This day in history: Orchardists called for inspector to be fired. ‘Popular’ man was left at altar
From 1975: Changes were on the way in college football. The Big Ten had just moved to break its “exclusivity contract” with the Rose Bowl.
This meant that Big Ten teams, other than the conference champion, would be free to accept other football bowl bids. Any of its top four finishers, other than the champion, could play in a lesser bowl. The Pacific-8 – which included Washington and Washington State – had already made the same move.
Yet the most important tradition remained intact. The Big Ten champion would continue to play the Pacific-8 champion in the Rose Bowl.
That’s because the Rose Bowl remained the most important of the bowl games and the most-watched on television. The “old guard” on the Tournament of Roses committee had insisted on exclusivity, yet the television revenue from the other, secondary, bowls, had proved too lucrative to resist.
From 1925: A petition with 490 signatures requested the firing of the Spokane Valley’s district horticultural inspector, after the inspector broke locks on gates and sprayed orchards without the owners’ permission.
“I believe in spraying, but I believe that reason should be used,” orchardist R.W. Lakin said, according to the Spokane Daily Chronicle. “… I feel aggrieved at the treatment I have received at the hands of the public officials of the state and county. In this I believe 95% of the residents of the Spokane valley join.”
He noted that when he sprayed his own orchard, it cost him $16.64. But when the inspector broke into his orchard and sprayed, he was sent a bill for $42.04. Meanwhile, The Spokesman-Review reported earlier in the day that a judged dropped misdemeanor charges against Lakin and two other orchardists who had refused to allow the inspector to spray their land.
The Spokane Daily Chronicle had run front-page photos in May of State Agricultural Inspector F.C. Nielsen cutting the padlock onto Lakin’s orchard and the “county spray wagon” spraying arsenate of lead onto his land. Lakin had been detained by the sheriff for refusing to allow Lakin to spray his orchard.
From the marriage beat: A woman who had planned to marry Fabian Smith, a recent Cornell University graduate was who called “one of the most popular young men in the city” by the Spokane Daily Chronicle, had unexpectedly married someone else.
The frontpage headline: “Fabian Smith loses at altar.”
Smith, however, would go on to get married and have four children, lead numerous charitable organizations in Spokane and live in a home near Cliff Park that The Spokesman-Review called “among the most beautiful in the city,” according to his obituary in 1949.