100 years ago in Spokane: Newspaper warns of dance ‘orgies’ at crossroads parties

The Spokane Daily Chronicle’s editorial page warned about a a new societal menace: dance “orgies” at country crossroads.

“Spokane is credited with supporting weekly orgies at a half-dozen points five to 10 miles from the city,” the editors said.

They said that most parents did not know the “true nature” of these orgies, and they naively assumed their teenagers were “merely going to old fashioned country dances.”

Instead, these dances were apparently drunken revels. They represented a danger to the city’s young people, said the editors, on a par with the “dances of the old days, when Spokane was classed as ‘wide open.’ ”

They said that 50 percent of serious auto accidents on country roads could be attributed to these dances. They heartily approved of the sheriff’s recently announced plan to crack down on these parties and relieve Spokane of this “moral menace.”

From the war beat: A Spokane Chamber of Commerce board member made a startling suggestion: He wanted German prisoners of war to be brought to the region to work on farms.

He said it would not only solve the farm labor scarcity, but it would result in many of the prisoners “settling here after the war.”

It would be, he said, “a great advertisement for the country.”

The matter was referred to a committee.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1967: Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. (They divorced in 1973.)