This day in history: Downtown Spokane Fox was set to be split into triplex. Men were badly burned in wildfire

From 1975: Spokane’s Fox Theater, built in 1931 as a magnificent Art Deco movie palace, was now being chopped into three sections and converted to a triplex.

“Two movie screens will be installed in separate auditoriums upstairs, in addition to the main screen downstairs,” said The Spokesman-Review.

“The idea is to give people a wider choice of movies,” said the general manager in Spokane for Mann Theaters, which owned the Fox. “Now, we’ll have more flexibility in bookings. With one auditorium, we weren’t able to bring in many good films we wanted to show here.”

He said there was a national trend to convert large downtown movie houses to triplexes.

This was true. Yet this marked another unhappy milestone in the Fox’s downward spiral since the 1950s. This spiral would eventually be reversed in 2000, when the Spokane Symphony purchased it and later restored it to its original glory.

From 1925: Two Newport area woodcutters were badly burned and their horses were burned to death in one of the many forest fires raging in the region.

They were in a wood camp when the fire got into the slash piles. “A whirlwind came up” and the men had difficulty escaping before they suffered burns and on the arms and face.

They made it out and later sought first aid in a Newport drug store.

Also on this day

(From onthisday.com)

2018: China bans the release of the Winnie the Pooh movie “Christopher Robin” after the character is used to mock Chinese President Xi Jinping.