Cincinnati Curiosities

The City of Cincinnati, encouraged by all the major dental associations, first considered adding fluoride compounds to the water supply to reduce tooth decay especially among children in 1952. Although equipment for this purpose was installed, fluoridation was cancelled at the polls in 1953. [Read Part One here.]

Fluoridation reemerged as a question in 1960, pushed toward another vote by the Cincinnati Jaycees organization, who saw fluoridated water as a sign of a forward-thinking city. The Jaycees faced entrenched opposition by the “Citizens Committee Against Fluoridation,” one of the conservative causes organized by J. Julian and Edith Bowman out of their art gallery and framing shop on Fourth Street. (Older residents will remember the Bowmans’ “Impeach Earl Warren” billboard on Gilbert Avenue near the Art Museum.)

Once again the Enquirer led the charge for dental health. Once again, the newspaper ran a series of articles very much in favor of fluoridating the water supply. This time, the series was written by Margaret Josten in her colorful style:

“Some folks are talking as if fluoridated water were brewed in the dark of the moon by a cackling, Communist witch.”

Once again, the Enquirer editorialized repeatedly in favor of fluoride, rejecting arguments that adding the chemical to our drinking water was expensive, experimental, untested, dangerous, disfiguring, losing support, a Communist plot or socialized medicine. That support swayed few voters. This time Cincinnati again rejected fluoridation in November 1960 by a vote of 107,782 to 83,685.

The State of Ohio entered the fray in August 1969 when the General Assembly passed a law requiring any water system serving more than 5,000 people to add fluoride to their product by 1972. Cincinnati was all set to comply when opponents filed a lawsuit to halt the state mandate. Common Pleas Court Judge William R. Matthews issued an injunction in 1971 stopping fluoridation. He ruled that the state law was unconstitutional.

Undaunted, the Ohio Health Department in 1972 ordered Cincinnati and several other lollygagging Ohio towns to begin fluoridation regardless of the judge’s opinion. City Council complied by voting to fluoridate immediately. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency piled on with an August 1973 order to proceed with fluoridation. By then, the Citizens Committee Against Fluoridation had forced the question onto the November ballot as yet another referendum. Cincinnati voters defeated fluoridation for a third time in November 1973, with a vote of 50,444 to 38,969.

As a consequence, the City of Cincinnati was caught in a double bind. Judge Matthews forbade fluoridation, the Ohio Health Department and the Ohio EPA demanded it, while the voters rejected it three times. The city took their quandary to the Court of Appeals. That court ruled in April 1974 that Cincinnati must comply with the state’s orders and begin fluoridation immediately.

Meanwhile, the Citizens Committee Against Fluoridation had shoved an amendment to the city charter onto the May 1974 primary ballot. That amendment prohibited any city ordinance to fluoridate water unless approved by a prior referendum of the city’s voters. By a narrow margin, 25,581 to 24,157, Cincinnati voters approved the charter amendment, another defeat for fluoridation.

The charter amendment proved a somewhat meaningless distraction, just adding to Cincinnati’s dilemma. Although two state agencies and the appeals court demanded fluoridation, Cincinnati now had three referendums and this new charter amendment arguing against it. Cincinnati City Council had no choice but to appeal their appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. That court finally got around to announcing its 5-2 decision in November 1975, with an order requiring Cincinnati to begin fluoridation at the soonest opportunity, obliterating Judge Matthews’ injunction and turning the city charter amendment into a useless sideshow.

It appeared that Cincinnati would begin adding fluoride to the water soon except for two further complications. To begin with, the city had no fluoride in stock, and the chemical was in short supply nationwide. Secondly, the Citizens Committee filed yet another court challenge to fluoridation, this time claiming that no court had resolved lingering doubts about fluoride’s contribution to cancer rates.

Judge Thomas Nurre issued a two-week restraining order while the Citizens Committee got their act together for trial. Nurre then realized that he already had a full docket without having to deal with dental health and cancer, so he recused himself and turned the case over to Visiting Judge Fred Cramer of Middletown. Cramer immediately dismissed the lawsuit, telling the Enquirer [12 March 1976].

“If we just ignored Supreme Court decisions, it would be judicial insubordination.”

Although the Citizens Committee agitated for the city to appeal their defeat to the United States Supreme Court, Cincinnati City Solicitor Philip Olinger noted that the federal justices had already declined to hear several anti-fluoridation cases. (Olinger may have known that Potter Stewart, then serving as a Supreme Court Justice, had voted in favor of fluoridation as a Cincinnati City Councilmember in 1953.) The first bags of fluoride compound were finally dumped into Cincinnati’s water supply on 15 March 1976.

Cincinnati’s fluoridation equipment had been in mothballs for so long that the rubber gaskets and seals had rotted. So, just one month after fluoridation began, it was put on hold while the equipment was repaired, resuming in May 1976. Meanwhile, technology had far outstripped that antiquated contraption so the Water Works announced it would soon install a new, improved system to inject liquid fluoride into our water.

Ironically, after 25 years of prodding Cincinnati into fluoridating our water, the Cincinnati Enquirer had second thoughts. To be more accurate, at least one very influential member of the Enquirer editorial board had second thoughts. That would be Associate Editor Thomas Gephardt, known for his journalistic visits with the fictional but very conservative “Mr. Whig.”

Gephardt, in a substantial op-ed piece [18 April 1976] took Cincinnatians to task for not objecting louder to government-mandated fluoridation. By imposing fluoridation through regulatory agencies and the courts, Gephardt claimed, the government discarded four elections in which citizens had rejected it. Additionally, Gephardt noted, fluoride was different from other water-quality issues like filtration and chlorination – it was a government-ordered medication. He placed the blame for Cincinnati’s lethargy on fluoridation’s opponents, who had put forth so many spurious arguments against the additive that their side had been reduced to caricature:

“The battle against fluoridation over the years has taken on the aspects of a zany crusade with which respectable people don’t want to be identified. It wasn’t that many years ago, after all, when Cincinnatians were being solemnly assured that fluoridation is a Communist plot to incapacitate our wills, and that fluoridation is being regularly used in the nation’s zoos as a means of rendering the lions and tigers lethargic or in the Soviet Union’s slave-labor camps to keep their inmates docile.”

Fluoride’s opponents, Gephardt suggested, were guilty of overkill. They ignored substantial arguments based on constitutional principles and pushed cockamamy flim-flam instead.

Bob Brumfield now helmed the humorous corner of the Enquirer’s editorial page and expressed high dudgeon consistent with Gephardt’s philosophic principles, but aimed at a lower-brow readership [16 March 1976]:

“Why in the hell should I have to submit to the fluoride treatment, against my will, every time I take a drink of water? I don’t like a bunch of two-bit politicians with the collective mentality of a bowl of oatmeal forcing me to either take medicine, buy expensive bottled water or perish from thirst.”

There was a big anniversary at the Greater Cincinnati Water Works this year, but it does not appear that anyone celebrated the occasion. Fifty years ago, on March 15, 1976, after more than 25 years of controversy, the million-plus customers of the Greater Cincinnati Water Works first began drinking fluoridated water.

