Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

The mystery of the tiny “waif,” abandoned 10 days earlier on a Spokane doorstep, had been solved.

Authorities discovered that the little boy was the newborn baby of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hawman, who lived in a Spokane hotel.

However, the city prosecutor was getting conflicting stories from the two parents. The father, a cook, claimed that his wife never wanted the baby and that his wife and some other women at the hotel “engineered the entire affair.” The “suffering mother,” however, intimated that the husband virtually forced her to abandon the child because she was sick. The mother was admitted to Sacred Heart Hospital for a serious case of blood poisoning.

Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Seidell, who found the baby on their back porch, continued to show “tender care” to the “infantile wanderer” and were planning to adopt the baby.

“As a matter of fact, I suppose the baby is better off with its adopted parents,” said the prosecutor. “I shouldn’t like, however, to see it torn from its mother against her will, and that is the phase of the case I am interested in.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1941: Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii; the raid claimed some 2,400 American lives.