This day in history: Teachers union threatened strikes. Spokane’s ‘King of Bootleggers’ sentenced to prison

From 1975: The Washington Education Association was threatening to hold a statewide teacher’s strike to protest a wave of school levy election failures throughout the state.

Spokane School District administrators warned Spokane teachers that shutting down the schools for a day “would be completely unacceptable from our point of view.” The Spokane Education Association had not yet authorized a strike.

Spokane voters had approved a school levy in February, but voters in Seattle and many other districts voted levies down.

A number of teachers in Puget Sound school districts already voted to walk out, as a way of putting pressure on state legislators “for full state funding of schools.” The teachers said they would strike for one day and gather en masse in Olympia.

However, most lawmakers already “agreed that school districts that had voted down levies should not be bailed out.”

From 1925: Charles Dale, Spokane’s “King of the Bootleggers,” was sentenced to a year and a day at McNeil Island federal prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate Prohibition.

“Although Dale has been charged with liquor violations many times … this is this the stiffest sentence he has ever received,” said the Chronicle. He was also fined $1,000.

Judge Stanley J. Webster seemed particularly offended, because Dale had recently pretended to reform.

“When I read your series of articles in the Chronicle, dealing with the folly of breaking the liquor laws, I was inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and I believed you had reformed,” said the judge.

“I was sincere when I wrote those things, judge,” replied Dale. “I had a good job, but when business fell off, I fell back into the old ways of making easy money.”