100 years in Spokane: National Apple Show attendees to get free pies ‘direct from the oven’

From our archives, 100 years ago

Visitors to the ninth annual National Apple Show in Spokane would each receive a generous treat – a “piping hot” apple pie.

It would mean baking many thousands of pies, but the organizers believed it would be worth it.

“Management has made a careful investigation of the cost, and has concluded that a pie can be given away at an outlay of one cent per pie,” said the story.

These would not be family-sized pies of “large girth and depth,” but “genteel individual pies direct from the oven.”

This pie giveaway promised to be better organized than the one in 1912, when every child attending “Children’s Day” was given a free apple pie. This resulted in a “melee” of pie-loving kids, in which police had to fence off part of the passageway in front of the ovens. A total of 10,000 pies were given away in one day.

From the court beat: The superior court in Spokane opened an unusual case. Henry Allen was charged with “stealing the whistle off the sugar beet factory in Waverly.”

The “enormous brass whistle and other brass castings’” were entered into evidence.

Why would Allen want to steal a factory whistle? The motive was not clear.