100 years ago in Spokane: A forger was arrested after repeating the same spelling mistakes from one of his checks

Bad spelling was the downfall of Charles Sherwood, alleged check forger.

A check on a Reardan bank was spelled “Reardon,” and the check was written in compensation for “labor,” but it was spelled “laber.”

Sherwood denied writing the check, but when the judge asked him to spell Reardan and labor, he repeated both mistakes and the judge bound him over to Superior Court.

Sherwood’s other mistake was writing another forged check to Fred Frese Sr., the father of a Spokane police officer. The younger Frese was in his father’s shoe repair shop at the time, and placed Sherwood under arrest.

From the tobacco beat: Girls should have nothing to do with boys who smoke cigarettes, a Christian missionary worker told the members of Spokane’s Otterbein Guild, the younger girls’ missionary society.

This advice was offered as a toast at the society’s banquet.

From the missing persons beat: The body of William McLachlin, 8, was found in the Spokane River, just above the Howard Street Bridge.

The boy had been missing for five days. He had told his friends he was going to play in a sand pit near Corbin Park. He never returned home.

Searchers moved several thousand tons of sand at the pit, on the theory that the boy was caught in a slide. Then they searched a nearby frog pond, to no avail.

“It is not known how the boy wandered from the sand pit … nor of the circumstances which led to the drowning,” the Chronicle wrote.