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Gig Harbor Now and Then | An explosive answer to our Item of Mystery question

Posted on March 9th, 2026 By: Greg Spadoni

The previous column introduced the second Gig Harbor Now and Then Historical Item of Mystery. How many will there be in the series? No telling at this point. What is known is that next time it will not be an item, but a location of mystery. Item of Mystery No. 2 will be cleared up first, though.

These are the photos of Item of Mystery No. 2:

Photo by Greg Spadoni.

And these are the questions:

Question 1: Generically speaking, what is Gig Harbor Now and Then Item of Mystery No. 2?

Answer: Everyone who guessed it to be a shovel is correct. And there were a lot of good guesses on the Gig Harbor Now Facebook page.

Question 2: What, specifically, was it used for?

While I greatly admire Mike Hondorp’s guess, ancient pooper scooper, it is not the correct answer. But it could certainly be used for that.

What it could not have been used for is a giraffe shoehorn. Tonya Strickland’s efforts to solve the mystery are commendable, but she didn’t get quite far enough in her research, for just about anyone (of a certain age, anyway) knows that giraffes don’t wear shoes, they wear taps.

That’s not to say that Item of Mystery No. 2 doesn’t have a history at the Wollochet Bay Zoo. It’s just that I’ve never heard of such a zoo, underground or otherwise, so can’t say one way or the other.

I also don’t know if a similar tool could be used as a shoehorn for zoo shoes in general.

As far as Tonya’s apple picker guess, had any one of the four Spadoni Brothers had a need for one, it is a foregone conclusion that they would’ve simply trained the giraffe to pick the apples for them.

The correct answer was given by Jim Langhelm. It is a dynamite shovel. His was not a guess, but actual knowledge of the tool and its history. Had there been a prize offered for the correct answer, he would’ve been disqualified for several reasons.

1. He is a nephew of the Spadoni Brothers.

2. He worked for Spadoni Brothers in the years they were using the tool.

3. Before the story was posted, I told him what Item of Mystery No. 2 was going to be.

A dynamite shovel is so much smaller than a regular shovel because it needs to dig only a small-diameter hole for the placing of dynamite under a stump (to either split it into pieces or remove it entirely from the ground).

Only Tonya and one other reader offered a guess to the third question. But the dynamite shovel was not replaced by a motorized, spring-loaded model or by a surplus, motorized robot arm from the U.S. Navy, or by Roto-Rooter.

Question 3: What was Spadoni Brothers’ motorized tool that rendered Item of Mystery No. 2 obsolete?

Answer: The Spadoni Brothers’ second Caterpillar D-8 bulldozer with a stump splitter on the back. Their first D-8, being a cable blade, did not qualify (even though stump splitters were sometimes operated by cable). It took the hydraulics of the second D-8 to do the best job.

The stump splitter on the back of the Spadoni Brothers’ second Caterpillar D-8 bulldozer rendered their dynamite shovel obsolete. Photo from the Claude M. Spadoni Collection.

With a splitter on the D-8, there was no more need for blasting stumps.

Little House in the Hayfield update

On Dec. 15, this column featured the early history of The Little House in the Hayfield. After reading the story, Bunny Arnold and her husband, Dan, visited me at the Harbor History Museum on Jan. 21. They brought with them new information about the house.

As Bunny Lemoine, she lived in the house in 1948 and ’49. That shows that Chris Woll, who owned the place from 1926 to 1963, did not live there full time. He rented it out at least some of the time. With his fishing boat being based in Seattle, perhaps he never lived in the house. Or perhaps he did, but only after retiring. There’s no way to tell at this point.

Bunny not only brought information to our meeting at the Harbor History Museum, she also brought pictures!

Bunny Arnold looking through her photo album at the Harbor History Museum. Photo by Tonya Strickland.

Rosemary Lemoine, Bunny’s mother, looking out the north end upstairs window of The Little House in the Hayfield. Photo provided by Bunny Arnold.

The Little House in the Hayfield, with fruit trees and an outbuilding on the north side of the house, 1948-49. Point Fosdick Drive can be seen on the right side of the picture. Photo provided by Bunny Arnold.

Bunny’s bedroom in the Little House in the Hayfield had quite an impressive view. This is looking west, over the county road. Across the water to the right is the tip of Cromwell. To the left is Fox Island. That view is blocked today by a solid line of trees bordering the west side of Pt. Fosdick Drive. Photo provided by Bunny Arnold.

The crotch of a fruit tree was a great place for Bunny Arnold to sit with a friend. Photo provided by Bunny Arnold.

Bunny’s favorite room in The Little House in the Hayfield was the one with the hand-cranked telephone. Family and friends are finishing up a Thanksgiving dinner in this picture. Photo provided by Bunny Arnold.

In addition to the information and photos, Bunny also brought to the museum a cat-in-mittens figurine she dug up outside the house when she lived there as a small girl. Lost by a previous little tenant, she has kept it all these years. Is it the same one that was placed in the center of her fifth birthday cake?

