Jim Kershner’s This day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Police were combing the area’s boarding houses, cheap hotels and transient camps for a menace to public health: A hobo with smallpox.

A friend of the man turned himself in to authorities, the day before, but it was too late. He already was covered with spots.

The city’s chief quarantine officer had “every man on the force out looking” for the smallpox-ridden hobo, who was out in the city “scattering the germs” of the virulent disease. One room he was known to have inhabited was fumigated.

From the love and marriage beat: Spokane was titillated by the divorce proceeding of a wealthy mine owner and his young wife. The husband said she had a habit of extravagant spending on clothes.

“I told my wife I wanted her to be the little queen of our home … and I would dress her like a queen,” he testified.

But he did not want her to parade down Riverside Avenue “dressed like a peacock, and have other men say, ‘There goes Old Steve Gibson’s wife.’ ”

For the trial, she was dressed in a black dress and a black hat.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1993: A gunbattle erupted at a compound near Waco, Texas, when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents tried to serve warrants on the Branch Davidians; four agents and six Davidians were killed as a 51-day standoff began.