The Great Balfour Dock Pie Heist
A group of hungry laborers were left with nothing but their pride when two men made off with their dessert, ignoring everything but the pastries.
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.
Men working at the Balfour dock did not have their usual allowance of pie for their noon lunch today. The men have been in the habit of leaving their lunch baskets in what has heretofore been considered a safe place inside the warehouse. This morning two gaunt, hungry specimens of the 'Weary Willie' type wandered into the warehouse. After the hobos had looked around awhile, one of them kicked the row of lunch baskets. There was no one in sight and as the prospect of a feast looked good to the knights of the road, they proceeded to help themselves. They proved to be men of cultivated tastes and passed by everything but pie. Delicious home-made sandwiches, jelly cakes and other tasty edibles were left untouched by these epicures. It mattered not to them whether it was apple, custard or cherry pie; it all went the same way. They had taken the pie from the last of the twelve baskets and were starting for the door when one of the warehouse men appeared. His suspicions were aroused and a hasty examination of his lunch basket revealed what devastation had been wrought. By the time he had given the alarm, the marauders were hiking down the line and a lively chase followed. The hobos did not care for a closer acquaintance with the men who had furnished their lunch, however, and by doing some lively sprinting prevented a tragedy. The last seen of them, they were headed for Puyallup and only hitting the ground in the high places.
“They proved to be men of cultivated tastes and passed by everything but pie.”
Stories of 'hobos' were a staple of early 20th-century papers, often reflecting the transience of the labor force in port cities like Tacoma. This humorous take on a petty theft highlights the divide between the settled working class and those forced into vagrancy.
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