Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

F.J. Kline, the wealthy president and manager of the Lamb-Davis Lumber Co., was sent to the Eastern Washington Hospital for the Insane after a court commission ruled that he suffered from a “temporary mental aberration.”

Temporary or not, his condition had already resulted in one injury. He shot F.C. Riggs in the shoulder at Leavenworth bank.

Doctors testified that Kline suffered from serious delusions. He believed that his friends were attempting to poison him, grab his property, blacken his name and rob him of his position. He also suffered from “hallucinations which make it dangerous for him to be at large.” He had suffered a similar “mental aberration” 10 years earlier, doctors said.

He was escorted to the Medical Lake hospital for an unspecified amount of time.

From the fashion beat: A high temperature of 77 brought out an unusual sight on the streets of downtown Spokane: straw hats.

Straw hats were normally restricted to summer. A reporter, tongue-in-cheek, said of one particularly fancy straw hat that it “would have been a sensation on July 11, but on April 11 was a veritable riot.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1955: The Salk vaccine against polio was declared safe and effective.