Let’s remember when a bunch of anti-gambling petitions were stolen from the Secretary of State’s office, on this day in 1963 (June 21)
Shorty and Fiddleface, thank you for your service.
There’s been a long, weird history of trying to implement anti-gambling laws in Washington state, and this is one of the weirder stories.
On June 21, 1963, two men steal petitions supporting an anti-gambling referendum from Washington Secretary of State Victor Meyers’s office in the Capitol. The petitions, consisting of 82,955 signatures on 5,530 signature sheets and weighing about 75 pounds, are dumped into a cardboard box and sacks and spirited away from the Capitol. Wags quickly dub the incident “The Great Petition Robbery.” The petitions are never recovered, but the referendum is certified and appears on the 1964 ballot anyway, where it is defeated. The two men accused of the theft, identified only by the nicknames of “Shorty” and “Fiddleface,” are never caught.
But wait, there’s more.
In March 1963 the Washington State Legislature passed an act permitting pinball games, punchboards, card games, and bingo under license by local authority. Former Tacoma councilman Homer A. Humiston quickly filed papers to initiate a referendum action against the act, and the action became known as the anti-gambling referendum, or more formally, Referendum 34. Humiston spearheaded a petition drive to collect signatures for the referendum. By June 1963 he had collected 82,955 signatures, far in excess of the 48,630 minimum required by law to submit the referendum to the ballot.
The petitions were filed with the Secretary of State Victor Meyers (1898–1991), and by June 17, Meyers’ office had counted the signatures and bound the petitions into 137 volumes. Verification of the signatures was slated to start on July 1. The petitions were stored in a safe in the Permanent Registration Office, which was located in the Secretary of State’s office.
Instead, shortly after the office closed on Friday afternoon, June 21, two men conned cleaning lady Ethyl Burkhart into letting them into the Permanent Registration office. Mrs. Burkhart had seen the men before: They had approached her approximately a month earlier and asked how to get into the Permanent Registration Office after hours. Other witnesses had also seen the men in the area numerous times in the preceding weeks and had even helpfully directed them to the Secretary of State’s office.
In an ironic twist of fate, the chief clerk of the Division of Permanent Registrations, Sadie Blackwood, had a premonition that Friday afternoon that “something was up” (The Daily Olympian) and just a few hours before the theft had the 75-pound, three-foot-high stack of petitions moved from one safe to another in the Secretary of State’s office.
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