This day in history: Businesses continued the cleanup after flood hit downtown Spokane. Sheriff promised that his department employed no ‘stool pigeons’

From 1975: Gawkers gathered around a giant crater near Post Street and Sprague Avenue caused by the rupture of a water main a day earlier.

Meanwhile, downtown businesses were cleaning up soggy messes in their basements. Reference books in the basement of the Spokane Public Library, three blocks away, were damaged.

Fortunately, the valuable historical, federal and state documents stored in the library’s basement escaped serious damage. Some damp manuscripts had to be spread out to dry, however.

No injuries were reported during the incident, “but many people were forced to wade to work.”

Investigators were still not certain what caused the 16-inch pipe to rupture and spout geysers on Post Street.

From 1925: Mr. and Mrs. Alexander McKechnie were drawing up a civil suit for the recovery of $165 in an unlikely bid to get back their $165 worth of “protection” money.

In a case that was widening into a City Hall scandal, the McKechnies said they paid Walter Simmonds $165 to be turned over to Spokane’s Commissioner of Public Safety Charles Hedger for “police protection” for the McKechnies’ illegal baseball pool gambling operation.

The McKechnies were subsequently arrested for running the pool. Now they were suing to get back the $165 payoff, since they clearly did not get value for their money.

The scandal widened when Simmonds claimed he was in the pay of the sheriff’s office as a “special investigator.”

The sheriff responded that “we employ no stool pigeons” and Simmonds was no “special investigator.” He did allow, however, that Simmonds occasionally gave the dry squad tips which he picked up while working his real job as a gas meter reader.

Simmonds had to resign his meter-reader job following the publicity surrounding the case.