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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

A crew of yeggs – slang for safe-crackers – botched a job in a lumberyard office. They snuck into the building at night and blew up the office safe.

They also blew up the office. 

Their nitroglycerin explosion blew out all of the windows, wrecked the furniture and hurled the safe against a wall. The safe door did fly open, but there was nothing in it except papers. The yeggs fled immediately, probably because the explosion was so loud they feared discovery. The entire neighborhood heard it.

From the rail beat: The railroad statistics compiled by The Spokesman-Review were truly astonishing: Every week, 630 passenger trains entered the city.

This meant that every day 38 steam passenger trains arrived in Spokane, along with 52 electric-line passenger trains, which were mostly local lines coming from nearby towns.

Spokane was the “converging point of six transcontinental lines, 10 branch roads and two electric systems.” The paper concluded that the city was “one of the greatest railway centers on the American continent.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1773: The Boston Tea Party took place as American colonists boarded a British ship and dumped more than 300 chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest tea taxes.