On October 13, 1914 you could read all about it in the Star-Telegram: The Braves were in Boston; the Athletics were in Philadelphia; the Stock Show was on the North Side, Buffalo Bill was on his way, and Gavrilo Princip was in deep trouble.
The Boston Braves had swept the Philadelphia Athletics in the first four-game World Series. The “miracle Braves” had been in last place on July 4 but had surged to win the National League pennant by 10 1/2 games. And at second base for Boston in the batting order, that’s Johnny Evers of the Chicago Cubs double-play combination immortalized in the 1910 poem:
“Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”
These are the saddest of possible words: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds, Tinker and Evers and Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double— Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
The Stock Show that year was held in October—in and around the Coliseum (1908) on the North Side. Special trains brought in people from out of town. Special streetcars shuttled people to the show.
At the Stock Show, Fort Worth Power & Light touted electric cooking appliances.
In the Sells-Floto circus parade the next day, “Buffalo Bill himself” would appear and “salute you from the saddle.”
Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb whose assassination of Austrian archduke Ferdinand on June 28 had precipitated World War I, was indicted in Sarajevo.
If you look at only the bucolic photograph, you’d never guess that the ad is selling whiskey.
For $3 women could button themselves into a pair of these.
A century later we can’t fully appreciate the role that rail mass transit played in Fort Worth. Streetcars served downtown and the inner city. Each day the newspaper printed a schedule of trains and of the interurban to Dallas and to Cleburne. All those passenger trains used just two stations.
Of the nine early automobile marques listed in this Fort Worth Auto Exchange ad, seven have gone the way of the interurban and high-button shoes.
