This day in history: Washington Mutual offered new innovation – paying bills by phone
From 1976: Washington Mutual Savings Bank was offering an innovative service: Password Plus, which allowed people to “pay your bills by telephone.”
Arrest and charges
The bank’s Spokane regional manager said that this checkless method was, “so far as we know, the first full-service system of this type west of Minneapolis.”
Customers needed a touch-tone phone, not a dial phone, to use the service.
They press “the appropriate touch-tone buttons,” and the “computer gives instructions by voice, guiding the customer through the payment sequence and repeating each step for verification.”
The service had already been tested successfully in the bank’s Puget Sound locations.
From 1926: A murder in Medical Lake 15 years earlier appeared to have been solved with the arrest of a man in San Francisco.
Authorities believed he was one of two Medical Lake hospital guards who beat to death Lee Johnson, a patient, in 1911.
The two guards then disappeared, and remained at large despite a massive manhunt and a $500 reward for their capture.
