Sinclair Park and Quincy Jones

In nineteen forty-three, a ten-year-old boy named Quincy Jones arrived in Bremerton with his family. His father, Quincy Sr., had come for work, the same reason most people came to Bremerton during the war years: the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard was hiring, the wages were steady, and steady wages were not something to take lightly in the years just after the Depression.

The Jones family settled in Sinclair Park, a neighborhood on the west side of Bremerton that had been developed for Black shipyard workers. The wartime industrial boom brought Black workers to the Pacific Northwest in large numbers, but it did not bring them equal access to housing or public life. Sinclair Park was a segregated community, separate by design from the rest of the city.

Quincy Jones had been born in Chicago on March fourteenth, nineteen thirty-three. His mother had introduced him to music early. By the time he arrived in Bremerton, music was already something he was listening for. What the Navy town offered him was less a musical education than a social one: a wartime industrial city, segregated but buzzing, full of people from everywhere, shaped by the specific pressures and energies of a nation at war.

After the war ended, the family moved to Seattle, where Jones attended Garfield High School, developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger, and began performing professionally at age fourteen. It was in Seattle that his career took root. But Bremerton is where the family landed first, and where a young musician spent the years when the world was making the most noise it had made in a generation.

Jones went on to become one of the most decorated figures in American music history, with credits as a producer, arranger, and composer across nearly every genre, including his work producing Michael Jackson's Thriller. He died in November of twenty twenty-four at the age of ninety-one.