Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Mayor C.M. Fassett promised swift and decisive action on a raucous civic issue: the clang, clang, clang of the trolleys late at night.

Fassett asked the heads of the street railway companies to instruct their motormen to “refrain from ringing gongs or blowing whistles unless it is necessary.”

Apparently, the “gong fiends,” as the headline called them, had been keeping Spokane’s citizens awake in the wee hours.

“Some of your cars run until after midnight, and some of your motormen are a bit careless of the right of most citizens to undisturbed slumber in the night hours,” Fassett wrote in a letter. “Whistles are blown and gongs sounded when there is nobody to need or heed the warning.”

Also, sometimes streetcars rumbled over rail crossings “at a speed which shakes the earth and makes a great racket.”

He suggested that a few words of caution to the motormen would solve the problem.

The president of Washington Water Power, which ran most of the streetcar lines, said he was in complete sympathy with the mayor. The president of the Spokane & Inland Railroad Co. went further than that. He said he “appreciated fully what a nuisance it is” and vowed to eliminate it.