A Toddler’s Cough Saves a Family from Fire
An 18-month-old infant is credited with waking his parents, Mr. and Mrs. T. L. Joslyn, just in time to escape a house fire in South Tacoma.
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.
By the merest bit of good fortune, the lives of Mr. and Mrs. T. L. Joslyn, 2319 South Ash Street, and their 18-months-old baby, Chester, were saved early yesterday morning when they awoke to find their little home in flames. The coughing of the suffocating boy awoke his parents, and it was with the greatest difficulty that they forced their way from the burning house. The home is a complete wreck, the blaze having gained such headway that firemen were unable to save it. Eleven hundred dollars worth of insurance was carried on the house and its effects, but the net loss will amount to $600. It is believed that cigar stubs thrown in the wood box earlier in the evening were the cause of the fire.
“The coughing of the suffocating boy awoke his parents, and it was with the greatest difficulty that they forced their way from the burning house.”
Residential fires remain a persistent danger, though modern fire codes and smoke detectors—technologies that would have felt like magic to the Joslyn family—now provide the warning that little Chester provided by chance. The neighborhood of South Ash Street remains a residential area, continuing the long history of Tacoma families building lives in homes that are one stray spark away from catastrophe.
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