Both dreamed of operating a business where they and their customers could be openly gay.
Mac was in his 30s, working as a prison guard, while Chadwick was in his 20s, selling retail goods for the Woodard chain. When they accidentally saw each other again on a city bus, they began a relationship that would until last Chadwick died 44 years later. In the early 50s, the two had met in a beer parlor in Vancouver. Mac, as he was always called, had been born in Quebec, that first name a reminder of his mother’s clan from the Scottish Highlands. They had just driven south from Vancouver heading for Seattle and a new life. In 1957, MacIver Wells and John Chadwick had other boxes to worry about. It was Boxing Day in Canada, when Christmas gifts are stored and alms passed to the poor. A court order would put an end to some of the outright harassment of gay patrons - but not stop a long-entrenched payoff system. This excerpt, from Chapter Four “Stirrings of Resistance,” chronicles the start of lesbian/gay resistance to the police in Seattle by bar owners who took the courageous first step of filing a lawsuit to stop police harassment of their taverns.