Narrow Escape from Fire for Two Girls
Prompt action by neighbors saved two young children after their clothing caught fire near a stove on the same afternoon.
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.
Tuesday afternoon, the daughter of J. B. Pugsley, while visiting the children of J. D. McIntyre in the Hotel Yakima, met with an accident which, but for the presence of mind of Mrs. J. A. Bicker, might have proved fatal. The young girl was standing by the stove when her clothes caught fire and in a moment she was enveloped in flames. Her screams brought Mrs. Bicker to her assistance, who caught up a blanket and wrapping it around the little one smothered the fire before further injury was done than the loss of the girl’s clothes and hair. Rhenff Lesh’s daughter met with a similar casualty on the same day and at about the same time which terminated with only the burning of her clothes.
“Her screams brought Mrs. Bicker to her assistance, who caught up a blanket and wrapping it around the little one smothered the fire.”
In an era of open-flame heating and high-pile flammable fabrics, fire hazards were a constant, daily threat in domestic life. Today's fire safety standards regarding child-safe clothing and modern HVAC have largely relegated these kinds of stories to the past, though the constant peril of home heating accidents persists in modern fire safety discourse.
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