100 years ago in Spokane: Long chase after would-be cloth thief

From our archives, 100 years ago

A 36-year-old switchman led police on a long downtown chase after he and a woman accomplice attempted to shoplift cloth from a tailor’s shop.

The tailor said the woman engaged the attention of the clerk. Meanwhile, the man strolled to the back of the store, and when he returned, he had a suspicious bulge under his raincoat. It was a bolt of cloth. Then he called out to his female companion that he had “lost some money and would go out on the street to look for it.”

The tailor was not fooled by this ruse and grabbed the man by his raincoat sleeve. But the man tore loose from the tailor’s grasp, dropped the bolt of cloth and ran down the street.

The tailor and his clerks went in pursuit, and then a patrolman joined the chase. The man ducked into a hotel lobby and escaped through the rear, but he was spotted by a clerk.

Detectives pursued him and watched as he jumped on a streetcar. Another patrolman spotted him hanging from the outside of a streetcar and nabbed him. He was being held in jail.

The woman, meanwhile, had walked calmly out of the tailor’s shop and disappeared. Police were still looking for her. They suspected the pair of being involved in several shoplifting incidents in the past month.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1966: China launched the Cultural Revolution, a radical, youth-driven reform movement aimed at bolstering Chairman Mao Zedong while purging the country of “counter-revolutionaries.” It’s been estimated that during the decade of upheaval that followed, hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more, died as a direct or indirect result of the Cultural Revolution.