75 years ago
May 24, 1943
A bayonet crease on his head, machine gun bullet and shrapnel wounds on his legs, back and arm have left scars to remind Private Raymond Spaur, Grays Harbor Marine of the battles he fought for seven months at Guadalcanal.
He is back from the war, eligible for a disability discharge.
“Fighting at Guadalcanal was as near to hell on earth as I ever want to be in,” the former Hoquiam resident said.
“(The enemy) game our boys plenty of trouble but we finally have them running for their holes — if they can get there before American bullets mow them down.”
Spaur was injured when he crawled about 25 yards into open country to rescue an army lieutenant who had been felled by machine gun fire.
May 25, 1943
It was quite a reunion at the recent Southwest Washington track meet at Centralia when Navy Lieutenant Walter Lunsford and Vic Palmason, former Aberdeen music instructor and now a teacher and coach at Shelton, met to talk over old times as runners for the University of Washington.
They attended UW when many of its greatest athletes were there. The basketball team was probably the greatest, the rowing crew swept away everything in sight, the track team turned out runners who attained national recognition and the football team was well up the Pacific coast conference ladder.
50 years ago
May 24, 1968
Montgomery Ward’s Hoquiam catalog store will close its doors for good this evening, reportedly due to a lack of business, but Mayor Rolland Youmans says that the real cause is a disease called “Don’t Give a Damnitis.
“I’ve been told that the Hoquiam people are going over to the company’s Aberdeen store to order things they could have ordered just as easily right here at the company’s Hoquiam store,” the mayor said.
May 25, 1968
Unbelievable quantities of hot dogs, hamburgers, ice cream and pie were consumed at Lions Park as the Hoquiam Police Association treated the city’s school safety patrol members to an old-fashioned picnic that featured a traditionally messy pie-eating contest.
More than 200 youngsters attended according to Capt. Richard Barnes, schoolboy patrol director.
25 years ago
May 24, 1993
A single-file line of police officers dressed in Army fatigues creep along the corner of a dilapidated old house near the Bayview Lumber Co. in Elma.
The silence is broken as an officer tosses a stun grenade through the window. The sound of shattering glass is followed by a loud explosion as the team breaks in the door and storms into the house to arrest a perpetrator who had barricaded himself and two hostages inside.
The scenario was played out last week by a multi-agency SERT (special emergency response team) that is being formed on Grays Harbor. The team practiced “dynamic entry” drills with an imaginary suspect at the vacant house.
May 25, 1993
Robert Winningham, is 14, an eighth grader at Hoquiam Middle School looking forward to high school this fall.
He won’t have a driver’s license for a while, but members of Grays Harbor’s new Audubon Society chapter felt strongly enough about finding a way for him to come to its meetings they bought him a 10-speed bicycle.
The Fish & Wildlife Service gave him a special certificate of appreciation this year for volunteerism. He stood duty at Bowerman Basin during the spring shorebird migration wearing a uniform and telling visitors — many of them pretty savvy birders themselves — about the natural spectacle before them.
“When he was 6, he started knowing different birds by sight,” said his mother Dessire. She said once he had a guidebook with color pictures of birds, it really started him down the road to identifying many species.
Compiled from the archives of The Daily World by Karen Barkstrom
