Hallowe’en Prank Leads to Attempted Assault on Prophet

Image from Love Letters to the Library

Attempted on Mayor Prophet by One Jack O’Neil, Who Was Crazed From Drink.

*     *     *     *     *

Had it Not Been for the Timely Arrival of Chief Watts Lima’s Chief Executive Would Have No Doubt Been Severely Handled — Trouble Precipitated Through the Arrest of O’Neil’s Son.

*     *     *     *     *

The mayor’s court was the scene of much excitement yesterday, and for a short time it looked as if Lima’s chief executive would be viciously assaulted by a fellow who apparently is devoid of one iota of manhood. The fellow in question is one Jack O’Neil, a well known character among police officials.

Saturday night his son John, who, though young in years is already well known for his many depredations, was arrested for tearing up a board sidewalk. The incorrigible lad was celebrating Hallowe’en and, together with other boys, was engaged in destroying as much property as possible when an officer happened on the scene.

The other boys got away, but young O’Neill was caught and taken to police headquarters, where he was placed in jail being without necessary security. His trial was set for yesterday.

The father and mother were both present and the former was pretty well “organized” (drunk), which, it is said, is not unusual for him. It seems that his son was making $1 a day working somewhere in the city. This sum was, of course, given to his drunken father. In police court the father kept repeating that he would make Mayor Prophet pay $1 an hour during the time he held the boy as a prisoner. The mayor told him to cease, or he would find some means whereby he would keep quiet. This seemed to make the loquacious fellow very wrathy and he threatened His Hone with personal violence. Mayor Prophet only laughed at this, where-upon the angered husband and father started toward His Honor, who was seated in his occasional place. O’Neil’s eyes flashed with wild anger; his fists were clenched, and the mayor would, no doubt, have received summary treatment from the man crazed from excessive drink had it not been for the timely arrival of Chief Watts, who interfered by grabbing the fellow just as he was about to strike a vicious blow. The chief had heard angry voices from his office below and ran up stairs leading to the mayor’s office just in the nick of time as has been seen. O’Neill was soon subdued and he was soon after ejected.

The boy was fined $4.00. Probably because of the pleadings of the wife and mother, who seems to be a kindly woman, whose withered cheeks and furrowed brow tell far plainer than words of her suffering and misery the mayor allowed her husband to go without being fined.

O’Neill, it is said, is drunk almost constantly and abuses his son and wife in a manner not unlike a Barbarian. He has been in the criminal court numerous times, while his young son had been arrested upon several occasions for different offenses, one of which was robbing a postoffice.

Lima News (Lima, Ohio) Nov 1, 1898

Lima News (Lima, Ohio) Nov 3, 1898

*     *     *

‘ROUND LIMA HOUR BY HOUR — WITH APOLOGIES
BY OH. OH. JACKENRIM
A Page from the Diary of an Antiquated Reporter — (TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO) —

*     *     *

Lima News (Lima, Ohio) Dec 30, 1923

Brief Bio:

From:

Title: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association…., Volume 36
Authors: Ohio State Bar Association, Ohio State Bar Association. Meeting
Publisher    F.J. Heer, 1915
Pgs 138-139 (google book link)

Title: The history of Fuller’s Ohio brigade, 1861-1865: its great march, with roster, portraits, battle maps and biographies
Author: Charles H. Smith
Publisher    Press of A. J. Watt, 1909
pgs 341-343

The Useful Plow

THE USEFUL PLOW

A country life is sweet!
In moderate cold and heat,
To walk in the air how pleasant and fair!
In every field of wheat,
The fairest of flowers adorning the bowers,
And every meadow’s brow;
So that I say, to courtier may
Compare with them who clothe in gray
And follow the useful plow.

They rise with the morning lark,
And labor till almost dark,
Then, folding their sheep, they hasten to sleep
While every pleasant park
Next morning is ringing with birds that are singing
On each green tender bough.
With what content and merriment,
Their days are spent, whose minds are bent
To follow the useful plow.

— Unknown.

Corpus Christi Times (Corpus Crispi, Texas) Nov 17, 1930

Old Sol

A Little Game of Strip Poker!
Now, then — I’ll raise the ante a few more degrees — and I’ll thank you if you’ll hand over your socks!

Daily InterLake (Kalispell, Montana) Jul 17, 1930

A-AHEM!

Summer and Fall Campaigns

Flights of Oratory on The Stump

Morning Herald (Hagerstown, Maryland) Jul 8, 1930

The Old Swimmin’ Hole

The Old Swimmin’ Hole

(“Greenfield, Indiana — James Whitcomb Riley’s Old Swimmin’ Hole has passed into oblivion, with the dedication of a modern bathing pool on the site.” — News item.)

