100 years ago in Spokane: Prohibition doesn’t stop drinking

How was prohibition working out in Washington?

Well, it clearly wasn’t preventing people from getting drunk.

On the list of causes of arrests in Spokane, “drunkenness” was still No. 1.

A total of 138 people were arrested for drunkenness in Spokane in April 1917, more than were arrested for traffic violations or vagrancy, which were No. 2 and 3 on the list.

Meanwhile, two other stories in The Spokesman-Review showed that the city wasn’t exactly “dry.”

One headline read, “Boys Get Drunk on Church Wine.” A 12-year-old and a 13-year-old were arrested on the street in “an intoxicated condition.” When questioned, they said they broke into a church and stole some sacerdotal wine.

After they downed their communion wine, bystanders called police to complain that they were “scaring women and throwing bottles.”

When arrested, they were too drunk to specify which church it was. Actually, they were too drunk to remember their names.

Finally, in another incident, a suspected drunken driver “raved like a mad man” after he was arrested for an accident in which a passenger in his car died.

He “wept in a hysterical manner” for his dead friend, Bennie Tuttle.

Police believed that the accident had “unbalanced his mind,” but they also believed he had been drinking to excess. His car crashed head-on into another car on Apple Center, a road eight miles east of Spokane.