Though his accomplishments and interests were certainly much broader, West Seattle writer Mark Bourne came to WSB attention over these past several years because of one quirky phenomenon: “The West Seattle Grouchos,” those Groucho Marx-photo cutouts that occasionally appear on local slopes. We pointed to his website just four weeks ago, after he wrote about a sighting at Walking on Logs, one of several times he had written about The Grouchos (including a 2008 article on Film.com).
This morning, Amy e-mailed to share the news that Mr. Bourne died suddenly last weekend. She included the link to this website mentioning that family and friends were gathering for a small formal funeral this morning, with a larger celebration-of-life event being planned for later. Checking WSB archives, we also had mentioned Mr. Bourne several times when running and re-running a memorable photo of the Alki Statue of Liberty, pre-Plaza, that he shared back in 2007:
![](https://westseattleblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/alkimarkbourne.jpg)
Mark Bourne was just 50 years old.
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