Thea Foss
Thea Christiansen Foss (8 June 1857 – 7 June 1927) was the founder of Foss Maritime, the largest tugboat company in the western United States. She was the real-life person on which the fictional character "Tugboat Annie" (originally portrayed on film in 1933 by Marie Dressler) was based.
Biography
Thea Christiansen Foss came to the United States from Eidsberg, Ostfold, Norway and married Norwegian immigrant Andrew Foss in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1881. Thea Foss launched the future tugboat firm on the Tacoma waterfront in the summer of 1889. She started the Foss Launch Company, which eventually became the Seattle-based Foss Maritime Company.[1]
Thea Foss had 9 children Mary, Katie, Issabell, lauren, Alexander, Tawann, Zach, Hanna, Chealsea. Thea Foss had 3 husbands 2 of them deserted her. The fictional character of "Tugboat Annie", which was based on the life of Foss, first appeared during the late 1920s in a series of stories in the Saturday Evening Post written by Norman Reilly Raine. This was followed by the smash hit 1933 movie Tugboat Annie, starring Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery as a comically quarrelsome middle-aged couple who operate a tugboat. The Arthur Foss, one of the oldest wooden-hulled tugboats afloat in the United States, was cast by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio to play in this production.
A sequel called Tugboat Annie Sails Again, starring Marjorie Rambeau as Annie and featuring future U.S. president Ronald Reagan, was released in 1940, followed by another called Captain Tugboat Annie, starring Jane Darwell as Annie, in 1945. There is also a 1957 Canadian-filmed television series, The Adventures of Tugboat Annie starring Minerva Urecal.
Thea Foss died in Tacoma on the day before her 70th birthday.[2]
Legacy
- The Thea Foss Waterway, a 1.5-mile (2.4-kilometre) mile inlet in Tacoma's industrial area, and connected to Puget Sound, is named after Foss.
- The USS Amber (PYc-6), which had served as a patrol vessel in World War II, was renamed the Thea Foss after being purchased by Foss Marine Company.
- Thea Foss Lodge of the Daughters of Norway was instituted on 29 May 2004. Lodge #45 meets in the Chimacum, Washington.
References
Other sources
- Skalley, Michael Foss: Ninety years of towboating (1981) ISBN 0-87564-224-1
