Making Sense of the End of Goldfish Racing in Tacoma

This week, the nation was rocked by the news that the Harmon Tap Room was compelled to end its Goldfish Racing program after animal rights activists from PETA lodged serious complaints. This epsiode brought widespread attention to Tacoma’s long-standing dependence on the goldfish racing industry and the decades of tradition that solidified it as one of the cultural and economic backbones of the City. As yet another goldfish racing venue disappears beneath the sands of time, Exit133 decided to step out into the community to document the local reaction.

Jonathan Harker, a retired rail yard worker, remembers the glory days of the races. “My dad used to take me to the races at the track down by Steilacoom when I was a kid. The War was on then, so a lot of the big names and more legendary racers were off fighting in Japan and Europe. That gave the wannabes and upstarts a golden chance to step up to the plate and carve out their own place on the grandstand,” he remembers. “Competition was – well, I guess there’s no other word for it – fierce. They didn’t have the same regulations they do now. We’ll just say that. It was really something to see. All them fish, just wrigglin’ away – sometimes chasing a nightcrawler on a string with a silver bell tied to its tail! All I wanted to do was be a part of the Pilgrim Racing Team. I had their posters all over my bedroom walls. Wish I still had them.”

The Pilgrim Racing Team is a figure that looms large in Tacoma goldfish racing lore. The outfit had humble beginnings in the old berry packing sheds of William Pilgrim’s farm – the location of which has been lost to time. Local historian Paul Kemp recounts those early days as wild and obsessive. “Those young men were absolutely committed to the breeding, training and development of the ideal racing fish. Of course, this was the Prohibition, when just about everything was illegal – and so was goldfish racing. It was often done under cover of night. But the law had to have been turning kind of a blind eye, because the races always drew a crowd.”

The fortunes of the Pilgrim Racing Team have suffered of late, after enjoying a long and storied position at the zenith of the goldfish racing industry. “The regulations and inspections are just killing us,” says Lane Dean Jr., current vice president of Pilgrim, LLC. “Track after track is just being shut down, or can’t turn a profit anymore. Endorsements are drying up. We were lucky to land GoDaddy.com back in 2010, but we kind of had to end our relationship after the elephant brouhaha. That really hurt us.”

The popularity of the races spawned a healthy bevy of track construction and maintenance businesses in Tacoma, including that of Brick Pollitt, which thrived on Dock Street from 1952 to 1978. “Things were good for a long time,” muses Brick, “But in ’78, we saw the writing on the wall. Permits for new tracks were harder and harder to come by. Coporations from out of town kept buying up all the best breeding operations and putting their names all over the top fish. Locals were getting squeezed out. I didn’t want to work for some jerk from Los Angeles or New York. Not me. I pulled up stakes and got into the yogurt business.”

“Will Tacoma survive the end of goldfish racing as we know it? I think so,” Kemp says. Of course, change is inevitable, he notes. “We’ve survived a lot in Tacoma, and we always dust ourselves off and proceed with diginity. This time will be no different. And we’ll always have the memories. Every time I see a goldfish in a bowl, I have to admit, my heart races a little bit and I get that pang of nostalgia.”

Jonathan Harker agrees. “We might have to say goodbye to the goldfish races here in Tacoma. But I like to think that somewhere, maybe in Albany or Kobe, there’s a kid hunched over a trough late into the night, training the next Goldfin Crusher or Fantail Fred. You can kill an industry, but you can’t kill a dream.”