A Breakfast Tragedy at Pacific Avenue
A local woman’s accidental encounter with a cable car turns the intersection into an omelette station.
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.
There was a combination of fresh omelette and clam chowder on the pavement at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Seventh Street yesterday afternoon. A lady, apparently of Italian birth, bearing two well-filled sacks—one containing eggs and the other clams—reached the corner just as the cable car was about to start up the hill. She stepped onto the low platform just as the grip clutched the cable, and the sudden movement threw her onto the pavement. There was a fall that put Humpty Dumpty's famous tumble in the shade, and the principal actor, the gripman, and the conductor united in a chorus, parts of which, if published, would bar any newspaper from the mails. Some of the clams were gathered up, but the eggs—well, they were left to soak into the pavement.
“There was a fall that put Humpty Dumpty's famous tumble in the shade.”
This vignette captures the daily friction between pedestrians and the cable car lines that once dominated downtown Tacoma's steep topography. The humor, while cruel by modern standards, reflects the precarious nature of public life before cars dominated these same corridors.
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