The War on Tacoma's Knothole Gang
When the local baseball management deployed a park keeper with a sharp stick to drive away children watching from a fence, the crowd turned on the club.
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.
D. Evans, president of the baseball club, and his husky park keeper opened a war on the small boys yesterday which didn't prove very popular with the crowd. The fact that the small boys of Tacoma have the inalienable right, the same as boys in every other city, to view a ball game while perched in a tree-top, or even while peeking through a knothole, has irritated the club management. Yesterday, the park keeper, presumably under orders, made a disgusting attempt to force the boys to either pay their admission or go home. Armed with a sharp stick, the park keeper walked quietly around the fence, and when he saw an opening where probably two or three youngsters were getting a view of the game, he would ram his weapon viciously through at the lads, little caring whether or not he might gouge their eyes out. The brave man's next move was to turn a hose on the score or more of boys who daily gather on the wood piles adjoining the park fence to the south. What authority D. Evans or his man had to interfere with the youngsters was not exactly clear to the crowd, and there was not a man present who, as a small boy, had seen scores of ball games in the same manner, would not have enjoyed seeing the boys mob the man with the hose.
“The fact that the small boys of Tacoma have the inalienable right, the same as boys in every other city, to view a ball game while perched in a tree-top... has irritated the club management.”
Public space and the right to spectate without a ticket remain core tension points in Tacoma, even as the scale of the game has shifted. Today, this 'knothole' struggle echoes in modern debates over the privatization of public waterfronts and the encroaching costs of entertainment that isolate lower-income youth.
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