100 years ago in Spokane: Magazine aids bootleggers’ jailbreak

From our archives, 100 years ago

Three bootleggers made a daring jailbreak from Spokane City Hall using a saw, a towel, some blankets and … a magazine?

Yes, the three bootleggers apparently shoved a magazine through the bars of their cell. They “tied a towel to the end of it, and using this, threw the end of the towel around the lever and gave it a jerk.” The lever, part of an automatic lock system, opened the door.

They got into the corridor, climbed to the top of the cell, “which is even with third floor windows,” and made it up to the windowsill by “running a plank over it.”

They apparently had a saw of some kind, because they sawed one of the window bars at the bottom and bent it out of shape sufficiently so they could squeeze through. They then took three blankets, tied them together and lowered themselves three stories to the ground.

One of the escapees, W.G. Henry, had been arrested a month earlier for driving into Spokane with a trunk full of whiskey from Montana. He was also wanted for violating parole at San Quentin.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1945: With World War II in Europe at an end, Soviet forces liberated Czechoslovakia from Nazi occupation. U.S. officials announced that a midnight entertainment curfew was being lifted immediately. … 1961: In a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton N. Minow decried the majority of television programming as a “vast wasteland.”