The Drunken Leap at the Tacoma Rooming House
A furniture salesman, searching for a companion named 'Alice,' broke into the wrong residence and was forced to jump from a second-story window to escape the homeowner's wrath.
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.
At midnight Tuesday, a man jumped out of a second-story window of one of three similarly built houses on the west side of a street between Ninth and Eleventh. It was initially feared his legs were broken, but he was later seen limping about with the aid of a cane. Mrs. Scrofford, who lives in one of the houses, is preparing to send away her roomers because of the scandal. Mr. John H. Hammond, who lives in the third house, said he would move if his neighbor, a recently divorced woman named Mrs. Davis, is not removed. It appears an intoxicated man entered Mr. Hammond's house by the back door, having first tried Mrs. Davis' door. He wandered upstairs into a vacant room and threw the furniture about. When confronted by Mr. Hammond, the intruder jumped out the window, groaning and calling for 'dear Alice.' He was later taken to Mrs. Davis' house, where she tenderly cared for him, calling him 'dear Al.' It is believed the visitor was Al Forbes, a furniture salesman.
“He thought he was dead, and called for his 'dear Alice.' When taken into the house he hugged a banister, calling it his 'Alice.'”
Public morality battles over 'rooming houses' were a staple of 1890s urban reporting. Today, these conflicts persist in the tension between neighborhood character, densification, and the struggles of transient populations in aging housing stock.
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