Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

The first New Year’s Eve celebration at the new Davenport Hotel was jovial and merry.

Hundreds of people were jammed into the hotel’s dining rooms and ballrooms. In one ballroom, “a slender woman won applause by leaving her table and climbing among the branches of the huge Christmas tree.”

“As she climbed, she stripped off tinsel and tossed the festoons to the crowd,” the paper said.

In the Marie Antoinette Room, the lights went down for the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” and then came back up to reveal Miss Anne Moore, in a “cerise and white Pierrette costume with a jester’s bells, gaily dancing on the table of a rather surprised supper party.”

Noisemakers and “squawkers” added to the festive din. Electric chimes, scattered about the room, “gave a tinkling swing” to the choruses of “Auld Lang Syne.”

The revelry was dampened only slightly by the knowledge that Prohibition in Washington was scheduled to begin in exactly one year, in 1916.

One man sang, “Goodbye gin-rickey, goodbye old rock and rye, it’s a long way to California, when Washington goes dry.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1863: President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.