Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

The Spokane Possum Club, an organization of about 90 former residents of the South, held its sixth annual banquet in the Spokane Hotel.

The main course? “Baked king possum on a silver tray,” specially imported from Texas.

The paper noted that “colored servitors attended all the banqueters and the entertainers all were colored.” The singers had been recruited from the ranks of the Silver Grill’s entertainers.

The main event was a four-round boxing match between what the paper termed “a local ‘white hope’ and a husky young colored gladiator.” The latter proved too much for  the overmatched “white hope,” who was “compelled to keep clinching his opponent to prevent being severely punished.”

In addition to baked possum, the banquet menu also included “gumbo filé, corn pone, big lye hominy and Aunt Dinah’s mince pie with cheese.”

From the charity beat: Spokane County had been duped by a number of “sympathy grafters,” claimed a county commissioner.

These were unemployed men who obtained county relief jobs under false pretenses. One claimed his family was starving. Only later did officials discover he was “a rounder who has no family and never did have a family.”