Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Two city detectives were thinking about getting into a new business: the “trained animal circus.”

The detectives said they purchased a small “brown bear cub” from a hunter who captured it in the woods. They told a reporter that they had been giving it lessons and they claimed the cub could already “ride a tricycle and hold a tin horn in his mouth.”

The reporter said the two detectives were “gum-shoeing it about” to see “if there is more money in the show business than in running down criminals.”

From the personal finance beat: Columnist Beatrice Fairfax in the Spokane Daily Chronicle provided financial advice as sound today as it was in 1915.

She wrote that it is tempting to say, “Charge it, please” – but the penalty is too high. You’ll eventually have to “discharge your debt when it has mounted to huge proportions of payment for what seems in retrospect a little, trifling, silly purchase.”

“If you do not have the means to pay for it, don’t buy it,” she wrote. “Pay as you go. That is the only way to keep books with life.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1846: Elias Howe received a patent for his sewing machine.