Photo provided by Bunny Arnold.

Their stay was a short one

The Lemoine family had to move out of The Little House in the Hayfield at the end of 1949. They didn’t want to, but Philip Lemoine Sr. worked for Tacoma City Light, which instituted a policy that employment at the utility could be maintained only by residents of Tacoma. So, to Tacoma they went.

Bunny has never forgotten the good times she had living in the house along Pt. Fosdick Drive. But to her and her family, it wasn’t The Little House in the Hayfield. It was The Ferry Highway House. Had I known that, I would’ve used that name for the title of the house’s early history.

Thank you, Dan and Bunny Arnold, for sharing more history of The Ferry Highway House with us.

Dan and Bunny Arnold in the Resource Room of the Harbor History Museum. Photo by Tonya Strickland.

Next time

The next installment of this local history column, on March 23, will debut a new occasional feature, the Gig Harbor Now and Then Historical Location of Mystery. Old and new photograph comparisons will illustrate the changes to various places on the Peninsula over many years, but only after readers get an opportunity to figure out where the old picture was taken.

Gig Harbor Now and Then Editorial Opinion

It’s time once more to deviate from the topic of history to tackle a contemporary subject that no other publication will cover. I don’t want to, but if I don’t do it, it won’t get done. And it needs to be done.

Because it’s a sports commentary, I suppose I probably should’ve checked with Gig Harbor Now sports reporter Dennis Browne to see if he had any plans to comment on the subject, but I didn’t.

In case it’s not painfully obvious, working for a newspaper is new to me. Compared to clearing land and building roads, it’s a foreign concept.

I hope I haven’t stepped on his toes, for two reasons. One, it would be a professionally crummy thing to do, and two, he’s a really big guy.

Although, because this is not my profession, reason number one shouldn’t apply. But there’s no escaping reason number two.

As a unilateral, non-consulted compromise, I’ll say my brief piece here, and leave any further commentary on the topic up to him.

Pinky Swear Surgery

The never-ending quest for athletic advantage in sports has reached a new high — or low, depending on your point of view — and it’s not only more radical than ever, it’s also creepier than ever.

The increasingly popular pinky-swear surgery, whereby another finger is added to the throwing hands of baseball pitchers and football quarterbacks, is said to give the thrower more control over the ball, therefore allowing pitchers to throw more strikes and quarterbacks to toss more accurate passes.

The sixth finger added to the throwing hand is usually not another pinky, in spite of the slang term for the procedure. Most often, it’s the third or middle finger of the opposite hand that’s used. The longer the sixth finger, the more positive the impact it will have on the athlete’s performance, or so it is said.

Outline of a six-fingered hand

Proponents claim it’s not a danger to the recipient’s health, with no chance of typical transplant rejection, as the finger added is the athlete’s own digit, taken from the non-dominant hand. The overall finger count remains the same; the distribution is simply rearranged.

But the flaw in that argument is demonstrated by a recent expansion of the practice to basketball players, who are now sometimes having a sixth finger added to both hands.

The numbers don’t add up.

The two extra digits are definitely not toes, which would give the athlete less control, not more. So, where are those extra fingers coming from?

Cash-strapped donors?

Parted-out cadavers?

Lesser players who didn’t make the cut?

What’s the next step? Will wide receivers get a third arm to better catch difficult passes?

Or will quarterbacks get an extra eye — in the back of their heads — so they can spot an edge rusher coming from their blind spot?

And where will it end? When batters get two extra arms so they can switch hit at the same time?

It’s bad enough when professional athletes dangerously tamper with their bodies, but it’s infinitely worse when children are encouraged, and even helped, by adults to risk their long-term health and wellbeing by artificially boosting their natural capabilities with unnatural procedures such as pinky-swear surgery. While so far confined to the pros, the controversy is getting louder as talk of it among high school and college athletes increases.

However (I resisted the inclination to say “on the other hand”), when debating the issue, other factors should be given due consideration. I once knew a guy who married into a family with a glove manufacturing business. No doubt he’d be all for it.

But what about kindly, sweet, well-meaning grandmothers? Considering their advanced ages and set-in-their-ways practices, could they be taught how to knit ugly sweaters with three sleeves?

— Greg Spadoni, March 9, 2026

Greg Spadoni of Olalla has had more access to local history than most life-long residents. During 25 years in road construction working for the Spadoni Brothers, his first cousins, twice removed, he traveled to every corner of the Gig Harbor and Key Peninsulas, taking note of many abandoned buildings, overgrown farms, and roads that no longer had a destination. Through his current association with the Harbor History Museum in Gig Harbor as the unofficial Chief (and only) Assistant to Linda McCowen, the Museum’s primary photo archive volunteer, he regularly studies the area’s largest collection of visual history. Combined with the print history available at the museum and online, he has uncovered countless stories of long-forgotten local people and events.