The Man Who Demanded Ten Thousand Dollars from the Law
A local man convinced an electrical machine was ordering him to collect a massive payday from the county deputy.
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.
I want $10,000. This request, made by an elderly gentleman, startled Deputy Sheriff Warner this morning. The deputy was attending to some work in his office when the stranger entered and made the unusual demand. 'I live at 116 1/2 Puyallup Avenue,' continued the stranger, 'and have a machine, run by electrical impulses, that tells me what to do. This morning it told me that you had $10,000 for me.' Deputy Warner looked around for the money, but didn't seem to find it, and asked the stranger to be seated. The man's name was found to be J. M. Huntley, and the answer to his modest request came this afternoon in the shape of an insanity charge. Drs. Parks and Parker found him to be mentally unbalanced, but as the people with whom he lives considered him harmless, and in view of the fact that the Steilacoom asylum is crowded to its limit, the case was dismissed.
“I have a machine, run by electrical impulses, that tells me what to do.”
This incident highlights the historical reality of the Steilacoom asylum, which frequently struggled with capacity limits, leaving families to manage individuals with mental health needs without institutional support. It serves as a reminder of how little infrastructure existed a century ago for those suffering from mental illness, a gap that still manifests in modern debates about public mental health services in Tacoma.
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