Oh! the old swimmin’-hole! whare the crick so still and deep
Looked like a baby-river that was laying half asleep,
And the gurgle of the worter round the drift jest below
Sounded like the laugh of something we onc’t ust to know
Before we could remember anything but the eyes
Of the angels lookin’ out as we left Paradise;
Now I gaze at the spot and it makes me very glum
For the hole’s been replaced by a natatorium!

Oh! the old swimmin’-hole! In the happy days of yore,
When I ust to lean above it on the old sycamore,
Oh! it showed me a face in its warm sunny tide
That gazed back at me so gay and glorified;
It made me love myself, as I leaped to caress
My shadder smilin’ up at me with such tenderness —
But now marble baths shine with bright nickle showers
And they’ve rules, regulations too, an’ set swimmin’ hours!

Oh! the old swimmin’ hole! In the long, lazy days
When the humdrum of school made so many runaways,
How pleasant was the jurney down the old dusty lane,
Where the tracks of our bare feet was all printed so plain
You could tell by the dent of the heel and the sole
They was lots o’ fun on hand at the old swimmin’s hole.
But today modern plumbin’ mocks the scenes of old —
An’ it’s plastered with faucets readin’ “Hot” and “Cold!”

Now no bulrushes growed, and the cattails so tall,
Are gone with shadders that fell over all
And the worter so mottled with amber and gold
Now gushes from pipes that some steamfitter sold;
At one end o’ the place is a sign — man alive! —
That says in big letters to bathers, “DON’T DIVE!”
And no glad lilies rock in the ripples that roll
In the new bathin’ pool by the old swimmin’ hole.

Oh! the old swimmin’ hole! When I looked at the place
I shuddered to think just what time could efface;
A great marble structure now stands on the spot
Whare the old divin’ log lays sunk and forgot;
As I stray down the banks whare the trees ust to be
There’s nuthin’ I see that’s familiar to me,
And there’s this that jest clutches my heart by the roots —
When the kids now swim there they must wear bathin’ suits!

Morning Herald (Hagerstown, Maryland) Jul 11, 1930

The original version from Poetry Foundation:

The Old Swimmin’ Hole

By James Whitcomb Riley

Oh! the old swimmin’-hole! whare the crick so still and deep
Looked like a baby-river that was laying half asleep,
And the gurgle of the worter round the drift jest below
Sounded like the laugh of something we onc’t ust to know
Before we could remember anything but the eyes
Of the angels lookin’ out as we left Paradise;
But the merry days of youth is beyond our controle,
And it’s hard to part ferever with the old swimmin’-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin’-hole! In the happy days of yore,
When I ust to lean above it on the old sickamore,
Oh! it showed me a face in its warm sunny tide
That gazed back at me so gay and glorified,
It made me love myself, as I leaped to caress
My shadder smilin’ up at me with sich tenderness.
But them days is past and gone, and old Time’s tuck his toll
From the old man come back to the old swimmin’-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin’-hole! In the long, lazy days
When the humdrum of school made so many run-a-ways,
How plesant was the jurney down the old dusty lane,
Whare the tracks of our bare feet was all printed so plane
You could tell by the dent of the heel and the sole
They was lots o’ fun on hands at the old swimmin’-hole.
But the lost joys is past! Let your tears in sorrow roll
Like the rain that ust to dapple up the old swimmin’-hole.

Thare the bullrushes growed, and the cattails so tall,
And the sunshine and shadder fell over it all;
And it mottled the worter with amber and gold
Tel the glad lilies rocked in the ripples that rolled;
And the snake-feeder’s four gauzy wings fluttered by
Like the ghost of a daisy dropped out of the sky,
Or a wownded apple-blossom in the breeze’s controle
As it cut acrost some orchard to’rds the old swimmin’-hole.

Oh! the old swimmin’-hole! When I last saw the place,
The scenes was all changed, like the change in my face;
The bridge of the railroad now crosses the spot
Whare the old divin’-log lays sunk and fergot.
And I stray down the banks whare the trees ust to be—
But never again will theyr shade shelter me!
And I wish in my sorrow I could strip to the soul,
And dive off in my grave like the old swimmin’-hole.

Woman Prospector Nurses Husband

Image from PopArtMachine

WOMAN PROSPECTOR NURSES HUSBAND

Mrs. Patrick O’Hara arrived in town yesterday from Witherspoon canyon in the Tule Canyon district, with the news that her husband, Pat O’Hara, a mining man well known in Southern Nevada, had on July 23 accidentally shot himself in the thigh. He was hunting rabbits and on stopping to adjust the hobbles on a horse his revolver was discharged, the bullet entering a point high up in the thigh. The nearest habitation to the O’Hara camp is at Lida, eight or nine miles distant and owing to the excessive heat on the desert his wife was afraid to risk the long drive over the desert to Goldfield for medical aid and has herself been treating the injured man, assisted only by the few Indians in the section.

