City Hall Janitor Crushed in Elevator Tragedy
A routine morning cleanup ended in a gruesome death for an elderly janitor when an elevator started unexpectedly.
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.
Robert Spaulding, head janitor of the city hall, was killed this morning at 10:16 o'clock while engaged in his duties. With A. B. Becker and Thomas Riley, two prisoners from the city jail, Spaulding had been on the top floors cleaning up. They had a box full of rubbish and placed it on the lower section of the elevator to take it to the cellar. The three men got on with the box and went down. At the gates of the elevator on the other floors, people were rattling for service, and Charles Johnson, the elevator man, for a moment forgot he had passengers on the lower section and started up. Spaulding had in the meantime started to get off. He was sitting on the edge of the elevator floor, ready to jump off, when the machine suddenly shot up. Spaulding gave a blood-curdling shriek as the machine ran up, but it was too late. His head was caught on the bottom of the first floor and crushed. Dr. Sargentlich was called and had the injured man taken to Fannie Paddock hospital, but he died shortly after arriving there. Spaulding was an elderly man, about 60, and leaves a widow who lived with him at the end of Jefferson Avenue.
“His head was caught on the bottom of the first floor of the city hall and crushed like an eggshell.”
Accidents involving primitive elevator systems were a common workplace hazard in the early 20th century, often resulting from a lack of safety interlocks. Today, Tacoma’s City Hall building serves as a historic site, but the story reflects the era's brutal lack of industrial safety protocols.
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