Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

It’s been a somewhat interesting week here. I cut myself at work. My son injured his leg climbing onto his bunk bed, and then got a minor burn on his hand while trying to make French fries.

It’s almost like January of 1925 all over again.

Early 1925 seems to have been a hotbed for injuries. Everyone and their grandmother was getting injured at the time for some reason. Obviously, it was the Clinton County Times who broke the story, because they loved unusual stuff like this. If it hadn’t happened, the Times would have sent someone around for the purpose of injuring people, just to report on it.

The most high-profile injury was Guy Brosius, the county superintendent. He’d injured his ankle when he slipped on the sidewalk near his house. The Times reported that he was currently using a cane, but would soon be able to ditch the cane and walk normally again. (Just the week before, Brosius had been attending a state convention in Erie, and he was lucky to have not been injured there.)

Mrs. B.E. Crites had a finger injury and a slight bruise on her side during an auto accident when a car driven by Lawson Graham drove his car off a twenty-foot shoulder alongside the road. He wasn’t drinking; the snow had piled up so high that he couldn’t see the turn in the road, so Graham wound up blowing right through it and careening down the hill. His own wife was also injured, spraining her ankle. Mr. Crites, a reverend, was uninjured, because apparently God was trying to make a point.

The bad weather wasn’t only causing injuries in cars. Mattie Thompson, of 139 Clinton Street, slipped on the ice and fractured her right wrist. The bad weather really seems to have had a grudge against wrists, because J.B. Furst of Flemington also fractured his when he slipped on ice while entering the Lock Haven Post Office. “As these icy steps have been exceedingly treacherous for the past several weeks,” said the Times,”Mr. Furst is fortunate to have escaped without more serious injury.”

My personal favorite, however, was George Truckenmiller, who injured himself playing with a toy. He was thirty-five years old.

Truckenmiller, 32 Hampton Street, hurt himself while trying to light off a toy cannon to celebrate New Year’s Eve. The Times doesn’t specify this, but I’m guessing it would not be unlikely that there was some alcohol involved here. He’d gotten the toy cannon someplace, and decided to light it off at midnight, but it went off too quickly for him, and he wound up with some burns on his face.

“The visor of the cap he wore protected his hair and eyes to a certain extent,” reported the Clinton County Times, ”But it is worried his sight will be affected.”

Truckenmiller was rushed to the Lock Haven Hospital, which at the time was on Susquehanna Avenue.

Truckenmiller was, as I mentioned, thirty-five years old at the time, but he did what any kid would do when getting injured with a toy, and tried like hell to prevent his mother from finding out about it.

“The story of the accident is being kept from his mother, who has been quite ill at their home on Hampton Street,” reported the Times.

It was a busy month for injuries, apparently, with people getting hurt left and right. The Clinton County Times compiled all of this into articles on the front page, several issues running. It’s interesting to read, and I thought I’d—Ow! I just burned myself on my coffee.