Image from University of Texas Libraries – Nevada Historical Topographical Maps

There is no doctor nearer than Goldfield and Mrs. O’Hara was unable to leave the wounded man until yesterday, when she drove over the scorching Ralston desert for supplies. She says that the patient is now getting on very well and there are no signs of blood poisoning. O’Hara is a member of the Knights of Pythias and has been in the section for some time engaged in mining. His wife says that they have a good prospect with some excellent ore exposed in a large vein. She was formerly Mrs. Casey, and was known as the “woman prospector,” having traveled far and wide over the desert and prospected alone in many parts of the southern part of the state.

— Goldfield Tribune.

Reno Evening Gazette (Reno, Nevada) Aug 8, 1910

CENSUS RECORDS showing Patrick O’Hara and wife, Syliva:

***

In 1920, they were listed as living in Lida, Patrick’s occupation listed as miner (gold and silver.) In 1910, they show up in the town of Goldfield, Patrick also listed as a (gold) miner, second marriage for both, Sylvia having had 2 children, but none living.

***

According to the 1930 census, Patrick was no longer working, but Sylvia was a tailoress, in her own shop.

By 1938, old Sylvia was back to propecting!

Reno Evening Gazette (Reno, Nevada) Dec 17, 1938

History of the Nivloc Mine – The Beginning

All Together Now – Relief Legislation

Congress and President Hoover Under the Mistletoe

Appleton Post Crescent (Appleton, Wisconsin) Dec 18, 1930

Unemployment and Drought Relief Problems

All Together Now!

“Our Country is To-Day Stronger and Richer in Resources, in Equipment, in Skill, Than Ever in History.”

Appleton Post Crescent (Appleton, Wisconsin) Dec 4, 1930

Ralph S. Bauer: Reform Mayor of Lynn

Lynn, Massachusetts postcard image from Jovike’s photostream on flickr

LYNN
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Mayor Bauer of Lynn has spoken. No more shall the woman smoker be seen in that town on stage or screen. The billboards have also been purged of the contaminating influence exercised by the pictorial cigaret and girl. And the ukase will, we are sure, be heartening to everybody who worries about the frailties and peccadilloes of other folks and thinks something ought to be done about it.

Obviously, the Mayor of Lynn is every inch a wowser; Lynn itself, once gay and grimy, has come upon the semi-retirement of “the city that was.” Now its elegy may be written, in true wowserian strophe:

Here lies Lynn,
Sans gin, sans sin,
Sans Nicotin.

Decatur Herald (Decatur, Illinois) Oct 24, 1929

MAYOR BAUER’S REFORM.

Mayor Bauer of Lynn gets his name on the front pages of the newspapers again by issuing an ultimatum against bare-legged girls, but he would accomplish more as a reformer if he used a little quiet persuasion with school teachers and pupils.

We have failed to detect a grave menace in the fashion of bare sun-tanned legs. With all due regard to the sensitive nature of the fair sex, it must be said that most feminine legs are too imperfect in form and natural covering to permit of public display without artificial covering of some kind.

The bare-legged fashion will not get very far because most women have too much common sense to display the imperfections which are more conveniently concealed or minimized beneath sheer silk.

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Oct 1, 1929

“The notions that were bred into being years and years ago are now being assaulted and turned topsy-turvy. Our social conduct is changing. We must admit that. Thirty or 40 years ago, if a flapper appeared on the street in the same costume she wears today, she would have been rushed to jail as fast as the smoke left her heels. Now no one cares about the flapper’s dress except Mayor Bauer of Lynn.

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Nov 23, 1929

Not yet can they put you in jail for wondering so we wonder what Mayor Bauer of Lynn is going to attempt after he has pulled off that recently announced determination to make the school teachers of his city, men and women alike, cut out tobacco. It might be as well to wait until he has made good on that ruling before thinking up the next play for front page position in the newspapers.

If the Lynn teachers are human beings, the mayor is likely enough going to find it harder to make them quit the smoking habit than it was to give his city a reduced tax rate. It will be more or less like enforcing the Volstead act.

Theoretically, it can be done, and the dry leaders can prove it. Actually, it has not yet been done, and the wet leaders say you can’t prove it can be. Looking at it from a distance, it doesn’t strike us as being any of the Lynn mayor’s business if the school teachers wish to smoke, providing they do it in reason. We shouldn’t say that the women teachers should smoke at any time, and not at all in public. But as for exercising that privilege in their own homes it is hard to see where the mayor has any particular call to get stuffy about it.

