GORST — AWHILE BACK, WE RAN A PIECE about‘Four Things To Do in Gorst’ other than sit in traffic. It was a bit kitschy, sure. But a decent guide on how to spend a day. There’s a bonsai garden, a bug museum, a plant nursery replete with a full-scale hobbit house and a rescued historic tavern, with a brewery in the parking lot behind it.
Not mentioned were: one of the best-kept-secret gas station hot cases in the area, or the old roadhouse diner/biker bar-turned-thai-food-restaurant across the way. Also left out were: the story behind the closing of the old metal scrapyard, the legend of the now-defunct storied underpass strip club, the news bulletins of some the earliest controversial nudie coffeeshops in the area, the Bremelore reports on the old A-Frame cabins tucked off the highway, the Jarstad Park music festival entering its 33rd year this August and the opus of one of the last remaining drive-in movie theaters in the country, located just down the road.
The urge to fill an entire issue of smokestack with all Gorst-related content is strong.
Maybe someday.
We also forgot to mention something else: Bremerton National Airport—founded in 1936, then known as Fleet Fields, home to hundreds of hobbyist aviators making thousands of flights each year which has been expanding its hangar capacity and property holdings over the past five years, currently amidst a feasibility study for commercial air traffic and hosting its annual Air Show featuring historic and modern day military aircraft flyovers this month—is also just down the road. And… (as a reader wrote into remind us, thank you Bill!) the unique name of this unincorporated area located at the head of Sinclair Inlet between Bremerton and Port Orchard, most often reported recently for its traffic snarls and vehicular fatalities, is tied to one of the early pioneers of northwest aviation and charter transportation, known as The Grandad of United Airlines—Vern Centennial Gorst, born 1876.
Vern’s story is a spectacular one. It reads like a World Record Book. A list of the man’s notable accomplishments is more than we have space for here. Vern’s son, Wilbur (named for, you guessed it: one of the Wright brothers) self-published the story of his father’s incredible life in 1979 in his book ‘Vern C. Gorst, Pioneer and Grandad of American Airlines.’ Vern’s achievements and adventures are also documented in history museum collections throughout Western Washington and Oregon. It’s chronicled in the Kitsap History Books. And the University of Washington archives. And at the Tacoma Museum of Flight. Among others. Here’s an abridged version:
The Gorst family relocated from Minnesota to the Kitsap Peninsula when Vern was boy in 1888. His father bought and homesteaded 60 acres in the area we now know as Gorst. At age 13—in the first of what would become a lifetime of transportation and business ventures—Vern built a raft and ferried chickens across the water to surrounding communities. His brother, Samuel, relocated to Kitsap from the midwest a year later and would later purchase another 160 acres where the brothers would start a logging business.
In 1896, Vern set off for the Klondike Gold Rush.
He arrived in Alaska already with money his pocket, as legend has it, from selling leather suspenders to the crowds of men on the boat, making their way to the Klondike. After arriving in Alaska, Vern began by transporting tools and supplies via snowshoe to miners at their claims, charging a dollar-a-pound. He’d also have a hand in engineering various mechanisms for transferring goods across the area’s treacherous geography and shared in some of the successful claims of the miners he served, including the famously massive multi-million-dollar strike by former Seattle YMCA director/instructor, Thomas S. Lippy
Gorst returned to Washington and used his earnings from the Klondike to create the first motor-launch service between Port Orchard, Bremerton and Manette, operating a fleet of three boats as ferries until 1904 when he sold the business and moved to the southern Oregon coast.
There, he would go on to create the first auto-stage and first ‘bus’ lines in that state before starting similar ventures in different parts of California over the next decade.
Back in Kitsap, he started the first auto-stage between Charleston and Bremerton in 1913. The next year, he and a partner set out to build the fastest boat on Coos Bay, Ore. by using an airplane engine and propeller. What they built became an air-propelled amphibious automobile, used for ferrying freight across the bay and up the Umpqua River.
At age 38—just a ten years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight—Vern taught himself to fly.
A decade later, in 1925, he won a U.S. Postal Service bid for the first airmail contract between Seattle and Los Angeles. He began offering passenger tickets to sit on mail bags for the 18-hour, 1,100-mile journey, later adding shorter passenger trips from Portland to San Francisco. Three years later, Gorst sold a majority stake in his company to Bill Boeing and, in turn, bought a plane from that Seattle manufacturer for another idea he’d had for an Alaska airmail contract.
Vern would become the first to deliver newspapers to Ketchikan, Alaska the same day they were printed in Seattle. And then, the first to offer air ferry service from Seattle to Bremerton in 1929. A year later, when the federal government objected to Boeing owning a majority stake in four different airlines (including Gorst’s Pacific Air Transport) at the time, it’s said that it was Vern’s idea to merge all four entities to create what would become one of the largest airlines in the world—United Airlines. // BILL MAN
FIND MORE ON Vern Gorst at the Kitsap History Museum, the University of Washington Libraries’ Special Collections or the Tacoma Museum Of Flight. And check out the 2025 Bremerton Air Show July 12-13 at the Bremerton Airport, more at bremertonairshow.com
