The City's 'Souvenir' Epidemic
Tacoma restaurants struggle with a wave of thefts as society women and girls make off with hotel silverware as mementoes.
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.
The 'collecting mania' does not seem to be confined to professional thieves and burglars. A good many women and girls, some of them moving in the best social circles, have also been collecting together other people's goods, in the shape of tablespoons, teaspoons, and the like. In Tacoma, restaurants have reported losses of spoons and even knives and forks, taken by women and girls from the tables as 'mementoes.' The kleptomaniacs who gather up this ware like to boast of it among their friends, and even tell male acquaintances how they took a spoon from this restaurant or a fork from that hotel. They gloat over these acquisitions as though they were jewels of great value, instead of cheap iron or steel. The spoon snatchers in Tacoma have been doing a big business at the Donnelly Hotel cafe, and inside the past year twenty-two dozen small dessert spoons and oyster forks have been sacrificed to the souvenir fiends. It is estimated that it costs about $10 a month to replace articles purloined as souvenirs from Johnston's cafe. At Carlyle's, the same sort of thieving is practiced. Articles are continually being missed, and the conclusion is irresistible that the same find their way into the 'collections' of the souvenir hunters.
“They gloat over these acquisitions as though they were jewels of great value, instead of cheap iron or steel.”
This 1904 account of elite 'kleptomania' highlights how the theft of public or commercial property was framed differently depending on the social status of the perpetrator. While the paper treats it as a 'moral degeneracy,' the story echoes contemporary debates about petty theft and social entitlement in the city's commercial districts.
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