This day in history: A chance run-in with a strangely attired bank robber rattled a woman

From 1975: A customer was walking into the First National Bank at Second Avenue and Stevens Street when a “stocky man” wearing jeans and a white sailor’s cap nearly knocked her over.

She thought he was just being rude, but she soon found out different.

“It never occurred to me to that he had robbed the bank,” she said.

He was fleeing to the parking lot with a bag full of loot. She and other witnesses said he jumped into a waiting car and “disappeared in the heavy holiday traffic downtown.”

“I think I could have caught him,” said a man who was in the parking lot. “But they told me not to chase him because he had a gun.”

This was the second time a man wearing a white sailor’s hat had committed an armed robbery. A man of that description had earlier robbed the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Division Street.

From 1925: The county jail’s road gang was proving to be so efficient that the “county engineer is urging the sheriff to give him another crew.”

The National Guard aviation unit in Spokane had also asked for a crew to work on their airfield.

Earlier fears that the prisoners would not work hard enough to “earn their three meals a days” had proven groundless.

Only one inmate had refused to work during the first days of the program. He said he had heart trouble and feared that the work might endanger his life. The county doctors looked him over and assured him that he was fit. Since then, “he has been doing fine work in the crew.”

Also on this day

(From onthisday.com)

1942: Nazi Germany annexes Luxembourg.