100 years ago in Spokane: McDonald sister denies she had steaks and ‘airy sunlight’ in jail

Marie McDonald, one of the notorious McDonald siblings, strenuously denied a charge that she was served $50 worth of porterhouse steaks while being held in the city jail on charges of murdering W.H. McNutt.

“If $50 worth of steaks came in to me, someone else ate them,” she told a gathering of reporters in her apartment, where she was living pending appeal on a forgery conviction. “The food served in the city jail is a disgrace to Spokane.”

She also wanted to lay to rest another false rumor.

“And boys, I wish you would deny that I lived in an airy sunlight room while in the city jail,” she said.

“My sister and I were held in the detention room where electric lights are on for 24 hours of the day, and dope fiends and drunken and diseased women were our companions.”

From the Wobbly beat: A supposed regional convention of Wobblies failed to materialize in Spokane.

Police received information that the Wobblies were gathering in Yardley (near today’s Interstate Fairgrounds). Police raced out there and found nobody.

Then they received a tip that the Wobblies were gathering in Hillyard. They found no Wobblies there, either.