Lou’s View – Feb. 26, 2015
A Street Full of Pretzels
by Lou Bernard
So I sit here at my desk, working on my column, eating my bag of pretzels, which I actually had to pay for. It wasn’t always that way, apparently. You know how it goes—There are pretzels all over the street, and you can just grab as many as you want.
Actually, you probably don’t know how that goes, because you are not well over a century old. (I assume.) But there was a time when this happened, right along with all the other bizarre stuff from the early 1900s.
It was a Saturday in Lock Haven. October 2, 1909, around nine in the morning.
Carl Deitz was a baker who worked at 101 Henderson Street, down on the east end of town, at the corner of East Bald Eagle and Henderson. He would bake his goods and then make his deliveries by horse.
It was a casual Saturday morning when he was delivering—Pretzels, that day. He was just going about his business, and something startled the horse.
They never did find out what—Just something along Bald Eagle Street. And the horse bolted in a panic. The newspapers always referred to this as a “Lively Runaway,” because only about fifteen words had been invented back then. It ran across the street and down Fallon Alley.
It was Saturday, the market was full, and everyone was out and about. So, of course, they all got to see the horse racing like crazy across Church Street, Dietz frantically trying to stop it. The newspaper article later that day said,”The horse dashed across Church Street during a time when many vehicles and persons were moving to and fro at the market, but luckily nothing appeared in the way and it continued its mad dash across Main Street and here also the animal was given a wide berth.”
This was on page four, later the same day. Breaking news just wasn’t the same back then.
As the horse ran, it spilled bags of pretzels from the cart it was carrying. The pretzels rolled all over the street, and small boys ran out to pick them up, because hey, free pretzels. In 1909, neither the FDA or PETA had been invented yet, so there wasn’t much of an aftereffect here—The only thing that happened was that the horse picked up a trail of little boys eating pretzels as they ran, Pied Piper-style. It was considered acceptable to eat your snacks straight off the street back then; presumably mothers would just fling random leftovers out the window when it was time for dinner.
So leaving a trail of pretzels and children behind, the horse ran two and a half blocks down the alley in a blind panic. It passed two churches, and then a hotel and tavern, where it’s pretty likely several men saw it go by and decided they’d had too much. Miraculously, nobody was hurt by all this chaos—People saw it coming and got out of the way in a big hurry, except for the young boys. According to the newspaper, even the pretzels fared reasonably well.
The horse entered Fallon Alley between Main and Water Streets, little boys still following and “confiscating” the pretzels. As it crossed another alley, it fell. These days, this would be the southern part of the Water Street parking lot, but back then it was the livery and boarding stable of O.F. Felmlee. The alleys were also brick at this time, so the horse lost its footing and fell over as it tried to make the turn. And then Brian Williams showed up to cover the story.
Several people, at this point, rushed forward to help, and they managed to subdue the frightened horse and get it under control. Dietz dusted himself off and took the horse back to his bakery, presumably to make more pretzels. (Now that I think of it, this is pretty exciting—I would pay extra to have my pretzels delivered this way; it beats drones.) Things calmed down, except for some enterprising reporter writing this all up for page four of that day’s edition.
This is one of those amusing things that so often made big news back then. I can just imagine it, a horse spilling pretzels all over the street as it runs in a panic. Now I’m all hungry.
