100 years ago today: Train derailment sends 30 into a ditch

A Northern Pacific freight train derailed at Marshall, throwing three boxcars and 30 boxcar-riding men into a ditch.

Authorities were still searching through the rubble, but so far no deaths were reported. However at least four were badly injured.

“I jumped on the train at Pasco to save a few nickels,” said one of the injured men, still spitting out teeth. “At the time of the wreck, I tried to jump, but landed on my jaw. I hope none of the men are under the wreckage, but I fear they are.”

The accident was caused when the wheels of one boxcar locked up.

From the Prohibition beat: A hotel landlady was under arrest after the police “dry squad” uncovered her ingenious booze delivery system.

She had apparently rigged a clothes-drying rack to secretly open a valve inside the woodwork. Once the valve was opened, booze flowed from a hidden vat of whiskey through a tube to the first floor room. Police used axes to uncover a 35-gallon copper tank.

On this day

(From Associated Press)

1955: Emmett Till, a Black teen from Chicago, was abducted from his uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, by two white men after he had supposedly whistled at a white woman; he was found brutally slain three days later.

1963: More than 200,000 people listened as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

2017: Floodwaters reached the rooflines of single-story homes as Hurricane Harvey poured rain on the Houston area for a fourth consecutive day.