Monthly Archives: September 2017

The Historian’s Curse

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Running into the Rockwell Museum one rainy day, I glanced up at the World War I memorial (now in Corning city hall) and saw the name of a man that I knew only as a young boy, from pictures taken by his aunt at the turn of the century.  It was like seeing a child die.

*Likewise doing research for Hammondsport Central School’s Gold Star Memorial, I pored through yearbooks only to be stricken again and again at the sight of boys playing sports, going to class, mugging for the camera, and looking forward, as they had every right to do, to a long full life.  But I knew that that would be snatched cruelly away from them.

*I don’t think we have yet reached that happy day that will mark the end of war.  But I do think we have far too many of them, and I’m convinced that we go into them far too cavalierly.  Americans are still dying in an Afghanistan/Middle East war that goes back to 2001, meaning that kids who were three years old back then could be getting killed in the same war right now.

*As I say, I don’t think that the world has yet outgrown war.  But before we decide on war, we might all do well to walk down by the day care or the elementary school, watch the children at play during recess, and think about which ones of those children we’d be willing to have killed in whatever cause we’re thinking of fighting for.

*Let me introduce you to a few of the children:

*When Sid Cole (Corning) was a young boy, he and his little brother Glen liked to spend summers under canvas at Keuka Lake.  Sid was killed in action in France on July 19, 1918.

*Thomas James Webster (Bath) was an Eagle Scout, an acolyte at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, and valedictorian at Haverling, where he also played football.  He died of wounds in Italy on October 27, 1943.

*Bill Douden (Hammondsport) played sports in school.  He was a class officer, and went to American Legion Boys’ State.  He edited the yearbook and worked at Mercury Aircraft until being called up.  Bill was killed in Germany on February 22, 1945. 

*Reggie Wood (Hammondsport) was in the school band, the Bird Club, and the Boys Dancing Club.  He was a Boy Scout, and played softball, and worked on the school yearbook and newspaper, and was president of the junior class.  He died in an airplane crash in Germany on April 7, 1945. 

*Steve Carrasas (Hammondsport) was in the school band.  He played baseball and basketball, and was president of the Sportsmen’s Brotherhood.  He died on September 27, 1948, at least in part from aftereffects of being blown off ship into the sea at Pearl Harbor, AND during the nighttime Battle of Kula Gulf.

*John Keegan ended one of his military history books quoting the long-ago song about how old soldiers never die, they just fade away. But armies, Keegan pointed out, are not made up of old soldiers. They’re made up of young soldiers. And they die in their millions.

*As far as I’m concerned, they’re not even young soldiers. They’re little boys. They’re baby boys, opening their eyes for the first time in their mother’s arms. That’s who dies in a war.

The Prohibition Story

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It’s probably no surprise to know that Prohibition wreaked havoc in our grape-and-wine producing region.  Grape juice, table grapes, and sacramental wines didn’t generate enough business to fill the void.  World War I ended at the same time, and the Curtiss plant in Hammondsport closed, laying off over 700 workers.  Then the soldiers came home, looking for jobs.

Now organizations such as the Finger Lakes Association (now Finger Lakes Tourism Alliance) tried to drum up business by boosting tourism, especially “fully independent traveler” tourism by car, and also spearheaded a push to improve the roads.

Prohibition was not just a “killjoy” thing.  Alcohol abuse was a staggering problem in America at the time, and few Constitutional amendments enjoyed more popular support, even popular demand — 46 states ratified the amendment, and only two rejected it.

Even in our area, Prohibition had a lot of support.  I identified 33 nineteenth-century temperance organizations just in Steuben County, and four temperance newspapers (including the Tribune and the Courier).  Two local railroads required total abstinence from their employees, and several Steuben municipalities permitted no liquor licenses.

Prohibition did not ban drinking.  It banned the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcohol.  Our local wineries put on big advertising pushes to sell their stock before the amendment kicked in.  The famous Taylor Wine Company “Wine-Type” marketing… selling juice, setups, and instructions so consumers could make their own wine… may have titillated buyers with the sense that they were being naughty, but it was perfectly legal.  Besides drinking up stock on hand, individuals could make up to 64 gallons a year for private use.

