May 14th, 2026
St. James Cathedral, Seattle
Remarks as prepared for delivery
Most of all, he loved the mountains.
And the mountains had no better, more loyal friend than Joel Connelly.
Before I ever met Joel, I got a sense of his passion for high places in the Northwest. Home from college, my mother gave me, as a stocking stuffer, a little booklet Joel had written: Twelve Secret Hikes in the Cascades,
I mentioned this to Joel, when I first met him at the Seattle P-I.
He grimaced, said, Ah yes. Twelve ruined hikes in the Cascades.
At the P-I, Joel was a hyperkinetic presence, gamboling up and down the newsroom, chuckling one minute, outraged another. He knew everybody in town. As a cub reporter, just out of the U-Dub, I learned a valuable lesson from Joel.
He said, “You know, Timmy, there are two sides to every story – good and evil.”
Something they didn’t necessarily teach in journalism school.
In print, Joel rewarded his friends and punched back against his enemies. He certainly relished a good fight, raging against clear-cutting timber barons, exploiters of nature, government incompetence and malfeasance, and craven politicians. He interviewed four presidents.
But he always knew there were good people in office, people who tried – like Joel – to leave this world a better place.
Also, as most of you well know, well before the days of AI or Google, Joel had stunning, encyclopedic knowledge of our shared history.
If I had to cover a lunch by Senator [Warren] Magnuson, Joel would instantly reel off three of the best Maggie stories, then add that there’s pod of healthy orcas in Puget Sound because of him.
He would never retire. You could no more stop him from putting words into print than you could stop the wind.
Well, after the P-I died, after he could no longer hold court in the Hi-Spot Café in Madrona, on his last day on earth… Joel was working on a column.
In the mountains, we spent many happy days with him. He introduced us to the Enchantments, to the Alpine Lakes, to views of the Picket Range and the pink-granite flanks of the North Cascades around Liberty Bell.
We’d settle in to some delightful perch at magic hour, sip a fine whiskey or a Walla Walla red wine carried in Nalgene bottle, and the Big Guy would point to the horizon and start rattling off the names of peaks, not just the major ones – every one.
There’s Shuksan, Whitehorse, Seven-Fingered Jack…
We called him The Living Map.
And the least we all can do, if there’s any justice in this world, is name a mountain for him.
You may not know that Joel had a deeply-evolved spiritual side. And a vulnerable side. Mickie Pailthorp was the great love of his life.
Even twenty years after she passed, he would tear up at some mention of her passion for gardens or when I pointed to the hostas in our yard that she’d given me – her living legacy.
He also loved Mickie’s children – Aaron, Bellamy and Melissa, loved them in the way that involved a lot of hard give and take.
And they were there for him, through many difficult times during his health struggles.
We will always remember the annual Pailthorp-Connelly Christmas party — the best in town, reflecting the range of friends: writers, mountain climbers, senators and governors, chefs and Connelly acolytes, priests and atheists.
He never stopped trying to probe the wondrous uncertainties of faith, as per the admonishment of St. Augustine, who said:
“Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars… yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”
Joel Connelly never passed over that mystery.
And in his dying days – when he said, “I’m good from the neck up” — he told us, a few of his friends, of a profound spiritual experience he had, of seeing something wonderful, something close to the other side.
He was at peace. Lucky man.
Lucky man.