Perhaps the Water Works simply forgot this golden anniversary. More likely, it was an intentional oversight. Although Water Works employees finally began dumping bags of sodium silica fluoride into Cincinnati’s water supply in 1976, that machinery had been fully installed but gathering dust since 1952, frozen by lawsuits, referendums and political gamesmanship.

As far back as 27 November 1950, keynote speaker Dr. Harold W. Oppice of Chicago addressed the 85th annual meeting of the Ohio State Dental Association at Cincinnati’s Netherland Plaza Hotel. Dr. Oppice announced that fluoridation of drinking water was the “most significant advance in preventive dentistry in years.” By that date, Grand Rapids, Michigan, the first city in the United States to fluoridate its municipal water supply, had been slurping fluoride for five years. Early surveys quickly showed a significant drop in tooth decay among residents, especially children.

That very month, Cincinnati’s Board of Health opened an investigation into the fluoridation question that would occupy the next year. In January 1952, the Board of Health delivered their positive findings to City Council’s Utility Committee, who shared the board’s enthusiasm. City Council as a whole agreed and directed the City Manager to proceed with the fluoridation plan. By November 1952, the necessary equipment was in place, and Water Works Superintendent Carl Eberling told City Council that fluoridation would commence in February 1953, after the equipment was tested and a suitable supply of sodium fluoride secured.

Cincinnati’s plans collapsed on 17 February 1953 when Tom McCarthy, host of a morning drive-time show for WKRC radio, devoted a significant portion of his airtime to reading an article from that month’s Harper’s magazine. “Go Slow on Fluoridation!” was written by a controversial muckraking journalist named James Rorty, who compiled the objections of several scientists skeptical about fluoride’s safety. McCarthy’s show, broadcast from his farm in Clermont County, was popular and influential. Thousands of calls poured into the City Hall switchboards and City Council asked the Water Works to hold off while Council revisited the fluoridation question. The Cincinnati Enquirer, which had come out strongly in favor of the benefits of fluoridation, editorialized [26 February 1953] that McCarty had jumped on the anti-fluoridation bandwagon mainly as a ploy to attract listeners:

“This is by no means the first time Mr. McCarthy has set himself against the community’s welfare, thus drawing momentary attention to himself. But it is perhaps the least savory of his adventures.”

After a couple weeks of sometimes heated debate, Council voted 8-1 on 1 April 1953 to proceed with plans to fluoridate the city’s water. However, according to the Enquirer [2 April 1953]:

“The ordinance was passed without an emergency clause (to make it immediately effective) and therefore will carry with it an automatic 30-day referendum period in which opponents can circulate a petition to challenge the ordinance by a vote of the people.”

Given this opportunity, opponents jumped into action and quickly collected far more than the signatures needed to put the fluoridation question on the ballot in November. Watching the anti-fluoridation movement grow, the Enquirer hauled out a big gun, a feisty young columnist named Al Schottelkotte, who had not yet ascended to media royalty on the newsdesk at TV station WCPO.

Throughout March 1953, Schottelkotte published a seven-part series titled “The Truth About Fluoridation.” Schottelkotte had never endeavored to maintain a reputation for impartial reporting, but his fluoridation series was so one-sided that the American Dental Association reprinted 10,000 copies for distribution in support of fluoridation efforts across the United States. Over the course of a week, Schottelkotte demolished every objection raised by Rorty’s article in Harper’s, noting that Cincinnati’s water had always contained a small amount of fluoride, as did almost every item of food consumed by Cincinnatians. While Al Schottelkotte flogged the issue on the news pages, Enquirer columnist Ollie James took up fluoridation on the opinion pages [26 February 1953], in his standard whimsical style:

“As we believe we have remarked on previous occasion, there is a lot in our water already besides two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen. There is also a half a part of chlorine, a half a part of catfish sweat, half a part of – well, our space is limited, but the point is they might have to hire some guy with a crowbar to pry open the drops to get the fluoride in!”

The Enquirer also published excerpts from anti-fluoridation letters designed to make opponents look like kooks. One writer complained that many Cincinnatians had no teeth and would therefore derive no benefit from fluoridation. Another claimed the chemical would cause everyone’s eyeballs to harden. Others saw fluoridation as the creeping shadow of socialized medicine – a sure sign it was a Communist plot. The irony here, as noted by an Enquirer editorial of 6 April 1953, is that James Rorty, author of that Harper’s article and champion of the anti-fluoridation crowd, was a strong supporter of socialized medicine, and a Communist to boot!

Despite the efforts of the dental community, strongly supported by the Enquirer, fluoridation opponents gathered enough signatures to place the question on the ballot in November, where fluoridation was slaughtered at the polls, going down in defeat, with 75,612 opposing and just 55,004 supporting the measure.

It is interesting that, throughout the public debate about Cincinnati’s water, marketing and consumer products powerhouse Procter & Gamble launched their fluoride enriched Crest toothpaste in 1955, apparently without the slightest judicial challenge.

Just before the November election, WKRC pulled Tom McCarty from the airwaves when he refused to remove a personal attack on a fluoridation proponent from his newscast. The issue had the opposite effect for Al Schottelkotte, whose growing public profile led to a nightly spot on WSAI radio and later on WCPO-TV.

Simultaneous with the fluoridation brouhaha, the Water Works began injecting carbon into the city’s water, with nary a word of objection. Our forebears, it seems, did not enjoy the delicious water we pour from our faucets today. The carbon eliminated algae that “flavored” Cincinnati’s water, as Ollie James noted [26 February 1953]:

“The odeur of our aqua pura, especially when it is hot, suggests that it has some traits in common with a camel.”

They don’t call them UFOs anymore. Those mysterious things zipping around up there are now known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, no longer Unidentified Flying Objects. That’s okay. Back in the 1940s and early 1950s, before we settled on UFO as the official acronym, we called them flying saucers, even though many sightings involved shapes not commonly found in the china closet.

The really big year for flying saucers was 1947. The Enquirer printed a banner headline – “Flying Saucers Over Cincinnati” – on 7 July 1947 to report the observations of a Terrace Park housewife. For the next two decades it was “Katie Bar the Door” as dozens of Cincinnati UFO sightings found their way into the files of Project Blue Book, headquartered just up the road at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton.

Those first flying saucer incidents were viewed with some amusement by Frank Y. Grayson from his perch at the old Cincinnati Times-Star. Good old Frank Grayson. He had a long career at several Queen City newspapers and, although he was primarily a baseball reporter, the papers kept him on as a dependable raconteur, one of those old duffers who remembers everything and has a good story to go with it. On 8 July 1947, Grayson’s column in the Times-Star was headlined “Flying Saucers Are Nothing To Flying Snake of Eighties.” The eighties in question were, of course, the 1880s, and Grayson had the goods.

“The writer was a small boy then and he can well remember the thrill that he experienced when told by his granddad, who was a great almanac reader, that a ‘flying snake’ was on the loose. Excitement attained its peak when the Police Gazette, that salmon-colored barber-shop bible of the period, published a fantastic drawing of the aerial serpent. It was 100 feet long, equipped with 14 wings, six legs and a head that was hideous to look upon.”

