Did you know?
What a difference 100 years makes.
While the Pittsburgh Pirates may have challenged for baseball supremacy this season, in October of 1913, they were only battling local teams that were holding their own against them.
The 1913 Pittsburgh Pirates had three future Hall of Famers (Honus Wagner, Max Carey and Fred Clarke) on their roster.
But, according to the game summary chronicled on the front page of the Uniontown Morning Herald, only one of them (Carey) played in a game against Scottdale on Oct. 16.
They eked out a 3-0 victory over the Scottdale team that day in front of 800 fans.
Twelve years later, though, the Pirates weren’t spending their October “barnstorming” around Southwestern Pennsylvania. They won their second World Series (they’d also won it 1909) on Oct. 15.
“Pittsburgh holds wild celebration championship as Bucs capture world’s championship in rain,”read the banner headline across the front page of the Morning Herald the following day.
The Pirates had defeated the Washington Senators in the seventh game by a score of 9-7, in the “wildest and certainly the wettest finish ever seen in a world’s series,” it was written.
Legendary sports writer Damon Runyon wrote game recap in his famous literary style.
“These pallid lines can not hope to inform the reader of the scene that befell when young Hazen Cuyler, outfielder for the Pirates, came up in the eighth inning with the score tied, two out, and the bases full, and slugged one of old Walter Johnson’s fast shots down the first base line, driving home the winning runs,” he wrote.
The Associated Press reported that, “In the downtown district, crowds filled the streets, while hundreds of office windows were opened and a cloud of torn paper was showered upon pedestrians by clerks.”
Although the police reported that there’d been no disorders, the revelry had engulfed the area surrounding Forbes Field.
Meanwhile, the commissioner of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, had been somewhat dismayed by the outcome of that year’s World Series.
Not that the Pirates had won it, but because the “unfavorable weather during which the last world series was held” gave Landis the belief that the Major League baseball season could end a week earlier.
In 1925, both the National League and the American League teams each played 154 games.
Of course, the shortened seasons never really took place. In fact, the American League expanded its seasons to 162 games in 1961. And the following year, the National League expanded from 154 to 162 games.
This season, the expected final game of a seven game World Series will be on Oct. 31st – Halloween night, and that’s only barring any postponements for inclement weather.
That month, aside from the local euphoria over a nearby World Series Champion, there was a lot of excitement about a world famous contingent of musicians that made their way to Uniontown.
“N.Y. Symphony and Damroscch inaugurate musical season with colorful concert here,” read the headline on the front page of the Morning Herald’s Oct. 23, 1925 edition.
“It was a large and brilliant audience that gathered in the State theatre last evening to welcome to Uniontown one of the greatest orchestras of the country – the New York Symphony Orchestra with Walter Damrosch conducting,” said the lead paragraph.
I’m not exactly sure what a “brilliant” audience might have been. Did they clap at the right parts?
Did they hum along with the Dvorak Symphony in E Minor?
At any rate, no matter how “brilliant” the audience had been, after their performance, the musicians failed to return for an encore, despite being so well-received.
On Oct. 10, 1937, there was a rather disturbing picture on the front page of Uniontown’s Daily News Standard.
“Fights for a chance to die,” read the headline above a picture of a woman who had to be restrained by two police officers, because she was trying to commit suicide by leaping from the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge.
That 50 year-old woman was hardly the first person, nor the last, to try to end it all by jumping headlong from a bridge.
There have been estimates that more than 1,500 people have jumped to their deaths from the nearby Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
It’s something of a an odd distinction that has become billed as one of the most common suicide sites in the world, since it first opened in 1937.
There have been even more suicide jumpers over Niagara Falls.
Since 1850, an estimated 5,000 bodies have been found at the foot of the falls.
Many of them were thought to have been suicides.