The news 100 years ago was terrible
It was unfortunate what happened to Andrew Nichols in South Brownsville, getting shot and then dying of his wounds.
Unfortunate, but in a way understandable. He was playing with fire. The police report put him at Cropp’s place in South Brownsville, where gambling was known to take place.
Nichols was playing cards or tossing dice, apparently, and he took a bullet to the brain for his troubles. Charged was John C. Busch of Belle Vernon, who pleaded self-defense.
The 25-year-old Nichols waged a valiant fight for his life, staving off death for 12 days. The doctors seemed to agree that they had never seen anything like it.
Meanwhile, in three West Virginia towns — Grafton, Elkins and Buckhannon — there was a puzzling outbreak of infantile paralysis.
Officials in Grafton were alert to the possibility that the contagion could spread. They placed a ban on children under the age of 16 coming to town.
The news 100 years ago was hardly any good at all. Just like us, the folks alive and kicking in January 1917 could hardly imagine what rotten thing was going to happen next.
Oh, there were bright spots. A handful of county employees were getting raises. The annual Elks minstrel show to raise money for charity was coming up. And there was an estimate on the cost of a new YMCA building slated for North Gallatin Avenue in Uniontown. A manageable $150,000.
Of course, it might be nice to clean up the corner of North Gallatin Avenue and Peter Street before the Y was installed near there.
It seems a taxi cab outfit with an office on the corner was not only hauling but soliciting customers for a house of ill-repute on the National Pike.
The taxi cab proprietors — a father and son — faced fines of $25 each to be meted out by acting Uniontown mayor George Hibbs.
The bawdy house which went by the name The Seven Sisters was actually a row of houses. It seems two gents transported there by cab felt they didn’t get their money’s worth, so they squealed on the cabbies.
It was purely coincidental, that on the boards of the Dixie Theater in Uniontown was the musical comedy “Miss Million Dollars” while the Penn featured the silent screen presentation “The Love Thief,” billed as “a vivid portrayal of a woman’s passion and jealously.”
Fifty small coal operators — farmers and such — were in Harrisburg fighting an attempt by the big boys of the coal trade to raise the cost of having their trackside coal reserves picked by the railroads.
A sale of 200,000-plus acres of coal land in Franklin Township, Greene County, was now before the courts. The land was part of the vast holdings of J.V. Thompson, the bankrupt Uniontown coal land baron.
These were “flush times” for coal, with the World War and all.
The United States was not yet a belligerent in the war, but it wouldn’t be long before the country entered the blood-drenched battlefields of Europe, giving up 116,516 dead in just a few months’ fighting.
In the middle of January 1917, President Wilson, just off a narrow re-election campaign, laid out in a plan to bring the warring sides to the conference table to hammer out a negotiated peace — a “peace without victory” because, the president believed, “only a peace between equals can last.”
With the Senate listening in “rapt silence”, Woodrow Wilson envisioned “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”
The world was, and remains, captivated by the Wilsonian vision. Even today, it is impossible to deny the magnetism and appeal of his words.
A later biographer wrote that Wilson thought his peace speech would not only end the war but usher in “a new age of peace.”
The president himself felt he was uniquely qualified as a “disinterested” party to compose the differences between the French-British-Italians-Russians on the one hand and the Germans on the other.
An admirer, Cleveland Dodge, agreed, writing the president, “We thank God for all you mean to the world, and trust that your life and strength may be spared.”
War came to the United States in April. It was hardly what anyone wanted. Events were in the saddle. The future was impossible to divine. Just like today.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.