This day in Spokane history: A 12-year-old won the fair’s attendance-guessing contest, and 100 years ago, someone was poisoning people with marshmallows

Tammy Meusy, 12, emerged victorious in the guess-the-Expo-attendance contest.

Her guess was 5,187,364, which was only a few hundred short of the official attendance number, 5,187,826.

The highest guess was 6.8 million, and the lowest was 4.6 million. That latter guess was non-competitive, to say the least, since it was submitted after the attendance had already hit 5 million.

Who came in second? Tammy’s little brother, Chris Meusy, 4, whose guess was only five short of Tammy’s.

Expo officials awarded Tammy a bronze Expo medallion and a “collector’s box” filled with memorabilia.

From 100 years ago: Spokane police warned of “fiendish plans to poison innocent citizens of the city.”

Someone had doctored packages of marshmallows and left them in various places. One man found them in his car after returning from a theater. He sampled one of them but did not finish it because of the bitter taste.

The next day a woman found a package of marshmallows on her porch. She mixed a few into her cake frosting, but after tasting a sample, she noticed the bitter taste, felt slightly ill and notified her doctor.

Analysis of the marshmallows showed they contained enough strychnine to kill. The substance is often used as rat poison.

The 11-person detective squad was working hard on the case, and the captain said he believed it was “distributed by an insane person.”