Jim Kershner’s This Day in History

From our archives, 100 years ago

The long-running waiters strike in Spokane was turning violent. A cook at Lattin’s Lunch Room on First Avenue said he was preparing food when two men broke in the rear door and felled him with a blow from a piece of iron.

The men escaped, but police suspected they were members of the waiters union who had earlier vowed to “drive out” all strikebreakers from the restaurant.

From the court beat: A Japanese man was sentenced to ten days working on a rock pile – the typical punishment for vagrancy – after he was accused of imitating “the ways of American tramps.”

The man came to Spokane two months earlier trying to get work as a “professor of jiu jitsu,” seeking matches with local wrestlers, police said.

This turned out to be a less than lucrative line of work, and the man resorted to “begging and sleeping in saloon chairs.”

Police said the man became an outcast among the city’s Japanese community for his “shiftless ways.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1929: The sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome. … 1939: King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, arrived at Niagara Falls, N.Y., from Canada on the first visit to the United States by a reigning British monarch.