Mystery soars across NW skies
The events of June 22-28, as reported in the pages of The News Tribune 61 years ago, read like déj vu for the very first time:
Food and fuel prices soar. Housing slumps. Import-export ratios wobble. Tornadoes and floods kill Midwesterners. Vice rages.
Then along comes a headline that transports the reader from a twilight zone of time and space, hurtling one to conspire and conclude that we aren’t in 1947 anymore: “Experts Skeptical On Huge Pie Plate Missiles.”
Whatever.
Everyone knows those nine shiny things that people reported zooming over the Cascade Mountains on June 24 were unidentified flying objects – UFOs, right here in Western Washington, a good week before Roswell, N.M., abducted the Northwest’s claim to the unexplained.
FLYING HIGH
According to headlines, business and recreational aviation soared in the South Sound, from the 20 members of the Washington Flying Farmers who winged into Puyallup to have lunch and tour the Washington State University research fields, to the 14 “air minded” Tacomans who flew from a Spanaway airstrip to the hard sands of Grays Harbor to dig their limit of clams and “be back at their jobs in time to receive the morning mail.”
Nine shiny objects – each as big as a DC-4 airplane and “flat like a pie pan,” said the Boise businessman who from the cockpit of the plane he piloted spotted them whizzing toward Mount Rainier at a reported 1,200 miles per hour – garnered two headlines.
The first headline cast the Army’s skepticism on Kenneth Arnold’s reported sighting three days earlier.
The next day’s headline – “Flying Disc Mystery Grows; Many See ’Em” – cast the dye for conspiracies to come. People from Bellingham to Eugene, Ore., reported seeing what The Associated Press termed saucerlike “flying objects.”
Speaking of airborne things, the Russians – referred to as “Reds” in many commie-baiting headlines of the day – admitted a giant meteorite had plowed into Vladivostok four months earlier.
PRICES UP, SPIRITS DOWN
UFOs weren’t the only thing in the stratosphere.
Domestic fuel oil jumped 35 cents a barrel. Standard Oil rationed gas in 12 states. Food prices were leveling off since their March peak; in the past year, the cost of meat rose 52 percent. A Vermont senator urged President Harry Truman to ration meat to curb “really serious” cost-of-living spirals.
The Distilled Spirits Institute reported a 30 percent drop in sales of whiskey, rum, gin and brandy; it cited “consumer resistance to prices which have not substantially reduced since the war.” Old Blue Spring Kentucky bourbon advertised for $6.39 a fifth. Mutton chops were 25 cents a pound, bacon was 69 cents and rib steaks were 43 cents.
Tacoma meat dealers refuted claims that local butchers no longer would accept waste fats, but agreed that with prices plummeting, it was hardly worth the cost to render the fat into soap.
WACKY WEATHER, WILD IMPORTS
Trace precipitation fell in Tacoma, making the previous month the driest May on record in the Pacific Northwest. Local crops were spared, but storms throughout the Midwest and Eastern Ohio swamped corn, wheat and grapes. Tornadoes killed 16 in Nebraska. Des Moines, Iowa, flooded. Puyallup Valley farmers said there was a shortage of hands for berry-picking season.
At the Rialto Theater, Abbott and Costello returned from World War II in “Buck Privates Come Home.” But where was an ex-soldier to live in Tacoma? Despite the postwar housing need, fewer homes were built in the first five months of 1947 compared to the same period of 1946. The high cost of labor and building materials was blamed.
Meanwhile, 85 million board feet of lumber was being exported annually, The News Tribune decried in an editorial headlined “Too Many Exports.”
That sentiment was echoed by trade experts, who noted that exports of American wheat, milk, cotton, lard, steel, coal and other goods doubled since World War I and might deplete America’s natural resources and its productivity.
Exports led imports by a ratio of 2 to 1. A University of Washington marketing professor told newspaper editors: “Exports are the key to production, and production is the key to prosperity.”
President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall weighed what the AP called a “ticklish” decision over whether the United States should do anything to prop up China’s sagging economy as China’s currency sank against Uncle Sam’s greenbacks. The United States said it would sell surplus ammunition to China.
Iran, “one of the more backward countries of the Middle East, was making a spirited bid for modernization” – using its oil.
In more lingering war news, Gig Harbor scheduled its centennial celebration, postponed by the war, for July 4-6.
TACOMA VICE
Mob kingpin Bugsy Siegel was shot to death in his Beverly Hills home. The AP reported he was reading a newspaper at the time of his gangland hit.
Had Siegel been reading The News Tribune, he’d have kept up on the saga of the Star Social Club, the Fife den of iniquity raided by gun-toting county vigilantes. Four employees were charged with possession of illegal gambling devices.
Four Tacoma stores were charged with selling ice milk in place of ice cream. Two Shelton men were indicted on charges of selling counterfeit sugar-ration stamps.
“The Comma,” aka Harry L. Thatcher, 58, of Spanaway, was sentenced to not more than 20 years in state prison for forging 300 checks, worth $8,000. Thatcher earned his sobriquet for his habit of signing a comma at the end of his name.
Ed Murrieta: 253-597-8678
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.
