And for it to take an hour to go down a flight of stairs, out the door, orient himself on a street he would have recognized and walk next door? That sounds a little far fetched, too. Might he have been looking around for a few “souvenirs” before he left and finding none, needed an excuse when he came out of the building?

I guess we’ll never know the truth, but this is one of those instances where it might be fun to take a historical event and turn it into historical fiction to explore the possibilities.

Anyway, the story itself is odd enough that it appeared in newspapers throughout the region in 1875. Hope you enjoy it.

http://times-news.com/local/x1818100579/Looking-Back-1875-Windsor-Hotel-guest-takes-nighttime-walk

What I’m more curious about is how the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Team of Rivals will be adapted to a movie. I read that it will focus on the last four months of Lincoln’s life. Now I may be remembering wrong, but wasn’t the gist of the book about how all these men with competing and sometimes conflicting views came together to form a “Dream Team”?

If so, then wouldn’t a lot of the focus need to be on the time around when Lincoln was elected as the 16^th President of the United States?

And if the movie doesn’t capture this storyline, then is it truly adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s books?

Steven Spielberg will be directing so I think I can safely say that he’ll make a good movie. I just hope that he makes the right movie. I’d hate to see the book ruined by a poor movie.

As Disert walked into the bay, he heard a popping sound. His attention focused on the 1952 American Fire Apparatus 500-gallon pumper truck. Suddenly he knew exactly what the smell was because he had smelled it earlier in the year. He saw that smoke was filling up the cab of the fire truck.

“He promptly cut the battery cable of the apparatus, extinguishing the smoldering fire,” reported the Public Opinion in 1957.

An investigation showed that insulation that touched a wire leading from the cold side of the ignition switch to the temperature, oil and gasoline gauges had burned. “Because the wire came from the ‘cold’ side of the switch, it was explained, the wire was not fused. All other wires of the truck carry safety fuses,” the newspaper reported.

While it was embarrassing to have a fire truck catch fire in a fire station, what was worse is that it wasn’t the first time that this had happened with this particular pumper. The borough had purchased the pumper for the Friendship Fire Company in October 1952 for $11,000 (roughly $104,000 today) and it had run well until this year.

The American Fire Apparatus was only the third motorized vehicle for Friendship Fire Company. It had first become motorized in 1911 with the purchase of an American LaFrance Combination Chemical truck for $5,500 (about $129,000 today) nicknamed “Cootie.”

In January, an electrical problem hadn’t been caught as quickly and the resulting fire had caused $2,100 worth of damage to the truck. L.B. Smith, Inc. had spent months repairing the truck and it had only returned to service that summer.

And now it had happened again.

The pumper was returned to L.B. Smith for repairs, which only took a day, and a complete check of the truck’s wiring system to ensure that a third fire wouldn’t finish the job that the first two fires couldn’t.

Here's the Chambersburg fire truck that caught on fire. Once it was repaired, it gave the city many more years of service. Courtesy of the Friendship Fire Company.

Once the pumper had a thorough wiring check, it was returned to service and did its job without problems until it was replaced in 1962. The replacement pumper was a similar American Fire Apparatus model, though the new pumper had a 750-gallon capacity.

Friendship Fire Company currently owns a 1991 Pierce Lance Engine Tanker that has a 2,500-gallon water tank. A 2006 Pierce Enforcer, 1996 Spartan/Fire Cab and 1989 Ford E-350 Type III Road Rescue also operate out of the station but are owned by the borough.

The company was first formed in 1780 as the United Fire Company. It became Friendship Fire Company in 1830. According to the company’s web site, the name originated “when during a hot debate over the selection of a new name, member P.R. Hazlett extended his hand to member W. Reilly and said, ‘I extend my hand in friendship to all.’”

When the Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg (on the left) affiliated with the Daughters of Charity in France in 1850, they began wearing the clothing that the Daughters of Charity wore (on the right), which included the iconic white cornette.

I had my first book signing for Battlefield Angels: The Daughters of Charity Work as Civil War Nurses yesterday and I was told something I hadn’t heard before. Maybe someone who is reading this can give me more detail.

The Daughters of Charity in America wore the wide, white cornettes that they became known for 114 years from 1850 to 1964. At that time, they switched to simpler head covering somewhat similar to what they had worn when they were Sisters of Charity in the early 1800’s.

