This day in history: It was two terrifying hours stranded in the air for a pair of downtown window washers whose scaffold gave out

From 1976: Two window washers had a terrifying incident 16 floors up on the Washington Trust Bank Building.

One end of their scaffold suddenly dropped about 15 feet when a vital component was stripped.

“I fell down on the scaffold when it dropped, skinning my knee,” one of the window washers told The Spokesman-Review. “Ken held on to his rope and kept his feet. The scaffold stopped when the safety latch caught the cable. But it almost dropped right down. The steel hook which holds it to the roof bent out under the strain.”

The men were stranded on their precarious perch for two hours until Spokane firefighters and fellow workers from the window-washing firm were able to “use safety belts and ropes to pull the two men up to the roof.”

When asked what they planned to do upon being rescued, one of the men said, “Go get a beer.”

From 1926: The mining town of Burke, Idaho, was about to get a modern update: Its street was about to be paved.

That’s street, singular.

“The town has 600 or 700 people and does a big business and could use a dozen streets, but it has only one for the good reason that there is only room for one,” the Spokane Chronicle wrote.

Burke is situated in a narrow, steep canyon.

“The street dodges back and forth between the rows of buildings crowded against the mountains on each side,” the paper reported.

The county commissioners, property owners and the Hecla Mining Co. agreed on a plan to pave the 1,000-foot-long street.