Monthly Archives: April 2019

1999 Bath’s Library is REborn (Among Many Other Things)

In 1999 Davenport Library celebrated its 130th birthday by moving to its new facilities… helped out by schoolchildren and others passing books from the old place to the new. The old library had been named Davenport, after the building donor in 1893. The NEW library was named Dormann, for the family that donated funds for construction. Gerald Ford and Walter Cronkite came for the opening festivities, as did Defense Secretary William Cohen. Every living President donated an autographed book. But what ELSE was going on in that year?

*The Dow-Jones Industrial Average closed above 10,000 for the first time in history. (Some of that was due to inflation, rather than actual performance.)

*Bill Gates of Microsoft, meanwhile, became the richest person on earth, demonstrating how important computers, including home computers, had become. Science fiction predictions of 1999 were right! (About computers, anyway.)

*Most of the European Union established the Euro, or Eurodollar, as their common currency, equally good in any of the participating countries.

*Lieutenant-Colonel Eileen Collins of Elmira became the first woman to command and pilot the Space Shuttle. As a teenager she had cadged flying lessons at the Harris Hill gliderport by voluntarily helping out with scut work around the hangar. She went on to Corning Community College, Syracuse University, a master’s degree, the Air Force, and the Astronaut’s Corps. The first American woman pilot, Blanche Stuart Scott of Rochester, made her first flight in Hammondsport in 1910. Eighty-nine years later Lieutenant-Colonel Collins was the highest-flying American woman ever.

*Steuben County Historical Society moved into the old library, now renamed Magee House after its 1831 builder. John Magee had been a member of Congress, banker, coal magnate, railroad baron, builder of canals and highways, organizer of stagecoach lines… not to mention twice being a P.O.W. in the War of 1812.

*George Pataki was governor of New York, and Vladimir Putin became president of Russia. Panama took over full control of the Panama Canal, an event now almost unnoticed, but so unpopular when it was planned that it had helped deny Jimmy Carter a second term.

*Bill Clinton weathered an impeachment trial in the US Senate – only the second in our history. Republican Representative Amo Houghton bucked his party to vote against impeachment in the House. Although Republicans controlled the Senate, neither of the two charges against Clinton even received a majority vote, let alone the required two-thirds. Historians and constitutional scholars since then have backed up Houghton and the senators.

*Twelve students and a teacher were killed in the Columbine massacre, after which the shooters killed themselves.

*Deaths for the year included Jordan’s King Hussein, John F. Kennedy Jr., John Ehrlichman of Watergate infamy, singer Mel Tormé (the “velvet fog”), actor Victor Mature, and Candid Camera’s Allen Funt.

*As the days of the year dwindled down, panic ratcheted up amid dire predictions of a worldwide computer crash that would destroy life as we knew it. But the Y2K bug came to nothing, and everyone pretended they hadn’t REALLY been all that worried after all.

Pinball Fun (and More) at the Strong National Museum of Play

If you’re of (ahem) a certain age, you may occasionally find yourself brooding on the fact that it’s very hard to get in a pinball game nowadays.

*Well, fret no more. You can get in all the games you like… in fact, more than you can handle… at the Strong Museum in Rochester.

*The Strong, which bills itself as the National Museum of Play, has set up a couple of dozen operating pinball machines, which you can tackle at a quarter apiece. Pull back the spring-loaded starter, flap those flippers, bounce the steel ball off the uprights and over the trip levers to the satisfying bing-bing-ching and bung-kachung, while lights flash and strobe, and you can drop all the way back to pre-computer days, when the world and you were young, and the pinball machine brightened the corner of the neighborhood newsstand.

*I played half a dozen machines from different periods, usually getting three balls for my quarter (plus any more I earned during play). Unsurprisingly, I found that some tilt easier than others! One had a set of suspiciously-short flippers. This left the open gate between them annoyingly wide, but it also meant that you didn’t get enough leverage for a good snap on those occasions when you COULD flip the ball.

*Pinball’s natural successor (and replacement) was the arcade video game, and there were at least as many of those in operation, even starting with the ur-game of Pong. Early Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are still in action at Strong, though I was sorry not to find the original Space Invaders.

*Strong hosts the Video Game Hall of Fame, and a Hall of Fame for video game designers. Pinball was a 2018 inductee for the main Toy Hall of Fame, along with Uno and Magic 8-Ball. I like to prowl through the Hall of Fame area and meet old friends, from the stick and the cardboard box, through Barbie and Mr. Potato Head, on up to modern high-tech playthings.

*Strong Museum is always changing, and always bringing forth new exhibits. But old favorites also continue to pack in crowds – the life-size walk-in Sesame Street set, the Berenstain Bears space, the gallery of superheoes, the working carousel, and the indoor Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden are all as busy as ever.

