The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the first major health crisis to face Spokane.

All Saints Episcopal church announced it would build a new cathedral that would be dedicated to those killed in action during World War I.

The arrival of returning soldiers from World War I was about to make the city go “hero wild,” the Spokane Daily Chronicle predicted.

Lt. L.S. “Babe” Wilson, a well-known Spokane man, had been reported dead in France. Yet he was happy to report that he was alive and well and “enjoying the hospitality of the French people in Paris.”

Two Spokane soldiers described their harrowing experiences in France and Germany.

Lumber companies in the Local Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen (the Four L’s) declared that they would fire any employee who was an “alien slacker.”

An uptick in new flu cases had residents worried that the the Spanish flu epidemic had not run its course.

A group of 23 civic leaders met at the Davenport Hotel and vowed to form “a great army of ideas pitted against the spirit of unrest, disloyalty, revolution and bolshevism.”

“Flying over England at night and chasing German zeppelins until they were well off home territory, then scouting around through the darkness to see if there were any left, sure has its thrills for a month or so, but after that it gets mighty tiresome,” said Lt. J.B. Rogers when he returned to Spokane from his service in World War I.

The ban on public dances – the last vestige of the Spanish flu quarantine – was finally lifted.

Dr. John Anderson was strolling down Riverside Avenue in downtown Spokane when a man spit on the sidewalk in front of him – a common, if foul, occurrence. It was also an arrestable offense, as the man would soon find out.

A group of boosters were touting a new route for a proposed Columbia Basin irrigation project – although this was not the same irrigation project that was later made possible by the Grand Coulee Dam.

The mayor of Hillyard (still a separate municipality in 1919) proclaimed a ban on public dances held for the benefit of Spokane people.

Spokane’s Central Labor Council said that the minimum wage law for women was “flagrantly violated” in the city.

Spokane’s emergency flu hospital closed its doors, after caring for 617 patients over three months.

“Noodles” Fagan, the uncrowned King of the Newsboys, entertained 300 Spokane Daily Chronicle newsboys in a free show at the Pantages Theater.

Not all was well at the Washington Motion Picture Corporation.

A mom and her two sons were killed in a fire and a third son was critically injured in a house fire in Colville.

Spokane’s newsboys – numbering in the hundreds – were about to get a special treat.