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

From our archives, 100 years ago

Sensational charges of abuse were leveled against the wife of a prominent Hillyard physician in a divorce case.

Dr. W.E. Abrams said his wife pulled out a handful of his hair and threw a carving knife at him. Once, while he was lying on a couch, she jumped on him and landed with both knees on his stomach.

He “spit blood for several days.” His wife often warned him that she came from “fighting stock” and that her brother had killed a man and her father had “died with his boots on.”

From the haberdashery beat: A man from New York arrived in Spokane espousing a shocking new fashion trend: going hatless.

Only rarely did men venture outside without hats in 1912. But this man, who called himself the “original hatless man,” claimed it had great benefits.

He said it “preserves my hair in all its pristine beauty” and “tends to keep my brain in better working order.” He said the sunlight and fresh air “penetrate to the brain cells.”

It was not, he insisted, just a fad.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1963: The Alcatraz federal prison island in San Francisco Bay was emptied of its last inmates at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.