100 years ago in Spokane: Girl sets record for graduating 8th grade

From our archives, 100 years ago

Lenora Frances Olsen graduated from the eighth grade at Washington School – and set a record.

She was 10 years old, thus the youngest student ever to graduate from eighth grade in Spokane. She had been in school for only three years, having previously been taught through private lessons at home. She first entered public school in Cambridge, Mass., in the fifth grade. When her family came to Spokane, she enrolled in Washington School, where it was determined that she should skip both sixth and seventh grades.

She graduated with a 97 percent score in reading, a 98 percent score in math, a 100 percent score in spelling. She was neither absent nor tardy once through the entire semester.

The story did not mention whether Lenora intended to enroll immediately in high school.

From the political beat: The Spokesman-Review applauded the selection of Charles Evans Hughes as the Republican candidate for president – but he wasn’t exactly the paper’s first choice.

The paper had always been an enthusiastic backer of Theodore Roosevelt, but a “difficult choice” had been thrust upon Roosevelt and his supporters. Roosevelt could “keep up the brave fight” and run as a third party candidate, but this would probably mean handing the election to Democratic incumbent Woodrow Wilson.

So Roosevelt told delegates at the third-party Bull Moose Party convention that he would not accept their nomination. He threw his support behind Hughes on the Republican ticket, and The Spokesman-Review agreed with that decision.

The Spokesman-Review said that a Roosevelt third-party candidacy would “lay upon the country four more more years of Wilsonian weakness in a crisis of grave national perils and tremendous international complications.” The paper called Hughes “vigorous, clear-cut, patriotic and statesmanlike.”

As it turned out, Roosevelt would not have survived another presidential term. He died in January 1919.