Radio’s Ted Potter, Paul Brendle, Cliff Murphy, Baron Von Kay Sound, Ted Garlatz Sr. & Jr.–The crowded skies of Seattle

A Bird’s-Eye View: Commuter Stress Makes Freeways A Mess
Oct 8, 1991
Emmett Watson
Last Friday was one of those lovely, clear, warm, forgiving fall days, so it seemed like a good day to go up and watch the carnage.
I joined up with Ted Potter of the KOMO air patrol. Friday, of course, is a traditional time of cursing, fender bending and car-commuting frustration, a time even of mortal danger on our freeways.
Ted Potter flies over all this. In between news snips, commercials and other air-talk, Ted brings traffic reports from I-5, both cross-lake bridges, I-90 and any other jam-ups he encounters.
When I first met up with Ted, I said, “I’ve not been up with you for two years. I listen to you all the time; it seems like traffic is hellish.”
“You’ll see a big change,” he said. “The traffic’s getting worse all the time. After a while, you’ll see the Eastside. All shingle roofs, new houses – big houses – and cul-de-sacs.”
Ted flies a 1981 Cessna 172, a high-winger with a good view of the ground. It’s a 1981 model but it’s powered by a 1991 engine. He puts in a new engine every year.
Last year he flew an engine 1,507 hours on traffic watch. The air-frame has about 13,000 hours on it, “and I guess I’m responsible for 12,000 of them.”
This is long, tedious work – up early to fly for 3 1/2 hours, then another 3 1/2 hours during the afternoon commutes. He is always on call for emergency traffic situations.
Ted is a big man (the son of famed aviatrix Illovene Potter) and he loves to fly. He’d have to. He has been traffic-watching for KOMO for 12 years.
Between morning and evening traffic watches, Ted is director of flight services for Galvin Flight Service, meaning he is responsible for everything Galvin sends up in the air.
For fun, Ted flies his own Great Lakes biplane with an open cockpit. He gets in a little jet time at Galvin.
If he has learned anything in his years of traffic-watch flying, Ted has concluded that the human being, the ordinary, perhaps even God-fearing, kind-to-children-and-animals commuter, becomes a different person during long-distance travel in high traffic.
“They are normally nice people,” he says, “but get them behind the wheel of a car and they become aggressive, hostile and accidents about to happen.
“I’ve seen them get into fistfights after accidents. I’ve seen them veer off the freeway onto adjoining on-ramps. They run all sorts of terrible risks to save a few minutes.”
Ted is in constant touch with the State Patrol to report accidents, jam-ups and unusual traffic patterns.
He said that early this summer the State Patrol did an “emphasis patrol” on Highway 405 out of Bellevue toward Bothell. This was between the hours of 7-9 a.m.
“They used patrol cars, radar and an airplane. They arrested several people going 70 and 80 miles per hour, one going 90. They got three DWIs – this was in the morning!”
Because hundreds of thousands of commuters have followed his traffic alerts over so many years, Ted has become something of a celebrity.
At one time, because of microphone-muffling, radio technicians were able to create a “studio atmosphere” in Ted’s broadcasts.
“We had to stop that and let in a little airplane noise,” Ted laughed. “A lot of commuters thought I wasn’t up there, that I was broadcasting from the ground.”
The behavior of motorists on gridlocked I-5 and 405, and their on- and off-ramps, can be laid to stress, Ted thinks. They either don’t or can’t allow themselves adequate time to get where they want to go.
Ted is familiar with stress. Flying in the dark, early mornings and evenings, in bad winter weather, plus broadcasting, peering below for trouble spots, is stressful enough.
“But even more stressful is driving a car down there,” he says. “I get stress up here, but not like in a car.”
Potter and his wife, Barbara, used to commute from Federal Way but the traffic got too thick. They planned together, drawing a circle on a map, calculating distance and stop signs, and now live in West Seattle.
Ted lives seven miles from Galvin. Barbara, who works for Laird-Norton Trust, drives 7.2 miles to her office in the Norton Building. They each have the same number of stoplights. The trips average 15 minutes apiece.
“There are people who call me,” Ted says, “people who commute to work in Seattle from Bellingham, Olympia and Shelton. I don’t see how they do it. Some people tell me they commute 180 miles a day.”
Below us, by now, the downtown freeway was clogged. Traffic moved fairly well on the Evergreen Point Bridge, but the slightest fender bender would back up traffic for miles.
At one point, a man abandoned his stalled car in the middle of the downtown freeway. There were several minor accidents.
North of Northgate, nearing the Redmond-Bothell turnoff on I-5, Ted put his traffic-watch plane into a tight bank, looked down and said, rather sadly, “Well, there’s one less motorcyclist.”
Below were three patrol cars and an aid car. The cyclist, victim of some kind of collision, was off to the hospital.
You know, there isn’t really a solution to all this. A few Band-Aid measures, to be sure: Staggered work hours, better and more on- and off-ramps, although any serious solution must involve the railroad tracks that already exist from Bellingham to Puyallup.
The problem with freeways, as always, is that they become obsolete at precisely the time you finish them. More freeways? More bridges? Whole neighborhoods would be wrecked, the general physical beauty of Seattle and surrounding areas would once again be badly scarred.
“I suppose one answer is to work at home, perhaps near neighborhood work centers,” Ted said. “So much is being done with computers now, it doesn’t much matter where you work.
“In a few years, with more growth, we are simply not going to get there from here.”
Emmett Watson’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.

