The Mattress They Took From the Children
A teamster's hospital stay turned a $136 loan into a chattel-mortgage seizure—and a lawsuit over the mattress his children slept on.
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.
G. H. Thomas and Frank K. Thomas are in trouble, for they are not only accused of taking the last stick of household furniture on which they had a chattel mortgage, so that a family of children had not even a bed to lie on, but also of seizing several articles to which the mortgage did not apply. Hence a suit for restitution brought by Bausman & Stedman on behalf of B. E. Baukins and his wife, Lorraine Baukins, against them, their agent Peter McMahon, and Sheriff Van de Vaster.
Baukins, who is a teamster, on January 1, 1894, borrowed $136.50 from McMahon at the astonishingly orthodox rate of 5 per cent a month, and gave a note secured by a chattel mortgage on his household goods and his wagon and team of horses. Baukins paid the interest up to August 9, 1894, so that Thomas received in those seven months a sum equal to 25 per cent of the principal. Then Baukins was taken ill and has been in the hospital ever since. His wife has since eked out a living by washing and has been unable to pay the 5 per cent a month.
The result was that on December 26 G. H. Thomas went out to her house and took possession not only of the mortgaged property but of other articles which Mrs. Baukins says were not covered by the mortgage—namely, a heating stove worth $8, a toilet set, $5, a parlor lamp, $3.50, an easy chair, $3.50, music books, $10.60, garden tools, $5.50, a sewing machine, $30, and a clock, $15. The last two articles are alleged to be the separate property of Mrs. Baukins, who says she bought them with money sent her by friends after the mortgage was given. Not only this, but Thomas is accused of taking the mattress and bedding on which the children had been sleeping.
Mrs. Baukins has entered suit before Justice Caldwell for the restitution of the articles she claims were misappropriated, and the case will be heard on January 29. The Thomases claim they are not interested in the loan, but receipts for the interest are signed by Frank K. Thomas on printed blanks of the Seattle Mortgage Company. McMahon has for an attorney "Gen." E. J. Jeffries, of the Coxey army, who has hitherto been supposed to condemn the recovery of both principal and interest by money lenders.
“Not only this, but Thomas is accused of taking the mattress and bedding on which the children had been sleeping.”
Medical debt and high-interest loans still push Seattle families toward eviction and the loss of household possessions. The Baukins case—a lender taking a child's mattress over an unpaid note—reads like a modern debt-collection horror story.
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