thrice all american: Tacoma Book Club Edition 3: Murder of a City, Tacoma

Tacoma Book Club Edition 3: Murder of a City, Tacoma

· Posted Tuesday November 7, 2006 by jamie

The book club is back, this time with Murder of a City, Tacoma by Jon Gold.

This is big time out-of-print, and used copies may be hard to find. (Though I did find mine at Kings Books, so there’s hope. And if you want to drop $50 bucks, there appears to be one copy used on Amazon right now.) Luckily, if you are interested, it is available through the Tacoma Public Library.

So this book is a little bit strange. I’m not even sure I recommend it. The topic is one of the first big fights against Tacoma’s City Manager form of government. I guess that if you are a junkie for Tacoma politics, you might find it worth a read. It is essentially one big piece of propoganda, circa over 30 years ago. But I guess it still has some implications to now, since the topic continues to come back up every so often. (Most recently in the post-Brame scandal.)

The author, “Jon Gold”, essentially spends the whole book railing against the then-new City Manager form of government and the manager of the time, David Rowlands. I cite the author’s name in quotes because in fact Jon Gold is a pseudonym for Fred Crisman, who is quite the interesting character himself. A Tacoma native, Crisman somehow pops up in various UFO and conspiracy theories all over the place, from the Maury Island Incident to the assassination of JFK (where one theory puts him on the famous grassy knoll). Additionally, some of his associates in the book were later implicated in the INSLAW scandal. In the chapter of his life captured in this book, Crisman became one of the early conservative talk radio hosts for a local call-in show (under the Gold pseudonym).

There are some interesting snapshots of names that you still see in Tacoma, some positive and some negative: Tollefson, Cvitanich, Morgan (as in Murray Morgan), Moss, etc. The overall tone I get from the book as that Crisman would consider someone like me to be a crazy socialist or something. We’ll just say I’m not his sort of people.

One highlight of the book for me was a brief little police chase that apparently went right past my house. I guess some things never change: everybody and their mother just has to drive fast down our road.

Anyway, for a totally slanted look at a different time in Tacoma history, this book is at once bizarre, fascinating, and repulsive. Sometimes interesting, sometimes tedious, it may take a while to slog through, but I don’t necessarily consider my time spent reading it a waste. Read at your own risk.

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