********”He has been traffic-watching for KOMO for 12 years.”

The column ran in Oct. 1991, and Watson was close, but not quite accurate: Before KOMO, Ted was the KAYO traffic reporter in the KAYO Skyhawk in 1981-82.

Ted Jr. passed away in 2011. ******

Pilot has seen volcano’s results: ‘Utter destruction’
The Catholic Northwest Progress, Volume 83, Number 21, 23 May 1980
By Bill Dodds

Ted Garlatz Jr. knows what a volcano can do. He has seen the destruction. Last Monday Garlatz piloted his charter plane 700 feet above the north fork of the Toutle River, a channel of water transformed by Mount St. Helens’ eruption Sunday morning. ‘‘For miles the area is completely wiped out,”’ Garlatz described. ““There’s nothing there. The river is gone. Just mud. I saw no wildlife. There are craters maybe 10 feet deep. The ground is blackened with ashes. Everything is a gray-black: Thousands of trees are on their sides. Not broken in half. Just down. It’s not like anything on earth. ““There aren’t enough adjectives to explain it,”’ he continued. “Imagine the surface of Venus or the moon. It’s like a picture of a nuclear explosion. “It’s utter destruction,” explain- . ed the former Kennedy High School and Marymount Academy student. Garlatz and- his father, Ted Garlatz_ Sr., have become very familiar with Mount St. Helens over the last two months. The owners and operators of Seattle Air Charter, they regularly flew reporters – and photographers for KOMO television and sightseers. (They also cover the KOMO radio traffic reports daily.) “We’ve flown over and around the mountain a lot in the last couple months,”’ Garlatz said, ‘‘and the change that has taken place is like night and day. It has a horse-shoe shaped top now. It was 9,700 feet.

