A Close Call in the Kitchen
A man’s attempt to dry his dynamite in a kitchen oven ends in a deafening, structure-leveling blast.
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.
Frank Anderson nearly killed several people in his shack today after attempting the foolhardy trick of drying eight sticks of giant powder in the oven of his kitchen stove. He and his wife happened to be out of the house at the time, and the only occupant was their baby lying in the bed. It was thrown from the ruins unharmed, but smothered under the mattress and bedding that had caught fire. The roof of the shack landed in a neighbor's yard, and pieces of the stove pierced the house for a hundred feet around as if hurled from a cannon. Mr. Anderson, a brother of Frank Blair, was near the front door and was struck on the ear by a piece of iron and severely injured.
“The roof of the shack landed in a neighbor's yard, and pieces of the stove pierced the house for a hundred feet around as if hurled from a cannon.”
While dynamite-drying accidents are thankfully a thing of the past, the recklessness of handling volatile materials in a cramped domestic space remains a dangerous, timeless human error. The story captures the precarious nature of life in the self-built shacks that once dotted the fringes of a growing Seattle.
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