As to making the men teachers take the anti-nicotine pledge, he has accepted a real job if the male breed down that way is anything like normal. The joker in the cold deck which Mayor Bauer has picked up appears in the situation as it affects the pupils in the schools.

Mayor Bauer may conceivably make the school teachers as smokeless as he decrees, but we have a natural curiosity to know how he is going to make the boys and girls who go to school quit it. Not that we know whether the Lynn school girls smoke, but many of the boys do, unless down in Lynn boys are no longs boys. For which reason the pupils are going to snicker as they look at their poor hen-pecked teachers who dare not smoke for fear of losing their jobs. And you don’t have to be a slave to nicotine to see the humor of the situation which Lynn’s great reform mayor seeks to bring about.

The Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Sep 8, 1926

Bone Dry or No Football Game

Lynn, Mass., Nov. 26. (AP) — Mayor Ralph S. Bauer saw so much drinking at the Harvard-Yale football game at Cambridge Saturday, he said, that he has ordered the Thanksgiving Day high school contest here to be bone dry or stopped.

Twelve thousand persons at the stadium for the Yale-Harvard contests, he estimated yesterday, were more interested in quart bottles and hip flasks than anything else. Many women “took a pull out of the bottles the same as the men,” the Mayor said, and neither the police nor the faculty interfered.

The Rev. Garfield Morgan, pastor of the Center Congregational Church, according to the Mayor, was approached by some one in a big fur coat who said to him, “you look like an old timer, have a drink.”

“Can this be the same Harvard of which the late President Eliot used to boast?” Mayor Bauer asked. “The factor that made her the dominant educational institution of our land was that she had been building men for nearly 300 years?”

On the Mayor’s order, the police chief will station fifty patrolmen and sergeants on duty Thursday at the Lynn-English classical high game with orders to arrest all persons who drink and to stop the game if drinking becomes serious.

Kingston Daily Freeman (Kingston, New York) Nov 26, 1929

Mayor Bauer, of Lynn, addressing a meeting of the Women’s Republican club at  Cambridge, Mass., this week, said there were about 4,000 too many municipal employes in Boston and that he could discharge all of them without one being missed. “All city governments are ‘good fellow’ governments,” the mayor told his audience. “Public officials feel they have got to get jobs for their constituents and they don’t care whether there exists a job or not.”

The Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) Jun 30, 1927

“THE NAKED TRUTH.”

“The Naked Truth” which is now showing at the Park theatre has caused considerable comment and discussion recently in Boston and Lynn, Mass. The Mayor of Boston, refused permission to present the film to Bostonians, and immediately upon taking this stand, Mayor Bauer of Lynn viewed the film and passed on it as a good and proper picture, bearing a message of beneficial value to the community and permitted the Lynn Auditorium to show the film for four weeks to record-breaking crowds. The film is featured by an all-star cast supported by Jack Mulhall and Helene Chadwick. This is the first showing of the film in this vicinity. “The Naked Truth” is to the point and calls a spade a spade.

The Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) Nov 2, 1926

Image from Shorpy

DOGS MAY ROAM

LYNN, Mass., — Dec. 14. — (By The Associated Press.) — By proclamation of Mayor Bauer, dogs are assured the freedom of the streets if they do not make nuisances of themselves nor obstruct traffic like some political aspirants do. The more he sees of men, the more respect the mayor has for dogs. The proclamation was issued after state authorities urged that stray dogs be rounded up and killed because of the spread of rabies.

Ogden Standard Examiner (Ogden, Utah) Dec 14, 1927

Images of John P. McGloin from the Lynn Museum and Historical Society

Independent baseball will be played on the playgrounds at Lynn this summer with Mayor Fred Manning tossing out the first ball. Former Mayor Bauer stopped the games on the playgrounds when he was in office.

Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Jul 12, 1930

Mayor of Lynn

Ralph Sherman Bauer

Image from NOBLE Digital Heritage

The following biographical information (from Descendants of HANS MICHAEL BAUER, (BOWER)) tells of Mayor Bauer “pulling himself up by the bootstraps” and making a life for himself:

Notes for RALPH SHERMAN BOWER:

His father died when he was only seven years old. Even at that extremely early age he became the main support of a family consisting of his mother and three sisters, the youngest a nursing baby. The family then living in Philadelphia and it was there that Ralph S. Bauer began his career in the newspaper business. The result of his first day’s sales as a “newsie” was cents. From that time on, every dollar he has ever had has been made by his own business ability. During the first 15 years of his life, there was no kind of human poverty this family did not face, and through it all, held together as a family and received such education as could be obtained under such circumstances.

