Lou’s View: JAHWEH OR THE HIGHWAY
By Lou Bernard
“Thou shalt not steal.” It’s one of the things I learned as a kid, being dragged to the Catholic Church every Sunday by my mother. That was drilled into me early on, along with “Quit fidgeting” and “Don’t annoy the nuns.” I wasn’t exceptionally good at either of those last couple, though sometimes I was rewarded with a comic book after church if I kept the fidgeting to a minimum.
But someone should have shared “Thou shalt not steal” with a couple of visitors to Lock Haven in October of 1914.
The Clinton County Times, which loved bizarre stories like this, ran it on the front page on October 23. The headline was “Fake Priest And ‘Wife’ Jailed.”
The previous Tuesday, a man and woman showed up and checked in at one of the local hotels. They registered as the Reverend T.A. Luning and his wife, which may have been the first clue, and claimed to be from Altoona. The Reverend—His real name was never reported, so I’ll just have to use his fake one—Began asking questions about where the local ethnicities were in town, particularly the Italians.
Around that era, ethnicities were still separated into neighborhoods. Now, the question of what ethnic group lived where has never interested me much, but Luning chose to stay away from Commerce Street, where the local Jewish population lived because the synagogue was there. Instead he went down to the east end, around Church Street or Bald Eagle, where the Italians were living.
Working solo, he knocked on doors and began requesting funds for the Catholic orphanage in Cresson, PA. That is, when he was speaking to a Catholic family. If the family inside were Protestants, he asked for money for a tuberculosis sanitarium, claiming to be a captain with the Volunteers of America.
This tipped off a few people. Also alarming was the general knowledge that Reverend Lewis Maucher was already collecting funds for some worthy causes.
A few words about Lewis Maucher here: He was a pretty awesome guy. A German immigrant who studied medicine before becoming a priest, he loved Lock Haven. Soon after this incident, as the country ramped up to World War I, he was transferred out of Clinton County when anti-German outrage began to build. But after his death in 1947, his body was sent back for burial in Saint Agnes Cemetery, because this was his favorite place.
So Maucher began getting questions about this from the locals. Who was this guy, claiming to be a priest, who was running around and asking for money? Maucher investigated, asking a few questions of his own, and discovered that Luning was a con artist.
So Maucher went to Mayor George Kreamer. Kreamer, who served as mayor from 1912 to 1915, was a businessman who was involved in both lumber and insurance. One of his big achievements as mayor was putting lights along Bellefonte Avenue in 1913.
The lights were just going off in the morning when Kreamer and Maucher, with the help of Chief Powers of the LHPD, arrived at the hotel. They were informed by the owner that Luning and “wife” had been asked to leave that morning.
“They had been quite hilarious during the night,” reported the Times,”And had been notified by the landlord that if they did not quiet down they would have to leave the place.”
So Wednesday morning, they’d checked out, paying their bill with some of the Italian community’s money. Powers checked other hotels, finding the pair at about noon and placing them under arrest. He took them to Alderman John Anthony, who sent them to jail for impersonation, and presumably a few other charges.
The whole thing made an interesting story, and I’m glad I got the chance to share that. Now it’s time for a break. I’ve been doing the research of the history of my neighbor’s house, and I think I’m gonna go outside and covet it a little.
