Jim Kershner’s This day in history

From our archives, 50 years ago

The Spokane Daily Chronicle was preparing to launch the premiere of its half-hour, full-color movie, “A Market Four Times Bigger Than It Looks.”

A taut, suspenseful thriller it was not.

It was a marketing and promotion film aimed at proving to the world that the Spokane market was enormous. It was also aimed at “attracting new residents and new industries to the Spokane area.”

It had sequences showing mining, agriculture and forestry. The Chronicle planned to show it to business and advertising executive groups in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago.

The movie employed what might charitably be termed hyperbole. The Spokane market, it said, consisted of 36 counties, and if “by a stroke of magic” everybody in those counties could be compressed into a single city, it would be “the 10th largest city in the United States.”

“The movie will stress the fact that the Spokane market actually has more than 1 million people,” said the Chronicle.

The real numbers? The Spokane metropolitan area in 1961 had 282,000 people and ranked 88th in the U.S.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1789: The U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs was renamed the Department of State.