Lou’s View – April 10, 2014

The 1906 Joy Ride

by Lou Bernard

You know all those news stories you read about kids pulling pranks, and then getting caught because they snapped a photo of themselves and put it on Facebook or something? This is not a new phenomenon, apparently, according to an article I found in a scrapbook donated to the Ross Library.

The article, from a newspaper in the 1930s, is headlined,”Old Photograph Recalls Trials and Thrills of 30 Years Ago In Motoring.” It includes a photo from 1906, which shows five guys, all wearing bowler hats, sitting in an old-fashioned car in front of the Fallon Hotel.

This began one morning in autumn of 1906. Samuel M. Bickford was the owner of several local brick-making plants. He was also the owner of the car, a bright red Winton Four. (You can’t tell it’s bright red from the photo. The caption mentions it. Colors weren’t invented until the 1970s, and even then we only had dark yellow, dark orange, and brown.) Back in those days, Winton Fours cost about three thousand dollars new, had four cylinders, and were considered recklessly fast at a high speed of twenty-five to thirty miles an hour.

Bickford drove over to the Fallon one morning, leaving his car parked outside. Car theft was not considered a huge threat in 1906, mainly because there were so few cars in Lock Haven at all. (“Can you identify your car out of the two in town?”) So Bickford left it by the curb.

There was a group of young men who met at the Fallon every morning, back in those days. The ringleader seemed to be Roy Schuyler, whose father John managed the Fallon in those days—Schuyler had, in fact, been born there in 1883. The others were Harry Weindorf, Charles Oberheim, Charles Suiter, and Clarence Achenbach.

These five saw Bickford leave his car, and decided, using the logic of many young guys to this day,”Why not?”

So they jumped in and went for a ride.

The article says,”Mr. Bickford had gone into the Fallon House when the five ‘young blades’ in the above picture and who met each morning at the Fallon House, decided they would like a ride. They had just returned from a spin about the city when the picture was snapped.”

It’s unclear where exactly they went with the car, though it couldn’t have been too far. A quick trip around the block would have taken them past a doctor’s office, a couple of jewelry stores, a telegraph office, a cigar store, and the Academy of Music building on the corner.

There is absolutely no indication of who held onto this photo for thirty years, and then sent it to the press with an accompanying article. For that matter, there’s absolutely no indication of who took the photo at all—All five of the guys are in it, posing in the car. Makes me wish I still had pictures from stupid pranks I pulled back in my twenties, so I could get media attention. (And you thought the stunt with Billy Walker’s crashed car was so stupid, didn’t you, DAD?)

The photo shows, in the background, barber Charles Ulrich cutting someone’s hair in his shop inside the Fallon, which he ran in between a reading room and a billiards room. It also shows Norman Merrill, standing on the porch and scowling at the boys. Merrill was a hack driver who made his living carrying people in a horse-drawn buggy, using the Fallon as his headquarters. It’s not clear whether he is scowling with disapproval at the prank, or at the gasoline-powered vehicle, but Merrill does have a very “Get off my lawn, you kids,” expression in this photo.

There is no indication that anyone got arrested or disciplined for this stunt, probably because the photo wasn’t widely shown around at the time. Facebook hadn’t been invented yet, so the guys had to wait thirty years and then send it to the newspaper, which was what passed for social media back then. By the time the photo made the papers, Suiter and Oberheim had passed away. Weindorf had married and moved to Erie, and Achenbach moved to Philadelphia. Only Schuyler remained in the area, living in Lockport. He died in 1966 at age eighty-three.

So, hey, parents! Important tip from history: Next time your kid does something totally stupid and uploads photos to Facebook, they’re just contributing to history! Tell the cops I said so.