Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

Sat., Sept. 17, 2011

By Jim Kershner jimkershner@comcast.net

From our archives, 75 years ago

A Wallace man declared that a singer named “Mildred Melody” got him drunk and kept him drunk for nearly two weeks.

When he sobered up, he discovered to his horror that he had married her.

He had been married 12 days before he even realized it. In his subsequent divorce action, he claimed that she used “vile language to torture him, causing him to writhe in agony.”

From the economics beat: The Spokesman-Review put a box on the front page which conveyed a message that sounds familiar today.

It quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt in a budget message from January 1934: “We can look forward today toward a continued reduction of deficits, to increased tax receipts and to declining expenditures for the needy unemployed.”

Juxtaposed with this quote were the most recent “relief” expenditure statistics, which had ballooned from $1.6 million in 1934 to $3.4 million in 1936.

From the industrial accident beat: A 32-year-old worker on the Grand Coulee Dam project died when he was struck in the head by the “clamshell” bucket of a steam shovel. He was the 25th dam worker to die.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1787: The U.S. Constitution was completed and signed by a majority of delegates attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

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