The Patent-Leather Fugitive
A suspected post-office burglar was tracked from Seattle to the Grays Harbor woods, only to be found asleep in millworker's clothes—and incongruous footwear.
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.
J. M. Meyers, alias I. Cohn, a young man with a thin face and high cheekbones, is confined in the county jail on the charge of burglarizing the MacDougall & Southwick Company’s mail box at the post office. He was arrested at Cosmopolis by Detective Bolton Rogers. The prisoner has refused to make any statement. Rogers tracked him to Lake Washington, then to Newcastle, and finally to Tacoma, where he registered under an alias. Meyers eventually traveled to Cosmopolis, where he hired out to the Gray’s Harbor Lumber Company. Rogers found the man in the garret of the M. Charles hotel, lying on the bed asleep. His clothes were a check jumper and blue overalls, but he was wearing patent leather pumps—not the typical footwear of a mill laborer. Meyers was arrested without a struggle and brought back to the King County jail.
“His clothes had not been removed, and consisted of a check jumper, blue overalls and patent leather pumps. The last articles are not usually worn by mill laborers.”
The 'patent leather pumps' in a logging town is a classic period detail, showing how difficult it was for even a quick-thinking criminal to blend into Seattle's industrial labor force. Today, the site of the former MacDougall & Southwick department store, a retail powerhouse of the era, is a reminder of the city's early commercial heart, long before the move toward modern tech-driven commerce.
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