Horse and buggy days were numbered in Lucas County by January of 1920, when The Herald-Patriot reported that 1,982 automobiles had been registered at the courthouse for the new year. That number reflected just how fast the social landscape of a place can change. A mere 15 years earlier, there had been none.
That article sparked a memory for Samuel M. Greene, then living in Inglewood, California, and he sat down and wrote a long letter to the Herald-Patriot recounting his experiences as owner as one of the first two automobiles in Chariton ca. 1905-1906.
Greene had purchased The Chariton Herald during 1900, then purchased The Patriot and merged the two, forming The Herald-Patriot. He continued as editor and publisher until 1912, when California lured him west and he sold out here. Here's the text of Sam's letter:
+++
Inglewood, Calif., Jan. 24, 1920
Editor Herald-Patriot
I saw the other day in your Herald-Patriot, formerly my Herald-Patriot, that there are now 1982 autos licensed in Lucas County. That item takes me back to the days when there were just 1980 less autos than that in the county, about fourteen years ago, when Harry Stewart and I owned the first two autos in Chariton.
I think there was another one about the same time, a friction drive Lambert owned by Ed Walton, who used to take inhabitants riding in it upon the paved street and back to the square on July 4 and other notable days, at five cents per inhab. It was a great treat for the hoi polloi, and I have no doubt that lots of fellows who paid their jitneys (nickels) then to go up the street and back and see how it felt to be buggy riding without a horse in front, are dashing in from the farm and back in eight cylinder cars of their own now. Such are the mutations of time. Ed sold that old Lambert afterward to Jim Hickman, who got lots of fun out of it. It probably is in auto heaven ere this.
Harry Stewart and I got two-cylinder Buicks almost on the same day, and neither of us knew that the auto germ was working in the other's system. He got his from the agent in Des Moines, after carefully attending auto shows for several years, and I got mine from the agent in Oskaloosa, after reading the Buick circulars for several years. The agent drove it over to Chariton for me, and the roads were hard and rutty and we wore out both back tires on the trip. They charged extra for auto tops in those days and I was proud to be able to brag of an auto with a top. I got a leather cap and a pair of goggles with it, but overlooked such trifles as extra spark plugs, extra tubes, etc. I learned very shortly that I needed them worse than the leather cap and the goggles, though in those days they had no windshields, and the driver of an auto would get dirt and bugs in his eyes if he didn't wear glasses of some sort.
The agent taught me to drive on the abbreviated paving we had in Chariton then, up to the freight house and back around the square, and we certainly had the eyes of the town on us that day. I had cut the end out of my barn for a home for the auto, and we ran it in on two planks and the agent went home on the train. I remember with what sinking heart I looked at the animal I had bought the next morning, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to get it out of the barn backwards and what I would do with it if anything went wrong. There wasn't a mechanic in the town who knew anything about autos in those days. Harry Stewart heard I had a Buick, and we got together and compared notes and by putting together what we could remember of what the agents had told us to do in each emergency, we managed to get our cars going the first few days, and got them back in their barn homes at night, and after that we were not so nervous.
But not so with the townspeople. When Jerome Oppenheimer was in Jefferson a year or so ago, we were laughing about the way people in Chariton who were accustomed to driving around in the cool of the summer evenings would have to phone to see if Greenes or Stewarts were going to be out with their autos that evening. If not, the horses and family surreys would venture out. But woe to the luckless drivers that would meet either of our autos unawares. I think I counted 50 runaways that my auto caused the first few weeks. I was almost a nervous wreck. Between trying to remember which lever to pull, and having my wife punching me in the back to warn me that a horse and buggy were coming three or four blocks down the street, I could hardly sleep at night after we would get home from an alleged pleasure ride.
Some of the farmers took the stand that anyone who owned an auto was an enemy because their teams would scare and sometimes run away when driving to town and they could not let their women come to town alone. I was likely to suffer financially from my auto enterprise as neither of the other editors in the town had been so foolish as to antagonize humanity in that way, and I was afraid I might lose a lot of subscribers. I only lost one, however, and he will probably laugh about it when he recalls it. His team rose straight up in the air one day when I met him and came down and broke the wagon tongue off short, and the end of it stuck in the ground and hoisted the rear end of the wagon in the air and dumped the farmer out and a man with him. Neither of them was hurt, but I could hear their opinion of me for at least a half mile down the road as I sputtered along toward home, and next day he came in and disengaged his name from my subscription list with a few choice expressions of personal regard, which Pearl Lewis listened to with quaking heart, as I was out on the street at the time.
