One hundred and two years ago, Lorain and the country were experiencing a bad winter, as shown on the front page of the January 26, 1924 Lorain Journal (above). "Lorain awoke this morning to find herself in the grip of a blizzard that caused her to shut off the alarm clock and crawl back into bed for another snooze," the lead story noted.
"At 8 o'clock, when office folks with muffled faces were slipping along to work on icy walks and pavements the thermometer registered 2 below, the coldest hour of all. From that time on the mercury rose slowly, but not fast enough to warm pedestrians, and at noon it registered 6 above at the U. S. coast guard station.
"Blinded by whirling snow, James Sugg, 26, 2007 E. 30th-st, an employe of the National Tube Co., stepped into the path of a west-bound Lorain Street Railway car at Vine-av and 28th-st, while on his way to work at 6:30 a. m. today.
"Prompt action by W. Woodcock, motorman, saved the man's life. Sugg was struck by the car and hurled against a trolley wire pole. He was picked up by Patrolman C. C. Smith, and sent to St. Joseph's hospital in the same car that hit him."
The story goes on to describe an unhappy occurrence involving some pigs being shipped to market.
"Fifty porkers enroute to the east on a Nickel Plate railroad stock train have made their last squall.
"When the train stopped at Lorain this morning, it was found that the hogs had been frozen to death.
"The shipment was consigned to Cleveland, where the carcasses were taken for disposal."
The article goes on to describe the blizzards in Michigan and New York.
It sure was a strange time for newspapers. The somewhat light tone of the report of the frozen pigs, however, is nothing compared to the short item entitled, "Today's Best Story" at the top of the page, which recounts the death of a 65-year-old Cleveland man who apparently suffered some sort of heart attack while watching a burlesque show. Chuckle chuckle.
And how about the the discovery of two heads imbedded in a concrete block in Aurora, Illinois? The murderer was a distant relation of President Abraham Lincoln. Pretty gruesome.
Anyway, feel free to peruse the rest of the page, which contains several tragic stories as well as a few funny ones, including the story of Mrs. Maggie Welgelfsky, who unsuccessfully hid a gallon of illegal liquor in her baby's cradle.
All that and an odd 'Abe Martin' cartoon!
I always enjoy reading those old newspapers! Today’s local papers are tissue thin, pitiful imposters. But, I still purchase them…Sorry to hear about your winter mishaps, Dan. Back in the day, they could have made a paragraph on the front page.
ReplyDeleteI looked at the Abe Martin cartoon and didn't understand it. I must be getting old if I can't decipher the funny pages.
ReplyDeleteBuster...
DeleteIn the 1920s, a very common way of completing suicide was by running a gasoline engine or rerouting furnace exhaust in an enclosed space. The cartoon shows someone asking for cigarettes near what appears to be maybe a furnace. The caption means something like, "Make sure you're serious about this, then go ahead. If you're driving an electric car, it won't hurt you." But, if you had a gas-powered car, the exhaust fumes could kill you.
This would be in shockingly poor taste in a modern newspaper cartoon, but in the 1920s, it was a-okay!
I think maybe Abe was just having fun with Davy Crockett's "Be always sure you're right, then go ahead" phrase, and applying it to someone driving erratically, in this case in an electric car, which were in use back then. As for the cigarettes, the 1920s were apparently when it was first suspected that they were bad for you. Maybe Abe's "Bunk won't hurt you if you don't inhale it" is a way of making fun of a similar claim about smoking?
DeleteI appreciate the thoughts of you two distinguished folks, but I have to believe that the readers of 1924 were just as mystified as I was.
DeleteI think your fall and dents are a sign from above that it's time to retire!
ReplyDeleteRE: The streetcar accident... In the past, people often walked tracks because the tracks went from place to place instead of zigzagging back and forth. Like, the train went directly from Oberlin to Elyria, the roads did not, and so the quickest way was the tracks. It was done more so in heavy snow because tracks were *always* cleared while roads were not. There's almost always an uptick in accidents of people being struck by streetcars and trains during/after snowy weather because people don't/can't get far enough away to be safe.
And I agree with Wendy. Old newspapers are the bomb. Though, even before their unfortunate Internet-driven demise, they were slacking. A newspaper just before the fall would have, maybe a half-dozen stories on the front page instead of the nearly twenty I count above. I think newspapers started coming apart at the seams when they began to embrace the concept of "white space" in their design.
When I was in journalism school 60 years ago, we were taught how to compose pages in the old way such as you see above, and in the more modern manner, with fewer stories and more white space. In those days, newspapers were relatively flush with money so could afford to add more pages and spread out the news. Today, what you get on the front page often isn't news - that you get from the Internet. It is more of what we used to call "enterprise stories" - more in-depth pieces about the issues of the day. I still get the Plain Dealer, as I have all my life, but it is a much different publication than it was in its heyday.
ReplyDelete