The Tragic Cost of a Neighborhood Game
A young boy's chase after a ball ends in a freak, fatal accident in Bellingham.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
F. Stubbs, the ten-year-old son of T. J. Stubbs, of Whatcom, died this morning from injuries sustained in a ball game yesterday afternoon. With other participants in the game, young Stubbs had run after the ball which had been knocked into the field and, catching it, put it in his arms and ran with it, his playmates following behind him. As he ran, he stumbled and fell upon a sharp rock, the point of which hit him in the pit of the stomach, just as the other boys piled upon him in the excitement of the play.
“As he ran he stumbled and fell upon a sharp rock, the point of which hit him in the pit of the stomach.”
While child's play remains a staple of life in Bellingham, this story highlights the brutal vulnerability of the pre-antibiotic era, where a common fall on a playground could lead to a fatal injury. Today's emergency medical care and surgical intervention would have likely saved the child, marking a stark shift in the reality of everyday childhood accidents.
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