Murray C. Morgan
Murray Morgan on Murray Morgan

Murray Morgan on Murray Morgan

Murray C. Morgan was born in Tacoma in 1916, the year the Smelter was rebuilt and Pierce County began commandeering land to present to Uncle Sam in return for the Camp Lewis payroll. The room in which I was born looks out over the gulch that Allen Mason bridged to open the North End to residential development. From that room one sees the bay, the Cascades, the Mountain.
The enclosed world of the ravine with its singing stream (now buried as part of a storm sewer project), the expanse of salt water leading off to every seaport in the world, the ethereal bulk of the Mountain sometimes manifest on the eastern horizon still mean, to me, living in Tacoma.
One of my first memories is of being held up to look over the railing of the balcony on the second floor of the house to watch a long line of great gray warships steam down the East Passage, round the point where George Vancouver dined with the Puyallup, and anchor in the bay Charles Wilkes named Commencement.
The war to end wars - the first war of my lifetime - was over, though children still sang, "Kaiser Bill went up the hill to take a look at France; Kaiser Bill came down the hill with bullets in his pants." The visit of the Pacific fleet marked victory. Marked, too, Tacoma's linkage with the military, a growth industry more reliable than railroads.
From our house on North Thirty-first Street on quiet nights one could hear the trains clanking along the waterfront on track laid by the old tunnel builder, Nelson Bennett; hear, too, the long whistles, mournful and romantic. We used to play by the tracks, though we were not supposed to, and the great game was to put a penny on the rail, then retrieve it after the train had passed.
The penny would be paper thin, misshapen, and almost too hot to touch. The money from the railroads was thinning out too. Tacoma's romance with rails was fading.

In 1920 the Northern Pacific moved its traffic department to Seattle; soon afterward the rest of the western headquarters went north. The Tacoma Lumbermen's Club telegraphed a complaint that this was "like throwing over an old love for a new." But the NP left its shops and their payroll in Tacoma as a sort of alimony, and the city acquired the graceful old Headquarters Building at Seventh and Pacific Avenue as an auxiliary police station.
Tacoma's affair with the Union Pacific had ended in a breach of promise. As for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, it had found little profit in reaching the Pacific. The railroad managed to go broke during the great twenties boom. Sold at courthouse auction it passed into the hands of Wall Street receivers who had no sympathy for Tacoma.
When Osaka Shoshen Kaisha, the Japanese shipping line which gave the Milwaukee Line considerable business, shifted its terminus to Seattle, the Milwaukee's western headquarters went too. Tacoma, a railroad creation, was left as a way station. Only the Union Depot and streets bearing the names of NP officials - Wright, Villard, Oakes, Ainsworth, Wilkeson, and Sprague - recall the days when Tacoma had a special relationship with its rails.
As children we didn't care about the loss of the termini. What bothered us was the loss of our Mountain. Tacoma had never acquiesced in the decision by the United States Geographic Board that the great peak was Mount Rainier. We called it Mount Tacoma and wanted the world to do likewise.

In the twenties, Tacoma created another justice to the Mountain Committee to get the bureaucrats to give us back our Mountain.
The committee marshaled considerable support. Theodore Roosevelt, Ambassador James Bryce, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Amelita Galli-Curci, and Will Rogers were among those who favored Mount Tacoma. Tacomans combed the records for proof that Theodore Winthrop knew what he was writing about when he said the Indian name was Tacoma.
Others researched Peter Rainier and announced triumphantly that he was fat, myopic, funny-looking, foreign, and had fought against the United States in the Revolutionary War. Tacomans persuaded a national convention of Indian leaders "to pray to the Great Spirit Kitchemanitou to restore to the Indians Tacoma, meaning Nourishing Breast." School children wrote essays, local historians wrote letters to editors, and everybody wrote poems.
My father wrote one of many poems called "The Mountain That Was God," the title deriving from a highly suspect "Indian" legend, and my mother, part Indian, wrote "The Mountain That Was Ours." And they lost again. The Geographic Board clung to Rainier.
Tacomans then petitioned Congress for relief from the intolerable burden. The Senate, in its wisdom, passed a bill on April 21, 1924, declaring Mount Rainier to be, henceforth and forevermore, Mount Tacoma. But the Public Lands Committee of the House of Representatives failed to report the bill to the floor. So Mount Rainier it remains, except in Tacoma, where we usually refer to the ethereal presence simply as The Mountain.

