Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I’ve mentioned this plenty of times before, but I love the Clinton County Times. Every time things get a little slow around here, I check the archives of the Clinton County Times, especially in the early days. This newspaper never lets me down.

The Clinton County Times was an absolutely insane paper. I’m not sure if it was perceived that way at the time, but looking back over the past issues, this paper was nuts. They would report on crazy stories that no other paper would touch. They would deliberately get into debates with other papers, politicians, or locals. All of this right on the front page. Even when it was perfectly normal news, the Times would report it in a dramatic and fascinatingly entertaining way.

Even something simple, like the weather.

It was a cold winter as of January 12, 1912. And the weather was on the front page. Nothing unusual in that, so far, but the Clinton County Times, as always, had to be very dramatic about it. “Ice King Here,” screamed the headline.

Now, when I was young and taking journalism classes, I learned to report the facts when I was doing hard news stories, like the weather. To be honest, it’s a little hard to make the weather all exciting anyway, but the Times somehow managed. With their usual in-your-face phrasing, they began the article with, ”Weather prognosticators who predicted a severe winter are now chuckling in their glee and saying ‘I told you so.’”

It had been warm for a few days, and people were beginning to relax and expect the rest of the winter to be mild. Then the temperature dropped severely, and the Times not only recorded this, they decided to gloat about it.

“The new year opened in a most auspicious manner and some optimists already could see signs of the crocus and arbutus—In their imaginations,” the Times reported. “Robins were reported here and there and various signs indicated an early return to the gentle springtime, but alas! All these fond hopes were ruthlessly dashed to the ground last Thursday, when the mercury received a solar plexus and sank dejectedly 40 degrees, to a point or so below the zero mark.”

It surprised the locals, because the Weather Channel had not yet been invented, and the county dropped into extremely low winter temperatures. Loganton seems to have set the record, with temperatures there dropping to eight degrees below zero—And let’s face it, Loganton in 1912 was not exactly a luxurious place to live anyway.

On one end of the county, Beech Creek reported two degrees below zero, and on the other end, McElhattan reported five below. In the county seat, temperatures were measured at the Lock Haven Hospital, which was on Susquehanna Avenue at the time. Lock Haven was getting a reading of six below zero, making me glad I wasn’t riding my bike to work in 1912.

The Times invoked not just the Ice King, whom I’m pretty sure they made up, but other characters, as well. They said, ”With the cold snap, came high winds which intensified the ravages of Jack Frost and many a finger and toe was nipped by the sprightly young elf.”

The river froze over, and employees of local ice salesmen ran out to cut blocks and save them. At the paper mill, ice skaters ran out onto the ponds, which was not considered an OSHA hazard at the time. Coal dealers were working overtime, and plumbers got busy dealing with burst pipes.

The very extreme cold rolled in on a Thursday, and lasted over a week. The Times gleefully reported, ”It was a real old-fashioned winter and the mercury hovered at about the zero mark.” Eventually, though, the weather warmed up, and I’m sure that summer, the Times had some dramatic things to say about the heat, too.