologists love telling Puyallupians that--as if they could do anything about it.  I was to 
discover that the residents were openly hostile to anyone who even looked like they might 
ask them why they were crazy enough to live at the foot of a doomsday device like Mt. Rainier, 
so I put the prospect of being buried under tons of lava and/or volcanic ash fatalistically 
out of my mind, just like the locals.  My room at the Best Western had a view of a building 
which likely had a view of the mountain so I basked in the view of the building and sipped 
cheap scotch on the limitless rocks supplied by the nearby ice machine and tried to figure 
out what I should do next. My finely honed journalistic skills enabled me to ascertain within 
hours that the building I was basking in the view of was actually the venue of this competition 
and at that point it appeared that my miserable editor had situated me such that I might 
actually have to work.  I cursed her savagely and drank more scotch.  The ice was delicious, 
which led me to believe that it must have been imported since the water in Puyallup is 
notoriously alkaline.

Having achieved a state of mellifluous banality, I decided I might as well try to figure 
out what I was supposed to do.  It was at this point I made the discovery about the venue 
and immediately became depressed once more.  How exactly does female body building competition 
work and why on earth was there a Washington State association of it?  Normally in 
sportswriting questions like those just don't come up.  Nobody has to ask what is the 
National League and what's it for.  You just write as if everybody already knows that because 
if they don't, they won't be reading your piece anyway.  So, all my training and experience 
led me to gloss over those questions as if they didn't matter, little suspecting the 
consequences of not addressing them.  As it happened, those questions were critical, and if 
I had sought answers to them before attending the competition, I would have spared myself, 
my paper and my editor (ho ho) some embarrassment and at least two bomb threats.