100 years ago in Spokane: Women pitch in for wartime rationing

Spokane women were avidly following the “Hoover requirements” – meaning, a voluntary form of wartime food rationing, as outlined by Herbert Hoover (later to become president).

These food-stretching suggestions included having a few meatless – and even wheatless – days every week.

Mrs. August Paulsen said that she sometimes had two meatless days a week, and “we never use any more butter than necessary.”

Other women said they were serving cornbread instead of wheat bread, sometimes three times a week.

Many Spokane women were also growing their own gardens and raising their own poultry and cows.

From the espionage beat: Carl G. Grossman, the “German spy” arrested in Spokane, turned out not to be a spy at all.

In fact, nearly every “fact” that led federal authorities to arrest him was fiction.

First of all, he was never on the staff of the German ambassador, which means that he was never ordered out of the country and never went into hiding. Second, he was actually a businessman touring the region for mining interests.

The trumped-up charges were apparently invented by a traveling salesman, an Englishman, who got into an argument with him at the Davenport Hotel and threatened to have him arrested.