This day in history: Marchers to Fairchild protested B-1 bomber purchase. Woman was desperate to get friends to stop sending Christmas cards

From 1976: About 50 protesters gathered at the U.S. Courthouse in Spokane and marched to Fairchild Air Force Base to protest funding of the B-1 bomber.

The demonstration was sponsored by the Spokane branch of the Fellowship for Reconciliation, which opposed the use of military weapons.

Congress was scheduled to vote soon on a $1.6 billion funding package for the new bombers.

The demonstrators had made a cardboard mock-up of a bomber with the slogan: “Our Choice: $90 Billion for Life or Death.”

From 1926: Mrs. Rudolph Dorn had a big problem: Too many people were sending her Christmas cards.

The “kindly pleasant old lady who has lived for 26 years in the same rooms in the Auditorium building” said she appreciated getting cards from her friends from all over the world. For Christmas 1925, she had received 262 cards.

The problem was this: “I must answer them, my conscience won’t let me do otherwise.”

“Now I am getting to be an old lady and I’m so tired of writing,” she said, as she motioned toward a box filled with cards. She grasped her head in desperation.

So now she planned to put an ad in The Spokesman-Review “asking my friends to remember me in their hearts – by not sending me cards.”

Also on this day

(From onthisday.com)

1874: Jesse James’ gang robs a train at Gads Hill, Missouri.

1929: Leon Trotsky expelled from Russia to Turkey.

1943: German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders to Soviet troops at Stalingrad.