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Seattle’s famed restaurateur Ivar Haglund lives on with his “underwater billboards.”

By Susan Conner

The close timing of Seattle-based Ivar’s Inc.’s clam-chowder promotions and the recovery of “underwater billboards” that advertise the restaurant's clam dishes didn’t bother too many Seattleites. After all, they’d been primed by decades of founder Ivar Haglund’s, and his successors’, humorous, pun-filled promotions.
So far, three signs have been pulled out of Puget Sound. Ivar’s president, Bob Donegan, proclaimed that, in May, historian Paul Dorpat discovered maps of seven, undersea sign locales. The company asked the diving and salvage ship Prudhoe Bay to explore the site, and the ship’s team pulled up the first sign on August 21, and found two more at different sites. The stainless-steel signs, which date to roughly 1954, were anchored with concrete footings.
The mystery remains whether they were sunk 55 years ago by the company’s prankster founder, who thought submarines would soon cruise Elliott Bay. Dorpat said Haglund thought submarines would be more efficient than ferries and plotted routes across the sound. He marked seven locations where billboards were to be placed to monopolize the attention of passengers/commuters.
Officials have clammed up about the signs’ authenticity, having added, “If it turns out to be true, we’ll donate the billboards to the Museum of Business and Industry,” or somewhere else appropriate.”
Even after its founder’s death in 1985, Ivar’s has entertained its home market with, among other things, an annual July Fourth (“Fourth of Jul-Ivar”) waterfront fireworks show and TV commercials that featured clam-orous parodies of popular movies.