Though rarely as huge or hideous as Grayson recalled, flying snakes were regularly reported by Cincinnati newspapers at the time. The Cincinnati Gazette [7 June 1882], for example, printed a squib about a farmer in nearby Connersville, Indiana:

“Jonathan Hittle, a well known and perfectly reliable citizen of this county, relates an extraordinary story about a flying serpent, twelve feet long, which he positively declares he has frequently seen of late in one of his wheat fields. He tried to kill it a few days ago with a rail, but it escaped into a den.”

The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [26 July 1899], by special dispatch, printed the discovery of a less imposing but still curious flying snake from a nearby Kentucky hamlet:

“John Greenert, a prominent farmer whose veracity has never been doubted, tells of a wonderful species of winged snake seen by him and a farm hand on his place. He described the snake, which they first discovered lying on the ground, as about three feet long and about ten inches in circumference at the center. It had four pairs of legs, two near the head and two just back of the wings, which grew just forward of the middle of the body. The wings consisted of a membranous substance, remained folded up under the body and were not noticed by them until on their approach. With a spring it raised from the ground and sailed through the air at a terrific speed. The snake is as black as charcoal and has a very repulsive appearance, especially when flying through the air.”

The Enquirer [28 June 1905] described a flying snake killed around Berry Plain, Virginia:

“The curious reptile was first noticed flying about in the air with several feet of its horrid snakeship dangling around, presenting the appearance of an ordinary snake attached to a strange-looking bird. It was finally killed and measured and proved to be five feet long and about one inch in diameter of body. It had perfect wings of good size, and these were covered with feathers.”

The really big and scary flying snakes seemed to be located some distance away from Cincinnati. If, in fact, the National Police Gazette did publish the horrific illustration described by Mr. Grayson, that issue has not been located. However, a competing salmon-tinted scandal sheet, The Illustrated Police News, did delight its readers in the 18 March 1882 issue with a drawing of an immense flying snake attacking a railroad train in the Nevada desert near the California border. The details, provided by the Los Angeles Times, describe a winged serpent some 30 feet long and a foot or more in diameter, flying at a pace equal to the locomotive and so close that the train’s wheels clipped the tip of the monster’s tail, which infuriated the beast:

“The angry animal kept over the train and gave the train a lively thrashing, roaring like a cow in distress all the time. After breaking several windows and frightening the women and children almost to death, the monster sailed off, followed by a shower of lead from pistols of the passengers, which seemed to have no effect at all, if any of the bullets hit him.”

A large flying snake was reported around South Carolina in 1897, estimated at twenty-five to forty feet in length and eight to ten inches through the widest part. This beast appeared to float leisurely just above the treetops, which its head reared back as if to strike.

A dreadful aerial lizard was reported from the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1903, estimated at sixty-five feet in length, with a head like an alligator and a body covered in scales thoroughly encrusted by salt from the lake. The veracity of the report was undercut the next day when an illustration of the alleged beast was printed in the Salt Lake Telegram bearing on its wings the insignia of a local department store then promoting excursions around the lake.

Commercial interests were not the only motivations suggested for apparitions of flying snakes. Alcohol, it was suggested, might play a part as well. The Cincinnati Commercial [24 August 1906] implied just this, assuming its readers were familiar with the famous Monongahela Rye whiskey:

“Pittsburgh papers record, with details and all evidence of truth, that a frightful winged snake has been frequently seen of late flying up and down the Allegheny. Taking the story for true, from start to finish, the wonder of it is that the monster wasn’t seen flying up old Monongahela. It would be just as convenient and far more appropriate.”

Even Mr. Grayson believed there was a bit of hokum to these reptilian visitations. Although he recalled how, after hearing his grandfather’s description, he slept all night with his blankets pulled over his head, he now looked back with a heavy dose of skepticism:

“Maybe there may be some old-timers who can recall how as small boys they took to the woods so fast that their ankles jelled when some weisenheimers told them that the ‘flying snake’ was headed their way. P.T. Barnum was right when he said there was a sucker born every minute. The ‘flying snake’ increased it to one every fifth of a second and we were one of them.”

It is possible that Ohio voters may be asked this year to vote on eliminating property taxes. Ironically, a little more than a century ago, there was a nationwide movement to do the exact opposite – remove all taxes except for property taxes. The national headquarters for this Single Tax League were right here in Cincinnati.

The Single Tax League was an outgrowth of the writings of Henry George, an American political economist, social philosopher and journalist. George’s best-selling book, “Progress and Poverty” (1879), established the economic philosophy known as Georgism, based on the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land should belong equally to all members of society.

Georgism attracted some rather wealthy adherents, notably Joseph Fels of Philadelphia, who made his fortune selling Fels-Naptha Soap. Fels created a fund to finance Georgist publications and projects. The national headquarters for the Fels Fund was in Cincinnati, at the Main Street office of one Daniel Kiefer. Kiefer served as chairman of the Fels Fund Commission, the group that controlled expenditures from the fund.

Kiefer was born in Cincinnati in 1856. He joined the Fechheimer clothing company as a young man and eventually worked his way into a partnership in the firm. He resigned while still in his 40s to pursue a career in political advocacy, specifically on behalf of the Single Tax League. According to a platform promulgated by the League in 1890, this was the essence of their proposal regarding taxation:

“We hold that each man is entitled to all that his labor produces. Therefore no tax should be levied on the products of labor. To carry out these principles we are in favor of raising all public revenues for national, state, county and municipal purposes by a single tax upon land values, irrespective of Improvements, and of the abolition of all forms of direct and Indirect taxation. Since in all our states we now levy some tax on the value of land, the single tax can be instituted by the simple and easy way of abolishing, one after another all other taxes now levied, and commensurately increasing the tax on land values, until we draw upon that one source for all expenses of government, the revenue being divided between local governments, state governments and the general government, as the revenue from direct taxes is now divided between the local and state governments; or, a direct assessment being made by the general government upon the states and paid by them from revenues collected in this manner.”

Kiefer was just one of several Cincinnatians at the center of the Single Tax League. Also prominent was Herbert Seely Bigelow, socialist pastor of the non-denominational People’s Church (formerly the Vine Street Congregational Church and later the Empress Theater). According to historian Daniel Beaver, writing in the Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio [January 1960], Bigelow was converted to the Single Tax cause by reading Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty”:

“Though the work was of little value as an economic tract, the paradox implied in its title and the tone of moral outrage that permeated the book made the ‘Single Tax’ an attractive answer to the problem posed by the accumulation of money in the hands of the few. In 1897, two years after he had become associated with the Vine Street Congregational Church, Bigelow began to investigate the possibilities of this intriguing panacea. A meeting with Tom Johnson, Mayor of Cleveland and one of the leading advocates of the ‘Single Tax’ in America, confirmed the pastor’s belief in the measure.”

