100 years ago in Spokane: Who abandoned baby Carl? The family someone entrusted the 2-month-old to wanted to find out why

A member of the Morris Brawman family walked toward the home’s front door and heard “a faint wail coming from a gunnysack.”

It was a tiny baby, abandoned on the doorstep.

“Inside a thin white blanket was revealed a frail little body and a well-formed head, from which peeped two blue and friendly eyes,” The Spokesman-Review wrote.

A note fluttered out of the sack. It read, “This baby’s name is Carl. He is two months old. He is in good health. Feed him on Eagle brand milk.”

The Brawmans had no idea why the baby was left on their doorstep, although it was possibly because someone knew the couple had their own little one, born six weeks earlier.

Little Carl was taken to the Salvation Army rescue home, where the matron said he was “poor, half-clad and neglected, starved and thin, and weighs but five pounds.”

But apparently Carl was quite endearing, because she added that he was “as bright as a new coin.”

From the accident beat: Power line construction worker Martin Frank died near Sandpoint after an accidental dynamite blast.

Frank was part of a crew blasting stumps along a power line right of way.

He was lighting a dynamite fuse, after he apparently forgot that “he had already lighted one.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1940: Rock ’n’ roll legend John Lennon was born in Liverpool, England. (On this date in 1975, his son, Sean, was born in New York.)