Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

From our archives, 100 years ago

This was Thanksgiving Day, and a Spokane housewife was hopping mad when she discovered she had been swindled – by a turkey.

She had purchased a nice, fat 9-pound turkey at a local market and “went home with a light heart.”

Her heart wasn’t the only thing that was light. When she started preparing the turkey, she found it to be stuffed with 20 large pebbles, “crudely inserted through the vent.”

She notified police, who talked to the market proprietor. He refunded part of the price and blamed a local wholesale house. The investigation continued.

Meanwhile, The Spokesman-Review editorialized about the value of Thanksgiving and the holidays.

“They lift us for a time above the treadmill of our affairs and the low level of living that it tends to form,” said the paper. “Our daily business drives us toward narrowness and hardness of character. We become liable to lose sweetness and the fine humanities. But festivals socialize us, enlarge the boundaries of self and enable us to give and take each other’s best.”

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1971: Hijacker “D.B. Cooper” parachuted from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 over Washington state with $200,000 in ransom.