This day in history: Superior Court judge must decide fate of frat’s ‘Filthy Festival.’ Man’s body found in CdA River after family car fails to make turn.

From 1976: A Superior Court judge landed a provocative assignment: deciding whether the films in a Cheney fraternity’s “Filthy Festival” were obscene.

A judge was now tasked with watching films “Deep Throat” and “Devil in Miss Jones” and ruling on whether Eastern Washington State College’s board acted legally in canceling the Filthy Festival.

The Theta Chi Upsilon fraternity had scheduled the movies at Pence Union Building on campus, claiming the festival was “a scholarly endeavor of artistic and literary evaluation of a current social and political phenomenon.”

After the board refused to permit the festival, the fraternity’s attorney contended the ruling amounted to prior restraint.

The court was now confronted with a logistical problem.

“I just wonder where our office can locate copies of these two films,” a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office said.

From 1926: After nearly two weeks, searchers finally located the body of James E. Codd, caught beneath a log on the Coeur d’Alene River.

He was one of four members of the Codd family who died when their car failed to make a turn at a bridge and plunged down the steep embankment. The other bodies had been recovered earlier.

A reward of $500 had been offered for anyone who recovered Codd’s body, and “a number of men have been working up and down the river since.”

The two men who found the body had been traveling along the bank every morning in hopes of finding it.