Jim Kershner’s This day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Former President Theodore Roosevelt’s triumphant tour of the Inland Northwest continued with an appearance in Moscow, Idaho.

The 52-year-old ex-president had breakfast at a University of Idaho girls dormitory, where he said, “I’m glad to see you all: Men, women and little folks, especially the pretty girls.”

Then, at dinner that night at the Hotel Moscow, he “passed laughing asides with his waitress.”

“What remarks he and the young lady exchanged, only he and she knew, but they were sufficient to send her into spells of profuse laughter every time he spoke,” said the Chronicle.

The rest of his conversation was about literature. Roosevelt called “Captains Courageous” by Rudyard Kipling one of the “finest books I know.” Yet he deplored Kipling’s “Stalky & Co.,” about British boarding school life, as “unwholesome.”

Roosevelt demonstrated a hidden talent during an earlier Spokane banquet. He sketched a drawing of himself shooting a lion, signed it “The lion hunter, T.R.” and sent it up to two small boys in the balcony.

The drawing was reproduced in the April 10 Chronicle.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1912: The RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, on its ill-fated maiden voyage.