A Punch-Up Over a Chambermaid
A political fixer accused of theft turns his ire on a harbormaster who offered unwelcome romantic advice.
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.
Andy Kehoe, the Democratic politician of the First Ward who had not been in trouble for several months, made up for lost time yesterday by being arrested twice—once for grand larceny of $77 from Ida Peterson, chambermaid at the St. James Hotel, and the second time because he thumped Harbormaster Jelich on the head. Ida Peterson, the chambermaid at the St. James Hotel on South Third Street, which is run by Samuel Kehoe, father of Andy, is a pretty girl. It is an open secret that Kehoe and Jelich both took a fancy to the fair damsel. Peterson claimed that when she went out of her room Monday morning, $77 she had saved was gone, and having seen Andy Kehoe tip-toeing along the hall, she suspected him. Yesterday, Jelich—knowing of the trouble—approached Kehoe in a saloon under the Occidental Block, offering to chip in $5 toward a collection to return the missing money to spare the family trouble. Kehoe, incensed by the implication and the interference, punched Jelich, resulting in a second warrant for assault and battery.
“He was not in the mood for such advice, so he flared up and told Jelich things that would not look well in print.”
This saloon-floor dispute highlights how local machine politics and personal grievances bled into the public sphere in 1890s Seattle. The Occidental Block was a cornerstone of early Pioneer Square, a site of constant intersection between the city's power brokers and the people serving them.
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