Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I’ve had this little holiday tradition for over a decade now—When Christmas rolls around, I go pull the old newspapers from the archives and write about what was happening at Christmas a hundred years ago. I think I started this sometime around 2012 for the Record; I’ve been doing it quite a while now. My first one had Santa Claus wearing a purple outfit at a local club.

This year was a bit of a struggle. I often run to the Clinton County Times for this stuff, as it’s my favorite paper because of all the bonkers items it considered news. But in 1924, news was apparently pretty light—I was only able to find one issue in the whole month of December.

Fortunately for me, the December 19th issue contained a lot of good items. Some people were having a good Christmas, and some were not.

It was a good Christmas for Philip H. Dewey of Tioga County. He’d been recently elected the new master of the State Grange. The previous one, from Lancaster County, had stepped down after ten years, and Dewey was unopposed.

It was not a good Christmas for Orvis and Preston Seyler of Montgomery. They were arrested while attempting to steal cars, and found to be armed. A local firefighter was on late-night duty and caught them, which means they were arrested by a fireman, which cannot be good for their street cred.

It was a good Christmas for Main Street in Lock Haven, as evidenced by the headline,”Main Street Transformed Into Avenue Of Evergreens.” The business section of the city put out a whole bunch of Christmas trees along the sidewalks, which were then decorated by the local merchants. This all led to one big Christmas tree at Monument Place, present-day Triangle Park, which even then was the heart of the city.

It was not a great Christmas for Edward Reidy and his wife, of Susquehanna Avenue, who were in a car accident very near Monument Place, but at least they escaped with reasonably minor injuries.

It was a good Christmas for local principal J.F. Puderbaugh, who accepted the award from the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Association. They presented a trophy to Puderbaugh when the local school won the state football championships against Harrisburg. It was not such a good Christmas for Harrisburg, who had been pretty cocky about their chances of winning.

It was not a good Christmas for some of Lock Haven, with a mumps outbreak throughout the town. In some cases, entire families were stricken with mumps all at once, which does not exactly promote holiday unity.

It was both a good and bad Christmas for young boys who had written to Santa asking for BB guns. They were pretty certain of receiving enough armament to start a small war, as the Times implies, but the Chief of Police had issued a reminder that there were to be no firearms shot off within the city limits. This was presumably out of fears that they’d shoot their eyes out, a concern that continues to this day. A lot of windows had been shot out in recent months, and the chief reminded parents that any discovered BB guns would be confiscated.

And it was a good Christmas for the local Tuberculosis Committee, which raised just over fifty dollars (sixteen million by today’s standards) under the fundraising direction of Albert C. Brown. He’d arranged a Double Barred Cross Tag Day, and the Clinton County Times does not describe what that entailed, but apparently it was pretty popular and brought in the money.

That was the big news, as best I can find, for Christmas of 1924. I hope you all have a good Christmas, too.