100 years ago today in Spokane: 70-year-old woman goes back to school to learn Spanish

Mrs. Levina Satterthwaite surprised the Spanish teachers at the Lewis and Clark evening school merely by showing up.

Why? Because she was 70 years old and just beginning to study Spanish.

Mrs. Satterthwaite explained that she had a perfectly good reason for commencing her Spanish studies.

She said she wanted to be “able to converse with a Spanish girl to whom my son is married in the Philippine Islands.” The couple was coming to visit soon, and Mrs. Satterthwaite said that her son told her that his wife “does not like to talk English.” So Mrs. Satterthwaite was determined to talk to her in Spanish.

Learning new skills was nothing new for Mrs. Satterthwaite. At age 61, she took up the violin and studied under some of Spokane’s best teachers.

She had been a schoolteacher for many years and “has more than 20 teaching certificates.”

From the wheat beat: The region’s wheat farmers were celebrating a victory in Washington D.C. on government-mandated wheat prices.

Farmers were granted a price of $6 per ton of flour and $3.50 per ton of grain for products shipped from Pacific coast terminals. This price would “inspire farmers to increase the crop of wheat this year,” which was considered crucial to the war effort.