A Teenager’s Seattle Escape
A fourteen-year-old girl is at the center of a criminal hearing after being found in a cheap lodging house.
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.
Frank Cook, the old man who is charged with committing a criminal assault on Elsie Lord, the 14-year-old Tacoma girl, in Seattle last Sunday, was yesterday sent to the county jail by Justice Jordan of Seattle, under bonds. Cook’s hearing was set for June 8. Little Elsie Lord was accompanied in court yesterday by her widowed mother, Mrs. Sadie Lord, who resides with her seven fatherless children at 3831 Sixth Avenue. Elsie Lord left her home here Sunday for Seattle, ostensibly with the intention of decorating her father’s grave. Instead of this, it appears that the girl left in company with Frank Cook, a laborer, 60 years old. On reaching Seattle, they engaged a room in a cheap lodging house, and there they were found by the police on Monday. Cook insisted to the officers that there had been nothing criminal between himself and the girl, but the latter’s story did not correspond with the one told by the man.
“Cook insisted to the officers that there had been nothing criminal between himself and the girl, but the latter's story did not correspond with the one told by the man.”
This story reflects the era's protective and often punitive approach to young women's autonomy, framing a runaway incident as a grave criminal moral collapse.
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