The musicians’ union played patriotic songs. The Eagles’ drill team drilled. Tacoma’s fireboat spewed forth cascades of water along Commencement Bay, and fireworks bearing the theme “The Birth of the Glorious Fourth” lit the night sky with gunpowder rainbows.
Tacoma celebrated Independence Day in 1937 – on a Monday, 71 years ago – by gathering at Stadium Bowl.
The week would later bring news both grand and sad.
The worrisome news concerned Amelia Earhart, who had gone missing over the South Pacific while piloting an L10E Lockheed Electra on a flight from New Guinea to tiny Howland Island.
The best news came from Tacoma’s little suburb to the south – Lakewood – where townspeople were agog and galvanized over the opening of Lakewood Center. Today we might call it a “lifestyle center.” Twenty years ago it could have been called a mall.
In The News Tribune, reporters barely had enough words to adequately describe the marvel of it all.
Opening festivities at the Colonial Revival outpost were spread over several nights, and included both private and public receptions.
“The center is ready to satisfy all desires,” one News Tribune story said.
And what might those desires be? Well, let’s take a walk through this wedding of commerce and community.
ORIGINAL ONE-STOP SHOPPING
“A man can take his wife to the market for vegetables and groceries and stop at the meat counter for a steak,” a profile of the center promised. “Then they can move along into the drug store for a soda.”
If the man needed a shave, the mahogany-paneled barber shop beckoned nearby. Should he be reminded during his shave that he has not lately visited a dentist, there is one just steps away, and that office “wherein Dr. E.C. Klopping reigns, has the same aspesis as is found in any general hospital.”
What’s an “aspesis”? It’s not really a word. Most likely, the writer meant to describe “asepsis,” the lack of germs.
At any rate, while the husband was having his teeth attended to, his wife might wish to see the doctor. She need not linger long, however, as “the waiting room itself is so comforting it will cure minor troubles,” this newspaper gushed.
And thus spruced of teeth and minor discombobulation, the modern couple of 1937 could adjourn to the dining room for a meal. And then to a movie. And then to the rifle range, where they could shoot all their troubles away.
But did they notice, back at the food market, that innovation unique in the Northwest? That revolution in grocery shopping?
“Roughly resembling a baby carriage, the push cart is equipped with hard rubber tires, and has a place for placing the market basket so that the customer may not have to carry a heavily loaded basket around the store. Harry M. Rowen, market manager, has purchased 18 of these carts for the convenience of shoppers.”
That’s where it started, here in the South Sound. The design of those carts would evolve, and it would be years before someone would suggest affixing a cup-holder to carry a $4 latte, but the grocery cart was born hereabouts.
At Lakewood Center!
THE PRIDE AND JOY OF ’37
At that first reception, “more than 500 invited guests of Mr. and Mrs. Norton Clapp, builders of a commercial castle that rivals Scotty’s Palace in Death Valley in splendor and comfort, were escorted through a private preview climaxed by a world’s premiere movie in the best little theater in the West.”
And on that screen, for the first time ever and anywhere, Claudette Colbert fadoodled with Robert Young and Melvyn Douglas in the screwball romantic comedy “I Met Him in Paris.”
Forget that other sources today list the premiere as occurring at least a month before the Lakewood showing.
There was no Wikipedia in 1937.
But there was pride and joy.
Guests at the theater sat on plush upholstery where “each seat is a separate and removable unit, like those in the famous Rockefeller Center in New York.”
Brad Bannon’s band played to a crowd of 1,500 on the night the public was invited. Joe Lento and his daughter Rosemary entertained in the dining room with harp and guitar. A vaudeville performance graced a temporary stage out front, where “the famous 3 Radio Rogues and the Four Esquires” provided patrons with “a well-rounded program of singing and instrumental solos.”
Along with Colbert, Young and Douglas, the lads of Boy Scout Troop 53 premiered a motion picture of their own, and Norton Clapp and Lakes District Improvement Club President Ray Thompson spoke volumes, today unrecalled.
As the people took their tour, “men exclaimed over the carpeted and tiled floors, plodding along with heads down, as men do in the midst of loveliness, and the women appraised and approved the chaste beauty of the walls, ceilings, furnishing and lights.”
And during that week in Lakewood in the early July of 1937, the “exclamations of surprise and astonishment were both as audible and frequent as those voiced at the Stadium fireworks show.”
Amelia Earhart, for her part, was never found.
C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535
blogs.thenewstribune.com/business
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.