She feared the bottom might drop right out of the business if I continued using that auto. But it didn't, and after a year or so, when most of the horses that were scary had scared until they were tired, other folks began to get autos and after half dozen or so had come to town, someone started a shop where they could be fixed if not too seriously indisposed, and the mad chase was on.
The only decent stretch of road near town in those days, fit for driving faster than a horse could go, was along the main (C.B.&.Q. Railroad) line for a half mile just east of Spring Lake addition, on the south side of the track. There we used to take our company to show them how terrifically fast an auto could go as compared with a horse. I have an idea we attained a speed of at least 20 miles an hour there at times, if the cylinders both happened to be hitting, and the timer didn't jar loose, or one of the tires didn't soozie.
Such a crude assembly of experiments that old two-cylinder Buick was! And yet I still believe it was the best car of its day. We drove to Indianola in it once, on our first really long journey, and felt as if we had crossed the continent. We rested there a couple of days before we ventured on the return trip. There were no garages in Indianola then, and we had to keep the auto in a livery barn. The continued use of horse stalls for the auto finally had an ill effect on the paint on it and I had to have Will Schreiber repaint it. I remember I thought at the time an auto was a poor investment, as the repainting alone cost about as much as it would to keep a horse for a year.
We had a lot of pleasure out of the Buick, however, in spite of the continual grief we had with it. The neighbors and friends who got their first auto ride in it will perhaps still remember the thrill of going wobbling along on the rutty roads, trying to imagine it was easier riding that a surrey when it wasn't, and remarking that it certainly must require a lot of skill to run it. That was their way of paying for the ride and it was sufficient compensation for me. I never had any really bad luck with the car. Never hit anybody, though I remember I came within a few inches of hitting a poor old chap on the square one day. I ran over a pet dog belonging to the little Grafton girl, who lived a few doors east of Jos. Brown's, and the poor pup died. I felt as badly about it as the little girl did, and yet it was entirely the dog's fault for it was a perfect pest about running out and barking at me, as well as every wagon and buggy that went past.
Another time we scared a team of mules standing alongside the road and they ran away, headed after us. They came faster and faster and my wife and Mrs. Stant Custer, who were in the back seat, kept urging me to drive faster as the mules were gaining on us. Mules always are very careful to keep the center of the road when they run away and they certainly would have run into the very auto that scared them, which would have been just like mules, if I had not luckily got a little burst of speed out of the auto and got away from them, whereupon they cooled down and stopped running.
So it went with our early auto adventures, and in a way they were the happy days, for we were young then and troubles sat lightly upon us. And I often wish, in spite of the spell that California has woven upon us, that we could be back in our life there when we were a young married couple, not realizing the risks and dangers of a business of our own, raising our little family and getting them started on life's rocky but happy road in that cold climate of Iowa, later to hear of the charms of California and risk a trip out here, to get dissatisfied and move here, only to get spoiled so we would not want to settle down again.
But speaking of autos again, I guess the really pioneer auto in Chariton came before Harry Stewart's and mine, and was a little steam propelled buggy that Harry Penick bought a year or two before that. It had a short and rather unhappy life.
Harry had a man to run it who was supposed to be a machinery tamer, but it was too wild for him. It ran when it pleased, and got too hot when he didn't want it to, and was hard to guide, as it was only a short buggy in length, and one day out by Gene Baker's farm, on the little slope that led up to the door of the farm house there, it took the steering wheel in its teeth, as it were, and rolled down the side of the hill and ruined the temper and one leg of the driver. I never knew whether Harry traded the thing off for a Louisiana ranch somewhere or sold it to the junk man. For all I know he may have captured his southern bride partly on the ground that he was a man with an auto, which was a rare distinction in those days, and was enough to turn any girl's head. Though that wasn't the reason I got one, for I had a wife so didn't really need an auto. Anyway, I never saw Harry's steam buggy after the hill mishap, and no one had the temerity to try the auto experiment again in Chariton until the days of the ones I mentioned above.
No comments:
Post a Comment