I'd like to go over the case here, but without giving the full story, which is available elsewhere. This thread will assume basic knowledge of the story and will concentrate on details, historical circumstances and additions to the information provided in the two classic works, Kenneth Arnold's "Coming of the Saucers: A Documentary Report on Sky Objects" 1952, and Kenn Thomas's biography of Fred Crisman, which I think was renamed JFK UFO in its latest incarnation, published in the last several years by Feral Press if I'm not mistaken.
My only qualification for this sort of commentary is several years spent living in Tacoma and some time reading about the incident many years later.
Let's start with Chapter II "The Tacoma Affair" in Arnold's book. He starts out by saying no one knew of his plans to take Ray Palmer up on the latter's offer to pay all expenses for Arnold to fly out and interview Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman of Tacoma, Washington, following Arnold's famous sighting near Mt. Rainer. The offer was made following Arnold's celebrity, while the Crisman/Dahl event was alleged to have taken place 3 days before Arnold's sighting, June 21 and June 24, 1947, respectively.
On the way Arnold sees more flying saucers, but decides not to let it get out publicly. Let's consider that the first mystery in the Tacoma Affair, but let's leave it on the back-burner for now and get on with some textual analysis:
Barry's Airport was a small private airport. The mudflats are the industrial wasteland along Commencement Bay between Tacoma and Fife. If memory serves the Puyallup River (American settles pronounce it "Pugh!" as in an exclamation upon sensing a stench, + Al as in Al Bundy, Up with a sort of non-distinct schwa kinf of U; the Puallups and Lushootseed speakers say Poo-yall-up, as does almost everyone else in America who doesn't come from the NW) flows into the flats there somewhere.
Presumably there is plenty of flat ground down on the mudflats for landing planes. Why it was tied up for the night, I'm not sure, but it must have been moored against air currents rather than water currents.
The housing shortage in summer of 1947 was acute all along the west coast. Returning GIs needed places to stay, while during the war massive numbers of people were settled on the west coast to serve the defence industries. It's worth noting that Tacoma was a major player in America's defence industries during and after WWII. Tacoma and Seattle long fought for primacy of place as Washington state's first city and my impression is that that battle was still unsettled in 1947 (Spokane was never really in the running because of its landlocked location). Ship building, metals (including the all-important aluminium during WWII), chemicals, timber and paper were major industries in Tacoma.
For more on the housing shortage and returning GIs in 1947, see the film Somewhere in the Night, 1947.
In that film the man at the front desk of a hotel in LA I believe makes an exception for the star because he is a returning GI, saying hotels always have an extra room for contingencies that arise.
In this case, Tacoma wasn't just in the midst of the general housing shortage, but there were some conventions going on in town as well. The Grand Chapter of the State of Washington, Order of the Eastern Star, were wrapping up their convention in late June and early July, 1947, for one example. A delegation of Hawaiian businessmen descended upon Tacoma in early August, for another.
The hotel Arnold called above, the Winthrop, really was Tacoma's premier luxury hotel, from what I can tell. I don't think I've ever been there, but I've heard of the ballroom on the top floor mentioned by name by native Tacomans. The Winthrop was designed by the George Wellington Stoddard (1896 - 1967), apparently a native of Detroit. There seems to be some confusion with real estate financier George E. Stoddard (1917-2009) and esteemed luxury hotel architect William Lee Stoddart (1868–1940) as to who actually came up with the Winthrop, but I'll leave it at that for now as an unimportant detail in Arnold's narrative.
The Winthrop in 1947, on Broadway in Tacoma. The cross-street is 9th and the view is looking to NNE. Ninth was theater row: the Roxy (later the Pantages) on the right side of the picture was showing Pursued with Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright, filmed in Gallup, NM, ca. 1947. To the left, across Broadway and out of view were the Music Box theater and the Rialto (where I saw Indiana Jones ca. 1984). The Winthrop itself became a movie set when Tacoma's own film company H.C. Weaver Productions filmed the silent The Eyes of the Totem aka The Totem Pole Beggar there and elsewhere in 1926: "The face of the Hotel Winthrop was transformed one evening in March of 1926, becoming the infamous Chinese cabaret 'The Golden Dragon,' during the local filming of the silent movie 'Eyes of the Totem.' ... The man responsible for the transformation was Art Director Gaston Lance. In the script, the cabaret is also the location where innocent young girls are lured into a licentious lifestyle by owner and villain Tom Santschi and his paramour Violet Palmer."
