Look at past 125 years might presage future
Together over the past 12 months we have shared a journey of 125 years. The origins of this newspaper were planted in 1883 – and since January, writers at The News Tribune have celebrated this anniversary with a
chronicle of weekly snapshots on the South Sound cover.
We’ve looked back at the milestones and tragedies, at daily life, at blizzards, boondoggles and bootleggers, at the people and events that have shaped us all, informed us, entertained, challenged and provoked us.
A newspaper is typically a product of the immediate past and an indefinite future. For more than a month of Sundays, we have taken a longer look into the memory book. Today we offer a brief look back at our anniversary offerings.
In the year we were born, and during this very week in 1883, our first parent, The Tacoma Daily Ledger, reported that the City of Tacoma welcomed a new steam fire engine and a horse fit to pull it.
All hotels in the city were filled, and the weather was as cold as it had been all year.
Two attorneys, brothers named Robinson, had established a practice. They were “lately from the East, and have come here to try the realities of our growing city.”
THOSE REALITIES
Tacoma’s earliest success came thanks to the forests and the mines that produced the lumber and the coal that filled the sailing ships that filled the wharves of Commencement Bay.
Wheat followed, and all three supported the railroads that carried produce and passengers into the city.
Our greatest shame came soon enough, in 1885, as the infant Ledger helped fire racist sentiment against Chinese citizens living in the city. One headline screamed, “The Chinese Must Go,” and a November mob of 500 forced the 200 Chinese left in Tacoma to march nine miles to Lakeview, where they were ordered to board a train bound for Portland.
This same fear and racism were rekindled more than 50 years later after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as families of Japanese ancestry all along the West Coast were herded into internment camps.
One such camp was hastily constructed on the grounds of the Puyallup Fair, and a small plaque of regret stands today near the administration office.
More commonly, over the years, the best among us had better dreams. Alongside the mistakes and misjudgments was an ethic fueled as much by hard work as by the expectation of greatness.
CITY OF DESTINY
We believed ourselves destined for the highest peaks of success, as stories written over the past year recall.
Along Pacific Avenue in 1898 stood Sally Sloan’s Searchlight Moving Picture Theater, one of America’s first movie houses. Vaudeville predominated the city’s entertainment scene, but Tacomans were among the first people anywhere to see those flickering images of shadow and light dancing upon a canvas screen.
Along with expecting a proud future on the silver screen, Tacoma once believed itself destined to help lead the national interest in automobile racing.
In 1916, future World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker joined speedster Barney Oldfield and 14 other drivers at Tacoma Speedway for the running of the Montemarathon Classic, a 300-mile race that Rickenbacker won with a record average speed of 89.3 mph.
He called the speedway “one of the fastest in the country,” and the track was made of wood, and when last seen, surviving boards had become the walls of a Parkland barn.
OTHER SUCCESSES, OR NEARLY SO
The Tacoma Hotel was one of the grandest in the West, hosting even a resident bear, named Jack.
And if we welcomed authors, stars of the stage and presidents, so did we proclaim our name outside the town.
In 1929, Harold Bromley first tried to fly across the Pacific, from here to Tokyo, in a Lockheed Vega monoplane he called City of Tacoma. Setting off from Pierce County Airfield, he reached a speed of 50 mph and a distance of less than a mile before crashing.
But George Francis Train did succeed in circumnavigating the globe in 1890, leaving Tacoma on March 18 and returning 67 days, 13 hours, two minutes, 55 seconds and 22,000 miles later, thus bettering by five days the record of the famous Nellie Bly.
Pappy Boyington, a Lincoln High School graduate and Marine Corps pilot, was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Harry Truman after building his own fame by founding the Black Sheep Squadron during World War II.
Tacoma oilman Austin Snell’s hydroplane, the Coral Reef, placed a solid second in the 1958 Gold Cup race on Lake Washington.
And who can forget – well, most everyone has forgotten, but his name remains carved with ink in these pages – Fred Anderson, who in 1918 won the crown as the World’s Champion Flapjack Fryer?
Just as Tacoma businesses failed to gain as much profit as those in Seattle during the Alaska Gold Rush, so did the city finally lose its struggle to have Mount Tahoma known by its rightful name. Ever since, it has been known by the name of portly British admiral Peter Rainier, who fought against America in the Revolutionary War and who never visited Puget Sound.
HISTORY AS FUTURE
Such is the stuff of newspapers – to report, sometimes to fight, sometimes to remember.
In celebrating 125 years over the past 12 months, The News Tribune has shown, among other things, that the past is sometimes a harbinger of what will be.
In 1898, city commuters rode 17 private streetcar lines – and now there is talk of streetcars once again. In 1902, the first Interurban train traveled from Tacoma to Seattle. Closed in 1930, 70 years would pass until a train called Sounder would once again deliver riders between the two cities.
Just as we survived the December to Remember of 2008, so we survived the blizzard of 1950, the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 and the earthquake of 1949.
If the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge brought us fame for its galloping collapse, we simply built another, and then another.
If racketeers profited by gambling, moonshine and other such sins, we were glad to expose their crimes. And if a sheriff or two went too far into the dark side, the courts, jails and this newspaper stood ready to help them pay a price.
The best name recalled over the past year? Amanda Truelove, a brothel keeper who testified before anticrime hearings in 1951.
The saddest tragedy? On July 4, 1900, a streetcar overfilled with passengers toppled 100 feet from a trestle above what is now South Tacoma Way. Forty-three men, women and children were killed, and 59 injured.
Events fall from tragedy to memory.
We survived the influenza epidemic of 1918 and the failure of the Scandinavian Bank in 1921.
From Fort Lewis – which the people of Pierce County gave in trust to the U.S. Army – we sent troops to victory against the Bosch in World War I and fascism in World War II. From Pierce County, fighters have gone to fight in Europe, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and a hundred other dangerous places.
Flyers from McChord Air Force Base have likewise fought, either on missions of compassion or in aid of battle.
NEW YEAR
As 1884 dawned, as The Daily Ledger began its second year, a reporter described New Year’s Day in Tacoma.
Several men were “noticed on the streets in an inebriated condition, but they raised no disturbance.”
At the Congregational Church, “tastefully decorated with evergreens,” those gathered enjoyed music and charades while “refreshments in the shape of cake and candy were passed around and discussed by all. The building was crowded with people, and the affair proved an appropriate opening for the New Year.”
May it ever be so as the centuries pass.
C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535
To read the 125th anniversary stories that recounted a piece of Tacoma and Pierce County’s history, go to
www.thenewstribune.com/125th.
