This day in history: A looming teachers’ strike centered on supposed ‘pigheadedness’ from all parties

From 1975: Labor tensions were rising a week before the new school year in Spokane.

About 50 teachers picketed the Spokane School Board meeting, “demanding mediation in their contract dispute with the district.”

Yet after a 40-minute executive session, the school board announced that it was standing firm on its “no mediation” position.

The board president said a state “impasse committee” had unanimously agreed that “further negotiations, fact-finding, mediation or arbitration” should not take place “until both sides seriously review their demands.” She saw no sign that the Spokane Education Association had changed its positions.

One speaker at the board meeting, an elementary school custodian, said that all he saw was “a triangle of pigheadedness” involving the board, the administration and the union.

Spokane teachers were planning a strike vote within a week.

From 1925: Every person in Spirit Lake, Idaho, was “preparing for a desperate fight” as a wildfire approached from the southeast.

About 30 men were stationed on the town’s southeast border, yet “if the humidity should drop, it would be almost impossible to prevent the wind blowing the fire into town and sweeping everything before it.”

“Many families have their household goods on trucks, ready to move if the town is destroyed,” the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported.

The fire started two days earlier near a fox farm. Some men “were burning brush and the fire got away from them.”

Also on this day

(From onthisday.com)

1955: Black teenager Emmett Till is murdered by white men in Money, Mississippi.

1963: Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom march at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.