I had been in that building before.
As a kid, I'd gone to the old Point Defiance Aquarium on the waterfront more than once, the one down near the water, below the bluffs. I remember the fish, the glass, the particular quiet of that kind of place. Puget Sound creatures behind thick panes, and kids pressing their faces in to get closer. There was a small amusement park next to it. I remember that fondly, too.
1970-71 Lincoln High School Rifle Team Yearbook page - Tacoma, WA. Some members missing.
In the fall of 1970, as a Lincoln High sophomore, I was driven to Point Defiance for my first rifle team practice. We pulled up above the boat house and I knew this building. It was the aquarium. But no, someone said, it's not.
We walked into what was by then just one long bare room with targets at the far end. Nothing on the walls. No tanks, no glass, no trace of what it had been. Just wood and distance and the smell of a place that had been repurposed and forgotten. No trace of what it had been. I stood there a little stunned. Things change.
The aquarium existed only in my memory now, not in the room itself, now turned into a firing range. We were going to be shooting in a ghost held only in my mind. I seemed to be the only one on the team who knew what it had once been. A journey into the deep of Puget Sound. Apparently, the aquarium burned down in 1974 and the boathouse ten years later in 1984.
I'd be curious who owned the building as Tacoma had a series of criminal arsons back in those days. I wrote about some of it in my award-winning screenplay, The Teenage Bodyguard, set in 1974. It details an attempted arson at the Top of the Ocean restaurant along the waterfront on Ruston Way, a few miles southeast of there. A local crime family had burned down or tried to burn down more than a few buildings in those days for fun and profit.
Lincoln's rifle team was not a glamour operation. We shot .22 caliber rifles donated by the Army — heavy, worn, some broken. The 1972 yearbook records them diplomatically as "worn out or broken." I struggled with the bulk and weight of those old surplus rifles from the start, and never quite made peace with the aperture sights either. I was not, I'll tell you honestly, a natural range shooter. Equipment that fits you matters, and nothing about those rifles fit me particularly well.
Our coach was Mr. Williams, ex-Army turned teacher, a genuinely humane man with great stories and a clear understanding of what his kids were working with and working against. When I complained about the rifles he didn't apologize for them. He just said: it's what you have, be proud and make the best of it. That was Mr. Williams. He knew something about making do.
Forty rounds counted toward your score, ten points each, four hundred possible. Hit three hundred sixty or better and you earned a varsity letter. Any member could earn one regardless of sex, which in 1971 wasn't nothing — we had girls on the team and they belonged there.
Every Monday afternoon the old aquarium became a gathering point for Tacoma's high school rifle league. Stadium, Curtis, Wilson, Mount Tahoma, and Lincoln all competed there, five city schools converging on one repurposed waterfront building with their rifles and whatever else they could get their hands on. One team, a school who was financially better off, had match competition pieces and won quite a bit more often. It was hard not to notice that fact.
We were the only school though with Army surplus rifles and our coach told me, "It's what we have, don't worry about those other schools, be proud of them, and shoot well." It was a real league, with real competition, and virtually none of it exists in any archive anywhere. The yearbooks are almost the only evidence it happened at all.
It is worth noting that today the idea of a Tacoma public high school rifle league — five city schools competing weekly, kids bused to a park facility with Army surplus weapons, earning varsity letters for marksmanship — would be unthinkable.
Not because the kids were dangerous, they weren't, we weren't, or because the sport wasn't legitimate, it was. Simply because the world changed. Hunter's safety courses still exist, and competitive shooting still exists, but the casual integration of rifle sport into public high school athletics, the same way you'd letter in swimming or track, belongs to a specific window of American life that closed quietly sometime after we did.
I've mentioned that from time to time in recent years when in a group and the topic came up and I have gotten horrified looks or comments like, 'Well, that wasn't a good idea." But WWII wasn't that far away back then. Certainly not for those who taught us.
I had a 20 gauge single shot shotgun and a British .303 bolt action WWII surplus rifle on a rifle rack in my bedroom in junior high. My older brother's as he traveled America on his motorcycle in the late 1960s. Yes, I had ammo.
The .303 British bolt action on that rack had been my older brother's, given to him at fifteen. Later, when I was fifteen, he passed it to me — he didn't have a son and didn't know yet that he would. It was a serious weapon. The British used that caliber to hunt elephants in Africa. It was not a toy, and we never treated it as one.
I eventually gave it to my own son when he turned fifteen. I did keep the bolt however, until he moved out and was legally old enough to own it. My brother died this year. I think about that rifle and what it carried with it — not just the weight of the thing, but the line of it, three generations each receiving it at the same age, each understanding what it meant to be trusted with something that demanded respect.
Mr. Williams was ex-Army. Mr. Eakes ran hunter's safety courses. For them, teaching young people to handle weapons carefully and compete honorably was simply good citizenship. None of us considered harming anyone, and none of us did. The newspapers from that era are proof enough of that. Compare those to the newspapers today and draw your own conclusions.
The best shooters on our team were the Hondle brother twins and the Eakes brothers. I already knew all of them from a private junior high rifle team coached by the Eakes boys' father, Mr. Eakes. They were older than me and they were crack shots, the lot of them — but the Hondles carried it differently than the Eakes did. The Eakes brothers were good but weren't on the high school team. They'd had enough of it with their dad, growing up, helping him as I had, teach hunter's safety courses a year or two previous.
The Hondles knew they were good. When you're a younger kid wearing a T badge around guys like that, you feel it without anyone having to say a word.
The T badge was my first year. Gold shield, black border, a T for Tyro — meaning beginner, meaning novice, meaning you're not there yet. In competitive shooting it's a legitimate classification for a first-year competitor. In that company it felt like wearing my inexperience as an announcement. Nobody said anything about it. That was almost worse.
My senior year I was working nights at the Auto-View Drive-In, where my stepfather was assistant manager for his night job. I missed matches. I showed up when I could, which was not always, and I watched my entire high school social life happen on the other side of the snack bar counter — friends and classmates coming in on weekend nights while I was working, every holiday, every Friday. I knew I was missing things that don't come back.
Mr. Williams saw the whole picture. At the end of my senior year he gave me a full varsity letter — a gold L, the real thing. I always figured it was for being on the team three years and holding down a night job through high school, both of which he understood and respected. He was that kind of man.
I never got the letterman's jacket. My parents couldn't afford it and neither could I on snack bar wages. So the letter sat. I still have the T badge somewhere. I'm not sure I was ever as dismissive of it as I felt at the time.
One of the faces in the 1973 team photo is my best friend Dave Henderson. Dave wanted to be on the team. So, I told him to get over for that day. He never fired a round that season. But he is in the Lincoln yearbook as a rifleman, which still makes me smile fifty plus years later.
The whole waterfront Pavilion complex at Point Defiance burned in 1984. The old aquarium building went with it — the shooting range, the ghost, all of it. Three lives for one building: aquarium, rifle range, ash. Almost none of it is documented anywhere. The yearbook pages are about the only hard evidence the league and that range existed at all.
I earned a letter in that building, for a jacket I never owned, shooting rifles I never fit, in a room I'd first entered as a child looking at fish.
I think about that sometimes.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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