The Edison Kitchen

He went into the hotel business in 1922, employed by the Arthur L. Roberts Corporation — an owner of twenty-nine hotels — at Winona, Minnesota, “while attending school, as bus boy,” and advanced “to chef at various hotels in four different states for fourteen years.” He was thirteen or fourteen. Winona sits on the Wisconsin border, a short way from the Pine Creek parish that later wrote to him as one of its own.

Thirty-eight years later he was still describing those kitchens to Seattle colleagues who did not believe him: breakfast, in the East, had meant fish, scrambled eggs and brains, kidney sauté, sweetbreads, pork chops and hot beef broth in place of juice.

He came to Seattle in the 1930s and was living there by 1937. His posts, as he listed them himself: assistant chef at Paradise Inn on Mount Rainier — a seasonal house that closed for more than half the year — then chef at the Frye Hotel, the New Richmond and the Claremont.

One letter dates the Frye precisely. On 12 July 1940 it is addressed to “Mr. H. Eickman, Chef, Frye Hotel, Seattle, Wash.” His own gloss, forty-three years later: “In those days it was a very famous hotel.” Then war work — chef and supervisor at the Seattle-Tacoma Shipyards, in charge of food operations — before he entered education.

Paul Muellet brought him onto the staff of Edison Technical School, a staff that “included 7 European instructors.” He arrived as an additional instructor the year Joe Leidecker replaced Leo Paulsen, one of eight teaching commercial cooking under the War Program Training Services.

The year is disputed. The archive says 1944 twice; the Seattle Times says 1943 twice — a 1952 caption calling him an instructor “the past nine years,” and the 1995 obituary. Neither figure is contemporaneous with the event. This exhibit leans 1943 and says so rather than choosing quietly.

He is independently visible at Edison by January 1949, in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer negative whose sleeve lists nine men — among them Jacob Lang and Hubert Eickman.

In March 1952 the Pacific Northwest Chefs’ Association president Hans Kirschner appointed him, with Edmund Kaspar of the Rainier Club and Daniel Beery of The Ranch, to select the association’s candidate for the national award the archive knows only as “Debands.” They campaigned for Paul Muellet, and Eickman wrote the circular letters himself.

Two months later the campaign succeeded. On 19 May 1952 a photograph showed Muellet displaying his huge silver cup — a sterling cup valued at $500, presented by the American Culinary Federation at a “gold service” dinner at the Hotel Pierre, with a congratulatory telegram carrying 321 Washington signatures headed by Governor Arthur B. Langlie — to Hubert Joseph Eickman and an Edison student.

In February 1954 a minister of the First Christian Church wrote to thank him for “the fine training that you are giving him.”

The student was Darrell Anderson, who had enrolled at Edison in January 1953 under the GI Bill after serving as a 6th Army food instructor at Fort Lewis. Forty years later Anderson assembled the booklets this exhibit is built from, and the archive that holds them carries his name.

The obituary names four more men it says Eickman trained — Walter Clark, Victor Rosellini, Bud Horton, and Wil Masset, founder of South Seattle Community College’s Food Services Program. If that holds, two Seattle culinary programmes trace to one classroom.

Four later accounts say Eickman became Department Head in 1957. A fifth says 1956–60; a sixth says “about the time of Jake’s retirement in 1958.” The contemporaneous letters beat every one of them.

Paul Muellet died in September 1956. Eickman was appointed acting head shortly afterwards, taking charge of a department Jess White had been acting head of. The Washington State Restaurant Association wrote to congratulate him on 26 October 1956. A letter of 30 October 1956 states that the acting appointment had been made permanent “just last week.”

So: acting head from September 1956, confirmed in the week of roughly 22–29 October 1956. The “1957” repeated in every retrospective account is a rounding to the following year, and the archive’s own paper corrects it.

A stroke in 1971 ended his teaching. In October that year the American Academy of Chefs’ local chapter gave him a special award at its annual dinner and he could not come; Gary Sims accepted it for him. He resigned from Seattle Central Community College effective 15 March 1972.

The acting president, Jerry M. Brockey, wrote that the staff would “not regard you as retired — you’re very much a part of us,” and that hundreds of students remembered his friendly, generous and helpful way of taking in anyone new. A testimonial dinner followed on 19 May 1972, and the menu carried a dessert named for him: Hubert Gateau d’Amour.

He did not go far. He is Senior Instructor on a letter of September 1977, and a tribute of 1983 — the last dated document in the dossier — calls him “the father of our association,” recording him still attending meetings alongside former students who had become executive chefs.

He died on Sunday 2 April 1995, aged 86. His student Stan Hawley, by then teaching at South Seattle Community College, said he “represented the old school, with an understanding of the effort that went into making something work. The new school, the razzle-dazzle, just didn’t impress him.” Darrell Anderson said: “He never had a harsh word for a student. He was always calm, cool, collected.”

Everyone called him “Mr. Eickman.”