Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

A strange man walked up to Ida McGinnis, 18, who was waiting at a streetcar stop in Hillyard, and said, “Here is a girl for me.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Ida struck him in the face, knocked his hat off and sent him sprawling in the gutter. He started to get up, but Ida whacked him on the head with her handbag and said, with impeccable grammar under the circumstances, “I will teach you to speak to women on the streets with whom you are not acquainted.”

The man’s pal, standing nearby, said, “Come on or the cops will get us,” and the two men wisely cheesed it.

In a later interview, Ida said she acted on impulse.

“I had often said if I ever had a chance to teach a masher a lesson, I would not overlook the opportunity,” she said.

She also said she was not frightened at all.

“In fact, the rat which ran across the stage while we were at the theater frightened me more than the man,” she said.

She and a friend had just come from a Hillyard theater.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1939: The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, N.Y. … 1942: Anne Frank received a diary for her 13th birthday.