"Lorain's Meanest Man" – Feb. 23, 1924

One hundred years ago today, this was the front page of the Lorain Journal on February 23, 1924. The vantage point of a century always seems to have at least a few things of interest.

The headline story about impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Harry Daughtery somewhat demonstrates that things haven't changed that much in Washington, D. C. in the last hundred years. (If you want to know what that was all about, here's the link to the Wiki entry about Daugherty.)

But the most interesting article is the one about "Lorain's Meanest Man." 

So who was this meanie? According to the article, "he is the man who yesterday afternoon in a downtown department store, struck in the mouth a 12-year-old newsboy, unfortunate enough to ask him, "Paper, Mister?"

"He is the same man who, a few seconds later, while the boy stood crying in the corner, his spirit broken and his lip bleeding, flung, with an angry oath, into the face of the young girl clerk, the money in payment for an article purchased."

One hundred years later, the whole thing would have been captured on someone's cell phone, and an angry mob would have held him until Lorain's finest arrived. And a judge would have given him a creative sentence, perhaps carrying the newspapers for a week for the injured young entrepreneur.

Anyway, other items of interest on the page include: the two articles about streetcars (one above the other), with one about an accident at Reid and 20th Street, and the other about streetcars being replaced by buses in Akron; a story about Lorain's booming economy; a notice about a meeting of the Lorain County Beekeepers' association, which is still around today (here's the link to its website); and another "Abe Martin" comic panel.

An interesting item at the top of the page reveals that the Lorain Journal "wired Henry Ford suggesting that the new freighter which he will come here to christen within the next two weeks be named THE CITY OF LORAIN." As it turned out, Henry Ford was unable to come to Lorain and the ship ended up being named "Henry Ford II" anyway.

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I'm still getting over monkeypox whatever it is I've got, so I haven't been able to devote a lot of time to the blog. Since I got sick on a holiday (Groundhog Day), maybe I'll be back to normal on St. Patrick's Day. In the meantime, I think it's time for another banana.