*It’s not just for kids any more, as the old commercial said. We’re in our late 60s, and we’ve seen at LOT of changes in the museum over the years, and we love the place. Our younger son is 37, and he’s been three times in the past month – once with kids, once with a peer, and once with us.

*You can still eat in Bill Gray’s Restaurant at the Skyline Diner, which is the largest artifact in the collection, but there’s also a food court space nowadays. The butterfly garden has an additional fee, over and above museum admission.

*Some other special features include: a “Cartop” rowboat made locally, by Penn Yan Boats; an original circular Monopoly board, with circular card table; and a number of huge 19th-century dollhouses (familiar to those who know the museum from of old).

*A decade-by-decade exhibition of toys, games, and playthings ropes in Shirley Temple, Davy Crockett, Charlie McCarthy, and G. I. Joe; Scrabble; Twister; the Kenner View-Master; space toys; war toys; homemaker toys… the list is endless. As long as kids keep playing, Strong Museum will keep on growing.

1869 — Bath’s Library is Born (Among Other Things)

Bath’s Library opened its doors in 1869 – this is its sesquicentennial year! (The library’s first location was in the county courthouse.) But what ELSE was going on at that same time?
*Here in Bath, St. Thomas Episcopal Church laid the cornerstone for the monumental Liberty Street edifice that we all know today. (It’s the oldest church building in the Village.) The Methodist church building was dedicated in Campbell, and First Baptist Church was organized in Addison.
*Over in Rome, the First Vatican Council got under way.
*Our County Fair had its 50th birthday in 1869, but they’d only been using the fairGROUNDS since 1854. They started permanent construction around 1863, creating the fair house, the gatehouse, and the track… all of which were brand-new in 1869, and all of which we still enjoy today.
*Down in Washington, D.C., General Ulysses S. Grant became president, succeeding Andrew Johnson.
*Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first woman to testify before a Congressional committee, and the Territory of Wyoming became the first U.S. entity to adopt universal suffrage, accepting men and women alike as voters.
*The transcontinental railroad was completed with the driving of the golden spike. Andrew Joseph Russell took the famous photo of that event. Mr. Russell had painted a view of Bath just ten years earlier. The painting, now on exhibit in the Magee House, shows that house, which would be home to Bath’s library (then called the Davenport Library) for 106 years… from 1893 to 1999.
*Over on the other side of the world the Suez Canal was opened. When combined with the transcontinental railroad, the canal would soon make it possible to go “around the world in 80 days.”
*Celluloid, the first plastic, was patented. Jesse James robbed his first bank. Leo Tolstoy published War and Peace. Jules Verne began serializing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Charles Dickens published a collection of short stories. Mark Twain was editing the Buffalo Express.
*Rutgers beat Princeton 6-4 in the first intercollegiate football game. The Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first all-professional baseball team.
*The elder Theodore Roosevelt (father of the future president) joined with J. P. Morgan and a dozen other men to found the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. (The younger Theodore would later be a founder of the Bronx Zoo.)
*Without President Grant’s knowledge, Erie Railroad magnates Jim Fisk and Jay Gould used their connections in Grant’s administration to try and corner to gold market. They failed, provoking the “Black Friday” financial panic… in part because Grant, once he realized what was going on, took steps to break the conspiracy.
*Austin Steward, who had escaped slavery in Bath to become a wealthy Rochester businessman, a memoirist, an abolition crusader, and an associate of John Brown and Frederick Douglass, passed away in 1869.
*Births that year included Rasputin, whose corruption helped lead to the Bolshevik revolution; Neville Chamberlain, whose appeasement helped ease the way for Hitler; Mahatma Gandhi, who led India and Pakistan to independence; and Typhoid Mary.
*Theodore Roosevelt was 11 years old, and Woodrow Wilson was 13. Henry Ford was 16. Deacon White of Caton was in his second year of professional baseball, catching barehanded for the Cleveland Forest Citys.
*It would be seven years before the telephone was invented, nine years before Glenn Curtiss was born. Neither Germany nor Italy yet existed as countries.
*There were still people living who had fought at Waterloo or New Orleans, or who had known George Washington. Slavery had ended just three years earlier.
*Corning Flint Glass Works was in its first full year in Corning, and Davenport Female Asylum was five years old. Neither Corning nor Hornell had become cities yet… but they wouldn’t have long to wait!

“Rain, Shine, or Cyclone”: Pioneer Pilot Blanche Stuart Scott

Two weeks ago in this space we looked at “eminent Rochestrian” Blanche Stuart Scott, up until she came to Hammondsport in 1910 to become America’s first woman pilot.

