100 years ago in Portland: A man engaged to Spokane woman proclaimed to be alive

From our archives, 100 years ago

A man’s lifeless body was found hanging in a men’s room in a Portland park. Police suspected it was Lloyd W. Chick, who had reportedly had an argument with his Spokane fiancee, Miss Florence Alexander, and had threatened suicide.

She was summoned to the morgue to identify the body. She confirmed it was him and promptly swooned. Then three of his other friends arrived and also identified the body.

A story about the suicide appeared in the Portland paper, and one man in Amity, Oregon, read it with particular interest : Lloyd W. Chick himself.

He then appeared, very much alive, at the morgue and demanded that the police and coroner stop “advertising” him as a suicide.

The real identity of the suicide remained a mystery.

From the divorce beat: In what the paper called “the sensational divorce case of the wealthy pioneer” Wentzel Struntz of Newman Lake, the court was asked to make an unusual ruling.

Should he have to pay for “snuff, cheese and groceries” his wife bought just before she eloped with the hired man?

Struntz claimed he shouldn’t, but the judge took the question under advisement.