Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

“It is all right to dance – if you let your parents or your preacher pick you whom you are to dance with.”

This was one of many observations about the pleasures and perils of dancing made by the Rev. Francis B. Short of Spokane’s First Methodist Episcopal Church.

“It is no harm to dance, but it is awfully dangerous,” he said from the pulpit. Regarding the perils of dancing, he added this: “The average man who gets married does not go around and get a girl who has danced all over creation with a lot of fellows that are no account.”

Then he went on to ponder his own high-spirited youthful self.

“I was a young fry once myself, and I was not one of the dead ones,” he told the congregation. “I was about as lively as any in shoe leather, but I did not dance. While some of the fellows were wheeling the girls around out on the floor, I was in the corner, holding their hands. I am not a has-been.”

Having exhausted the subject of dancing, he moved on to millinery. He read a letter from a man who wanted to know why women did not remove their hats in church. The letter said, “It gives me a disagreeable pain to look through a millinery opening to see the preacher.”

A number of women in the congregation removed their hats.