*Assuming she was only 18 (as per her publicity), and figuring that a woman being killed would wreck the airplane business, Glenn and Lena Curtiss supervised Blanche closely at first. Even so, by the time she finished training Glenn had signed her on as an exhibition pilot… exhibitions being where the money was, in those early days.

*But someone as savvy as Blanche, and as skilled as Blanche, always had a crack at a better deal. She also flew in succession for Glenn Martin, for Tom Baldwin, and for Jimmie Ward… always a crowd-getter, and always a crowd pleaser.

*“Rain, Shine, or Cyclone,” her posters declared. Screaming crowds loved her “death dive,” from 4000 feet to 200. Billing herself as “the Tomboy of the Air,” she made (she claimed) $5000 a week, “and spent it just as fast.”

*“We were all kooks,” she said, “and I was probably one of the biggest.” Cerainly those who did stunt flying back before World War I were not run-of-the-mill or middle-of-the-road people, and even among the fliers, very few were women.

*Blanche was actually flying at the Harvard Air Meet on July 1, 1912 when she saw headliner Harriet Quimby and a passenger fall a thousand feet to their deaths. She landed safely, but was so shaken that she had to be lifted from the airplane. Even so, newspaper ads the following day listed Blanche as the Meet’s new headliner. And she flew.

*“Miss Scott,” as she was known, had some scares of her own, and she claimed to have broken dozens of bones. She acted and flew in two or three silent movies. But eventually she became disgusted at being treated as a freak (a woman pilot!) rather than as a highly-skilled aviator, which she certainly was.

*The snapping point came when she overheard a spectator complaining that nobody had been killed. “No more!” she said, and had given up flying by 1916.

*She stayed active in movies (mostly writing), and moved on to radio when that became popular. In the 1930s she came back to Rochester because her mother’s health was failing. Paul Roxon, who worked for the C.A.B. for years, told me that she used to come around to air shows and the like, but always seemed like she was on the outside looking in. Like so many of those pioneer pilots, she had been forgotten.

*She worked in a Rochester factory making batteries during World War II, regaling skeptical co-workers with tales of her exploits. After the war she worked in TV, and as a publicist for the Air Force Museum, besides boosting the idea of a museum for Glenn Curtiss. For quite a few years she lived near Hornell, broadcasting on WLEA. When Otto Kohl opened Curtiss Museum she donated her gauntlets and flying hood, still on exhibit there. (A 1980 air mail stamp, first issued in Rochester, depicted her in that hood.)

*Blanche Scott died in 1970, sixty years after becoming America’s first women pilot. “Life has been exciting and interesting,” she once said. “I have lived it my way, and found it good.”

Life as a World War I Doughboy

America has always lived a lot of its life by wishful thinking. When we got into World War I, in 1917, the war had already been going on for almost three years. And we weren’t the slightest bit ready.

*Out navy was in adequate shape, thanks in part to Franklin D. Roosevelt, our energetic young assistant secretary of that department. But our army was small and ill-equipped, and horribly unprepared. General Pershing was the only officer who had commanded anything larger than a regiment in the field.

*We beat the recruiting drum to expand our army rapidly, and we started a draft. But even once we got men into the boot camps and induction centers, we often couldn’t give them weapons, or even uniforms. Once our men got to France, many of them would be using British or French rifles, helmets, and artillery.

*American women were in uniform for the first time, mostly as nurses, and in that area we WERE fairly well prepared. Jane Delano of Watkins Glen headed up Red Cross nursing AND army nursing. She had foreseen a large war on the horizon, and worked to prepare both programs.

*The government commissioned Red Cross and similar agencies to provide care and support for the troops overseas. To finance this, those agencies were given the exclusive right to sell cigarettes to the soldiers, and even men in hospital deathbeds went without smokes unless they ponied up the price of a pack.

*By the way, prewar Americans considered cigarettes an affectation of gigolos and lounge lizards. REAL men smoked cigars or pipes. The war changed all that.

*Likewise men in the prewar carried pocket watches; wrist watches were for women. But in the midst of combat the pocket watch was clearly impractical, and wrist watches became standard wear.

*Assuming he got American equipment, the infantry soldier was probably using a 1903 Springfield rifle, bolt-action and clip-fed, with a five-round magazine. Khaki and olive drab had been adopted in ’03, so at least our men were wearing reasonable colors for modern combat. They got the “Smoky Bear” hat in 1911, but in action mostly wore the British soupbowl “tin hat” or the more substantial French helmet. They also wore puttees, a “mummy wrap” around the lower leg, theoretically serving to keep mud off the uniform.

*Thousands of local fellows served in the war, and scores died. At 4 PM on Friday, April 5, Dave Clark will attend a Steuben County Historical Society presentation in uniform as his great-uncle, PFC Steven Smith, giving us a “first-hand” account of life in the trenches. The free event is at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath. We hope you’ll join us.