Enforcement was never staffed or funded at the needed levels.  Indeed, in Washington, D.C. the attorney-general and the director of the Bureau of Investigation (now F.B.I.) established standard rates, based on population, as to how much you would pay them to block enforcement in your community.  One elderly woman from a winery family told me about driving as a little girl by night with her father on what she later realized were bootlegging deliveries. 

Still, some local owners of restaurants and the like were arrested and fined for serving liquor, while White Top winery in Pulteney was raided with considerable damage resulting.  But many flouted the law, provoking the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan, who ran nighttime patrols on Long Island hoping to stop bootleggers, and descended upon a Corning roadhouse, burning a cross and threatening the owners.

It’s a legend that people drank even more during Prohibition, BECAUSE it was forbidden.  Considering that most of the bars, liquor stores, and manufacturers were closed, it’s clear that that’s not the case.  In fact, some scholars say that consumption not only went down — it STAYED down after Repeal, not getting back up to pre-Prohibition levels until the early 1970s.

But Prohibition did enrich organized crime, and over time even supporters had to admit that it wasn’t working.  By then, though, it had become the third rail of American politics — a public official supporting Repeal was quickly clobbered with the cry that he promoted drunkenness.

In 1932 the wily Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed Repeal as a jobs measure, to get more people working in the Great Depression.  That worked, giving people who needed it an excuse to support repeal, or at least an excuse to stand aside and let it happen.

A onetime-librarian told me that he had checked the records to see how rock-ribbed Republican Hammondsporters voted in 1932 and found that, like much of the rest of the country, they went strong for Roosevelt.  Repeal came nine months after F.D.R.’s inauguration but, according to the librarian, in 1936, eschewing gratitude, they went back to the Republicans, making Hammondsport one of those very rare communities that gave their votes to Alf Landon.  Roosevelt won anyhow.  And Prohibition stayed repealed.

Making Airplanes at Mercury

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The Hammondsport company that we now know as Mercury Aircraft, or Mercury Corporation, got its start in 1920 as the Aerial Service Corporation.  Founder Henry Kleckler, and others in key positions through the years, were former Curtiss men.  (Ownership changed hands several times in the first twenty years or so.)  As they said, “Service” was their middle name. They did a lot of things in aviation, and one of them was to build airplanes.

*In 1922 they built two racing airplanes for the navy, plus a monoplane for an exhibition pilot.  All of these were designed by another Hammondsport firm, the Aerial Engineering Corporation, which hired Aerial Service to do the construction.

*In 1925 came the Aerial Mercury, designed for a competition to create a new air mail plane.  The post office liked it, bought it, and used it for years, but never made any follow-up orders.  It made enough of a splash, though, that its name soon became the company name.

*Also in 1925 they bought a number of surplus Model J biplanes made by Standard Aircraft and rebuilt them extensively.  We can argue about whether to count these as airplanes manufactured by Mercury, but at any rate we don’t know how many there were, although the Argentine government bought five to use as trainers.

*Also in 1925 came the single Mercury Junior, which led to the larger Aerial Mercury retroactively being called the Mercury Senior. The single Mercury Kitten appeared in 1927, and an innovative airplane designed for a safety competition came two years later.

*None of these resulted in production contracts, but the 1929 Mercury Chic DID.  This was a two-seater parasol-wing open-cockpit monoplane, and the Curtiss flying school in Chicago took five of them as part of a special package… learn to fly and take home the Chic you trained on, all for a single price.

*The Chic was a well thought-of airplane, and the future looked bright, but 1929 was the year of the stock market crash.  With the Great Depression under way, not too many people were signing up for the lessons-plus-airplane deal.  About 16 or 18 Chics were manufactured (one source says as many as 30), but a number of them were never actually assembled.  Instead, the components were crated to wait (mostly vainly) for a buyer.

