"Howling in from the northwest after a few warning roars of thunder and flashes of lightning, a 60-mile gale accompanied by an early spring thunderstorm, hit the city last night, threw Lorainites into a panic and caused thousands of dollars worth of damage," noted the report.
"The wind, driving solid sheets of rain before it and stinging faces of unprepared pedestrians and autoists, bowled over trees, blew in windows in downtown stores and in residences in the outlying districts and drove frightened people into the streets to escape, they believed, another tornado."
Remember, it was only a year earlier that the infamous Lorain Tornado of 1924 had devastated the city – so it's not surprising that the residents were on edge. Speaking of the tornado, a relief bill for Lorain was still working its way through the State House in Columbus, as reported by William E. Ashbolt.
Elsewhere on the front page are some pretty disturbing articles. A two car accident at the intersection of Globe Ave. and 30th Street left one man dead (with his head crushed) as well as three others injured. I guess it was common back then to present the news in the most gruesome way possible.
Two other small items were a parent's worst nightmare: a baby girl in Columbus dying by falling on scissors, and a Cleveland baby suffocating while sleeping between her parents.
But there was an uplifting article. Frederick Atwood, supreme prelate of the Lodge of Knights of Pythias, addressed a crowd at Lorain High School with a speech about ways to attain happiness. Atwood apparently accomplished that feat despite being blind.
And oddly enough, right in the middle of a page filled with tragedy and unhappiness, is a funny cartoon. It shows two citizens, flattened by a steam roller labeled '1925 Income Tax Payment,' but smiling because they felt that the income tax was lighter this year.
4 comments:
100 years later and the news is pretty much the same - natural disasters like tornadoes, income tax, car accidents, train accidents, gasoline tax, and even an article about the absence of prayer before meals. All still relevant topics in 2025. All this progress, but we really haven't made any progress at all.
I wish my grandma was still with us so I could tell her that someone actually did die from falling on a pair of scissors.
My research has shown me newspapers of the past contain what we would consider unnecessary details when describing violent deaths and disease. Here's part of an article from the Elyria Evening Telegram (1911, July 31, p. 1.) describing the death of Andro Pivarnik, aka Andy Liptas:
"The body was terrible mangled and was scattered in all directions. The man's scalp and other parts of the head were about 100 feet north of the crossing, some seventy-five or eighty feet from the trunk of the body, showing he'd been struck by a north bound train. The man's head was cut off at the shoulders and so badly ground to pieces that it was impossible to identify him..."
The above is typical for a person struck by a train or streetcar. I figure the papers were trying to out-compete each other for readers.
Anon: All we need is a "running with a popsicle stick in your mouth" death and we'll be all set!
The sensational, embellished, gruesome stories may be a hold over from what is known as "yellow journalism" ... basically the idea was to sell as many newspapers as possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
That was weird the way the paper described that baby that suffocated in bed with her parents.The paper stated "it" was found in the crook of her mother's arm instead of "her" or "she".Like the baby was an object or something to be bought and sold on the open market.
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