100 years ago in Spokane: A Danish noble couple faced deportation over ‘moral turpitude’

Federal immigration officials ordered the deportation of Count and Countess Viggo von Holstein back to Denmark.

The reason? “Moral turpitude.”

Both were tossed in jail in Spokane five weeks earlier for a scheme to “flimflam” several department stores. Federal immigration officials said the couple still owed nearly $2,000 to Spokane stores.

The countess, an American, blamed it all on the fact that they had lost their Danish fortune to inflation and had made a number of unwise business decisions. The count, at one point, had even worked as a Spokane construction laborer just to stay afloat.

They arrived in Spokane in 1919 and were already well-known to police in other cities for various schemes. There was apparently some question whether they were truly Danish nobility. The Spokane Daily Chronicle was now putting quotation marks around the word “count.” But there was indeed a Danish noble family of that name.

From the basketball beat: The Stanford University basketball team – one of the tops in the country – made an appearance at a Spokane gymnasium en route from Pullman. They had just finished two games at Washington State College, where they “trimmed” the Pullman team. They practiced in Spokane before heading to Seattle for two games with the University of Washington.

Stanford’s squad had a 14-1 record.

On this day

(From Associated Press)

1815: The United States and Britain exchanged the instruments of ratification for the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.