Now it is more like 8,500. It’s got a flat top, like a crew cut. “The snow. is almost all gone or it’s black with ash. You can see big erosion marks down the sides that before were covered with snow. You can tell the mountain has been around the blocks a few times.”’ I saw two eruptions when I was up (Monday),”’ Garlatz said, ‘‘but they were nothing like the one Sunday when my dad went up. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and talk with him about what he saw. “The mountain looks like a big smokestack. The smoke doesn’t shoot up, it billows. Like a growing mushroom. The eruptions didn’t look like a Tarzan movie. There was some lightning but no fire. An eruption looks like a big forest fire.”’ Garlatz has flown along the southern and western 20-mile government-restricted perimeter of the volcano. “I’ve stayed away from the northeastern half because there was so much ash in the air,’’ he said. ‘I . flew through a little. You have to be careful. Basically, it’s like sand in the air. It smells like ashes from a fireplace. I’m anxious to get back and see what’s left of Spirit Lake. It isn’t scary, but you have to be prudent. ‘‘What was most impressive was seeing all the destruction from the blast, the melting snow and the mudslides. You can drive in your car and see what the river looks like * downstream, but the flooding ‘~ doesn’t hold a candle to what’s ” upstream. ‘‘People who say they liked living up there and want to go back are crazy,”’ Garlatz concluded. ‘‘They ““haven’t seen the destruction.”’
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Seattle Times November 1993- Ted Garlatz Sr., `Man In The Sky’ For Komo — He Flew 2.6 Million Air Miles While Reporting Traffic
Nov 18, 1993
Ted Garlatz Sr., KOMO radio’s popular “man in the sky” for two decades, died Sunday. He was 73.
“He was a very gentle, kind man,” recalled Larry Nelson, KOMO-AM’s morning host, who worked and flew with Mr. Garlatz.
“Teddy really took me under his wing. . . . We called him `Garflaps.’ ”
By the time he quit flying in 1983 after suffering a stroke, Mr. Garlatz had logged 2.6 million air miles, about as many as a retired commercial airline pilot, said his son, Ted Garlatz Jr.
Despite two crashes during his career at KOMO, the elder Garlatz felt no pressure and no fear, said his son, who followed in his father’s footsteps as an eye-in-the-sky traffic reporter.
Mr. Garlatz walked away from both crashes, each of which involved emergency landings at Husky Stadium. His friends dubbed the stadium “Ted Garlatz Memorial Airport.”
Nelson recalled a hoax he and Mr. Garlatz pulled after it became clear that competing stations KING and KOL were using KOMO’s traffic reports. On a prearranged signal from Nelson, Mr. Garlatz reported over a two-way radio (but not over the air) that a truck full of oil barrels had overturned on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. The sting worked.
KING sent news cars to the scene, and KOL and KJR both put traffic alerts on air, Nelson recalled.
“The news director at KING was screaming that we were perpetrating a hoax and were going to sue,” Nelson recounted. “It turned out their attorney was our attorney.”
Mr. Garlatz was born in Seattle Dec. 30, 1919. He went to St. George Elementary School in south Seattle and graduated from Cleveland High School in 1937.
He then went to school in Glendale, Calif., and became a sheet-metal specialist, working on aircraft. He worked for Boeing during World War II and later joined the Navy, where he fixed bullet-damaged planes, despite wanting to be a fighter pilot.
Mr. Garlatz began soloing in the 1940s and obtained his commercial pilot’s license in the early 1950s.
“He desired to fly until the day he died,” his son said.
Ted Garlatz Jr. occasionally filled in during his father’s final 10 years at KOMO. When events were particularly newsy, such as the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, both flew for KOMO in separate planes.
“We were the only father-and-son team that ever flew a traffic watch that we know of in the United States,” the son said.
Mr. Garlatz made a remarkable recovery after his stroke, traveling to Europe with his son, Larry Nelson and another friend three months later.
From the early ’60s until his retirement from KOMO, Mr. Garlatz and his son ran a flight and air-taxi operation, Seattle Air Charter, at Boeing Field. In the past decade, they ran a property-ownership and management business.
For the past five years, Mr. Garlatz had been suffering from leukemia, and his death resulted from complications related to the disease.

Other traffic reporters: Clark Stahl, Wendy/KJR, Ted Potter, and Rudy Schroeder. Bob Young, Baron Von Kay Sound of KSND, and for anyone familiar with Phoenix media history, the obit for Jerry Foster.

SEATTLE P-I February 14, 1982–