How Ivar Haglund Sold Slacker Style And 'Acres Of Clams'

Think of a simpler Seattle in 1938: No Jeff Bezos, no Bill Gates, no dawn to dusk traffic jams. Instead there was Ivar Haglund, restaurateur and showman with a penchant for the preposterous.

Knute Berger told KUOW’s David Hyde that a new exhibit at the Nordic Heritage Museum tells Ivar’s story. It’s “part of that Northwest sensibility that leads you to grunge, leads you to … who wants to be New York? You know, we came here for other reasons,” Berger said. “And he really got that.”

Haglund opened his first seafood restaurant on the Seattle waterfront in 1938 (today, the chain has more than two dozen outlets). He could be thought of as part Jack Kerouac meets P.T. Barnum, with a little Burl Ives and a little Woody Guthrie thrown in, Berger said. His restaurant’s theme song spoke to the slacker aesthetic he promoted:

No longer the slave of ambition,

I laugh at the world and its shams.

I think of my happy condition,

Surrounded by acres of clams.

“You know Seattle often has had these little heroes come along,” Berger said. “People love these stories about the little guy who makes it, sort of spitting in the eye of the establishment. Nobody would have looked at Ivar and said, wow, there's a radical communist or a socialist or anything like that. But they did recognize somebody who defied the conventions of the Mad Men era, of the button-down middle class. He just brought an element of fun.”

Berger said Haglund was perfectly positioned for a changing Seattle.

“There was a burgeoning middle class in Seattle — people whose dads worked at Boeing — and so the waterfront was transitioning from a working-class place to a place of recreation for Seattle's middle class, and Ivar was right on the wave.”

So what will people find in the exhibit? There’s a photo of Ivar feeding a seal — a restaurant attraction where Berger said he got his fingers nipped as a boy. And there’s the “sports model clam gun” — basically a hunting rifle with a shovel instead of a barrel.

“So this is supposed to be a patent-pending invention of how to go about it," Berger said. "Even has a little horn on it like a bicycle horn so you can make noise, I guess, when you get your clam.”

Even in the midst of change, the Seattle of that era totally got what the gun was about, Berger said.

“The people who came to Ivar's had weekend places on Hood Canal. They would look at that clam gun and they would laugh, but they would also know what it’s like when you're hunting clams and digging with that shovel really fast.”

And what would Ivar Haglund, who died in 1985, say about the Seattle of 2015?

“I think he would think Seattle was probably taking itself too seriously,” Berger said. “I think he'd be trying to get us to lighten up and laugh at ourselves. Seattle sometimes has a hard time laughing at itself.”

The Nordic Heritage Museum is in Ballard at 3014 N.W. 67th St. Hours are 10 a.m. - 4 p.m., Tuesday - Saturday, and noon - 4 p.m., Sunday.