Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Mrs. George Groshoff, 20, became the first woman in Spokane to apply for a license as a jitney bus driver.

“Can I run an automobile?” she said. “Why, bless you, I’m an old hand for I have run one for four years. I first drove a Buick car and then a Peerless 40, and I guess that a jitney bus is no harder to manage than one of those.”

She said her husband was a jitney bus driver, and she planned on helping him out on his route. She decided that instead of sitting “around the house all day, with little to do, it will not hurt me to get out for a couple of hours and enjoy the fresh air, besides rendering needed assistance to my husband.”

From the canine beat: Two Wallace men owed their lives to a young “Scottish collie” dog.

They were sound asleep in their cabin when they were awoken by the dog, “frantically scratching and clawing” at the back and shoulders of one of the men.

He discovered the cabin was full of smoke and flames. He alerted the other man in the next room and they all barely escaped from the cabin. The fire apparently started in an overheated stove.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1971: Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell stepped onto the surface of the moon in the first of two lunar excursions.