If you read the Inslee post below you'll find a link to HistoryLink.org, an amazing online source for Washington state history. It is often a first stop for me in trying to learn the history of the area. (I've spent lots of time — not on the clock of course — reading the great minor league baseball history there.)

In one of those strange coincidences, soon after posting that I received an e-mail from a colleague with a post from Michael Hood at blatherwatch saying that Walt Crowley, the site's president and executive director, is about to lose his voice due to cancer.

Walt's voice has been a little scratchy lately — he's been battling cancer of the larynx with what doctors believed was a winning regimen of chemicals and radiation. Last week, a year after his last treatment, doctors found more cancer. His voice will be removed at Virginia Mason Medical Center. ...

(Walt will have an electro-larynx installed, the vibrating voice thingie that makes its owner's voice sound robotic — a fate that may be more acceptable to Walt than to us: admirer of robots that he is).

The prognosis is good for him after this surgery, but speechlessness is not an easy prospect when thinking of Walt who's a conversationalist, public speaker, and a former broadcaster.

Walt's voice has been an important one in Seattle for many years. I can't claim to know him well, but he has been a huge influence on journalists around the city. His friend Hood describes Walt as a "growly old lefty, activist historian and Seattle bon piquante."

Here's hoping that Walt recovers quickly and finds new ways to share what he's thinking.

Crowley was on KUOW's Weekday Monday for what was billed as his swan song. Listen to it here. And here is HistoryLink's entry on Crowley.