Gettysburg goes audio
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 27, 1950, Robert Smith, an announcer engineer, pushed a button and the miracle of Marconi came to Gettysburg and the surrounding region. Music was transmitted through the air from a location north of Gettysburg into people’s homes miles away. Though radio had been around since the early years of the 20th Century, WGET Radio became Gettysburg’s first commercial radio station. The first thing Gettysburgians heard on their radio station was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Then Owen Voight, another announcer engineer for the station, stepped up to the microphone in the main studio and said, “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. This is Radio Station WGET signing on its initial broadcasting day WGET transmits on a frequency of 1450 kilocycles, with a power of 280 watts as authorized by the Federal Communications Commission,” the Gettysburg Times Read more…
Callithumpian band causes worry in York
The metallic reverberating sound of gongs repeatedly sounded throughout downtown York, Pa., in August 1925. It was a sound people recognized as the alert on a fire truck. Somewhere in York, a fire was burning. “During the disturbance patrons of theaters, hurriedly snatched their wraps and fled from the amusement places to ‘go to the fire.’ Others telephoned or went to their homes,” The York Dispatch reported. People attending a municipal band concert at Farquhar Park heard the gongs over the music and streamed out of the park, seeking the fire or their homes to make sure it wasn’t burning. The problem was that there was no fire. “A callithumpian band mounted on a truck which also carried, despite their objections the bride and bridegroom, coursed about downtown streets for about an hour last evening,” The York Dispatch reported. According Read more…
Where Fairytales Came to Life on a Civil War Battlefield (Part 1)
It was a place where families made happy memories, and now it only exists as happy family memories. Fantasyland in Gettysburg, Pa., entertained tens of thousands of youngsters and the young at heart from 1959 to 1980. Kenneth and Thelma Dick took their family to the shore for a vacation in 1957. On their way home, they stopped at Storybook Land near Atlantic City, N.J. It was a small park, planned to entertain young children like the three Dick girls. “My mother kept saying the whole time, ‘I could do better than this. This is so okay, but I could do something so cute,’” Jacqueline White said. She is the middle child of the three Dick girls between her sisters, Stephanie and Cynthia. White’s parents spent the four hours of the drive home, planning the Read more…
The first residents of Johnstown (part 2)
The Indians first mounted a large attack against white men in the Johnstown, Pa., area was during the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755. This was at the beginning of the French and Indian War. The French soldiers and Native American warriors joined to fight and defeat British General Edward Braddock. Braddock was mortally wounded during the battle and died near present-day Uniontown. Years later, Native Americans started warring on their own against White settlers and the British. “The Native Americans were upset over British laws being enforced by General Jeffrey Amherst,” said Scott Perry, museum facilitator at the Bushey Run Battlefield. One problem was that Amherst cut off the Native American supply of gunpowder, which they had grown dependent on for their hunting. This was named Pontiac’s War after one of the leading Native American generals. The Native American raids were Read more…
Right city, wrong state
It’s bad enough to get a call that your son’s in jail and needs you to bail him out, but what happens when you show up at the county jail with bail money and the corrections officer has never heard of your son? You may want to look at a map. James Ridings was a 21 year old from Keyser, W.Va. was driving through Franklin County, Pa., on the evening of April 7, 1961. He was a mile north of Waynesboro, Pa., when he pulled onto the Waynesboro-Quincy road from a side street without paying attention to oncoming traffic. His car hit a northbound car being driven by Kenny Cook, Jr. from Quincy, Pa. The crash sent Cook’s car off the road and into a tree. The impact pushed one of the front wheels on the car back three feet. Read more…
York County’s first supermodel
Nearly a century before the term “supermodel” was coined, Amanda Straw was living the life of one. Of course, by then, most people knew her by her professional name, Madeline Stokes. Straw was born in 1875 on a farm in Fishing Creek Valley in northern York County. Unlike the tall, long-legged models of today, Straw stood only 5 feet 4 inches tall. She had hazel eyes, light brown hair, and a figure that epitomized feminine beauty in the 19th century. After receiving an education in one-room schools in the county, she left for Philadelphia to attend the Pierce Business College. However, she left the school to try her hand on the stage and as an artist’s model. “One special performance included working on a New York roof-top garden, Jardin De Paris. She was clad head-to-toe in nothing but enamel (Straw Read more…
Pennsylvania’s Ghost Towns
Susan Tassin was hiking with her husband one day along a Pennsylvania trail when they came across stacked cut stones in a large rectangle. Tassin recognized what she was seeing as the foundation of a house. The home was long gone, and the stones were all that remained to mark that someone had once called that out-of-the-way place home. “I was excited,” Tassin said. “We saw some other hikers and told them what we had found.” The other hikers didn’t understand the Tassins’ excitement. The hikers pointed out a historical marker that told readers the site had once been more than a place for a single home. An entire home had been located there. It was all gone, though. All that was left was a ghost town. When most people think of ghost towns, they picture dusty streets flanked by Read more…
Small-town high school students prepare for the journey of a lifetime in the middle of the Great Depression (Part 4)
The boys of Arendtsville Vocational High School had already seen so much during the summer of 1937. They had traveled across the United States, down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and upon an ocean to reach Alaska. It was almost too much to take in fully, and yet, their journey wasn’t complete. From Vancouver, British Columbia, they climbed aboard a half-ton truck that they had specially outfitted to carry the 25 boys and their teacher, Edwin Rice. “Most of the roads in British Columbia are dirt and not very good at that,” Rice wrote in a letter to The Gettysburg Times. “We were saturated with dust when we got to Asveyoos.” They drove into Washington State where they watched the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. “Today it is one of the largest dams in the world, but Read more…
Small-town high school students prepare for the journey of a lifetime in the middle of the Great Depression (Part 2)
Twenty-six students from Arendtsville Vocational High School set out on a cross-country journey to Alaska and back on June 18, 1937. The trip had been years in the making and for the boys, many of whom had barely ventured to the furthest reaches of Adams County, no matter what happened, it would be well worth the wait. They first headed east in their Ford half-ton flatbed truck, which had been specially outfitted to carry all of the boys, their teacher Edwin Rice, and everything they would need for their journey. Rice had taken his students on a number of summer trips over the years, but the 9,000-mile trip planned for 1937 was by far, the grandest trip that he had undertaken. The traveled along the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware, and down into Virginia. They stopped at Virginia Beach where Read more…
Small-town high school students prepare for the journey of a lifetime in the middle of the Great Depression (Part 1)
Arendtsville is a small town in south central Pennsylvania 3,800 miles from Alaska. In 1937, a group of teenagers set out from their little community with Alaska as their destination. The teenagers were students of Arendtsville Vocational High School. The school had first opened as a two-year high school in 1911 on the second floor of the elementary school. Enrollment quickly grew and within a couple years the students moved to the second floor of the fire house on South High Street, according to the National Apple Museum web site. The students got their own building in 1914 when the school board voted to build a high school on South High Street. The course work was expanded to a three-year program. This was due to the urging of Edwin Rice, who was a student a State College. His arguments convinced Read more…
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