It was an ordinary day. Just opened the Sunday News to browse through all that has been going on in the past couple of days. Read about all the automobile accidents and murders in my hometown and decided to open the "Living" section of the paper for a few more bits of local information. Page E2 always has half a page of stories titled "Lancaster That Was." The stories are excerpts and summaries of news stories from the Intelligencer Journal, Lancaster New Era and The Sunday News that focus on the events in the county's past that were newsworthy 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 75 years ago and 100 years ago. So...on this Super Bowl Sunday...here are a few newsworthy stories from my past in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
25 years ago: In a case of extremely bad timing, Lancaster County's only curling club closed up shop just months before the 1998 Winter Olympics catapulted the quirky sport into the public eye. Curling, sport of Scottish origin and Canadian popularity, has drawn increasing interest during recent Olympic Games. Occasionally presented as an exhibition sport over the years, curling joined the ranks of Olympic medal competitions for the first time at Nagano, Japan, in 1998. But just two months earlier, the Keystone Curling Club, which had met every Wednesday at Regency Sportsrink in Lancaster, ended its life after less than three years due to lack of interest. Initially 334 people signed up for the club, but by 1997 that number had dropped to 16, with only about 10 showing up each Wednesday. A failed partnership with Millersville University contributed to the trouble, as did the difficulty of curling at a facility that wasn't purpose-built for the sport.
50 years ago: A group of burglars were thinking ahead to summer during the winter of 1973, when they stole 27 new lawnmowers from a dealer in Columbia on February 11. The thieves broke into R.P. Williams & Sons, located on Route 462 near the Columbia Drive-in, through a small side window, police said. The 27 stolen mowers were all self-propelled Toro models, red with chrome handles and were valued at a total of $4,500. In what was perhaps a minor concession to the season, the burglars also took a single snow blower. None of the stolen mowers were riding mowers!
75 years ago: The New Era of Feb. 12, 1948, featured a front-page story about the Clawges family, who had turned the second floor of a chicken barn into a home after being evicted from their home in Lancaster city. Russell Clawges, along with his wife and five children, were living in what amounted to a one-room apartment in an empty chicken barn in Paradise. The large room was heated by two small stoves, which the family needed to juggle around for warmth, as winter wind whistled through cracks in the walls and door. There was a tap in the room for running water. The Clawges family was evicted from their city home when the property was sold to a new landlord. After a fruitless search for a new home, they rented their makeshift quarters from John Erb for $15 a month. Erb was planning to convert the second floor of the barn into two proper apartments...one of which he would rent to the Clawges family...but that project wouldn't begin until spring.
100 years ago: On Feb. 12, 1923, Canada's oldest citizen, Susan Augusta "Sarah" Maxwell, died at the age of 117. She was a former slave who was born and raised in southern Lancaster County. Born in 1805, Maxwell was one of the few surviving former slaves who escaped from the United States prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. She and her husband were freed in 1853, traveling from Unicorn in East Drumore Township to Toronto via the network of abolitionist safe houses and secret routes known as the Underground Railroad. They found life in Toronto unsuitable and soon moved to Richmond Hills, Ontario, where she lived the rest of her life. She had several children, all of whom predeceased her.
Every Sunday newspaper has the "Lancaster That Was" column which gives the newspaper readers a chance to see what life was like in the city of Lancaster in the past. Neat feature and one of the first pages that I read when I first open my Sunday News. I would love to be the newspaper reporter who had the chance to look through the Sunday News editions from the past to pull out the stories that would be featured on the "Lancaster That Was" column. Probably more than half the articles happened before the reporter had been born. Great job! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
No comments:
Post a Comment