(I believe at least in later years the boxoffice of the Roxy/Pantages faced onto 9th right across from the Winthrop.)
The Winthrop was named after Theodore Winthrop (1828 -1861), apparently the first Union officer to fall in the American War between the States and the author of The Canoe and the Saddle and Life in the Open Air, which both deal with Washington Territory, I believe. Winthrop is credited with being the first "white man" to put the name Tacoma into print.
Tacoma, you might have guessed, is an Indian word. It's actually a place name, but refers to the mountain, Mount Rainier, which any local Tacoman will tell you is really named Mt. Tahoma. Confused yet? This is immediately followed by the legend that the local Indians feared the mountain, and felt it was the abode of evil spirits, and should never be climbed under any circumstances, lest the spirits be angered and rain bad luck down upon you. It's also the name of a computer font, probably thanks to Microsoft, although I don't know the history of the Tahoma font. Tahoma and Tacoma are basically the same word. It might be interesting to note as well that, if memory serves, the Puyallup Indians with their reservation right next to the city of Tacoma were not originally Salish speakers. I think Vy Hilbert of the University of Washington explained this in one of her books on the Puget Sound Salishan language Lushootseed. They and a few tribes on the Olympic Peninsula (several of them long extinct) represented pockets of the aboriginal inhabitants prior to the Salishan invasion ca. AD 1000, swooping down from the Alberta plateaux. While most of the Puget Sound peoples have a demonym ending in -ish (Duwamish, Skykomish, Snohomish) the Puyallup have one ending in the schwa plus undifferentiated p/b, if memory serves.
So the Winthrop was all about Tacoma, and the initial thrust of its marketing was as a sort of gateway for tourists visiting the Northwest and especially Mt. Rainier, a luxurious safe harbour whence they could venture out into the great unknown and whither return to recuperate from same.
In Arnold's text above he wasn't expecting a room at the Winthrop. We don't know how exactly he inquired whether there was a room free for him, at which point he introduced his name into the telephone conversation, and so on. The point is no one was supposed to know he was travelling to Tacoma that day, and yet someone had booked a room for him there at the fanciest hotel in the middle of a general housing crisis and some conventions visiting the bustling metropolis that was Tacoma in 1947.
This first mystery in Tacoma proper becomes the subtext in later passages for Arnold discovering his room is apparently bugged, and not just bugged, but all information discussed in that room is being actively relayed in real time to the local press. Arnold later, many years later, will say that not only what was discussed in that hotel room was leaking to the media, but things left unsaid, thoughts were being leaked, by what agency and to what end, he could never determine.
Suffice it here for now to say that the Winthrop achieved a kind of first as being a hotel completely wired for telephones. Every room in the Winthrop had a telephone handset. The trunk line ran from the basement through all the floors to an operators' room hidden in a small inaccessible room on the roof. Of course Arnold didn't know where the wires all led back in 1947, but made extensive use of the telephone in his account. His expenses were being paid by Ray Palmer and in any event local calls should have been free, if I understood the tarriff structure in the NW in 1947 correctly. What he wouldn't have had was direct dialing: everything would have to go through the operator on the roof of the Winthrop and likely she would have called out to the telephone company's operator with a request, Mercyside 6667 or whatever the format was (two letters as a single word memnomic plus three or four numbers).
The telephones installed in every room of the Winthrop, with two female operators in the center of the collection at their stations. Photo courtesy of the Tacoma News Tribune (5/16/1925) and the Tacoma Public Library. Please note: Fred Crisman, one of the main characters in the Maury Island Incident/Affair, was intimately involved with the Tacoma Public Library in his later years and I believe he even served as director for a time.
