Lou’s View – August 21, 2014

A Lively Runaway

by Lou Bernard

We’ve all been there—You’re just walking along Main Street, minding your own business, when suddenly you’re in the middle of a huge, chaotic disaster involving horses, a bucket, meat, and a piano. We all know how this goes.

Or, wait….Maybe we don’t. Maybe that was just the citizens of Lock Haven in 1903.

I absolutely love the newspapers from the early 1900s. Especially the Clinton County Times. For some reason, the first fifteen years of the twentieth century were a hotbed of bizarre activity, and the Times reported on all of it. You had to love the constant news stories on naked sewing machine salesmen, severed hands caught while fishing, and typos that accidentally declared a Canadian immigrant the King of England, all of which I’ve previously written about. For sheer outrageous craziness, you just couldn’t beat the Clinton County Times.

This one began with a county treasurer, John R. Thompson. He’d just taken office, actually; his term began in January 1903. He’d been in office all of twenty days when this happened.

Thompson was also a farmer, in addition to being a local politician. In those early days, nobody had one job. They were always a mayor and a butcher, or a barber and attorney, or something like that. I have literally seen obits that explain that the person was a PhD and hog farmer.

So Thompson was shipping a load of meat to Smith’s meat market on Main Street on Tuesday, January 20th. Smith’s meat market was probably along Vesper Street, about where He had two horses attached to a wagon, which was cooled and loaded with meat.

While Thompson was selling his meat, two children came by with a sled. It had a small tin bucket on it. The sled hit a crack in the sidewalk—The sidewalks, being mostly slate or brick back then, were pretty much composed of nothing but cracks. And the bucket fell off, clattering to the ground.

Well. This was all it took to startle the horses, and they bolted.

(Just as an aside, this is exactly the point in the article that I was working on when I got the call about my adoption. I had to stop here and run to New Orleans to adopt my baby son, and then come back and continue writing two weeks later. If this one seems a little disjointed, that’s why.)

So. The horses bolted. They ran down the street, scattering meat all along Vesper Street. When they hit Main Street, they turned sharply, but most wagons are not made to turn on a dime. The wagon crashed into several metal hitching posts, getting caught, and the horses broke free and kept running in a panic.

In the meantime, a supply wagon owned by R.B. Reitenour was parked along the street, outside the music store of O.B. Hummel. They had used a large, thick board as a ramp to move a piano up on the sidewalk and into the store and—You can see this coming—The horses raced up it, launched themselves over it, and kept right on going.

The newspaper reported, “This did not impede the progress of the runaway for they leapt it in unison and ran on to Vesper Street and then on to Water.”

Seriously, why doesn’t stuff like this still happen these days?

The horses ran down Water Street, passing the hospital that stood there at the time, and then they finally calmed down enough to be stopped by a local man named Normal Merrill. Merrill held the horses and calmed them until Thompson came to pick them up.

The Times reported, “Considering the crowded condition of the street at the time, it was a most fortunate accident. The only damage done was the breaking of the single tree of the wagon.”

You just don’t get this kind of chaotic fun anymore. I mean, a county treasurer who accidentally lets his horses loose on a busy street, launching themselves over a piano ramp? I wish our politicians still did this stuff. I’d seriously vote for that guy.