TV host truly was toast of the town
If you were looking for a big name to help celebrate a significant community event and it’s 1954, then Ed Sullivan was your man.
The New York newspaperman was just beginning to take off as America’s master of ceremonies, hosting the television variety show that would soon bear his name and rocket into the top five programs in the country.
If Ed Sullivan decided an actor or comedian or singer was worth seeing, then they were worth seeing. Careers were made with an appearance on his Sunday evening CBS show.
That’s where Elvis made his national debut in 1956. It became the beachhead for the British Invasion when the Beatles appeared in the first of three appearances in 1964.
So it was a big deal June 9, 1954, when Sullivan arrived in Tacoma to help lay the cornerstone for a children’s hospital, thanks to the Tacoma Orthopedic Association and a local car dealer.
Sullivan also was the featured guest at a gala luncheon at the Masonic Temple on St. Helens Avenue.
“This will always be my memory of Tacoma,” Sullivan said during the ceremony, “one of human values and sacrifice.”
It was a front-page story in The Tacoma News Tribune, and it would have been even had Sullivan not been involved.
For more than three decades, local women gathered in orthopedic guilds and raised money via bake sales, penny drives and rummage sales to provide care for disabled children.
That evolved into the dream of an orthopedic hospital. Dr. Albert W. Bridge and businessman W.R. Rust had helped endow a new hospital that would be named for Bridge’s mother, Mary.
The 100-bed hospital was expected to open the following spring. The ceremony was filmed and shown during the 10 p.m. news broadcast at KTNT and aired on local radio stations KTNT and KTAC.
But it wasn’t all philanthropy for Sullivan.
His first appearance in town was up at Ray Ridge Lincoln-Mercury at 124 Tacoma Ave. An ad in The News Tribune the previous day held an invitation from Sullivan to stop by so he could “tell you what we’re planning for future shows” and “see the brilliant new 1954 Lincolns and Mercurys too, if you haven’t already.”
Sullivan signed autographs and posed for publicity photos with Tacoma’s “Irish Pat” McMurtry. The heavyweight boxer was given a real shot at the world championship, and Tacomans followed his every bout at the Tacoma Armory and later as part of record crowds at Lincoln Bowl where he defeated former champ Ezzard Charles and lost a close decision to future light-heavyweight champ Willie Pastrano.
With brother Mike McMurtry, a former NCAA national boxing champ, Pat struck the typical boxer’s pose with a smiling Sullivan – or at least as much of a smile as the typically stone-faced Sullivan could muster.
Another photo from the dealership showed Sullivan shaking hands with a local federal judge who decades later would render a controversial decision on tribal fishing rights that still bears his name: George Boldt.
It was a pretty newsy week in Tacoma, as well as nationally and internationally. Sullivan’s letter shared the paper with a story about the Park Board accepting bids to build an outdoor swimming pool at Titlow Beach and another story about President Eisenhower supporting a plan to build the Stevens Canyon Road and complete the loop road around Mount Rainier.
Another story told of a bus driver named Richard Hirist who saw a flying saucer as he stopped to drop off passengers at Sixth and Union avenues. Hirist and some passengers, as well as customers at a nearby restaurant, saw an orange ball appear, then shrink and disappear.
But far more Americans were looking for communists than for UFOs.
U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had just returned from a conference and laid out five conditions that might justify American intervention in Vietnam. And that week marked the beginning of the drawn-out end of U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy’s search for communism in high places – the political phenomenon known as McCarthyism.
It was during a session of the so-called Army-McCarthy hearings that the Wisconsin senator suggested a young attorney was a communist. The lawyer representing the U.S. Army responded with the now-famous quotation:
“Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Joseph N. Welch told McCarthy. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Up in Seattle that week, the House Un-American Activities Committee was hearing from an admitted communist who was naming names. Among them was a Tacoma school counselor named Margaret Jean Schuddakopf.
She wasn’t front-page news based on Barbara Hartle’s June 14 testimony. But Schuddakopf soon would become an almost constant fixture there as the School Board first resisted and then succumbed to pressure to fire her after she invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and refused to testify to the same committee.
Mary Bridge Hospital construction wasn’t the only milestone in Tacoma that week. A restaurateur named Houston Smith was celebrating the grand opening of “Tacoma’s most unique and fascinating self-service drive-in.”
It was a fast-food joint he’d call Smitty’s Hilltop Drive-in, located on South 38th Street near Lincoln High School. In addition to 19-cent hamburgers, Smitty promised no waiting, no tipping, instant service and, of course, ample parking.
Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657
blogs.thenewstribune.com/politics
This is one of a series of stories appearing during The News Tribune’s 125th year. Every Sunday we take a look at what happened during the same week sometime in the past 125 years. To suggest a week or an event for an upcoming story, e-mail your idea and any details to
randy.mccarthy@thenewstribune.com">
randy.mccarthy@thenewstribune.com.
