As passengers walk to check-in, they still get a glimpse of the entire mainte-
nance operation, boarding in much the same way as passengers did in the
earliest days of Kenmore’s operation.
I
T WAS 1960, AND THE morning
mist was still rising off of
Lake Washington as Howard
H. Wright climbed into the
yellow and white Cessna
180 seaplane patiently bob-
bing alongside the wooden
dock with pilot Bob Munro. The short
flight to the San Juan Islands, about 60
nautical miles northwest of Kenmore’s
Air Harbor, was the first intersection of
two Seattle families that would go on to
shape, and sometimes define the Pacific
Northwest experience.
In fact, flying above the Puget Sound
today in a Kenmore Air seaplane is still
the best vantage to understand how
these two families, the Wrights and the
Munros, influenced the Pacific North-
west — and how their descendants are
still doing it today.
LAYING THE FOUNDATION
Howard Wright owned a construction
company that helped build the Grand
Coulee Dam on the eastern side of the
state in the years before World War II.
Industry and population growth in the
region was fueled by its construction, as
were the wartime industries located in
the Northwest.
The seaplane company, whose ser-
vices Wright hired on his inaugural 1960
flight, was started by three friends who
reunited after World War II to put their
flying and mechanical engineering skills
to new use.
Wright played his own part in the fate
of the region when he and a group of
men thought that visitors of the soon-to-
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explore: NW | The Official Magazine for kenmore air | Spring 2019
Below, Kenmore Air’s five-acre campus began as
just a single hangar bordered by a swamp.
be-held 1962 World’s Fair needed some-
thing remarkable to remember their visit
to Seattle. His company would build one
of the country’s most iconic structures:
the Space Needle — a symbol for the
Century 21 Exposition and America’s
commitment to the space race.
GETTING STARTED IN SEATTLE
Four generations of Wrights have left
their mark on the Pacific Northwest
since the family arrived in Seattle.
Howard H. Wright, whose weekly flights
with Kenmore Air brought him to the
beautiful San Juan Islands, was from
the second generation. In the Great
Depression, the family had moved to
Seattle and built an apartment building
on Capitol Hill, a central neighborhood
now frequented for its buzzy bars and
highly rated restaurants. It was one of
the first projects that he and his father
took on together in the city.
Those regular flights to and from
the San Juans in the ’60s made him a
Kenmore Air regular. Kenmore Air had
developed a reputation for safety, cus-
tomer service, and reliability that was
unmatched and grew over the decades.
Similarly, the Wrights’ construction
company continued to grow. By the
1980s when the company was sold by
the Wright family, the firm was one of
the largest in Washington, where a se-
ries of high-profile projects had brought
the company from humble beginnings
as a builder to a developer of the high
rise cityscape.
Foremost among those achievements
was the Space Needle.
For Wright and his son, the Century
21 Exposition was an opportunity to
introduce the Pacific Northwest to the
wider world and, in doing so, write a
new chapter in America’s history. The
1962 World’s Fair would be held just
north of Seattle’s downtown core, at the
southern foot of Queen Anne Hill. To
its west lay Elliott Bay and the shores
of the Puget Sound. To its east was Lake
Union, where Kenmore Air would even-
tually expand.
At the time of its construction, begin-
ning in the early ’60s, the world was un-
der the shadow of the Cold War. A small
group of developers that included the
Wrights had dreams of creating a land-
mark that the world would remember
as the symbol of the exposition. They
hoped to place their creation alongside
the Eiffel Tower and the Chicago Ferris
Wheel, as structures that inspired gen-
erations to dream of the possibilities the
future would bring.