Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Every year, I have a little Christmas tradition. I dig into the old archives from a hundred years ago, and see what was happening then. And I write a heartwarming, cozy little story about Christmas a century ago, and run it in the Record.

Yeah, well, that’s not exactly gonna happen this year.

I’ll write the story. I have plenty to write about from a hundred years ago. But the “heartwarming and cozy” part is completely out the window, because Christmas in 1925 seems to have been crazy as hell.

The Clinton County Times reported on all of this; as I’ve mentioned before, the Times had nothing against crazy news. And a Christmas full of accidental shootings never bothered them any.

Samule Probst of Gallagher Township was shot accidentally while hunting on December fifteenth. He’d been accidentally shot in the leg when a deer ran in between him and his hunting partner, and they both fired at once.

This is generally not recommended in those situations, but the bullet hit Probst, and he passed away in spite of the efforts of Dr. J.L. Lubrecht to save him.

Seventeen-year-old David Kennelly was out trapping muskrats in Bald Eagle Township when the trigger of his rifle got caught on a part of his boat, and went off, hitting him in the stomach. He was found by his cousin, who attempted to help, but Kennelly died, as well. (You have to wonder if anyone warned these people that they’d shoot their eye out.) On the front page of the same issue, the Times ran a notice that the 1025 hunting season was ending, which had to be something of a relief, under the circumstances.

A mystery man died of old age at the Lock Haven Hospital. He was not a patient there, he was the handyman. Emil Rudolph Maximilian Fraenzel, known to all as “Rudy,” passed away, and eight nurses were his pallbearers as he was buried in Flemington. You wouldn’t think a man with the name of “Emil Rudolph Maximilian Fraenzel” would be all that hard to track down—There can’t have been more than one of those—But nobody knew anything about him, and he was secretive about his past. “To the end of his life, Fraenzel kept his past a secret and his actual identity will remain unknown,” the Times reported. “It is the belief of some that he was a member of the German nobility.”

One of the big stories, however, involved the death of Oscar Anderson. Anderson lived along Jessamine Street, and he was known as “Oscar Wild” because of his routinely drunken and violent behavior. He was abusive to his family, and his wife had not spoken to him in twenty years. Anderson was walking home from work in the Castanea area when he was hit by a truck. He may have been drunk; that was not exactly out of character for Anderson. While he was walking home, Anderson saw the bright lights on an oncoming truck, and blinded by the lights, he did what your average deer would do, and stepped in front of it.

The truck, owned by the Long Coal, Feed, and Supply Company, hit Anderson and ran him over. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died an hour later. In a true Christmas miracle, as soon as his death was announced, this drunken, abusive man became a saint.

A garage in Flemington and an outbuilding owned by the paper mill burned down. Two burglars broke into the office of the Long Coal, Feed, and Supply Company, the same company that had run over Oscar Anderson. They didn’t get any money because they searched the wrong desk, making it even a bad Christmas for the burglars.

Boy, I hope 1926 was a more cheerful year—Christmas in 1925 doesn’t seem to have been very much fun. Have a good holiday, everyone. Don’t get shot.