This day in history: The tales of Thanksgiving humanity, live from Riverside Avenue

From 1975: A Spokesman-Review reporter decided to hang out on Riverside Avenue on a cold Thanksgiving Day and watch the pageant of humanity pass by.

Except, there wasn’t much humanity.

He did find an 83-year-old woman waiting for a bus. She “reminisced about the time 63 years ago when she first came to Spokane and caught a trolley on this very corner.”

She recalled that she had taken an open-sided stagecoach from Canada to Browning, Mont., and then hopped on a mail train to Spokane.

“There was a kid about five smoking a cigar on the stage,” she said with a laugh.

Other than that, the reporter saw a mother and son going to dinner at a hotel and a man looking for a jewelry store – in vain.

The conclusion: Spokane “looked like a scene out of the movie ‘On the Beach,’ after World War III: Empty and bleak.”

From 1925: The “hostilities” between Lewis and Clark High School boys and North Central High School boys ended with a session in police court.

A 19-year-old LC boy was charged with disorderly conduct after he infiltrated a North Central pep rally and “showed the poor judgment of yelling for Lewis and Clark, thus precipitating a battle royal.”

He probably would not have ended up in police court, except he struck a patrolman by mistake. He was fined $4 plus costs. The two North Side boys who testified against him waived their witness fees so the costs would not be run up for the LC boy. At the end, he shook hands with the two NC boys.

Lewis and Clark ended up winning the “hostilities” – at least the on-field kind. LC beat NC in the big rivalry football game.