SEATTLE — They were a distasteful breed, all in all, the loud-mouthed young hustlers who sold newspapers on this city's street corners, and when the 11- and 12-year-old newsboys got driven out in the early part of the last century, the old men and toothless reprobates who replaced them were scarcely any better.
"In every condition of decrepitude, some with two crutches, some with one, some with but one arm, some partially blind and some totally blind," a county judge wrote in 1937. Still, he allowed, they had "manhood enough to stand on street corners day and night, freezing cold and storm, to sell newspapers for pennies, rather than beg, which, from the evidence, would in some instances be equally or more remunerative."
Gradually, the old metal shacks that were the boutiques of the news gave way to vending machines and home delivery; the old news wretches died; selling newspapers on the street became a license to go broke.
Enter Benjamin Gant, whose narrow, blue-metal kiosk at the corner of Pike Street and Third Avenue, said to be the last surviving corner newsstand in Seattle, sells newspapers (well, most of them are free), hot coffee, soft drinks and copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence (at $5 apiece, these are Gant's real profit engine).
"If you can keep a level head in all This Confusion, then you just don't understand the Situation," says a sign posted prominently on one wall.
Gant, 28, is battling with the city over whether his 87-year-old newsstand -- one of the oldest in Seattle, where the city's most famous news vendor, the one-legged, trumpet-mouthed labor activist and Newsboys Union founder Frank Turco sold papers for 47 years -- should be razed as an eyesore.
The city and some neighboring merchants are leaning toward the affirmative; Gant is launching a last-ditch effort to save his 6-by-6-foot kiosk by turning it into a memorial for Turco and, by extension, the early 20th century labor union movement that briefly turned Seattle into what many thought would become, in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the next flash point in a world workers' revolt.
"This guy was an American hero. In 1961, he was bringing up deforestation being a major issue, he was talking about government not representing people's interests, he was talking about jobs being lost to outsourcing, about juvenile delinquency happening because both parents have to work. Well, these are all things that have come to pass," Gant said.