Bigelow’s enthusiasm led to full-time employment by the Single Tax League as a traveling promoter. Although he is among the most colorful characters in all of Cincinnati’s long history, even Bigelow had to take a back seat to Doctor Benjamin Franklin Longstreet, who had done jail time following arrests at Single Tax demonstrations.

Longstreet’s pulpit was the intersection of Race and Eighth streets, at that time the location of the statue honoring U.S. President James A. Garfield, now located a block east on Vine Street. Under the glow of a single electric streetlamp, Longstreet cobbled together a couple of carpet-covered wood planks balanced on a pair of sawhorses to assemble his nightly stage. On a nearby rock, he laid out some cotton banners painted with explanatory diagrams. As the sun went down, Longstreet fired up, expounding in a cultured oratorical style that attracted crowds as curious about his show as they were about the theory. According to the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [19 June 1899]:

“Dr. Longstreet is a very effective talker, adopting the colloquial style in preference to the declamatory. His illustrations are of a homely nature, but none the less to the point, and each climax falls with the weight of a trip hammer.”

It was a great loss to the Single Taxers when Longstreet died from a bad cold in 1901.

Mainstream Cincinnati media rejected the Single Tax idea. The Cincinnati Times-Star, essentially the newsletter of the Boss Cox political machine editorialized [6 September 1902] against the Georgist concept, citing Bigelow as well as Cleveland mayor Tom Loftin Johnson:

“Johnson and Bigelow have sought to advance the interest of the single tax under a mask; but in this they have failed. They have sought to wear the lamb’s skin, but will be exposed. They have sought to pose as the friend of the property owner, whereas they are his worst enemy, seeking to make him pay all the taxes. Before the end of the campaign just opening every property owner in the State will know their real purposes and will understand the fanaticism which has led at least one of them to abuse his cloth by abasing himself to so low a degree as to become a hypocrite.”

By linking Johnson and Bigelow, the Times-Star put its finger on the major reason the Single Tax idea did not evolve beyond niche appeal – it attracted a lot of truly eccentric and controversial adherents. Mayor Johnson, for example, was totally opposed to vaccination, leading one newspaper to claim he imagined smallpox as a blessing to be bestowed upon humanity.

Bigelow, although an avowed and quite vocal Socialist, was forced by the political realities of Cincinnati to disguise himself as a Democrat throughout his electoral career. Although he supported the United States entering World War I against Germany, Bigelow’s opposition to forced military conscription through the draft led to him being kidnapped and horsewhipped. It was at this time that thirteen Cincinnati Socialists demonstrating against the draft were arrested and charged with treason in a case that lingered in the courts for seven years until the charges were finally dropped by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Kiefer was not only opposed to the draft, but staunchly pacifist and opposed to American involvement in the war in any capacity. As a consequence, the Single Tax League essentially fired him in 1917 from all positions of responsibility in the organization. The League’s position held that the Single Tax would inevitably lead to the eradication of war and that quibbling about the draft would only delay its implementation. With Kiefer’s dismissal, Longstreet’s death and Bigelow’s shift to other causes, the Single Tax League disappeared from Cincinnati.

There are still Georgist and Single Tax organizations operating throughout the world, but none of them are headquartered in Cincinnati these days.

As a child, did you hop around on a pogo stick? Would you believe that Cincinnati was introduced to pogo sticks in 1922 by a New York showgirl? It’s true.

The showgirl in question was a Cincinnatian named Marjorie Whittington, who lived with her family at 942 Morris Street just off the northern edge of Eden Park. Marjorie’s father, John Whittington, was a carpenter and Marjorie worked downtown as a cashier. She traveled to New York City to compete in one of the “physical culture” contests popular at that time, with prizes awarded to the “perfect” man or woman.

Marjorie earned first prize and the attentions of Broadway impresario Florenz “Flo” Ziegfeld Jr., who billed himself as the “glorifier of the American girl.” His Ziegfeld Follies, modeled on the Parisian Folies Bergère, offered risqué titillation slathered in extravagant costumes from 1907 to 1931.

Ziegfeld not only cast Marjorie in the latest Follies production, but he scored a public relations coup by insuring her “perfect” legs for $250,000. The newspapers, reporting on the policy, printed lots of photos of Marjorie’s legs. Marjorie’s legs made their Broadway debut on a pogo stick. The New York Herald [19 November 1921] took note of the gimmick:

“For an athletic number Mr. Ziegfeld had provided a ‘pogo’ offering, in which his exceptionally beautiful chorus jumped about on this new form of single, bouncing stilt and revealed that they had other talents than wearing clothes.”

In 1921, the pogo stick was indeed new, having been patented in Germany just a year earlier. (Inventors Max Pohlig and Ernst Gottschall named their "spring end hopping stilt” with the first two letters of their surnames.) And so, when Edmund M. Brendamour caught wind of a Cincinnati lass with $250,000 legs and pogo skills, he brought her to the Queen City to promote this novelty now on sale at his Brendamour Sporting Goods store on Sixth Street. In a demonstration staged on the Fountain Square esplanade, Marjorie regaled a crowd with professional hints:

“Hold the stick close to you. Rest the ball of the foot on the braces and hop on with both feet. Once you’ve learned, it is as exhilarating as flying. Central Park in New York is crowded every morning with pogoers of all ages.”

Mr. Brendamour gave the hopping stilt a whirl himself and proclaimed it was as rambunctious as “a jackrabbit full of moonshine.” Judge magazine, the premier humor periodical of the day, ran a leggy photo of Marjorie in the 14 January 1922 issue, noting, “If you don’t pogo to business these crisp mornings, you’re not only middle-class but decidedly middle-aged.”

Marjorie’s tenure as a pogoist lasted barely a year. She left the pogo stick behind and took on a more prominent role as a whistling act. By 1924, her career with Ziegfeld was over. She helped organize an association of Ziegfeld alumnae who entertained high-paying customers at a series of fashionable balls.

It’s not exactly clear how Marjorie supported herself after she left the Ziegfeld show. She appears throughout 1926 in advertisements for Corticelli Silk Hosiery and for a skin cream, cashing in on those expensively insured legs. The Whittington family left Cincinnati and moved to Queens, New York.

Marjorie made the scandal sheets for the first time in 1928 when Hendrick C. Nelson, a wealthy dealer in silverware, drowned on Long Island Sound. According to the Queens Daily Star [11 July 1928]:

“Nelson wound up a joy ride in the company of Miss Marjorie Whittington, Follies girl who won renown as ‘the girl with the million dollar legs,’ and Miss Whittington’s brother, Larry Whittington, cartoonist and creator of ‘Mazie the Model.’ The party also included John Sparrell of Cedar lane, Douglaston, and John Wingate of Eighth avenue, Malba. It had been at Wingate’s home and had stopped at Villa Beau Rivage on Merritt road, Whitestone, when several of the group decided to take an early morning dip. They were in the water only a few minutes when Nelson was seen to double up with a cramp and sink.”

Questions were obviously raised about the nature of that “joy ride” when Nelson’s body was recovered wearing only underpants. Marjorie’s woes mounted, with every newspaper mention including a reminder of her perfect legs. There were traffic tickets, an auto accident, a car impounded for debts.

