Starbucks Co-Founder Gordon Bowker Passes At 82 – CoffeeTalk

Gordon Bowker, an influential Seattle entrepreneur who co-founded Starbucks and Redhook Brewery, has passed away at the age of 82. Bowker, who lived in Seattle most of his life and died there Thursday, left an indelible mark on the city’s business community and the industries he was a part of, from coffee to beer to advertising.

The advertising firm Bowker started with his business partner Terry Heckler, who was behind the iconic Rainier Beer ads of the 1970s and 80s. Heckler also designed the original Starbucks mermaid logo, displayed on the company’s first store on Western Avenue near Seattle’s Pike Place Market, in 1971. Bowker helped launch Seattle Weekly, wrote restaurant reviews, and co-founded a real estate development company. He loved the challenge of starting something from scratch and he loved telling stories, said Zev Siegl, Bowker’s longtime friend who started Starbucks with Bowker and Jerry Baldwin.

Bowker met Siegl and Baldwin while studying at the University of San Francisco, and the three would later found Starbucks in Seattle. According to a recounting of Starbucks’ history by former Seattle Times reporter Sheila Farr, Bowker came up with the idea for a coffee company when he was routinely traveling from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C., to purchase coffee and tea from a company called Murchie’s. The three co-founders later struck a deal with Peet’s, a gourmet coffee company based in Berkeley, California, to supply fresh-roasted beans for the Seattle store.

While searching for a name for the new coffee venture, Heckler suggested that names starting with an “St” were bold and memorable, Bowker told The Seattle Times in a 2008 interview. With that in mind, Bowker noticed the town of “Starbo.” He connected it back to the character Starbuck in “Moby-Dick” and the Starbucks name was born.

Bowker stayed involved in Starbucks until 1987. Siegl had exited the company years earlier to pursue other ventures, and Baldwin and Bowker put Starbucks up for sale. Howard Schultz, who had been hired as the director of marketing and would go on to run the company for decades, bought Starbucks with a group of investors for $3.8 million. But the Starbucks founders held on to one part of the coffee empire: Peet’s Coffee & Tea. Starbucks bought Peet’s in 1984.

As Starbucks was first taking off, Bowker turned his attention to another fledging industry: craft beer. In 1981, he founded Redhook Ale Brewery with Paul Shipman in a renovated transmission shop in Ballard, with the goal of “brewing Seattle a better beer,” according to the company’s website. The two founders hoped to create a local alternative to mass-produced, commercial lagers.

The company, which merged with Widmer Bros. Brewing in Portland in 2007, was sold in 2019 to Anheuser-Busch and again in 2023 to cannabis-product company Tilray. It is often seen as inspiring the craft brewing movement, particularly in Seattle, nearly 40 years ago.

Of all his numerous accomplishments, Siegl and Baldwin suspect Bowker was most proud of his two daughters and his lasting marriage with his wife, Celia Bowker. Siegl, who was with Bowker when he died Thursday at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, said Bowker’s family was not interested in speaking for this story.

Bowker grew up with his mother in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood and nearby Burien. His father was killed during World War II when Bowker was a baby. After college, he returned to Seattle where he drove taxis, worked as a Seattle Underground tour guide, and wrote educational films for King Broadcasting. He played pickup basketball with Baldwin and was a fan of the then-hometown team, the SuperSonics.

Bowker was an excellent storyteller and spent most of his adult life living in nearby Magnolia. He listened to the stories of family and friends just as intently as he shared his own. He was rarely the first to speak in meetings, preferring instead to listen, analyze, and summarize.

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