75 years ago

April 20, 1942

• While stormy seas have kept most of the Westport salmon trolling fleet at their moorings the past week, Grays Harbor crab fishermen are enjoying one of their best springs in years, Westport buyers reported today.

Price for ocean run crabs is $1.75 a dozen, one of the highest in many years. Salmon prices range around 20 cents a pound. Soupfin sharks, cause of last year’s bonanza bonanza, have not yet appeared off the Washington coast.

• James Walker, bridgetender on the Eighth street bridge in Hoquiam, today asked cooperation of law enforcement agencies in preventing persons from jumping on or off the span while gates are down. He said a schoolboy narrowly escaped being cut in half last week and was saved only by the presence of mind of a young companion. Walker said the child jumped onto the swinging span and fell in such a position that he could not get up until aided by the other boy.

April 21, 1942

Wendell Wilson, Aberdeen mill worker, has a gift for der fuehrer and hopes the AEF will deliver it for him.

Wilson, now 47, was a machine gunner in the front lines with the 47th division on June 20, 1918, when a spray of German bullets caught him crossing some open ground.

“Seven of ‘em hit me,” he said. “The doctors took out four, but the other three were so close to my heart that they didn’t dare try to remove them.”

Saturday he suffered a coughing fit — “I thought I was going to strangle,” he said and finally up came a small pellet. He’s sending it to General George Marshall with a request it be made into a new shell and put in the bullet pouch of some fighting man with the instructions to “make it count.”

50 years ago

April 20, 1967

The Texaco Louisiana, the 504-foot tanker spent yesterday high and dry on the north side of the Grays Harbor channel about a half-mile west of Moon Island. The ship ran aground in the fog early in the morning and was pulled loose again, apparently undamaged, by five Allman-Hubble tugs at high tide last night. It was inbound to the Rayonier plant dock loaded with oil.

April 21, 1967

Where previously an ugly cloud of black smoke belched out of the Interstate Asphalt stack at the Aberdeen plant, now only a wisp of white vapor escapes into the air and dissipates immediately.

“For 15 years people in Aberdeen have been sniping at us, complaining about the unburned oil dust that under the wrong wind conditions, drifted from the stack at the foot of Monroe Street to homes in the vicinity,” Interstate President Ed Bowers said.

A recently installed $250,000 machine extracts all the previous wastes that were sloughed off in the atmosphere.

An open house announcing Interstate’s contributions to air pollution control will be held Saturday at the plant.

25 years ago

April 20, 1992

About a dozen surfers rescued an Olympia woman and her 4 1/2-year-old son at Westhaven State Park Saturday afternoon after an incoming wave tossed them off a log. The boy was knocked unconscious and his mother suffered a crushed pelvis and broken ribs.

The driftwood log was tossed about in the waves and rolled over them at least three times, authorities and witnesses said this morning.

The boy was treated at Community Hospital and released later in the day. His mother was in satisfactory condition this morning at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

April 21, 1992

A fund has been established at Anchor Savings Bank in Elma to help the family of a local man injured April 10 in a logging accident.

Brian Schweitzer, 23, of Elma, was working as an employee of Papac Logging of Montesano when he was flung by a cable and suffered serious injuries.

He is in Harborview Medical Center in Seattle recovering from numerous broken bones, including a skull fracture. He was released from intensive care April 20.

Compiled from the archives of The Daily World by Karen Barkstrom