100 years ago in Spokane: One of the McDonald sisters bailed on her court appearance after being found in Mexico

A judge called out the name of Fay McDonald three times in a Spokane courtroom. As expected, nobody responded.

So the judge declared Fay, one of the notorious McDonald siblings, to be in forfeit of her $2,000 appearance bond. A bench warrant was then issued for her arrest.

This was no particular surprise, since a Spokane detective had just returned from Tampico, Mexico, where he had found Fay McDonald at a dance hall. He tried to arrest her and bring her back to Spokane, but her friends prevented him from doing so and she was being held by Mexican authorities instead.

There was no possibility of extradition, but her bond lawyer told the court that he believed she was willing to return and serve her three years in Walla Walla on her forgery conviction. He said the same thing about Marie McDonald, who had also disappeared after her forgery conviction. The lawyer said that Fay was not happy with her living conditions in Mexico.

“The penitentiary at Walla Walla is a palace compared to most of the places I have seen in Mexico,” the bond lawyer said.

From the education beat: W.J. Sanders, an English teacher at North Central High School, wrote a column in support of American Speech Week.

He wanted to direct attention to the “five cardinal virtues of good speech: correct pronunciation, clear enunciation, effective sentence organization, correct grammar and good diction or choice of words.”

An indiscriminate use of slang, he wrote, “imparts a flavor of vulgarity to everything one says.”