50 years ago: Dreams fulfilled and yet to come
It was the week we tried to go to the moon and it was the week Miss Thriftway went to the bottom of Lake Washington.
If you were in the South Sound on that summer Sunday 50 years ago today, then you will remember the announcer’s anguished call: “Where’s Bill? Where’s Bill?”
Bill Muncey, driver of the unlimited hydroplane Miss Thriftway, had been thrown into the lake as his boat lost a rudder in the first turn of heat 2A in the race for the coveted Gold Cup. People watched from the shoreline, the log boom and on black-and-white TV as Muncey’s boat slammed into the port bow of a Coast Guard utility boat, sinking both craft and causing only minor injuries to the Coastie crew.
Tacoma’s own Coral Reef, owned by local oilman Austin Snell and powered by a Messerschmitt engine, placed a surprising second in the overall competition, losing only to the big pink Hawaii Kai III.
Hawaii Kai driver Jack Regas won with an average speed of 103.481 mph – well below the near-140-mph mark clocked by today’s turbine-powered crafts.
The race signaled the culmination of other competitions in those summertime weeks 50 years ago, as neighborhood kids would construct hydroplanes from discarded wood and tow them with thin rope or strong string behind their bicycles, riding up, down and around their suburban blocks.
They would also race running on freshly sprinkled deep green lawns, circling newly built postwar homes as younger children stood on the sidelines cheering their favorites to victory.
If that day five decades ago saw tragedy on Lake Washington, it also brought destruction to a popular Northeast Tacoma restaurant. Someone, said a story in The News Tribune, had left a beach fire unattended, and flames crept up a 250-foot bluff and torched the Cliff House Cafe.
Tacoma’s fireboat and two Tacoma Fire Department companies assisted a dozen volunteer firefighters from the Browns Point department. Cafe owner Frank Gillihan estimated the damage at $25,000 and promised to rebuild.
Along with a preview of the day’s hydroplane racing, The News Tribune and Sunday Ledger on Aug. 10, 1958, told the story of hidden treasure, as Edwin Scarborough of Tacoma related the tale of his sea.captain grandfather, James Scarborough, who had somewhere stashed a cache of “$50 gold pieces and ingots.”
“Grandfather came in with a ship and would bury his gold. He would lock the children in the house and be gone for 15 to 20 minutes,” the younger Scarborough said.
During that week, the people of Tacoma celebrated the vitality of downtown business and enjoyed a look at the future.
City Engineer Yoshio Kosai offered the City Council a new one-way street plan for Tacoma’s core, promising, according to The News Tribune, that “the advantages of a one-way operation outweigh the disadvantages.”
Downtown, where Broadway remained a two-way street, shoppers that Thursday attended the grand opening of the S.H. Kress & Co. store, an air-conditioned, 20,000-square-foot facility offering a hi-fi record shop and a lunch counter – where a turkey dinner went for 49 cents and a banana split for 29 cents. Along with assorted knickknacks, bric-a-brac, notions and appliances, customers could also buy a revolutionary “all-transistor portable radio” for $41.88.
That radio may have weighed about as much as a small watermelon, but it still contained those transistors – whatever a transistor was.
It was, as the future would prove, the way of the future.
But not all the speculations made that week in a front-page story, “The World of Tomorrow,” have come to pass 50 years on.
Pills don’t relieve a faulty memory, yet, nor has cancer become a thing of the past. Newspapers are delivered electronically, but tooth decay still bedevils some people. Mechanical hearts haven’t quite caught on.
We don’t go to work driving our “strap-on helicopters,” although we do watch the Olympics “over worldwide TV, whose signals bounce off an earth satellite.” And solar energy and atomic fusion do indeed power some homes and communities.
War, however, has not been eliminated by “social psychologists.”
And that trip to the moon?
An Air Force Thor rocket – marking America’s first lunar venture – exploded at Cape Canaveral, Fla., 77 seconds after blasting off.
C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535
