100 year ago in Spokane: The ‘Lion Tamers Club’ formed, with tween boys living it up in a shed

A group of 12- to 14-year-old boys in North Spokane built their own clubhouse and named themselves the Lion Tamers Club.

“We did all the work ourselves – put in the electric wiring and built the brick chimney an’ everything,” one of the boys said.

It even had a cast-off wood burning stove for heat.

The boys had an advantage in that one of their fathers ran a hardware store, which supplied some of the building materials. The Spokane Daily Chronicle dryly noted that “the architecture isn’t exactly Italian Renaissance, nor does it fit in with the Gothic or Elizabethan.”

Instead, it was modeled after clubhouses in two popular newspaper comics of the day: the Lion Tamer’s Club in “Mutt and Jeff,” and the Scorpion Club in the “Frisky Foibles” comic. It was essentially a small shed.

“Pretty swell dump, ain’t it?” one of the boys reportedly said.

From the fire beat: The ear-splitting fire alarms at the Spokane Hotel began to clang, and panicked guests rushed out of their rooms, shouting, “Where’s the fire?”

A bellboy responded, “Huh, there ain’t no fire. Some nut just set off the fire alarms.”

The guest was “fresh off the farm” and unfamiliar to the “many devices in a large hotel.”

The manager later explained that “a fellow on the third floor smashed the glass and pushed the fire alarm button, thinking he was ringing for the elevator.”

A firefighter said, “I guess he must have thought you employed an elevator operator who was a little hard of hearing.”