Out in the big world in 1920, Joan of Arc was named as a saint. In that same year, in Poland, future Pope (and saint) John Paul II was born. Joan needed five centuries to become a saint, while John Paul took just nine years.
In Russia, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was born. Other births for the year included Mickey Rooney; Werner Klemperer; Jack Webb; Yul Brynner; DeForest Kelly AND James Doohan (from Star Trek); torch singer Peggy Lee; and baseball great Stan Musial.
In Bath, George Haley was born – future Tuskegee Airman in the old segregated army, and combat pilot in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Also first seeing the light of day was a brand-new character created by Agatha Christie – Hercule Poirot.
The world was still reeling from aftershocks of the Spanish influenza pandemic. Over in Europe, many of the Irish were fighting their war for independence. Under pressure from new member Adolf Hitler the German Workers Party adopted the swastika symbol and renamed itself the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazis.
Here in the U.S. the Negro National League was formed, and so was the National Football League. James Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president and vice-president, losing out to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
In Pittsburg station KDKA, the first commercial radio station in America, made its first broadcast on election night… they’re still on the air. Woodrow Wilson was still in the White House, and his “Justice” Department made nationwide roundups and attacks on people, especially immigrants, considered to have dangerous political ideas, and either jailed them or shipped them overseas – the Red Scare. Young J. Edgar Hoover sat in his office, wrote up lies about people he disapproved of, then went to court and committed perjury to get people deported. This perhaps helped inspire the birth, also in 1920, of the American Civil Liberties Union.
American women nationwide finally got the vote in 1920 (New Yorkers had done so two years earlier), and the League of Women Voters was born.
Prohibition was in full force, devastating the economy around Keuka Lake, but to cheer things up a little, 1920 saw the very first Zorro movie (silent, of course, and starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.).
Representing us in Congress was a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works. Eighty years later, our representative in Congress was a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works. (“Amo” would be the grandson of Alanson.) James Wadsworth of Geneseo was one of our senators in 1920, and Al Smith was our governor. Unfortunately many western New Yorkers were so enraged by a Catholic governor that they would join the Ku Klux Klan in thousands, even using the Bath, Yates, and Chemung fairgrounds for their rallies, and having “K.K.K.” carved on their gravestones.
Locally in 1920, the Penn Yan was the last steamboat running on Keuka Lake. Brown’s Crossing and Mossy Glen, in the Town of Corning, were merged and incorporated to form the Village of South Corning. Saxton’s barn burned in Cameron Mills. Firefighters in Corning bought a new American LaFrance fire engine, made in Elmira. The Corning Daily Journal issued its last edition, and sold their subscription list to the Leader.
This means that they missed the stories of how burglars blew open a safe in the Corning Post Office, and how the Centerville (now Riverside) Bridge washed away in flooding accompanied by high winds that blew off roofs and uprooted trees in Hornby, Erwin, Lindley, Caton, and Campbell. Scottish Rite Masons advanced 850 members in Corning, where the city agreed to financially support the library. Embalmers held their state convention in Corning, where three local undertakers formed the entertainment committee.
In Wayland, the brand-new American Legion post built a home for itself, and that home included just what every town of good size needed in 1920 – a movie theater! In Hammondsport Henry Kleckler opened a new business, the Aerial Service Corporation. We know it today as Mercury Aircraft – now 100 years old.
The American Multiplane Company in Bath made their third attempt in three years to convince the army to buy their huge and complex airplane. Since it failed to fly for the third year in a row, that was the end of the project and the company.
If you’d been in Bath in those days, you’d have been getting your mail across Liberty Street from today’s post office, and going to the “old” Haverling School.
Haverling graduated 23 students, including grads with such well-known local names as Daniels, Faucett, Switzer, McCabe, Van Gelder, Bonsor, Kleckler, and Stocking. The basketball team was a financial success, despite winning two games and losing nine. The track team did rather better, and insisted that Hornell cheated them out of victory in the Steuben County track meet with the help of bad officialing. They had to be content with watching one of the Haverling players break the county pole vault record by almost two feet. In a meet at Colgate he had already done better than the Colgate collegiate record.
In September of 1920, W. Sterling Cole started his senior year at Haverling. He would later be elected to Congress from our district twelve times, and become the first chairman of the International Atomic Energy Commission.
According to the yearbook ads you could get your notions at the Racket Store… your Pyrex glass baking dishes from George W. Peck…
your shoes from Castle’s and cigars from Walter’s. You could climb and save at the Up-Stairs Clothing Store, or get choice meats and groceries from Van Gelder and Sons. You could get flowers from Van Scoter, and ice cream at the Olympian.
One 1920 landmark would not be recognized for decades to come. Not only was it the first year in which all American women had the right to vote. The cohort of girls born in 1920 were the first group of girls in which the majority of them lived until their children were grown up. That all by itself made 1920 a glorious year.