Tacoma hasn't even had good fortune with nicknames. Back in the 1880s the eccentric eastern promoter, George Francis Train, saddled the community with the sobriquet "City of Destiny." That one went sour during the Panic of Ninety-three. When the Milwaukee Road and the Union Pacific rekindled civic expectations early in the twentieth century, the Chamber of Commerce came up with the slogan "Watch Tacoma Grow."
That proved to be about as exciting as watching coral accrete. Tacoma grew by only 16,000 between 1910 and 1920, achieving a population of 96,965. Seattle during the same ten years gained 127,000 inhabitants.
Tacoma then styled itself the Lumber Capital of the World. So, for a time, it was. Logging trains continued to roll in from the mountains, bearing to the saws the carcasses of giant trees. The ships of the world came to the wharves below the bluff to pick up lumber from mills that lay like beached sea mammals at the tideline. By night one could trace the curve of the harbor by the ruby glow of the screens atop the waste burners.
Few questioned the practice of discharging industrial waste into the sky for all to share. Particulate matter from the mills, like the chemical exhaust of the Smelter, smelled like dollars in a community anxious for payrolls. Nevertheless the old-fashioned sawmill was an endangered species.
Costs rose as lumbermen chased the virgin forests deeper into the surrounding mountains. Distances were greater, the slopes steeper. The cream had been skimmed. There was decreasing profit in the simple geometry of transforming round logs into rectangular planks. A new technology arose, more sophisticated and more capital intensive. Logs were not merely sawed; they were broken up by machines and chemicals to be reassembled as plywood, fiberboard, cardboard, and newsprint. St. Regis Paper Company bought the land where the great pile driving war had been waged in the 1880s between John Burns and the Tacoma Land Company.
They built the Kraft mill which has helped to stabilize the economy while making its contribution, too, to what is known as the aroma of Tacoma. West Tacoma Newsprint was built at the mouth of Chambers Creek not far from the site of Andrew Byrd's grist mill, where Job Carr found occasional employment while waiting for the city of his dreams to materialize.
One by one the waterfront sawmills I knew as a boy disappeared, usually in a burst of flame, a rain of cinders, and an investigation by the insurance company. Tacoma's publicly owned power system, part of the heritage of the Angelo Fawcett period, lured electrochemical industries such as Penn Salt (now Pennwalt), Hooker Chemical, and Ohio Ferro Alloy to the tideflats to replace the lost payrolls. They were most welcome. But they made Tacoma, increasingly, a community in which the basic economic decisions were made in distant board rooms.
Tacoma's struggle long since had become not to surpass Seattle but to survive as something other than suburb or satellite to the metropolis, to remain a community with a distinct economic base and personality. During the Depression, survival was all. Any activity that kept people in town was welcomed. Banks might fail and mills might close but the oldest profession flourished in Tacoma with a vigor unsurpassed since Harry Morgan was blindfolding the police department with dollar bills.
During the Thirties, Tacoma received more national headlines than at any time since the great boom of the Eighties - most of them inadvertent and unfavorable. It was the city's misfortune to be the scene of two kidnappings at a time when the murder of Charles and Anne Lindbergh's son made kidnapping the most newsworthy crime. Charles Matson, the young son of a prominent Tacoma physician, was taken from his North End home by a gunman, sexually assaulted, and murdered. The manhunt went on for years. The FBI file on the case remains open but the killer was never caught, or identified.
George Weyerhaeuser, scion of the timber family (and now president of the Weyerhaeuser Company), was pulled into a car as he walked home from grammar school. He was released unharmed after several days, and his kidnappers were captured and convicted; but though the story had a happy ending, it helped fix on Tacoma the reputation of being kidnap capital of the West.
Even successes went quickly sour. In 1940 Tacoma realized an old dream of direct connection with the Kitsap Peninsula. The Narrows Bridge was opened to traffic fifty-one years after George Eaton, a clerk in the NP Land Department, proposed a Tacoma to Port Orchard railroad to link the terminus of the transcontinental with the proposed Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
But Galloping Gertie, as the slender, swaying suspension bridge was nicknamed, went into the Sound almost before the echoes of dedicatory speeches died down, the victim of design changes brought about by demands for economy in government including bridge construction. It was not to be rebuilt until 1950.
The New Deal, American rearmament which followed the rise of Nazi Germany, and World War Two lifted Tacoma out of economic stagnation. During the war, everything Tacoma produced was in demand, especially soldiers. Fort Lewis, Madigan Army Hospital, and McChord Air Field, which had been acquired by the War Department in 1938, expanded hugely, while the tideflats sprouted shipyards. Not since the days of Stampede Tunnel construction had Tacoma shared so fully the heady excitement of common purpose and overtime pay. But with the outbreak of peace it was back to the same old problems in the same old city.
The generation that had been off to the wars returned to a town strangely unchanged. Tacoma had won its fight for survival, but Downtown was a relic of the nineteenth century. It was like a pressed flower, a memory of when Tacoma had been invited to the dance.