Maybe that's enough for now. We'll return to the Winthrop next time for further explorations.
My only qualification for this sort of commentary is several years spent living in Tacoma and some time reading about the incident many years later.
Let's start with Chapter II "The Tacoma Affair" in Arnold's book. He starts out by saying no one knew of his plans to take Ray Palmer up on the latter's offer to pay all expenses for Arnold to fly out and interview Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman of Tacoma, Washington, following Arnold's famous sighting near Mt. Rainer. The offer was made following Arnold's celebrity, while the Crisman/Dahl event was alleged to have taken place 3 days before Arnold's sighting, June 21 and June 24, 1947, respectively.
On the way Arnold sees more flying saucers, but decides not to let it get out publicly. Let's consider that the first mystery in the Tacoma Affair, but let's leave it on the back-burner for now and get on with some textual analysis:
Barry's Airport was a small private airport. The mudflats are the industrial wasteland along Commencement Bay between Tacoma and Fife. If memory serves the Puyallup River (American settles pronounce it "Pugh!" as in an exclamation upon sensing a stench, + Al as in Al Bundy, Up with a sort of non-distinct schwa kinf of U; the Puallups and Lushootseed speakers say Poo-yall-up, as does almost everyone else in America who doesn't come from the NW) flows into the flats there somewhere.
Presumably there is plenty of flat ground down on the mudflats for landing planes. Why it was tied up for the night, I'm not sure, but it must have been moored against air currents rather than water currents.
The housing shortage in summer of 1947 was acute all along the west coast. Returning GIs needed places to stay, while during the war massive numbers of people were settled on the west coast to serve the defence industries. It's worth noting that Tacoma was a major player in America's defence industries during and after WWII. Tacoma and Seattle long fought for primacy of place as Washington state's first city and my impression is that that battle was still unsettled in 1947 (Spokane was never really in the running because of its landlocked location). Ship building, metals (including the all-important aluminium during WWII), chemicals, timber and paper were major industries in Tacoma.
For more on the housing shortage and returning GIs in 1947, see the film Somewhere in the Night, 1947.
In that film the man at the front desk of a hotel in LA I believe makes an exception for the star because he is a returning GI, saying hotels always have an extra room for contingencies that arise.
In this case, Tacoma wasn't just in the midst of the general housing shortage, but there were some conventions going on in town as well. The Grand Chapter of the State of Washington, Order of the Eastern Star, were wrapping up their convention in late June and early July, 1947, for one example. A delegation of Hawaiian businessmen descended upon Tacoma in early August, for another.
The hotel Arnold called above, the Winthrop, really was Tacoma's premier luxury hotel, from what I can tell. I don't think I've ever been there, but I've heard of the ballroom on the top floor mentioned by name by native Tacomans. The Winthrop was designed by the George Wellington Stoddard (1896 - 1967), apparently a native of Detroit. There seems to be some confusion with real estate financier George E. Stoddard (1917-2009) and esteemed luxury hotel architect William Lee Stoddart (1868–1940) as to who actually came up with the Winthrop, but I'll leave it at that for now as an unimportant detail in Arnold's narrative.
The Winthrop in 1947, on Broadway in Tacoma. The cross-street is 9th and the view is looking to NNE. Ninth was theater row: the Roxy (later the Pantages) on the right side of the picture was showing Pursued with Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright, filmed in Gallup, NM, ca. 1947. To the left, across Broadway and out of view were the Music Box theater and the Rialto (where I saw Indiana Jones ca. 1984). The Winthrop itself became a movie set when Tacoma's own film company H.C. Weaver Productions filmed the silent The Eyes of the Totem aka The Totem Pole Beggar there and elsewhere in 1926: "The face of the Hotel Winthrop was transformed one evening in March of 1926, becoming the infamous Chinese cabaret 'The Golden Dragon,' during the local filming of the silent movie 'Eyes of the Totem.' ... The man responsible for the transformation was Art Director Gaston Lance. In the script, the cabaret is also the location where innocent young girls are lured into a licentious lifestyle by owner and villain Tom Santschi and his paramour Violet Palmer."