Marjorie and her brother Larry were again prominently connected to scandal in 1932, when Massachusetts state police responded to a disturbance at a vacation cottage near Wrentham. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer [14 August 1932]:

“Marjorie Whittington, blonde Ziegfeld Follies alumna, and her brother, Larry, a cartoonist, were arrested early today when state police dropped in at the former beauty’s Lake Anchor cottage and discovered James Gillis lying under a table with stab wounds in his back.”

The arresting officers claimed a drinking party preceded the melee. Marjorie, allegedly inebriated and wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, insisted she was asleep upstairs and heard nothing until her brother and Gillis woke her as they fought. Gillis, reputedly affluent, owned an opulent cottage nearby. It is unclear whether the “stab wounds” came from broken glass or an ice pick. The Whittingtons were fined $25 each for disturbing the peace. Gillis was still in the hospital when his wife announced her intent to divorce him. According to the Washington, DC, Times-Herald [23 August 1932], Mrs. Gillis announced:

“I can’t compete with the $250,000 legs of Marjorie Whittington. I’m going to file suit for separation and support, and end my hopeless marriage.”

Perhaps the strangest episode in Marjorie’s life developed when two 20-year-old fiancés, Frances Hajek and Lewis Weiss, were shot and stabbed to death on a secluded lover’s lane in Queens. Because the assailant scrawled a red circle on each of his victim’s foreheads, the still-unsolved crime became known as the Lipstick Murders.

Throughout the investigation, several individuals approached police or the newspapers with claims that they had witnessed the attack or knew someone who had. Many of these tips were fabrications or hallucinations. Others held some promise. One caller, insisting on anonymity, intrigued police so much that they traced her calls to a telephone booth in Bayside, where they apprehended none other than Marjorie Whittington. She claimed it was all a mistake, that she was trying to sell her life story and phoned police headquarters by mistake.

In November 1941, Marjorie married a much younger man, an auto mechanic named Stephen Tomilowitz. A few years later, she had him arrested when he broke into her apartment and beat her up while demanding she pay his tab at a local saloon. They were divorced soon after.

On 23 October 1957, Marjorie collapsed in Grand Central Station and died immediately. Her death notice in the New York Daily News reminded readers (mistakenly) that Flo Ziegfeld had insured her legs for $1 million. There was not a word about pogo sticks.

On 27 September 1929, the Cincinnati Post ran a photograph of a comely young flapper staring at a yo-yo, accompanied by a drawing of the toy in action. Under the headline, “It’s A Yo-Yo,” the newspaper explained:

“Latest fad sweeping the country, one known in the Philippines for generations, is the yo-yo. A yo-yo is a weighted disc-like spool, with a string wound around its axle. To ‘yo,’ one holds the string and drops the spool. The string unwinds and then the momentum causes it to rewind in the reverse direction, if manipulated properly, causing the spool to climb back up to the hand. Simple – but just try to do it.”

You will notice two things about this squib. First, it points to the Philippines – still a United States territory in 1929 – as the point of origin for the toy. Second, the writer dismissed yo-yos as a fad, destined to fade away.

The next decade proved that yo-yos were here to stay. Every Cincinnati movie theater worth its admission price conducted a yo-yo contest. Local nightclubs sponsored “yo-yo dances.” Some fashion accessories were marketed as “yo-yo style.” It wasn’t until World War II that yo-yo sales slumped, to be revived by an advertising campaign aimed at Baby Boomers in the 1960s.

There is, indeed, something to the Philippine origin story. The word yo-yo derives from the Iloco language spoken by the Ilocano people of the Philippine islands. The 1929 introduction of yo-yos to the United States was initiated by a Filipino immigrant named Pedro Flores who opened a large factory in Los Angeles. Within a year, Flores was bought out by a marketing genius named Donald Duncan, who not only founded the Duncan Toy Company, but also built the Good Humor ice cream franchise empire and a parking meter company.

All of that 1929 capsule history ignores a century-long history of very similar string-and-spool toys in the United States. In fact, the very first patent for a yo-yo was issued to two Cincinnati men way back in 1866. But they didn’t call it a yo-yo.

James L. Haven and Charles Hettrick (or Hettrich – the patent papers spell it both ways) of Cincinnati were awarded United States patent 59,745 on 20 November 1866 for what they called a “whirligig” or an “improved bandalore.” Bandalores are mentioned in American newspapers at least as far back as 1819, and similar toys are depicted on ancient Greek pottery dating from 440 BC. No one, however, thought to patent the devices.

James Haven was a wealthy manufacturer in Cincinnati. The Haven foundry churned out all sorts of metallic items, from hinges to sconces to cider presses to grain mills to elevators. He even manufactured steam furnaces and parts for buggies and carriages. Some of these contraptions were inventions of Haven himself or one of his workers.

Charles Hettrick (let’s settle on that spelling, which is how he is buried at Spring Grove) was among Haven’s employees. Variously identified as a finisher or hinge-maker, Hettrick would certainly have been familiar with the metalworking skills required to assemble the improved bandalore.

So, curiously, would Hettrick’s son, Charles Hettrich Jr. (for that is the way he spelled his name in the city directories). Junior was a jeweler, employed by the Duhme Company, Cincinnati’s premier jewelry and silverware firm. The patent paperwork does not provide the age of the applicants. Dad would have been 45 years old and Junior 20 in 1866. The two Charleses lived at the same address until about 1880, so it is possible they both had a role in the invention.

Although his name appears on the patent, Haven apparently did not add whirligigs or improved bandalores to the plethora of ironmongery offered for sale from his foundry. A surviving Haven Company catalogue and price list from 1871 includes not a word about this or any other toy. Although the Guinness World Record folks attribute “Earliest patent for A Yo-Yo” to the “Cincinnati, Ohio-based toy company Haven & Hetterick” [sic], there is no record that Haven or Hettrick formed any such company. There is no mention of any such company in any Cincinnati newspaper or city directory in the years following the patent. Further, there is not a single mention of bandalores or whirligig toys in any Cincinnati newspaper from 1866 until 1934 when a horse named Bandalore starting winning races at local tracks.

By then, Cincinnati was deeply invested in the yo-yo craze. Up on Gilbert Avenue, the Mansion Ballroom opened the new year with a “Yo-Yo Dance.” According to the Cincinnati Post:

“And now the Yo Yo will foxtrot and waltz. It will take its lessons from Norma Cox Wheeler when she presents a ‘Yo Yo Dance’ at the Mansion Ballroom Saturday night. Dancers will receive Yo Yos to train and retain as gifts from the management. The Harry Willsey Orchestra will spin some special Yo Yo music.”

And when Cincinnati dives into a fad, especially when dancing is involved, it’s only a matter of time before some salacious dimension emerges. So it was no surprise when the Enquirer [5 January 1932] reported on a vice raid on a downtown apartment:

“Dominigo Bragado, 24 years old, 134 West Seventh Street, and Joseph Deiera, 25, same address, Philippino Yo-Yo teachers and salesmen, were arrested by Detectives Millard Schath and Andrew Beard and held for promoting juvenile delinquency last night. The officers sent two sixteen-year-old girls, found in the men’s room, to Juvenile Court.”

