The Great Finley School Board Election
A sleepy community turnout of nearly 100 voters leaves a rural school district energized and calls for a healing of fractured neighborly relations.
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 recent school election has been the all-absorbing topic of interest this week. The average number voting at previous elections has been about a dozen, but this year the community registered 99 votes. Guy Moore was elected to the two-year term without opposition. Arthur Skinner and Ed. Angell ran a good race, Mr. Angell winning by a margin of thirteen votes. It was a good race, and everyone took part and worked for either one candidate or the other. The telephone lines were kept hot and the telephone snipers reaped a harvest. As a matter of fact, now that it is over, we believe no one cared much which candidate won, but the election will prove a fine thing for the district, for it served to awaken the interest of many who had never before given the school a thought. Now that it is over, there is but one course to follow, and that is to bury the hatchet—to bury it deep and not leave the handle sticking out.
“Bury the hatchet—to bury it deep and not leave the handle sticking out.”
School board elections remain a primary site of hyper-local political engagement in rural Washington, where the stakes—and the 'telephone sniping'—feel just as personal today as they did in Finley in 1916.
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