Good Old Days

125 years ago

The Commoner, Sept. 22, 1893

An old man named Harvey was sleeping in a barn near Garfield, and when getting up in the night to get a drink of water fell through the floor and broke his collar bone. The intemperate will declare that he should have taken “a bottle” to bed with him and thus saved his collar bone.

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Business in Colfax is now improving every day. The currency scare of the summer is subsiding as an abundant harvest progresses.

100 years ago

The Colfax Commoner, Sept. 20, 1918

Morris Pollock of Colfax has filed a damage case against William Cole through his attorney A.B. Wiltze of this city. Pollock claims he had been injured through the action of the deputy sheriff to the extent of $500.

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A fire alarm was sounded Saturday noon and the men who responded to the fire call were notified that a grain fire had broken out at the Chas. Hart ranch and that help was needed at once. A hurried run was made to the scene of the fire, which was found under control when the firemen arrived.

75 years ago

The Colfax Gazette-Commoner, Sept. 17, 1943

Administration of penicillin failed to save the life of Charles William Mays, 54, farmer of the Hooper region, who died Sunday afternoon after the new wonder drug had been rushed to the Byrant and Weisman clinic by sheriff's officers of three counties. Mays, reported to have worked in the harvest fields Saturday, died of pneumonia, the disease having gone too far to make the new treatment effective.

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Attracting considerable attention throughout the state is the Navy Victory Truck routed by the United States treasury in cooperation with the Colfax war finance committees in the interest of the third war loan. It is scheduled to be in Colfax Saturday, Sept. 25. Mounted in the slate grey navy truck is the first gun to speak an answer to Japan, sinking the first Japanese submarine outside Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

50 years ago

The Colfax Gazette, Sept. 19, 1968

David Kelly, 20-year-old truck driver for Gardner & Smith, Oakesdale, probably owes his life to a farmer who happened to see the clouds of “steam” arising over the horizon and investigated because he thought it might be a fire on his neighbor's property. Harold Parsons, who lives about four miles north of Oakesdale, found Kelly pinned inside the cab of an overturned truck loaded with a tank of anhydrous ammonia in a ditch alongside the road near his farm. The “steam” was ammonia fumes escaping from a valve broken on the tank in the accident.

25 years ago

Whitman County Gazette, Sept. 23, 1993

The Dry Creek road project will cost an additional $168,000, but the project is continuing on schedule and could reopen within a month.

10 years ago

Whitman County Gazette, Sept. 18, 2008

Green carbon copies of the citation for traveling 70 in a 55 mph zone will soon be a thing of the past in Whitman County. Under a mandate from the state Legislature, road deputies in the Sheriff's Office and officers in the Pullman Police Department will train next month in a new e-ticket system.