100 years ago in Spokane: A ‘whirling mass’ of a high school fundraising carnival featured a 6-foot ‘baby’ and a Spanish cabaret

North Central High School held a combination of pep rally and midway carnival, and it was a doozy.

“Nobody could come up for air in the whirling mass, and what’s more, nobody wanted to,” reported The Spokesman-Review.

Here are just a few of the attractions:

• Clayvon Lipscomb, dressed up as a nurse, wheeled “Skeezicks,” a 6-foot baby, through the crowd “in advertising the baby show.”
• The baby show featured “a half-dozen sweet darlings,” including “Tubby,” who was “advertised as the fattest baby in six states and looked as though he was indebted to Mellin’s food for about 200 pounds.”
• “Professor Bunken’s consolidated museum” – a kind of jokey “Believe It or Not” exhibit – featured a collection of “things not as represented.” For instance, it contained “the first tooth” from the mouth of the Little Spokane River and a baby shoe “from the foot of Mount Spokane.”
• A comic sideshow tent in which a character name Bluebeard “bragged about a half-dozen beheaded wives he had in a tent.”
• A Spanish cabaret, featuring Joe Valentine, pretending to be Rudolf Valentino, who “uses brilliantine (hair tonic) just as effectively as the real star.”

The pep carnival was staged by the North Central girl’s league, and it was a fundraiser for the student council. All of this “pep” apparently worked wonders for the North Central football team, which defeated Lewis and Clark High School 12-9.