I was told that the reason for the switch was that three sisters were killed in an automobile accident because the cornettes obstructed their peripheral vision and they didn’t see an oncoming car.

So does anyone know anything more about this?

Now don’t get me wrong. I think the site is a great clearing house for current news and blogs about history. However, when I get an e-mail like the Roundup Top 10 that gathers a lot of headlines in one place, you can’t help but see the bias.

When trying to classify the different types of bias I see among the historians on this site, I kept coming back to political viewpoint. I don’t mean Republican or Democrat so much as Conservative versus Liberal.

Now I’ve never been much interested in history that is picked apart to be analyzed to fit a particular viewpoint. Whether or not the author admits this is happening, I think it should be obvious. Have you ever seen a historian who is liberal in politics write a book or article praising a conservative view as successful?

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.-Sir Isaac Newton

This tends to follow the trend that you can read in some history that judges previous generations by today’s standards rather than viewing the people within the context of their time and how far they were able to move the ball forward while they lived.

History should tell the factual story in context and leave it to the reader to decide whether someone or something that happened was good or bad. These are the histories that last because become useful to multiple generations in learning about the subject rather than the author’s beliefs.

It’s been 43 years, but the Star Trek episode, “The Patterns of Force” was finally broadcast on German television. When the episode first aired in 1968, it was not broadcast in Germany because the episode centers around a future culture that patterned itself after the Nazi regime. The episode showed the swastika throughout and Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock impersonate the Nazi SS officers at one point to infiltrate the regime.

And when it was recently shown in Germany, according to the U.K. Daily Mail, it was not broadcast until after 10 p.m. and it was preceded by a parental warning that no one under 16 years old should watch it. And this was 66 years after the fall of the Nazi regime.

The Daily Mail also points out that, ironically, both Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock) and William Shatner (Captain Kirk) are both Jewish.

Now I know that Star Trek pushed some cultural boundaries of its times. Many of episodes seem dated when watched now because their themes are no longer relevant. Apparently, it can still push some cultural boundaries decades later.

That’s nice to know, isn’t it…235 years after the fact.

Also, quite honestly, when you’ve got lawyers talking law, I half expected the decision to be that it wasn’t legal and that the United States still belongs to the British.

I ran across this article yesterday and have been thinking about it since then. You’ve got British barristers and American lawyers debating the legality of Declaration of Independence. If the United States had tried to win its freedom in the courts, we would probably still be tied up in appeals.

A couple of points hit me in this article:

It is assumed that the British were the rightful owners of the country when the Declaration of Independence was written. If the group had found the Declaration of Independence illegal, then there probably would have needed to be a follow-up debate over who gave the British the right to rule that pits the English barristers against the Native Americans.

I also think the debate ignored the basic rule of nature. An animal can claim whatever territory it wants, but if it’s not strong enough to hold it, then it doesn’t mean a thing. If the British had won the Revolutionary War and held onto their land claim, then the Declaration of Independence would have been deemed a treasonous document and our forefathers executed.

They knew this going into the situation as witnessed by the last line of the Declaration, “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

Read the article for yourself and see what you think. Here’s the article and here’s the text of the Declaration of Independence.

I already had the historical society bookmarked in my research folder, but I quickly added this one. I’m always working on Maryland topics and this will definitely help with my research. If you use the search feature, make sure you try the most-unusual words that will get your information, otherwise you may get a lot of dreck in your results. For instance, a search of the word “Carrollite” yielded two useful hits, but “Carroll” gets you any article where Carroll County, Charles Carroll, Carroll Creek or John Carroll appeared. It’s a thorough search engine, but too many Maryland topics are inter-related.

I have had an article appear once in the magazine. My article about the 1905 Great Ransom Train Wreck was in the Summer 2010 issue. Since the magazine doesn’t pay, I did it more to start working on my scholarly article credentials and to make sure I could shift from writing historical features to scholarly history articles.

Just a small, two-room school in a tiny company coal-mining town that became the center of national attention and local activity in 1949. It's a story waiting to be told and mystery waiting to be unraveled. Photo courtesy of Jerry Andrick.

You would think that with history, things would be set in stone. I mean, history’s happened so the facts of what happened are there for everyone to see. That should make my job as a writer who likes historical topics easy.

 Maybe. Maybe not.

 I’ve run into two instances recently that have both frustrated me and intrigued me because they are a bit of a mystery.

