25 years ago
February 27, 1945
The Wager Lumber company will take possession of part of the old Michigan mill site March 1, under terms of a lease signed by Mayor Walter T. Foelkner.
The lease is for a five-year period, and at rate of $250 per year.
Inasmuch as the city obtained ownership to the tract through a tax sale, it does not guarantee the title, and cannot be held responsible for any claims for possession by previous title or interest holders.
February 28, 1945
Primary students of Hoquiam’s Central school today made the final payments in war bonds and stamps on a field ambulance costing $1,950, Mrs. Dorothy Bonham, in charge of the drive, said today.
The project, undertaken by the kindergarten, first, second and third grades of the school was begun September 20. The purchase was completed one day before the end of the drive, which had been set for tomorrow.
50 years ago
February 27, 1970
Vice President Spiro T. Agnew has called on the nation’s governors to join in a fight to drive kooks, misfits and bizarre extremists from the nation’s front pages and television screens.
“Never in our history have we paid so much attention to so many odd characters,” Agnew said. “Twenty five years ago, the tragi-comic antics of such societal misfits would have brought the establishment running after them with butterfly nets rather than television cameras.
“It is in this inordinate attention to the bizarre, this preoccupation with the dramatic, this rationalization of the ridiculous, that we threaten the progress of our nation,” Agnew said.
February 28, 1970
Saturday, no newspaper published
25 years ago
February 27, 1995
Vic Gomery has had a fire truck sitting in the middle of his driveway for the past two weeks.
His children and his grandchildren love it. They’ve been begging him for rides — with little success.
It isn’t there as a plaything; it’s part of a campaign.
Gomery hopes people will see the truck and think “fire district.” The remote Brooklyn area southeast of Grays Harbor doesn’t have its own district. Area residents and the tiny North River School depend upon the generosity of neighboring District 15 to come to their aid.
District 15, headquartered at Artic on the Raymond highway, is willing to continue making calls to Brooklyn, Fire District Chief Roy Pearmain says. But homes in the Brooklyn area are mostly all wood and extremely flammable. Even the district’s substation at Vesta has trouble reaching blazes in time, the chief notes.
February 28, 1995
Leo Haukkala, 69, holds the distinction of being the only author ever to get a novel published by the Quimper Press in Port Townsend. Traditionally, Quimper Press publishes historical North Puget Sound books, but for Haukkala they made an exception.
Haukkala, whose father was a sawmill man and longshoreman on Grays Harbor in the 1920s, is a storyteller, a graduate of an announcer school, a former maitre d’, a retired Port Haddock mailman and now a published author.
His book, “King of the Sea World,” explores the tremendous journey of the chinook salmon. He begins with small fry breaking from their eggs buried in the river’s silt floor and follows their struggle until they return to spawn.
In an unusual twist, Haukkala tells the story from the fish point of view. He says he’s never been good at dialogue, but in his offbeat book, he’s included what he thinks the fish might actually say as they avoid the fingerling-hungry trout, sample the first shock of swimming in salt water and dine on shrimp together.
Haukkala will hold a book-signing event at Warehouse Books at the Wishkah Mall on Saturday.
Compiled from the archives of The Daily World by Karen Barkstrom
