Jim Kershner’s This day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

The baby’s mother, father, grandmother and aunts had argued and debated for four months over a name.

They were torn between “Elizabeth, Gwendolyn or just plain Mary.”

The grandmother was tired of calling the child just plain “baby.” So she finally took the girl to the First United Presbyterian Church in Spokane for baptismal services.

When Rev. Foster asked for the name of the baby, the exasperated grandmother told him he could settle the question.

With “scarcely a break in the ceremony,” he pronounced her “Margaret Helen.”

From the avalanche file: The terrible Wellington avalanche, which claimed more than 100 lives in March 1910, claimed one more victim.

Martha Virginia Bogart, 63, died at her Spokane home. She had been grieving her son, Richard Clarence Bogart, ever since he died in the avalanche at the top of the Cascades. Her daughter said that her mother’s health began failing at the time of his death and she had never recovered.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1961: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton N. Minow decried the majority of television programming as a “vast wasteland” of “game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.”