100 years ago in Spokane: Hard labor for driving over 30 mph? A fed-up judge warned that speeders would ‘get the rockpile’ going forward

Spokane police judge Fred Witt raised the alarming prospect that any driver convicted of driving over 30 mph would be sentenced to hard labor on the city’s rock pile.

Up to that point, the controversial city rock pile had been reserved for drunks and vagrants.

But now, the fed-up judge said that anyone caught speeding “would get no sympathy – they get the rock pile.”

He also announced that mail truck drivers would not be exempt.

The judge told an errant mail truck driver that he should take the following message back to his fellow drivers: “They have endangered the lives of pedestrians in the downtown district long enough.”

He issued this proclamation after hearing a number of speeding and reckless driving cases. He had just heard a case in which the chaplain at Fort Wright was arrested for driving 32 mph. The judge said he would not make the chaplain preside “over meetings of the rock pile crew,” but from now on, he would be giving out the rock pile sentence.

From the music beat: Nearly 300 of the 500 students at Whitman College were taking music courses in the college’s conservatory of music, according to Howard Pratt, the director of the conservatory.

Pratt said the Whitman glee club had just finished a 10-day tour, “playing to packed houses everywhere.”

One thing they would not perform: jazz.

“None of the jazz contagion which has swept schools and colleges has disturbed the decorum of college life at Whitman,” The Spokesman-Review wrote.

“The out of door life in western colleges keeps students normal,” Pratt said.