Jim Kershner’s This day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

The dean of women at the State Normal School at Cheney (which has evolved into Eastern Washington University) sounded the alarm about the perilous moral state of Spokane’s teenagers.

One problem, she discovered, stemmed from the fact that Spokane’s high-schoolers had been forced into two separate half-day sessions ever since South Central High School had burned down.

What were teens doing with their half-day of freedom?

The dean said they were “attending moving picture and vaudeville shows.”

That, she said, was incredibly dangerous. These cheap entertainments “fire the emotions of adolescent boys and girls.”

She proposed banning students from attending such shows. Then she went further. She believed that boys and girls should be entirely separated during the whole of the adolescence period, “from the seventh to the advanced high school grades.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

44 B.C.: Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius. … 1962: A chartered Flying Tiger Line airplane carrying 107 people, most of them U.S. Army personnel, disappeared en route from Guam to the Philippines.