The Price of a 'Square Meal' for a Piano Tuner
After recovering from a drinking binge in Oroville, a hungry traveler found himself penniless—and learned the hard way that business owners in 1882 took a dim view of unpaid bills.
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.
A traveling piano tuner named C. H. Chase got on a spree lately in Oroville. When he recovered, he felt hungry, went into a restaurant, and ate a square meal. When he came to pay, he found he had no coin. The proprietor thought he was a 'beat' and threw him out, beating him so severely that the man was forced to go to the infirmary.
“The proprietor thought he was a 'beat' and threw him out, beating him so severely that the man was forced to go to the infirmary.”
This brief account highlights the era's brutal, unregulated approach to 'service refusal' and the harsh realities of transience in the developing West. While we now have social safety nets and legal recourse for such disputes, the stigma against those who cannot pay for basic needs remains a persistent, unresolved friction in modern Seattle.
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