All the news that fits, gum that sticks at Pike Place

SEATTLE — Lee Lauckhart carries all the printed news that’ll fit into his little stand, First & Pike News, at Pike Place Market. One of his big sellers? The raw components of Seattle’s nearby Gum Wall.

He’s done this for 35 years, and the numbers say he should probably stop. But he’s not ready.

“My mother always said I had printer’s ink in my blood, because we had so many newspaper owners and writers in the family,” Lauckhart says. “But nobody had stooped so low as to sell the newspapers.”

Then came Lauckhart. His degree from the University of Washington is in public health. But when he was 35, a brother-in-law on the East Coast offered him a temporary gig running a newsstand at 23rd and Park Avenue in Manhattan. It was cold, and it was the early ’70s — miserable years in New York. But “I just liked the whole action thing. I’d never even made change.”

When Lauckhart returned to Seattle, he sold jewelry, then joined a partner and opened a newsstand on Pike Place, which was resurgent in the late 1970s. Later, he bought out the partner. It’s called First & Pike News, though old-timers still use its previous name, Read All About It.

He remembers when there were few flower merchants, when most fishmongers were Sephardic Jews, when Starbucks was selling just coffee beans and equipment.

His best year? 1994. Nine employees then. There are four now, as the newspaper business withers and magazines fade.

But Lauckhart, a canny 72-year-old in a plaid cap and a Financial Times apron, can’t help himself. This is what he loves — the foreign titles, the ebb and flow of locals and tourists shouldering their way toward the flying fish or the Hmong flower merchants. He has 2,345 titles in about 350 square feet, he says, but “for the last four or five years, I haven’t been making any money at all on this.”

What keeps him afloat is other stuff tourists want: postcards, stamps, ChapStick, batteries, aspirin and such. Also refrigerator magnets, for which, believe it or not, he needed the landlord’s permission.