Have you ever heard of W. T. Van Orman?
I hadn't – until I read the front page of the Lorain Journal from one hundred years ago today – June 1, 1926.
Van Orman – who was born in Lorain in 1984 and graduated from Lorain High – had just won the 1926 Gordon Bennett international balloon race. In the headline article below, he is acknowledged as "America's premier balloonist."
You can read more about his life, his work at Goodyear, his achievements and his inventions here.
Elsewhere on the front page, several articles chronicled the accidents and tragedies that had occurred during the Memorial Day holiday, with stories about: multiple crashes of street cars, buses and autos; a young girl who plunged thirty feet to the ground from a roller coaster at Crystal Beach in Vermilion; a young man who was struck by lightning in a church and died; a Lorain six-year-old who had been missing for several days; and nineteen persons arrested for various charges, including intoxication.
Another story told of five surviving Civil War veterans (the war had ended more than sixty years earlier) and how they participated in Memorial Day ceremonies. The article noted, "a bronze tablet cast from the Battleship Maine, was presented to the city by the Spanish War Veterans." The tablet was installed in the City Hall lawn, but was moved to Washington Park in 1929. I wrote about that tablet here and here.
On the lighter side, the captain of the "Walter B." fish tug boat caught a forty-two inch long eel. Yuck! According to the story, "The eel will be cut up and sold, like any other fish."
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