Super-sized ocean tug, movie star, speed queen, war hero, fully restored centenarian. All of these achievements can be claimed by only one tugboat the historic Arthur Foss, which celebrated its 100th birthday in 1989.

  Like the Foss company itself, the old Arthur had its birth in 1889. Following this origin in Oregon as the steam tug Wallowa, the tug became famous under Foss ownership.

  The Wallowa starred in the 1933 motion picture classic Tugboat Annie. And during the next dozen years, the tug - in 1934 converted to diesel power and renamed the Arthur Foss - became one of the West Coast's fastest tugs and performed
heroically in World War II - after narrowly escaping capture by the Japanese in 1941.

  Now, after having been retired by Foss in 1968 and fully restored by non-profit Northwest Seaport, the old Arthur still is chugging faithfully with its 80-ton, 700- horsepower Washington diesel that was installed in 1934 for Foss.

  The Arthur's 79 years of commercial operation began in 1889 when the steam tug Wallowa, designed and built
by David Stephenson of Portland, went into service for the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company. For the first nine years, the Wallowa assisted sailing vessels across the dangerously shallow Columbia River bar.

  Following the Klondike gold strike, the Wallowa began towing barges between Seattle and Skagway in 1898 as part of the Pacific Clipper Line to help rush men and supplies to the gold fields. Two years later, the tug was granted a more sedate life of Puget Sound area log towing - mostly for Puget Sound Sawmills at Bellingham but later for Merrill & Ring Logging Company of Port Angeles. It was from Merrill & Ring that Foss purchased tire Wallowa in 1929.

  Based out of Tacoma, the Wallowa - then the largest tug in the Foss fleet - continued to tow log rafts. In 1933, though, the tug became a star in movie theaters coast to coast when - as the "Narcissus" it answered to the helm of Hollywood actress Marie Dressler, who co-starred with Wallace Beery in the film Tugboat Annie.

  The motion picture, which had its world premiere at Tacoma, was inspired by the fictional character Annie Brennan's antics in a Saturday Evening Post series of articles authored by Norman Reilly Raine, then a University of Washington writing instructor and lecturer. As a Seattle resident, Raine had become familiar with the working waterfront and had become acquainted with Foss company executive Wedell Foss. Although Annie Brennan bore no resemblance to the late Thea Foss, Wedell's recollections of how his mother played a major role in the Foss company's early success inspired Raine to write his series of articles on Tugboat Annie.

  A year after the Wallowa's Hollywood stardom, the tug was repowered with a new, six-cylinder Washington diesel and again was given a new name - this time in real life. Named for the eldest of Andrew and Then's three sons, the Arthur, quickly acquired a reputation as one of the fastest tugs on the coast.

  As a repowered vessel, one of the Arthur's most unusual assignments was that of towing the four-masted schooner Commodore from Puget Sound to Los Angeles, The schooner - laden with 1.5 million board feet of lumber - was towed south in seven days, despite rough seas much of the way. The record speed was due not only to the Arthur's powerful engine but because the Commodore hoisted its sails in favorable winds during two days of the trip. Also in 1936, the Arthur set a speed record by towing a steel dredging barge from Astoria to San Francisco in 60 hours.

  This new career, however, was nearly cut short in early 1937 when a fire that started in the engineroom nearly destroyed the wooden tug. The Arthur's brave crew beached the boat at Discovery Bay, near Port Townsend, and managed to beat back the flames until Coast Guard and other emergency help arrived in response to the tug's SOS. After being reconstructed in the Foss shipyard at Tacoma, the Arthur continued to set speed records. In late 1937, for example, the tug towed a big oil barge from Juneau to Puget Sound in six days.

  The Arthur also was noted for its ocean rescues. In late 1937, the tug towed the disabled Seattle ship Eastern Prince from the Gulf of Alaska to Seattle. And only a couple of weeks later, the Arthur was dispatched back to Alaska to fetch the disabled steamer Evelyn Berg to Seattle.

  Harold Spies, a retired lumber retailer living in Springfield, Ore., was a former Foss towboater who started serving aboard the Arthur in 1937 as a radio operator and deckhand. In 1938, Spies was aboard when the Arthur was hired to make waves - literally - on Lake Washington, Continuously, the big tug generated four-toot waves and made passes alongside an anchored barge aboard which the State of Washington was measuring "storm" stresses that would be imposed on the future floating bridge to Mercer Island.

