Michelle Palithorp, 61, was a longtime local attorney and social activist for over three decades. Among the organizations and causes for which she worked were the American Civil Liberties Union, Washington Women Lawyers, the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association, Northwest Island County Conservation Voters, the Nature Conservancy, Patty Murray’s first U.S. Senate campaign in 1992, and the Washington State Equal Rights Amendment ratification drive in 1972. Palithorp died July 31 from a sudden brain aneurysm. Her survivors include Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel Connelly, described by various sources as her “spouse” and “life partner.”
C. James Carrico, 67, came to Seattle in 1974. He worked as Harborview Medical Center’s chief of surgery until 1983, when he became chair of the UW Medical School’s surgery department. In 1990 he left Seattle to work at the University of Texas’ medical center in Dallas. It was in that town, as a 28-year-old resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital in 1963, that he was one of the first doctors who attended to John F. Kennedy. He stayed with the stricken president for 25 minutes until another physician pronounced JFK’s death. Carrico moved back to Washington when he retired in 2000. He died on July 25 from colon cancer.
Sadako Tsutakawa Moriguchi, 94, was the widow of Fujimatsu Moriguchi, founder of Uwajimaya, the Chinatown-International District’s most prominent retailer. While she never held an official job title at the store, she and her husband essentially co-ran the place, which started as a small grocery store and fish-cake bakery (named after Fujimatsu’s hometown in Japan) in the late 1940s. After Fujimatsu died in 1962, she continued to oversee its growth into a hypermarket for all things Asian, with branches in Bellevue and in Beaverton, OR, plus catalog, wholesale, export, and food-service divisions. She lived to see her son Tomio open the mammoth Uwajimaya Village shopping-apartment complex in November 2000. Moriguchi died on July 25 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. Her seven children, three of whom were born at the Tule Lake internment camp during WWII, have all worked for Uwajimaya at one time or another.
Betty Jane Flaherty, 82, came to Seattle in the late 1940s and spent 55 years working as a waitress for various local restaurants. One of these was the Athenian Inn in the Pike Place Market, where she got to play herself serving Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner in Sleepless in Seattle. She also volunteered in support of many worthy causes over the years (including the Veterans Service Foundation’s Homeless Meal Program, which regularly used the Athenian’s kitchen facilities). Flaherty died on June 27 following heart surgery; her death came 19 days after that of the Athenian’s longtime owner, Robert O. Cromwell.