City government, too, was something out of the past. Tacoma voters adopted the commission form of government in 1910, when that was the latest municipal style, like the grid pattern on streets. For a time the system of elected department heads who sat as a council to make policy energized municipal affairs. The combination of legislative and administrative authority allowed able men, like Ira Davisson, the utilities commissioner, to sell their plans to the public and carry them out.
Tacoma's light and water departments provided electricity and water to the citizenry and industries at rates as low as could be found in the nation. The public works department, too, was innovative and efficient. But inevitably innovation settled into routine. Timeservers became policy makers. Vision perished. Municipal politics became largely a question of who ran the police department, because that's where the money was.
The mayor might be titular head of Tacoma but he had direct control only of the garbage department while the commissioner of public safety appointed the chief of police. The mayoral race drew two or three candidates at most; the lineup in the public safety commissioner primary usually looked like the start of the Boston Marathon.
Tacoma had an open town tradition. There had been a "crazy house" on the hill above Old Town before the village was incorporated. New Tacoma was not far behind in providing commercial sex as an amenity. Harry Morgan gave gambling a good name.
Prohibition brought the speakeasy. Night life in Tacoma meant bookie joints, slot machine and pinball routes, unlicensed drinking spots, and an abundance of brothels, most of them in Opera Alley, between Broadway and Market Street. They offered all the glamour of a fastfood franchise, but the operators paid high rent. Reform advocates were assured that Seattle was worse and more prosperous.
Control of night life in Tacoma centered on two local organizations that grew up during Prohibition. Sometimes they shared, more often they competed. There was little rough stuff, just politics and corruption. Each side financed one or more candidates in the quadrennial election of safety commissioner. The side that won the election got to run things without raids while its rival planned better precinct organization.
Change came, surprisingly enough, from within the police force. Some idealistic young men returning from military service objected to selective enforcement of the vice laws. Styling themselves a Vigilance Committee they raided some joints that had paid their dues. The safety commissioner was embarrassed. His embarrassment increased when other cops with ties to the out of power organization began making raids too.
The commissioner suspended several policemen for excessive diligence. The Civil Service Board, after a prolonged hearing, ruled that a policeman could not be suspended for enforcing the law, no matter on whose behalf he was enforcing it.
In the ensuing uproar a reform candidate for safety commissioner, backed by church groups, won election. Unfortunately between the night of victory and the day of inauguration he made a tour of inspection of the places he was pledged to close and was tape-recorded in intimate conversation with a charmer of no discernible virtue. His reform administration thereafter labored under difficulty.
Whenever enforcement became onerous to the forces of the night somebody would phone the commissioner, play the tape-recording and suggest the virtues of moderation in all things. Moderation became so rampant that the military threatened to put the town off limits. The American Social Hygiene Association sounded the alarm on venereal disease. National magazines ran articles deploring "Seattle's Dirty Back Yard." A legislative committee headed by State Senator Albert D. Rosellini held the town spellbound with a televised investigation of Tacoma vice that made city officials took, if not wicked, awfully silly.
Tacomans had had enough. A charter proposing a council/manager system of municipal government was drawn up by a freeholders committee. It won adoption at the general election of November 1952 - the, one in which General Eisenhower was elected president. Tacomans went on to elect an elitist city council, perhaps the best-educated city council in the history of American governance.
Its nine members averaged six years of college education. In their collective wisdom they hired a city manager of rigorous honesty, who appointed an old shoe chief of police competent and content to live on his salary. The climate changed. Tacoma won a Municipal League rating as an All American City, night life disappeared as a serious political issue (and almost disappeared altogether), and the populace had time to address more important problems, such as Tacoma's role as second city and worry about law enforcement in surrounding Pierce County.

The City of Destiny remains unsure of what its destiny should be. The land is much changed from that which George Vancouver called "the most lovely country that can be imagined" where "the labour of its inhabitants would be amply rewarded in the bounties which nature seems ready to bestow on cultivation." Few would care to depend on cultivation of the land today.
Nor will Tacoma ever be the metropolis of the Pacific that Job Carr envisioned that Christmas Day when he stood in his canoe and shouted "Eureka." It is unlikely to become, as Allen Mason hoped when his earlier dreams of greatness had faded, a Philadelphia to Seattle's New York, though the possibility remains that it will be, as R. F. Radebaugh of the Ledger once predicted, a Liverpool to Seattle's London.
The Tacoma of today, 187 years after Vancouver's visit, 128 years after Delin started his mill among the skunk cabbages, 115 years after Job Carr exulted in his first sight of the Sheltered Place, 106 years after the Northern Pacific chose Commencement Bay as its terminus, 81 years after Nelson Bennett undercut the Cascades, 76 years after the crash stilled the great boom, remains a city set in beauty, a city small enough for people to say hello on the downtown streets, a city where it is safe to walk at night and a morning's drive takes you to mountain or ocean, a city of easy access to parks and playgrounds, and to the more metropolitan delights of Seattle: in short, a pleasant place to live.
An anonymous visitor to the Pacific Northwest, quoted in the January 12, 1894, issue of Harper's Weekly, had it right: "Well, gentlemen, if I were a man of wealth seeking a home and investments on Puget Sound, I would live in Tacoma and invest in Seattle."