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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

100 years ago in Spokane: Man loses arm in dairy accident

John Nord, a worker at the Pine Creek Dairy on Division Street, was expected to lose an arm after it got caught in equipment, the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported on May 29, 1917. (Spokesman-Review archives)

John Nord, a worker at the Pine Creek Dairy on Division Street, must have felt as if everything was going against him.

First, he got his arm caught in the butter mixer. His arm was “torn and broken.”

Then, his fellow workers could not extract his arm from the machinery and he had to lie there for more than an hour while the machine was taken apart.

Finally, he was put in a car for Sacred Heart Hospital. The car broke down, and he had to be transferred to another.

Then that car broke down, and he had to be transferred to a third car.

When he got to Sacred Heart, he learned that he will probably suffer the loss of the entire limb.

From the labor beat: The Spokane Central Labor Council firmly opposed a proposal to import “Chinese coolies” into Washington to take the place of farm workers who had gone off to war.

The council feared that local farm workers would never get their jobs back when they returned from the war. It predicted that the Chinese laborers would “never be sent home without a struggle,” and there would be “difficulties which would lead to an immense amount of permanent bad feeling in the country.”