Howard Behar had given up on being rich. Born in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood to immigrant parents, raised in his family's store, he was a self-taught and successful retailer. He'd used his hard-knocks knowledge and customer insight to climb the corporate ladder with a national retailer. By the time he was in his 40s, he'd reached a pretty high rung - and he was miserable. He was tired of the corporate runaround, the workplace was too political, and he was fed up with the rat race in general.

He just wanted out, and he had an idea of where he'd go. There was this little Seattle company. He'd been shopping there practically since it opened. It was growing, but barely making money. Still, Behar had met the guy who ran it, and liked him, liked the way he did business.

So Behar talked to his wife. He wanted to join the little company. He wanted to do something he enjoyed, sell a product he could believe in. He remembers telling her, "I won't make as much money, but I'll have a happier life."

She agreed, so they sold their house. They cleared $140,000. Half of that went to buy a new, "tiny house." The rest he used to buy a stake in his new company, a little coffeeshop chain called Starbucks Coffee Co. It was 1989 - three years before the initial public offering that was to make him a multimillionaire.

"I didn't know we were going to go public," Behar says today. "I'd like to tell you I was brilliant and had this grand strategy. Anybody who tells you how smart they are and how great they are is full of it."

"You don't know," he says. "You turn left or you turn right, in life."

Those kinds of long shots seem one-in-a-million. But in Washington, such stories are not that uncommon.

Behar is just one of an estimated 68,000 millionaires living in King County, part of one of America's 10 greatest concentrations of wealth, according to a survey by Taylor Nelson Sofres, a London-based research firm.

The survey found that two-thirds of Washington's millionaires live outside King County. But the greatest wealth is concentrated around Puget Sound, says Michael Parks, editor and publisher of Marple's Pacific Northwest Letter. Other parts of the state have their share of the rich, but there's nothing to compare to the kind of mega-wealth found in Seattle and its suburbs.

In fact, five of America's richest billionaires live on the shores of Lake Washington, according to Forbes magazine: Bill Gates (net worth: $59 billion) and Timothy Blixseth ($1.3 billion) in Medina, Paul Allen ($16.8 billion) on Mercer Island, and Steve Ballmer ($15.2 billion) and Craig McCaw ($2.8 billion) on Hunts Point. Behar's former boss, Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz, also lives on the western shore of Lake Washington in Seattle's Madison Park neighborhood, although he's no longer on the Forbes list.

It wasn't always this way. For generations - even before the grunge era - a "Seattle tuxedo" was simply a clean flannel shirt. The egalitarian ideals of socialists, trade unionists and communists were incredibly influential during the 1930s. Working-class solidarity became a regional hallmark. "There are 47 states in the union," quipped then-U.S. Postmaster General James Farley, "and the Soviet of Washington."

Today, Jaguar dealers have replaced postwar chicken farms in Lynnwood, and $10 million penthouse condos are within walking distance of Seattle's Yesler Avenue, where bordellos and flophouses used to line America's original Skid Road.

Out on "Poverty Rock" -Mercer Island - there were three estates listed for sale this fall at more than $30 million each. The monthly mortgage payments on them would be right around $170,000 a month - which is what you'd pay for a three- or four-bedroom house in a middle-class neighborhood in Grays Harbor or the Tri-Cities.