In a very suspicious coincidence, just two days after the “Yo-Yo-Gate” bust, the Cincinnati Post named the winner of the top prize as Champion Yo-Yo Spinner in Cincinnati. The champ was Robert Beebe, 11 years old. Robert’s home address? None other than that very same 134 West Seventh Street. (At the time, it was a large rooming house.)

Cincinnati’s connection to yo-yos or bandalores is not limited to that earliest patent. On 15 September 2012, Beth Johnson of LaRue, Ohio, demonstrated the world’s largest working yo-yo somewhere around Cincinnati. Measuring nearly 12 feet in diameter and weighing more than two tons, the “Whoa-Yo” disc plunged 120 feet on a rope attached to a gigantic crane before successfully rebounding three times. Johnson had endeavored on three earlier occasions to get her gargantuan toy to function, mostly at locations in Florida, with no success. On one attempt, her yo-yo unrolled, then spun around until its 1.5-inch yacht mooring cable “string” melted, plunging the whole thing to the ground. It’s not clear exactly where in Cincinnati she effectively yoed her yo, or why she made the attempt here and not closer to home or in Florida. All Guinness tells us is she provided evidentiary video of her success.

So, you might suffer under the delusion you have attended some wild parties in your life.

Really?

Have any of those wingdings ever made the front page of the newspaper? For three weeks of coverage? Did any of your social events ever require a statement from the archbishop? Or threaten to upset the mayoral election? No? I thought not.

Meet Moses Goldsmith. He was born into poverty. His parents were German Jewish immigrants, and Moses, born 1848 in Cincinnati, was the oldest of their four sons. As a teenager, Moses peddled shoestrings, popcorn and other items on the streets of the city. He saved his pennies and bought a storefront at Findlay Market from which he sold notions, toys, stationery and fireworks. The shop was quite profitable and Moses invested in real estate, eventually accumulating a portfolio worth around $500,000 by 1900 ($20 million in today’s dollars).

In 1897, Moses constructed a fine stone mansion at 836 Beecher Street in Walnut Hills. It was here that Moses invited some friends to a party in 1903.

The menu was substantial, with courses of halibut, beef tenderloin, roast duck, chicken croquettes and stuffed squab, accompanied by oyster cocktail, and asparagus. Palate cleansers and desserts included ice cream, Charlotte Russe and bonbons. Camembert cheese and coffee supplemented cigars. Libations ranged from punch to fine German wines to sherry.

A mandolin club of 22 young women, a minstrel group, two full orchestras and a handful of soloists provided the musical accompaniment. Every guest received a basket containing French lace handkerchiefs and a bouquet of orange blossoms. The Enquirer [22 March 1903] was mightily impressed:

“The guests heartily applauded all of Mr. Goldsmith’s devices for their entertainment, and it was the unanimous verdict that the affair, in all its features, was the most elaborate and costly ever given in Cincinnati. It was a feast that the epicures of all Rome might have attended with pride.”

Who were Mr. Goldsmith’s guests? Boss Cox headed the list, George Barnsdale Cox himself, and the rest of the list were high-ranking associates of the Cox gang. Within 48 hours the “Goldsmith Incident,” as it became known, was the juiciest scandal in Cincinnati.

It wasn’t the food or the music that outraged the Queen City. It was the two women dressed as Catholic nuns who greeted the guests as they arrived. The Cincinnati Post [23 March 1903] explained:

“The two girls who impersonated nuns are employed as substitutes in the ballet at a local theater. Both girls are extremely handsome, and made a decided hit later in the evening, when they danced an Oriental dance in costumes less saintly than those prescribed for women who have renounced the world.”

The Post described the habits as those worn by the Sisters of Mercy. The Enquirer described them as belonging to the Sisters of Charity, but both papers agreed the women were dressed as some sort of nun, and Mr. Goldsmith was quite pleased with the effect. According to the Post, he said:

“Yes, it was a new idea. Thought I would give my guests a taste of church first and then show them the houchee couchee.”

The Goldsmith party took place Saturday evening, March 21. Cincinnati’s mayoral election was set that year for Monday, April 6. Boss Cox supported incumbent Mayor Julius Fleischmann for reelection. Opposing the Cox machine was a bipartisan “Citizens’ Committee” comprised of Democrats, Socialists and liberal Republicans. Moses Goldsmith handed the Citizens’ ticket a delicious campaign scandal, and he handed Cincinnati’s newspapers fodder for the front page. The ink-stained wretches ran with it, publishing every burp of outrage and denial on the front page for two weeks.

The political opposition accused Goldsmith of staging an orgy and the Cox party of endorsing blasphemy. This message resonated with the city’s growing Catholic population. Dr. Thomas P. Hart, editor of the Catholic Telegraph newspaper, let fly with a scorcher:

“What sort of man is he who, maliciously and without the semblance of an excuse, casts a reflection upon the pure Catholic sisterhoods, whose members have, at all times, shown themselves to be the good guardian angels of humanity, whenever and wherever their services were in demand.”

Between the lines, Hart made sure his readers understood that Moses Goldsmith was Jewish and so was Boss Cox’s favored candidate for mayor, Julius Fleischmann. The electorate turned its baleful gaze upon Cincinnati’s Jews, prompting Rabbi David Philipson of the Mound Street Temple to proclaim:

“Unfortunately, and as a usual thing, no Jew can do anything reprehensible but that the fact of his being a Jew is called attention to. We have protested against this time and again, but the world has not yet learned the lesson that the individual Jew who offends should be judged and denounced as an individual and not as a Jew.”

The Cox machine, watching this religious prejudice slop onto their candidate, appealed behind the scenes to Cincinnati’s Archbishop William Henry Elder to say something, anything, to defuse the mounting antisemitism. Henry C. Wright, in his 1905 book, “Bossism In Cincinnati,” reports that the archbishop complied:

“An appeal was made to Archbishop Elder to make a public statement that Fleischmann’s father had befriended the Catholic Church, and the incident had no bearing on the candidacy of the son. He would not speak at first, but later published such a statement. This smoothed the troubled waters somewhat, and eased the consciences of the Catholic voters who wanted to support Fleischmann.”

The Citizens’ ticket was led by Melville E. Ingalls, president of the Big Four Railroad and major investor in the 16-story Ingalls Building, the first skyscraper in the world. Ingalls was scandal-free and a Unitarian and he largely avoided mentioning Goldsmith, his guests, or the ersatz nuns, in his campaign speeches.

Moses Goldsmith’s guests, however, spent a great deal of energy in what would later be called “damage control” or “spin.” Early on, several were quoted as denying there were any women dressed as nuns at Goldsmith’s party. Those women were dressed as nurses, obviously. Someone undoubtedly remarked that nurses dressed in white, while the “houchee couchee” dancers were clad in black. This led Mr. Goldsmith’s guests to actually buy an advertisement in the papers with a new theory:

“As the early guests reached the house the front doors were opened by two female attendants, attired in dominoes, and not the garb of a Sister of Charity. The host may have intended to represent this order, although he disclaims any sort of intent, but if he did so none of his guests had any knowledge of it.”