*(By the way, in 1930 Harvey Mummert put Billy Mummert and Joe Meade, Jr. into the front cockpit of a Chic, and piloted the aircraft as the boys tossed flowers out onto the crowd at Glenn Curtiss’s burial.)

*Otto Kohl and Harvey Mummert created the Red Racer in 1929, and the White Racer followed in 1931.  Mercury squeaked through the Depression and boomed during the war, but made no more airplanes until 1976, when Joe Meade, Jr. and a team of Mercury men reproduced the 1908 June Bug originally designed and flown by Glenn Curtiss.  (Joe had planned a static reproduction, but Cole Palen of Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome told him, “It isn’t an airplane unless it flies.”)  Fly it did, at Hammondsport, Dansville, and Oskosh, piloted by Joe, by Cole, by Dave Fox, and by Harry Saltsman, all of whom are now gone.

*How many Mercury aircraft are left today? Two or three Chics, including one at Curtiss Museum, and the White Racer, also at Curtiss. The June Bug II is at Curtiss as well, and the remnants of the Red Racer still theoretically existed around the year 2000, though it would be too generous to have called it a basket case. So to see the wings of Mercury – Curtiss is where you have to go!

The Amish and Mennonite Story

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Since 1990 or so, many of us have been aware of Amish and Old Order Mennonites moving into the area. The general name for Amish and Mennonite groups, and others, such as Church of the Brethren, is Anabaptists. These include “modern” people with business dress, advanced degrees, and jobs in finance, commerce, the professions, or high technology.

*Then there are groups often referred to as “Old Order” — the Amish, and those Mennonite groups that, like the Amish, maintain plain dress and abstain from most modern technology.

*All Anabaptists trace back to the turmoil of the Reformation… traditional date 500 years in November. Believing that Biblical baptism was the declaration of a mature commitment, they rejected the infant baptism that they had all received at birth, and baptized each other anew, sometimes right in the town fountain — Anabaptist means rebaptizer. They walked away from the churches practicing infant baptism (which was just about all of them), and started their own.

*Taking the teaching of Jesus both literally and seriously, they refused to swear oaths. They insisted that government had no legitimate power of compulsion in religious matters. They also refused to take up the sword, and adopted a non-resistant lifestyle, saying it was better to suffer wrong than to give it. The classic example was Dirk Willems, fleeing for his life across the ice when his nearest pursuer fell through. Dirk Willems returned, pulled the man from the ice, was captured, and was burned at the stake for the crime of being an Anabaptist.

*However, this non-resistance is not simply a passive thing; it is equally an active approach to life. In 1948 Eastern Mennonite College became one of the first two southern colleges to integrate racially. An even more modern example would be the West Nickel Mines school shooting in Pennsylvania in 2006, when a gunman barged into an Amish school where he killed five girls and wounded five more before killing himself. Members of the Amish community immediately… that day… went to the gunman’s family to extend their love and concern for THAT family’s suffering. Thirty Amish attended the gunman’s funeral. The Amish set up a charitable fund to assist the family of the killer.

*This has limits, when it goes beyond an offense to Anabaptists. When Dr. Myron Augsburger was growing up on a farm, their “English” neighbor was fiercely angry that people were stealing crops from the Augsburgers, but Mr. Augsburger refused to take any action — non-resistance. One day when the Augsbugers were off the neighbor spotted the thieves out in the field, fired a shotgun blast over their heads, or ordered them all to sit down, holding them prisoner until the Augsburgers returned. Mr. Augsburger told the neighbor to put up his gun and let them come out.

*It turned out, though, that one of the thieves was the sheriff. Starting that moment Mr. Augusburger dedicated himself, successfully, to having that sheriff thrown out of office at the next election — not because he had stolen from the Augsburgers, but because he had betrayed the trust of the entire community, and was not fit to hold public office, especially as a law enforcer.

*At 4 PM Friday, September 8, I’ll be doing a non-intrusive presentation on the history of Amish and Mennonites for Steuben County Historical Society. The presentation at Bath fire hall is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there.