  "Supposedly, we simulated storms with the waves," Spies recalled- "They used the stress there to see what they would have to anchor that bridge with. We had a good wheel wash at full speed."

  Spies also recalled some of the interesting Alaska and coastwise tows of the Arthur during the late 1930s. On one occasion, the Kodiak-bound tug and its tow - a sailing ship converted to an oil barge, with a crew on board - were feared for lost when the Arthur lost its radio antenna in the stormy Gulf of Alaska. On another occasion, the Arthur towed a surplus San Francisco ferry to the Bethel area in the Bering Sea from Astoria, where the ferry had been towed by another tug. He also remembered the Arthur barging lumber along the coast and towing square-ended Davis rafts of logs - about 750,000 board feet at a time - from Garibaldi on the Oregon coast to Grays Harbor- "The brakes on the towing winch got a lot of use" coming across the bar, lit recalled.

  Following a record barge tow of 1.8 million board feet of lumber to Los Angeles in early 1941, the Arthur went into what was to become wartime service in the South Pacific.

  In May 1941, with Spies aboard (at the age of 18, he became a mate on the coastwise tows), the Arthur departed Oakland with a huge gate for one of the Navy's graving docks at Pearl Harbor. However, instead of quickly returning home to Tacoma as anticipated by the crew, the tug remained in the Pacific to begin a series of tows from Honolulu to Wake Island in support of air base construction at Wake undertaken by Pacific Naval Airbase Contractors, a consortium of construction companies. Already in service there were the Mathilda Foss, justine Foss and Foss No. 11. The Arthur towed cement and other supplies and equipment to Wake until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Wake. Well aware that war appeared imminent and
anxious to return to Honolulu by Christmas, the Arthur's captain - Oscar Rolstad - made the trip into and out of Wake in one day instead of the customary three days, The tug and its barge in tow were about 80 miles from Wake when Pearl was attacked and the siege of Wake began shortly after (the following chapter relates what happened to the Justine, assigned as a harbor tug at Wake). The Arthur's crew became aware that evening of the attack on Pearl when the tug picked up a commercial radio broadcast from the Mainland.

  'We were painted up like a yacht," Spies related. "So, that night, all hands got out and slapped gray paint on white paint." With green and white Foss colors, shiny brass and teak doors, the Arthur "was just like a yacht" before the rapid repainting, he noted.

  Fortunately, the Arthur remained out of harm's way during its voyage back to Honolulu. The usual route was charted back to Honolulu, but the tug's speed was cut to conserve fuel because we didn't think we were going to have a Honolulu to go back to," Spies recalled. He said the tug could have returned halfway front Hawaii to the Mainland without running out of fuel. Under radio silence, which had been in effect before the attack on Pearl, the Arthur reached Honolulu, a week behind schedule. By then, the tug and its crew were presumed missing in action.

  With Spies and the rest of the Foss crew still on board, the Arthur continued in service in the Pacific, including within the Hawaiian islands, until the middle of 1942 when the Navy took over the tug.

  Ironically, because the Navy crew was unfamiliar with heavy-duty diesels like the Washington, the Arthur was laid up during most of the rest of the war. Meanwhile, Spies got his master's ticket and sailed on Army transport tugs in the Pacific.

  In 1947, the Arthur was turned back to Foss and was towed inside a floating dryclock from Honolulu to Los Angeles. The tug sustained damage during the stormy tow and required extensive refurbishment before going back into Foss service - this time, as a Port Angeles-based tug towing log cribs in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, By then, larger and more powerful
Miki-class tugs surplused from the war were doing most of Foss' ocean towing.   In 1964, the Arthur was renamed the Theodore Foss (in honor of Andrew's oldest brother) because a newer and more powerful (5,000 horsepower) Arthur Foss was being completed. Four years later, the old tug went into layup. But rather than selling or scrapping the famous vessel, Foss donated the tug in 1970 to a non-profit organization whose efforts eventually led to Seattle-based Northwest Seaport resurrecting the Arthur Foss name and restoring the venerable vessel to its earlier glory.