50 years ago in Expo history: President Ford was nowhere to be found, but his speech still rang out at the fair

Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B. Morton was the stand-in for President Gerald Ford at Expo ‘74 and delivered the same speech, in large part, that Ford had originally been scheduled to give.

“I bring you his greetings and his assurance that the vital concerns to which we are addressing ourselves today are also of vital concern to him and his entire administration,” Morton said, speaking at the Expo Environmental Symposia.

He admitted that the recent oil crisis had shown the need to “mine and use more coal, (and) step up drilling for oil and gas.”

So the challenge now was how to “carry out that program and improve environmental quality at the same time.”

He believed that it could be done, with better regulation of strip mining, cleaning up auto emissions, better energy conservation and more research into nuclear fusion.

He admitted that “the answers are not easy.”

From 100 years ago: Three “dope peddlers” were in city jail after they were arrested for selling a “bindle” of cocaine to an undercover police officer.

About $100 worth of cocaine and morphine was confiscated during the arrests.

Police said they learned a week earlier that “dope peddlers had returned here in numbers after being kept out for nearly two years.”

One of the suspects was a 17-year-old Spokane boy, and the other two were apparently adults.

A fourth person, a Spokane woman, was thought to be part of a second gang. She had been arrested for vagrancy, but asked to be allowed to return briefly to her Spokane hotel room to “take care of her three canaries.”

Her request was granted, and she was accompanied by an officer and jail matron. When she returned to jail, officers searched her and found a package of 115 capsules of morphine, strapped to her waist.