This day in history: County shoots down Liberty Lake music festival; Glee club flees West Side hotel fire

From 1976: The promoters of a gigantic Liberty Lake area rock festival expressed their frustration after the county commissioners rejected their permit.

“We’re quite disappointed in the attitudes in the All-American City,” said a lawyer for the promoters, sarcastically referring to Spokane’s recent designation. “It is an All-American City for those 35 and older.”

The promoters, based in Lewiston, said they would seek to stage their festival in some other state. Washington’s Outdoor Festival Law was “too restrictive,” said the lawyer.

The promoters had predicted crowds of 60,000 people, and the county ruled that it did not have enough deputies to handle security for such an event.

From 1926: About 30 members of the Washington State College Glee Club were on a trip to Mount Vernon, Washington, when they were forced to flee a hotel fire by means of “ropes, torn sheets and ladders.”

The Glee Club members were on the third and fifth floor of the Windsor Hotel when they “heard the cry of ‘Fire!’ ” and “at first took the entire affair as a joke.”

When smoke started to fill the halls, they knew it was no joke. They were all able to flee the building safely.

“Professor F.C. Butterfield, in charge of the Glee Club, was the last man out of the building,” the Spokane Chronicle reported.

The Glee Club members were able to carry on with their concert in Bellingham that night – clothed in “overalls, new and shiny,” because their clothes were lost in the fire.

Two of the singers were credited with rescuing two women from the fire, and the entire group was given a standing ovation.