Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Spokane audiences had a wide choice of entertainment over the weekend, from vaudeville to classical music.

Crowds continued to flock to the New York Symphony, in the midst of a three-week engagement at Natatorium Park. The newspaper’s music critic continued to rhapsodize about the “genius” and “mastery” demonstrated by this world-class orchestra.

Over at the Orpheum, the entertainment was not quite as highbrow. Here’s what the paper said about one of the members of the Pianophiend Minstrels, who were atop the bill of a vaudeville show.

“Linn depends on his bulk for much of his humor in his singing,” said the paper.

The critic also liked “attractive comedienne” Elida Morris, whose “most captivating song is in man’s attire.”

Meanwhile, Bob Pender’s Giants “travel a rollicking route through a lot of foreign slap-stick and gunpowder, but the closing is pleasing in its grotesqueness.”

Grotesqueness? Unfortunately for us, the critic did not elaborate.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

2010: A stampede inside a tunnel crowded with techno music fans left 21 people dead and more than 500 injured at the famed Love Parade festival in western Germany.