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.

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.

USS Amber (PYc-6)

USS Amber (PYc-6) was a patrol boat in the United States Navy during World War II, built at Long Beach, California in 1930 as the yacht Infanta for the actor John Barrymore.

Private yacht

Infanta was designed by Ted Geary and built by the Craig Shipbuilding Company in Long Beach, California for John Barrymore as a present to his wife, actress Dolores Costello. The keel was laid on 15 September 1929, launched on 16 January 1930 and named in honour of the couple's expected first child, Dee Dee Barrymore. The motor yacht was originally measured as 118 feet in length and with a tonnage of 253 GRT. Power was from two 275bhp Atlas-Imperial diesels driving twin propellers The Barrymore's used the yacht sparingly, due to his preference for the simpler pleasures of his sailboat and his increasing alcoholism. By 18 July 1935 Infanta composed most of Barrymore's net worth, being assessed at $56,350 of his net $56,575. In 1937 the yacht, then valued at $75,000 was auctioned to satisfy a mortgage. The yacht was subsequently renamed Polaris by owners Edward and Kathryn Lowe of San Francisco and home-ported at Juneau, Alaska.