She Came to Spokane Looking for Work and Died in the YWCA Rest Room
Mrs. Warren W. Orr left her 60-year-old husband in a lumber camp near Marcus and travelled to the city to find a job. On Sunday afternoon her seven-year-old boy held onto her skirts while she took morphine.
Spokane, Wash., March 29. — The 7-year-old son of Mrs. Warren W. Orr hung to his mother's skirts while she killed herself with an overdose of morphine in the rest room of the Young Women's Christian Association Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Orr came to the city Saturday from Godfrey, near Marcus, Wash., leaving her husband, who is 60 years old, working in a lumber camp. The family was in stringent circumstances and Mrs. Orr hoped to get work in this city.
“The family was in stringent circumstances and Mrs. Orr hoped to get work in this city.”
A sixty-year-old man in a lumber camp, a wife who came to the city to find work and found none, and a child in a YWCA rest room: this is what the bottom of the wage economy looked like in 1909, when there was no unemployment insurance and no public assistance to bridge a bad month. Substitute a motel room and a temp agency and the story is still being written in Spokane, in Newport, and in every timber town that loses its mill.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.