Did you know?
On Jan. 28, 1913, the Uniontown Morning Herald carried this startling headline: “Row at wedding causes another fatal shooting.”
There had been a “foreign wedding” in Revere. Two men engaged in a quarrel.
A 25 year-old pulled a revolver on a 21 year-old, and fired two bullets into his abdomen. The victim was rushed to Uniontown Hospital, where there was little hope he would survive.
That crime, like many during that period, seemed to be ripped from today’s headlines.
“Heroin, hidden in coat, is smuggled to prisoner,” read a headline on the front page of the Morning Herald on Jan. 15, 1915.
A woman had been arrested after she tried to smuggle “heroin tablets” into the Fayette County jail.
She’d sewn the contraband into a coat that she was delivering to her jailed husband, when Warden Newton Newcomer discovered it in the coat’s lining.
“A clever ruse was used in smuggling the drug into the jail and it was not until after the prisoner for whom it was intended had secured some of the drug that the attempt was discovered,” the report said.
“Local women hear address by Mrs. Crane,” read a headline on the front page of the Morning Herald on Jan. 30, 1914.
Caroline Bartlett Crane was a renowned suffragist, known nationwide as “America’s housekeeper.”
Crane had given a lecture at the Titlow Hotel the previous day that merited front-page coverage.
According to her, men could cast a dim view of women who engaged in any form of change in their communities.
“The growth of women’s influence in city matters has just developed in the last 10 years, and there is a feeling on the part of the officials to consider women to be ‘meddling’ when they attempt to criticize them,” she had told the group, “which consisted principally of women.”
Ironically, on the same front page there was another news story that seemed to support what Crane had said about men (of the time) not taking women seriously.
“Angry wife spits false teeth in husband’s eye,” read the headline that had been sent from Harrisburg.
It seems an estranged wife had been confronted by her husband at her home.
He wanted to move back home, but she strenuously resisted, and that led to a fight.
“His wife grabbed him by the hair and pulled a handful out of his head. Not satisfied with that, the husband went on, she tried to spit in his face, when her false teeth flew out of her mouth and struck him in the eye,” the report said.
The wife was charged with beating her husband, and she was held for court.
On Jan. 13, 1912, there was a report about a successful slander suit that had been filed by a Uniontown woman who’d felt she had been the victim of mistreatment by, of all people, a priest.
“A verdict for $100 damages was obtained in common pleas court No. 2 yesterday by Anna Karnak against Rev. Father F.J. Pribyl, of St. Mary’s Slavish Roman Catholic Church, for slander,” said the lead paragraph.
Mrs. Karnak had asked for $3,000 in damages, because she claimed Father Pribyl had, “after the regular services of the church had concluded,” publicly concluded she was “bawled out” for getting drunk, and that her husband did not pay his church dues.
“Byrnes Resigns; Truman Appoints Gen. Marshall,” was the headline atop the Jan. 8, 1947 edition of the Morning Herald.
“President Chooses Uniontown Man For Secretary of State,” the headline above the story detailing the appointment of George C. Marshall to replace outgoing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes.
Marshall would serve in that position for two years, and then he would become the U.S. Secretary of Defense from September of 1950, until September of 1951.
On that same front page, there was another one of those stories that could have easily been written today.
“H.S. Students Use ‘Hypnotic’ Drug For Kick,” was the headline for a story about the growing concerns about school students in Pittsburgh who were mixing unknown capsules with drinks that would produce “a kick.”
One 19 year-old student was arrested after he was “found unconscious from the effects of the narcotic and that 50 capsules were found in his pockets.”
According to a member of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, the drug was considered “worse than marijuana or morphine.”
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