A “domino” is a character in the Italian commedia dell'arte, clad in a luxuriant black dress and wearing a black half-mask. Hardly convincing, but at least the color was correct.

Having unleashed a scandal into the political arena, Cincinnati’s newspapers found themselves forced to defend their coverage. The Cincinnati Post, in a front page defense on April 2, actually quoted their competitor, the Enquirer, who reminded readers that Moses Goldsmith proudly called the newspapers’ attention to his bogus nuns and bragged about it.

Boss Cox, cornered by the Enquirer [27 March 1903] a week after the event, claimed absolute ignorance of anything that may, or may not, have transpired at Moses Goldsmith’s house on the prior weekend:

“I can’t tell you because neither Mrs. Cox nor myself was present.”

When the votes were counted, the entire affair was exposed as a tempest in a teapot. Fleischmann was reelected with a plurality of 15,000 votes. Ingalls and the Citizens’ Party carried only a few heavily Catholic wards in Price Hill and the West End.

As Opening Day nears, many of us bust out our favorite baseball movies, often including 1989’s “Major Legue” with the unforgettable performance of Charlie Sheen as Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn, hurling hypersonic fastballs almost anywhere except the strike zone. Who remembers these days the Cincinnati Reds’ very own “Wild Thing”? Tony Mullane was a wild one, no doubt, but he left a far more complex legacy.

Mullane wasn’t a Cincinnati native. In fact, he wasn’t even born in the United States. Anthony John Mullane came into this world in County Cork, Ireland, on 30 January 1859. The Mullane family emigrated to the States in 1862 and eventually settled near Erie, Pennsylvania, where young Tony was introduced to baseball, much to his family’s dismay. The youngster ditched school so often he effectively expelled himself. He refused to learn a trade. All he wanted to do was throw the ball, hit the ball, catch the ball. In 1881, he made his big-league debut with the Detroit Wolverines, departing the next year for the Louisville Eclipse (later Colonels).

During his first full year in the majors, that 1882 season with Louisville, Mullane racked up two significant accomplishments. On July 18, 1882, he logged the first ambidextrous pitching appearance ever recorded, in a game against the Baltimore Orioles. After surrendering seven runs through two embarrassing innings while pitching right-handed, Mullane switched to his left arm. Although, as a southpaw, he held the Orioles to only two more runs, the hometown Louisville Courier-Journal [19 July 1882] was unimpressed:

“The Louisville boys lay their defeat at Mullane’s door. He pitched a game against which any nine boys could have won. He was brought to task for his pitching and claimed his arm was sore, but this is a very lame excuse.”

On 11 September 1882, Mullane pitched the first no-hitter in American Association history, in a game against the Cincinnati Reds. This time, the Courier-Journal was kinder, dubbing his pitching “remarkable.” Still, Mullane’s experience with the fans, the back office and the press in Louisville set a pattern that would follow him the rest of his career. He rarely felt appreciated.

Mullane finished the season at Louisville with a breath-taking 1.88 ERA and a 30-24 win-loss record, the first of five 30-win seasons. His stats inspired a bidding war, and he joined St. Louis for the 1883 season, then ignored the reserve clause to join Toledo in 1884. St. Louis allowed the move with conditions that would later bite Mullane.

In Toledo, Mullane openly admitted that his catcher, Moses Fleetwood Walker, was the best he had ever thrown to. But Walker was Black. Mullane was openly racist and intentionally disregarded whatever signals Walker showed him. Undoubtedly, Mullane’s prejudice contributed to him throwing 63 wild pitches during that season in Toledo.

Mullane jumped again, in 1885, signing with the Cincinnati Reds for a reported $5,000. In this move, he jumped too far, breaking a contract he signed in St. Louis. For punishment, he had to sit out the 1885 season, smack in the middle of his run of 30-win seasons. That year off probably cost him the wins that might have sent him to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

When Mullane finally joined the Cincinnati Reds in 1886, he brought with him a controversial reputation. He also carried celebrity as a ladies man. The Reds’ owner, a haberdasher named Aaron Stern, noticed there were significantly more women at the park every time Mullane pitched. Fans had bestowed a couple of nicknames on the Irish hurler by this point, one of which was The Apollo of the Box. Stern had the manager schedule Mullane to pitch every Monday, declared that Ladies Day, and offered free admission to any woman accompanied by a paying male customer.

Baseball in those days was not the year-round commitment it is today. Most players found something to bring in cash during the off-season. Rookies and journeymen often pursued a trade, while the stars opened saloons. Mullane was no exception, as the Enquirer [14 February 1886] noted:

“Tony Mullane is the latest accession to the ranks of ball players who mix long flies, foul tips and strike-outs with mint juleps, sherry flips and other palatable bar decoctions. He has about completed all arrangements, and will soon open a saloon on Vine Street, near Eighth, which, to use his own words, will be a ‘dazzler.’”

Over a career spanning seven and a half years with the Reds, Mullane won 163 games and notched two more 30-win seasons. As his pitching arm tired, Mullane’s value as a hitter emerged. In 1889 he recorded a career-high batting average of .296, a slugging percentage of .418, and 24 stolen bases in 196 at-bats. He regularly took on non-pitching positions, especially at first base where he was skilled at scooping up grounders without a glove. But – and this must be noted – he was vocally unhappy about playing for Cincinnati.

In May 1887, it looked like Mullane’s career was over, at least in Cincinnati. He refused to pitch one day in a bid for a higher salary, which led to a stormy confrontation in President Stern’s office. Mullane threatened Stern, who called for police. He also spent much of his time in Cincinnati in court, defending himself from his wife’s request for a divorce.

Throughout Mullane’s career, baseball was rapidly evolving. Rule changes were frequent and so were club realignments. In 1890, for example, the Reds rejoined the National League after more than a decade in the American Association. But the change that effectively ended Mullane’s career was introduced in 1893 – the pitcher’s mound.

Before 1893, pitchers threw from a box on flat ground 55 ½ feet from home plate. In 1893, a rubber plate 60 ½ feet from the plate, atop a small mound, became the pitcher’s perch. Mullane’s stats plummeted immediately. He was traded to Baltimore mid-season. Baltimore dropped him in the middle of the next year and he closed out his career pitching just four games for the Cleveland Spiders. Mullane told Sporting Life magazine, as reported in the Enquirer [9 July 1893] that he was glad to leave the Queen City:

“I feel like a man who has just been turned out of jail. I mean that Cincinnati-Baltimore deal. Honest, I was never as glad to leave any place in my life as I was in Cincinnati. There I got cussed every day, whether I pitched good ball or not. In Baltimore they appreciate me for what I am worth, and treat me like a ballplayer should be treated.”