(I believe at least in later years the boxoffice of the Roxy/Pantages faced onto 9th right across from the Winthrop.)
The Winthrop was named after Theodore Winthrop (1828 -1861), apparently the first Union officer to fall in the American War between the States and the author of The Canoe and the Saddle and Life in the Open Air, which both deal with Washington Territory, I believe. Winthrop is credited with being the first "white man" to put the name Tacoma into print.
Tacoma, you might have guessed, is an Indian word. It's actually a place name, but refers to the mountain, Mount Rainier, which any local Tacoman will tell you is really named Mt. Tahoma. Confused yet? This is immediately followed by the legend that the local Indians feared the mountain, and felt it was the abode of evil spirits, and should never be climbed under any circumstances, lest the spirits be angered and rain bad luck down upon you. It's also the name of a computer font, probably thanks to Microsoft, although I don't know the history of the Tahoma font. Tahoma and Tacoma are basically the same word. It might be interesting to note as well that, if memory serves, the Puyallup Indians with their reservation right next to the city of Tacoma were not originally Salish speakers. I think Vy Hilbert of the University of Washington explained this in one of her books on the Puget Sound Salishan language Lushootseed. They and a few tribes on the Olympic Peninsula (several of them long extinct) represented pockets of the aboriginal inhabitants prior to the Salishan invasion ca. AD 1000, swooping down from the Alberta plateaux. While most of the Puget Sound peoples have a demonym ending in -ish (Duwamish, Skykomish, Snohomish) the Puyallup have one ending in the schwa plus undifferentiated p/b, if memory serves.
So the Winthrop was all about Tacoma, and the initial thrust of its marketing was as a sort of gateway for tourists visiting the Northwest and especially Mt. Rainier, a luxurious safe harbour whence they could venture out into the great unknown and whither return to recuperate from same.
In Arnold's text above he wasn't expecting a room at the Winthrop. We don't know how exactly he inquired whether there was a room free for him, at which point he introduced his name into the telephone conversation, and so on. The point is no one was supposed to know he was travelling to Tacoma that day, and yet someone had booked a room for him there at the fanciest hotel in the middle of a general housing crisis and some conventions visiting the bustling metropolis that was Tacoma in 1947.
This first mystery in Tacoma proper becomes the subtext in later passages for Arnold discovering his room is apparently bugged, and not just bugged, but all information discussed in that room is being actively relayed in real time to the local press. Arnold later, many years later, will say that not only what was discussed in that hotel room was leaking to the media, but things left unsaid, thoughts were being leaked, by what agency and to what end, he could never determine.
Suffice it here for now to say that the Winthrop achieved a kind of first as being a hotel completely wired for telephones. Every room in the Winthrop had a telephone handset. The trunk line ran from the basement through all the floors to an operators' room hidden in a small inaccessible room on the roof. Of course Arnold didn't know where the wires all led back in 1947, but made extensive use of the telephone in his account. His expenses were being paid by Ray Palmer and in any event local calls should have been free, if I understood the tarriff structure in the NW in 1947 correctly. What he wouldn't have had was direct dialing: everything would have to go through the operator on the roof of the Winthrop and likely she would have called out to the telephone company's operator with a request, Mercyside 6667 or whatever the format was (two letters as a single word memnomic plus three or four numbers).
The telephones installed in every room of the Winthrop, with two female operators in the center of the collection at their stations. Photo courtesy of the Tacoma News Tribune (5/16/1925) and the Tacoma Public Library. Please note: Fred Crisman, one of the main characters in the Maury Island Incident/Affair, was intimately involved with the Tacoma Public Library in his later years and I believe he even served as director for a time.
Maybe that's enough for now. We'll return to the Winthrop next time for further explorations.
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