100 years ago in Spokane: Judge considers possible marriage of teen girl

The supposed May-December romance between Edna Neff, 16, and Truman Persons, 56, both of Green Bluff, was apparently a figment of someone’s imagination.

Esther, her younger sister, told her parents that when Edna left home, she said she was planning to marry Persons. This alarmed Edna’s parents so much that they obtained a court order prohibiting the marriage pending a hearing.

Yet during the hearing, Edna said she never intended to marry Persons when she left home. She left only because “the treatment of her father forced her to leave.”

Her father then testified that he “told the girl to leave following a quarrel.”

The judge, who no longer had to deal with the question of a marriage, reprimanded the father and said his “sympathy was with the children.” Then he told Edna to go back home.

From the Prohibition beat: Spokane police held their biggest “liquor-pouring party” in three years in the station’s basement.

“For more than two hours, four men pulled corks and permitted the liquor to run from the bottles to the sewer,” said the Spokane Daily Chronicle.

In all, 900 quarts of bonded liquor went down the drain. It was contraband that had accumulated from a number of raids in recent months. The police chief noted that “nothing but bonded stuff was poured today” because most of the homemade liquor had been poured the day before.

In fact, one of the pourers was sporting a bandage across his chin from an accident the previous day. A bottle of home brew exploded, and flying glass gashed his face.