This morning I’ve been culling through the internet, my research library and making calls to try and find out how a baseball league, that by all accounts ceased playing in 1930, was still competing in 1934. I went through an article I had from my idea folder and made notes about the season opening for the Chambersburg Maroons in the Blue Ridge League in 1934. I took the specifics of the event from the article and then started looking for background information on the team and league.

To my surprise, the league ceased operation in 1930. Every source I checked (2 books, some baseball internet sites, a newspaper sports editor) all tell me the same thing. The Blue Ridge League ended in 1930.

So how could the team be playing in 1934 and still have the original league teams in three states?

Now I’m curious. I’ve sent out some e-mails and made additional calls. Hopefully, someone will get back to me and we can track down what happened.

In the second instance, I’ve been working on a new book project about a small Western Maryland coal mining town. I wanted to put this project off because of timing issues with a couple of other projects, but it keeps pulling me back.

With this story, the facts weren’t that hard to get. The story my book is built around made national news for a couple of weeks. I’ve found plenty of stories, though many of them are simply wire stories that were reprinted. Finding pictures that ran in the newspapers will be impossible. Of the six papers I called, only one held out any hope of having pictures from 1949. The others said they had gotten rid of them long ago or just can’t find them.

The interested part with this story has been trying to find details about the events. With the newspapers that did original reporting thoroughly checked, I’m now trying to find people who were alive and living in the town then. This was 62 years ago in a town of 200 residents that is now a ghost town.

Most of them are dead, but I have tracked down a few people. They were youngsters at the time of the events I’m writing about so their memories aren’t that great about what happened. Still, they have given me some additional details and even some leads. My hope is that one of their parents kept a journal that will have some information.

So I keep digging, connecting dots and wondering why some people think history is boring.

A baseball game in Cumberland, MD, typical of the time period. From the Herman and Stacia Miller Collection courtesy of the City of Cumberland.

The team may have been amateur, but the baseball game on July 8, 1928, was considered excellent. St. Patrick’s of Mount Savage were the leaders in the Holy Name Baseball League, which was made up of church teams in the county.

St. Patrick’s team came to Frostburg on July 8 expecting to win, which they did. However, they encountered unexpected resistance from the team from St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Frostburg. The game went 10 innings before St. Patrick’s pulled out a 7-5 win in a game played at Johnson Farm on National Highway, about two miles west of Frostburg.

However, in the days that followed people weren’t talking about the fact that St. Michael’s pitcher Dickle struck out 14 batters and allowed only six hits. No, they only wanted to talk about a single pitch that spun off a batter’s bat and into the spectators. Eighteen-year-old William Callin was watching the game from about 50 feet behind the batter when the foul ball hit him in the neck.

While it most certainly hurt, the Cumberland Evening Times reported that “The injury was regarded trivial at the time but a serious condition developed within 48 hours.” Callin developed neck pain where he had been struck. He died early in the morning on July 13. It was determined that the foul ball had fractured one of his vertebrae.

The young mine electrician for Brophy Mine was survived by both of his parents and four sisters. He was buried in Allegany Cemetery two days later.

You might think that death by baseball is an unusual way to die, but on the day that Callin was buried, the Midland and Moscow teams played a baseball game in Midland. A foul ball landed off the field near the crowd.

Thomas Johnson of Gilmore picked up the ball and threw it back onto the field, but not before it hit Cecil Thomas of Moscow. Thomas was the 17-year-old first baseman for the Moscow team.

“Johnson says he threw the foul ball back on the diamond in the direction of no one in particular and Thomas in attempting to catch it stumbled and fell, the ball striking him behind the left ear,” the Cumberland Evening Times reported.

The blow from the baseball knocked Thomas unconscious and he died 10 minutes later without ever regaining consciousness from “a concussion of the brain.”

A horrified Johnson turned himself in to police. He was taken to Cumberland and held there overnight. State’s Attorney William A. Huster, County Investigator Terrence A. Boyle and the county coroner meanwhile traveled to Midland to investigate the crime scene and question witnesses. The reason for the formal investigation was that it had been reported that there had been bad feelings between Thomas and Johnson.

As could be expected, the investigation confirmed Johnson’s version of the story.

He was released the day after the game when the investigators ruled that that the death had been an unfortunate accident.

Thomas, who was survived by his parents and a brother and sister was buried in the Laurel Hill Cemetery.

http://times-news.com/local/x1190858133/Looking-Back-National-pastime-deadly-for-local-residents