BY MATT KITE

Imagine a free music festival at Point Defiance Park. Imagine an all-star lineup of musicians gracing the stage, from local icons to touring performers. And imagine it all happening on a beautiful sunny afternoon in the middle of summer.

On July 29, 1945, no one in the crowd of nearly six thousand people attending the first USO Music Festival in Tacoma had to imagine anything. They watched from folding chairs, picnic blankets, and the roadside above, as a talented assemblage of military and civilian musicians delivered two straight hours of popular tunes, including George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The concert took place on the eastern shore of the duck pond in Point Defiance Park, which was then a somewhat bigger and less “ducky” body of water. A giant USO banner decorated a crude wood amphitheater, above which flew a jumble of flags—twenty five total—representing several countries that would officially join the newly formed United Nations three months later. An American flag hung front and center. The Allies had defeated Nazi Germany in May, and Japan would surrender September 2, thereby marking the end of World War II.

Musicians crammed everything from tubas to a grand piano onto the modest stage, festooned with patriotic bunting, and an overflow of orchestra and big band players spilled onto the grass. The Tacoma News Tribune reported two days later that the crowd was “the largest ever” to watch a music concert at the park, citing official estimates from Sherman Ingels, the superintendent for the Metropolitan Park Commission (now Metro Parks Tacoma). Behind hundreds of folding chairs assembled close to the stage, concertgoers made do on picnic blankets and the freshly mowed grass. The views were better from atop the incline, so some were satisfied to watch the concert while leaning against their cars parked alongside the road.

How big of a deal was the music festival? In anticipation of the turnout, local newspaper articles in the preceding week implored concertgoers to offer rides to servicemen and women living in Tacoma, because the city buses wouldn’t be able to “accommodate such tremendous crowds.” The rest were bused from Fort Lewis.

The United Service Organizations in Tacoma and the Post Special Service Office at Fort Lewis organized the festival, with Bennie Brown serving as the event chairman and Ruth McFarland and Alice Creswell heading up an eight-person committee that planned the program. Joseph S. Powe, from the Navy, directed a twenty-five-voice choir from Bremerton, while Sergeant Lloyd Pinckney directed the 362nd Army Band and Sergeant Earnest Hayden directed the Army’s 29th Special Band.

Individual performers included Robert Brown, a popular baritone soloist from the Navy, Mrs. Mark Johnson, a renowned soloist from Tacoma, and Edyth Lundgren Ostberg, a harpist from Tacoma. Seattle’s Stephanie Lewis, dressed in a Spanish-flavored costume, sang several songs in Spanish. KMO broadcasted part of the concert live, with Verne Sawyer from the radio station playing the role of master of ceremonies.

Some of the performers continued making music for decades. Pinckney, who joined the Army in November 1943, co-directed Kapers in Khaki, a GI production, and was the sole African American to serve in the American Theater Wing of the 29th Special Service Company. After graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music as well as Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, he studied at the Paris Conservatory and London’s Royal Academy of Music. He performed all over Western Europe and continued making music in upstate New York until his death in 1971.