Last week, I wrote about John and Mary Tucker, who settled first on Cowlitz Prairie in 1865 and a few years later moved to Silver Creek, where they raised their large family of eight children.
Their eldest, William John Tucker, was the great-grandfather of my friend Maeve Mitchell, who contacted me after reading my novels to share how those stories inspired by local history intertwined with her family’s genealogy.
My second novel, “Shattered Peace: A Century of Silence,” featured Elmer Smith, a Centralia lawyer who fought for years to exonerate and free the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, who were arrested after that fateful clash on the streets of Centralia on Nov. 11, 1919.
The story resonated with Maeve because Smith tried to help her grandmother, Effie (Graves) Tucker, after the tragic death of her grandfather, Alva A. Tucker, who drowned when the tugboat on which he worked sank en route to Victoria, B.C., in the wee hours of May 24, 1927.
Alva Ashbury Tucker, known in his family as Alvie, was born on Jan. 8, 1892, at Salkum to William John and Georgianna “Anna” Katherine Ragan, the second of their four sons. After a divorce, William married May Mabel Wright in 1898, and they had a daughter, Calla Lily Tucker. After his wife died, he married a third time in 1926 to Ella “Dee” Sparks DeBelle. William died on March 1, 1933, but he survived three sons — Harold, who died at the age of 2; 35-year-old Alvie; and 38-year-old William Henry, who died six months after Alvie.
Alva grew up in Silver Creek and Salkum, and when he was 23, he married Effa Belle Graves on March 20, 1915, at Coulee City in Grant County. They had a daughter, Vera Louise, who died in Coulee City on the day she was born in January 1916. The family moved to Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County, where their daughter Stella was born in December 1916. The following year, they lived in Hoquiam, when Alva was inducted into the Army on Dec. 15, 1917, at the Vancouver Barracks. He served with the 354th Aero Squadron in Texas and then the 866th in Garden City, New York, during World War I, receiving a discharge on Jan. 15, 1919. A son, Arnold Virgil, was born on Dec. 3, 1919, when the family lived at Vesta in Grays Harbor County.
On July 6, 1921, Alvie was among five men who made the season’s first ascent of Mount Rainier, led by a Swiss guide. The guide reported he had to cut more steps on this single climb than during the entire previous season because of exceptional amounts of ice and snow. They encountered a storm at the summit.
By October 1921, Alvie had moved his family back to Lewis County and decided to build a gas station and garage at what today is Mary’s Corner, at the intersection of U.S. Highway 12 and Jackson Highway, just a few yards north of the Jackson House. Their daughter, Elva Rosalie, Maeve’s mother, was born on Sept. 30, 1922, in Chehalis.
A year later, in June 1923, The Chehalis Bee-Nugget reported that Alva was building a 40- by 40-foot addition to his gas station on Jackson Prairie, where he repaired cars and sold gas and other supplies. The family lived on James Street in Chehalis but bought a five-room home on Cascade Avenue from Kenneth P. Siler.
But then, despite his enterprising gas station and garage at Mary’s Corner, Alva and his family moved back to Grays Harbor County, settling at Aberdeen in the mid-1920s, where their daughter Vina Louise Tucker was born on March 22, 1927.
Maeve’s mother remembered visiting her baby sister shortly after her birth, accompanied by their father. “Alvie asked her if he could hold Vina, and she told him no—she would sit in his lap and hold Vina,” Maeve said. “My mom was no dummy at age four!”
Then tragedy struck.
Alva was working as chief engineer on the 70-foot tugboat Warren when it sank in the Strait of Juan de Fuca on May 24, 1927. All five men on board perished. In addition to Tucker, the crew consisted of Captain William McDevitt of Seattle, master of the ship and the father of two young children; and three bachelors — second engineer George Moore of Seattle; deckhand Charles Boringer of Seattle; and cook H. Healy of Seattle.
Headlines in The Seattle Times blared the news when, days later, a diver repairing a fish trap in 50 feet of water discovered the cook’s body wrapped in the tentacles of an octopus.
“In a terrific hand-to-hand submarine battle with an octopus, the body of H. Healy, cook on the ill-fated Seattle tug Warren, which went to the bottom of the Puget Sound with all hands off Middle Point early Tuesday morning, was recovered today by H.E. Hook, diver,” the story stated.
The sensational story described the octopus as a “sea monster, with Healy’s body held fast in its clutches.” Hook was repairing a fish trap belonging to Bellingham Packing Company. In a fight lasting nearly an hour, Hook jabbed and ripped apart the octopus’ midsection with his pike before the spider-like “devilfish” let loose its prize and scurried back into the muddy depths, the newspaper reported. They sought relatives in Atlanta, Georgia, but buried the body at a Port Townsend cemetery.
The diver who discovered the location of the sunken tug interviewed a woman who lived in a home on the bluff overlooking Middle Point, Mrs. W.L. Rinehart, who recalled waking up to the sound of a shrill whistle about 2:30 a.m. on that Tuesday morning, not realizing the catastrophe unfolding on the water. She saw a vessel’s lights as the wind howled and waves crashed ashore, but then the lights disappeared, the whistle silenced.
No other bodies were recovered, but papers belonging to the master were found a dozen miles from where the tug submerged near Partridge Point on Whidbey Island, and a coat containing the name and address of A.A. Tucker of Aberdeen was found floating near Middle Point, five miles west of Port Townsend.
The coat was returned to the family and hung on a clothesline, according to his daughter Stella, Maeve’s aunt.
“Stella remembered going out, emptying the sand from the pockets, and watching it fall to the ground,” Maeve wrote to me. “There was a notebook inside one of the pockets that was still readable, and Alvie had written a note to each of his children in it. He also found his sister Calla in Seattle before he left and gave her his life insurance premium to mail. It is almost like he knew he wouldn’t make it back.”
One of six Coast Guard boats searching for the tug discovered a food chest and life preservers marked SS Warren at Point Partridge seven miles northeast of Middle Point.
A sheen of diesel oil floated on the water’s surface.
Some say that in the darkness, another vessel, perhaps a steamer, rammed the Warren, severing its six-inch-thick tow line to the Independent Gravel Company barge as if with an axe. A Coast Guard official said he thought the craft’s 180-horsepower diesel engine exploded, tearing the tugboat into pieces. Still others contended the vessel wasn’t seaworthy, which led to the tragedy.
It was that contention, and Effie’s attempt to obtain compensation for the loss of her husband and father of their four children, that drew her to Elmer Smith’s office. She had little money, but the Centralia lawyer who had been disbarred after the Centralia Tragedy often offered legal help in exchange for trade, Maeve said.
“On December 18, 1929, he helped my grandmother file a lawsuit against the tug company in federal court,” Maeve said. “He did not actually get reinstated to the bar until November 17, 1930, but he did help her with the paperwork etc. She had no money, but he was good about accepting livestock, etc., when people couldn’t pay. Aunt Stella remembered meeting him and said that he was a very nice man and soft-spoken.”
The family filed a $25,000 wrongful death lawsuit, but in March 1930, Judge Edward E. Cushman ruled in favor of the company and against Tucker’s claim, saying the tug was seaworthy. The ruling protected the tugboat’s owners, the R.J. Ultican family in Aberdeen, against liability claims. Ultican filed a $15,000 insurance claim for the boat.
The tug had left the Seattle harbor at 3:15 p.m., hauling an Independent Gravel barge to Victoria, B.C. The crew of the large steamship Sol Duc of the Puget Sound Navigation Company spotted the scow adrift off Protection Island. A tug called the Hornet towed it to Port Townsend.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