When Ralph Bauer, yet in his teens, determined to exchange the environment of Philadelphia for cultured Boston, his [wealth] when he landed amounted to 27 cents. Many were the hours of loneliness that were his, with neither kith nor kin nearer than the PA metropolis. Many were the night he slept on a Boston Common bench with the star-studded blue dome of the heavens above, his only coverlet. Oft were dreams rudely disturbed by the smart blow of a patrolman’s night-stick on the thin soles of his tattered shoes. Always with warm appreciation will remained his memory of one of Boston’s guardians of the peace, who drew from him the tale of his struggles for existence. Never will he forget the warmth of the coat the officer tucked about his lusty body while he promised to rouse him from his slumbers in time to get his share of the profits from the early morning edition of the Herald. True to his word the officer awakened the sleeping lad and provided him with a good hot breakfast. If that man is still alive today Ralph Bauer would like to know his whereabouts, for he has never forgotten his kindness to a little lonely lad in a great city, far from his lived ones. He was graduated from the Boston Latin school and immediately thereafter obtained a position in the mailing department of the Boston Herald.

Who’s to Blame?

WHAT’S wrong with this picture?

It will strike The Journal reader instantly that it is highly improper to combine silly farce with grim tragedy.

What, more or less, are some of our national leaders doing today with the problem of prohibition enforcement?

In the center you behold 1,376 victims of the shotgun method of law enforcement.

In the foreground are the common or garden variety of Drys, tilting their thumbs at one another.

“Let’s have an investigation.” There’s a good theme for a topical song. Gilbert and Sullivan could have done well with the suggestion.

But prohibition in the United States is not a farce comedy subject. As the number of victims of shotguns and poison piles up higher and higher the tragedy must be apparent to all.

What’s wrong with the picture?

The answer should be simple. The fallacy of all efforts to enforce prejudice, bigotry and fanaticism has been left out. And it is being left out of the argument by all of these wise men who, holding themselves blameless, “pass the buck” to their neighbors.

Rochester Evening Journal (Rochester, New York) Jan 4, 1930

Rochester Evening Journal (Rochester, New York) Jan 9, 1930

At Either Extreme

At Either Extreme

By Herbert Kaufman

To a Rut-jogger

IF you’re jogging along in a crowded way,
Stepping the same slow pace each day;
Like and old car-horse with his movements tracked,
It is time, my friend, you were soundly whacked
‘Til your eyes are open to the fact,
That the land on either side of the road
Is a virgin field that may be sowed.
If you need more space in which to do
There’s plenty of waiting room for you.
In farming, in business, in art, there are still
Enormous deserts for wit to till
What the world most needs are magic seeds
That are spread as dreams and are reaped as deeds.

But the beaten paths where so many pant,
And jostle and rant, is no place to plant
For high endeavor. Nobody ever
Achieved distinction within a rut
Or by following patterns the past had cut.
And the posted score declares you can’t
Securesuccess at a bargain rate,
Or snare it with stale and borrowed bait.
You must force a gap through the throttling throng
If you really expect to come along.
But the man who pines, and the man who whines,
Who skulks away from the skirmish lines —
He isn’t worth bothering over a minute;
He’s out of the game, and he never was in it.

To a Crested Popinjay

THOUGH lions and griffins may charge your crest,
If truth be confessed, nobody’s impressed —
Mere quarterings can’t lift you over the rest.
The fact that dim grandsires rode off to war
And rampaged and tore in a wild zeal for gore,
Doesn’t count any more;
The days of the snob and le sang pur is o’er,
In these times, even kings are poor, puppety things —
Ermined jumping jacks, jerking on parliament strings.
Your family tree may reach high up in G,
But we’re waiting to find out what your branch will be.
It’s you, not your father, we’re putting on trial;
It’s your exploits, not lineage, that reaches the file;
It’s the record you’ve made that we count worth the while.

A noble old oak drops acorns all day,
But that doesn’t say
They’ll all sprout the same way —
A lot will be spoiled by a touch of decay,
You may start in the peerage or start in the steerage,
As the son of a duke or a grimy coal-heaver;
‘Twill amount to the same if you’re not a believer
In self, and are ready to work like a beaver.
The world scoffs at men who can’t help to improve it;
It respects only brains with the power to move it,
Don’t flaunt coats-of-arms or take pride in beginnings,
Your birth won’t advantage or hinder your winnings.

Rochester Evening Journal (Rochester, New York) Jan 4, 1930