A century ago today readers of the Star-Telegram read these ads and articles:
Two young men were arrested after two safes were blown open and looted in Azle. One safe contained 1,500 pennies, which the explosion scattered around the room. Nonetheless, the yeggs took the time to gather up all those pennies before making their exit. Such penny pinching might sound foolish, but in 1915 those $15 worth of pennies (weighing about ten pounds) were worth about $340 in today’s pennies.
These two briefs have the makings of an Abbott and Costello routine (“Who’s on thirst?”): A man named “Ford” driving a Case collided with a man named “Alton” driving a Ford. And a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union party was presided over by a Brewer.
(The Case company, long known for its agricultural and construction equipment, made automobiles for a few years.)
Before the Poly and Stop 6 areas of the East Side were incorporated by Fort Worth, they had their own school districts. The president of the Young Men’s Business League predicted that the two districts would consolidate and build a shared high school. Lewis H. Tandy, secretary of the Poly school district and a grandson of Roger Tandy, had offered land near Texas Woman’s College, the new (since 1914) incarnation of Polytechnic College. The Stop 6 area was named for the interurban stop at today’s Rand Street in Meadowbrook.
The Fair department store experienced a 1915 version of Black Friday at Walmart when it held a sale of three hundred suits. One man facing fifteen hundred women. It was the Alamo with estrogen.
Even a century ago people debated whether students—female, in this case—should wear uniforms. But school board president George C. Clarke (for whom the 1914 school on South Henderson is named) said the best course of action would be to have high schools for boys and girls.
The conflict that would become known as “World War I” raged in Europe.
Earlier in the month a reader had written a letter to the editor complaining that employers hire married women when single women and men with families are more in need of a job. This respondent, Mrs. L. V., wrote, “To the bride who works I would say, ‘Don’t.’” She added: “And then you go home and make home so sweet and neat, bright and comfortable that when hubby comes he will wonder how the gods could have been so good as to have let him have so wonderful a girl. . . . Between the hot muffins, delicious biscuit and steaks, he would . . . never miss the paltry few dollars you would earn.”
The selling points in these ads give away their antiquity: steam heated, sleeping porch, car line, gentleman.
It was not unusual for J. Frank Norris of First Baptist Church to lecture to “men only,” especially when his topic was Hell’s Half Acre.
In an announcement that must have struck terror in the hearts of teenagers, Southwestern Telegraph & Telephone warned that it would—without warning—conduct fire drills for its 175 “phone girls,” rendering Fort Worth incommunicado for four minutes each month. In 1915 Fort Worth still had the three original exchanges: Lamar, Rosedale, and Prospect.
For sale among the ubiquitous Fords were flivvers that floundered: Jackson, Overland, Regal, Apperson, Baker.
(Because I know you want to know, the 1913 Webster’s dictionary defined master vibrator: “In an internal-combustion engine with two or more cylinders, an induction coil and vibrator placed in the circuit between the battery or magneto and the coils for the different cylinders, which are used without vibrators of their own.”)
And we thought “They won’t last at these prices” was just a comedian’s version of a used-car slogan.
I do love to read century-old news.