By Ray Kresek
Sixty-nine years ago, the Antoine Creek Fire was located about 1/10th of a mile west of where Watch Duty is showing the origin of the Apple Acres Fire, north of Chelan. It was a late summer lightning strike in grass and sagebrush; a couple acres, just skunking around, behaving itself; a short walk from the road, and would’ve been soon forgotten, but for one thing.
As I pulled up to the Antoine road junction off old US-97 eight miles NE of Chelan, in my shiny new red Dodge Power Wagon state Fire Warden fire truck, my boss Walt Smith in Omak called me on the radio. When I told him what I had, he told me to sit at the highway where I had a good view of the fire, wait and watch for an airplane. I had little idea what he was up to, but at a monthly fire warden’s meeting earlier that summer, there’d been talk about an experiment in California with a new idea of air dropping ‘retardant’ on fires.
About a half hour later a World War II Stearman bi-plane arrived out of the south. The pilot made one pass overhead, waved at me from the open cockpit, made three more low passes in a triangle over the fire, dropping soapy water. As he departed, he waved again. No radio contact. No nothin’.
At East Wenatchee’s Pangborn Airport, they had removed the nozzles from under the bottom wing of AK Platt’s orchard spray plane, and to 100 gallons of water, 1 gallon of liquid dishwashing soap was added.
It was the 1st aerial retardant drop on a wildfire in Washington; my fire. September 1st, 1956.