We have reviewed Mullane’s unique ambidexterity, his role in establishing Ladies Days at baseball parks, his temper and his initial no-hitter, but we haven’t clarified Mullane’s connection to Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn. For that, we turn to the Guinness Book of World Records:

“The most wild pitches thrown by a pitcher in a MLB career is 343 by Tony Mullane (USA) playing for the Detroit Wolverines, Louisville Colonels, St. Louis Cardinals, Toledo Blue Stockings, Cincinnati Reds, Baltimore Orioles and Cleveland Spiders between 1881 and 1894.”

That’s a lot of wild pitches. Mullane’s closest competitor for this dubious honor was an almost year-for-year contemporary of his, Mickey Welch of the New York Giants, who tallied just 274 wild pitches in a career spanning 1880 to 1892.

Nevertheless, over Mullane’s 12 full seasons, only three other pitchers won more games than he did and all three are in the Hall of Fame. In total, Mullane garnered 284 wins, the second highest sum among pitchers not enshrined at Cooperstown. Cincinnati stopped cussing him long enough to induct Mullane into the local Reds Hall of Fame in 2010.

Cincinnati has always tolerated gambling. “Chasing the tiger,” as it used to be known, ebbed and surged in popularity over the years, but placing bets has never faded away. For most of Cincinnati’s history gambling was outlawed yet the laws prohibiting gambling were often entirely ignored.

Especially in the Boss Cox years from the 1880s into the 1920s, gambling prospered because wagers funneled a torrent of bribes, kickbacks and graft into the coffers of the Cox machine. Today’s gamblers would not recognize some of the games that sucked in fortunes in those days. For instance, bucket shops.

Bucket shop gambling was based on the stock market and was made possible by the invention of the stock ticker in 1867. This handy device received telegraphed market information and spat it out on a long paper tape. (From which we get ticker-tape parades.) Legitimate stock brokerages loved the ticker and relied on them until the internet took off in the 1990s. In the late 1800s, gamblers adopted stock tickers as high-tech gambling devices in a scheme known as the bucket shop.

In Cincinnati, around 1890, the most active bucket shop occupied an office on the ground floor of the Mercantile Library Building on Walnut Street. It was operated by a well-to-do wholesale merchant named Mathias S. “Shafe” Forbus. The Cincinnati Post [18 November 1891] explained how the bucket shop worked:

“If wheat is quoted at 94 cents a bushel, you can purchase 1000 of these measures for the small sum of $10 – that is idealistically speaking – and if that modern wheel of fortune, the stock-ticker, typographically imparts the information that the price of the cereal has advanced to 95 1/8 cents, you are the winner to the amount of your wager. Should wheat decline in value to 93 1/8 cents, your $10 have gone to swell the bank account of M.S. Forbus & Co.”

You will note that no stock or commodities actually changed hands. Our gambler owned nothing. He merely bet on that com modity’s or stock’s performance without ever taking ownership of anything. According to the Post, the Forbus bucket shop had all the trappings of a legitimate business:

“Entering, you at once perceive the familiar and unmistakable surroundings, and hear the tickety-tick-tick of the ‘bucket shop.’ All the paraphernalia are presented to the eye – the blackboards, the tickers, the desks, the big safe in the corner, and the 25 or 30 chairs whereon the ‘shoe-strings’ of the euphemistically styled ‘commercial gambling.’”

Shafe Forbus never had to worry about police raiding his bucket shop because, in addition to his business interests, Forbus just happened to be a member of the Police Commission, the board that supervised Cincinnati’s police department.

You read that correctly. The man who ran one of the largest gambling spots in Cincinnati had the ability to hire and fire the police who were supposed to arrest anyone who ran a gambling establishment. Welcome to Boss Cox’s Cincinnati.

The crusading Cincinnati Post, longtime antagonist of the Cox regime, was not amused. In an exposé headlined “Heal Thyself. Advice to the Local Police Board” [18 November 1891], the newspaper fumed over the conflict of interest:

“What are the police going to do about it? M.S. Forbus intertwines his lily-white fingers over his aldermanic abdomen, winks the other eye, anathematizes the newspaper and profanely ejaculates: ‘The police! D—n it, I am the police!’ If he isn’t the police, he certainly can conduct an unlawful business without police interference.”

It’s not that the police didn’t try to interfere, but they were thwarted at every turn. In 1893, Forbus was still in business, but now had competition from another bucket shop, the Nelson Commission Company, who sold bogus stock from a shop directly across the street from the Enquirer.

When Cincinnati Police raided the Nelson rooms, they confiscated record books, stock certificates and even a ticker machine. No sooner had the evidence been logged at headquarters than a court constable arrived, with a writ ordering the police to return everything to the bucket shop. The writ was signed by Police Court Judge John C.H. Hart, who was – surprise! – also retained as the attorney for the Nelson Commission Company.

Police Chief Philip Deitsch complained that the courts refused to convict bucket shop owners unless police proved that nothing changed hands. The bucket shops dodged this requirement by issuing authentic stock certificates to the police or, worse, delivering actual commodities. The chief told the Post [14 November 1893]:

“Well, we tried to convict them once before, and we spent the department’s money. We had two very excellent cases, but the Grand Jury ignored them. The court has decided that where there is no actual delivery it is gambling. Now, in our last cases, the bucket shops were about to send us 50 barrels of pork, and compel us to pay on the margin. At that time the department was given to understand that if it bought again the goods, whatever they were, would be delivered at Police Headquarters. If that is done, it knocks out our case; so you see our hands are tied.”

At least one honest jurist occupied a bench at the Court of Common Pleas that year. Judge John R. Sayler cut through the defendants’ folderol and rejected an injunction requested by the Nelson gang to prevent police from raiding their business. In denying the injunction, Judge Sayler ruled that where stock was not actually delivered or where there was no bona fide intention to deliver real stocks, the business was engaged in gambling. Attorney and occasional judge John Hart told the Post [14 November 1893] that the judgement was bad news for all the city’s bucket shops:

“I’ll tell you one thing: The ruling bodes evil to Shafe Forbus’ and other bucket shops.”

Lawyer Hart was either being sarcastic or disingenuous. No one was convicted of anything in the Nelson case and Mathias Forbus carried on exactly as before. He was now chairman of the Police Commission.

Later in the year, the Cincinnati Enquirer, while naming few names, asserted that gambling was rife in Cincinnati. The public accusation was too flagrant to ignore, and so the Police Commission took it under advisement, if only to make the allegation disappear. The Enquirer [20 December 1893] quoted Commission Chairman Forbus, owner of the largest bucket shop in town:

“We have no evidence of gambling. I guess there is no doubt that it does exist, but the question is to get evidence.”

It was not police interference but national trends dampened the appeal of bucket shops. The real stock exchanges in New York and Chicago took steps to restrict access to trading information. Federal laws carried heavier penalties than local regulations, and federal law enforcement and courts were generally more honest and above-board than local jurisdictions. The handwriting was on the chalkboard. The Enquirer [6 June 1895] carried the obituary for what might have been Cincinnati’s last bucket shop:

“The Owen Commission Company, running a bucket shop in the Mitchell Building, has shut its doors and returned to Chicago. Cause: Patrons too scarce and too lucky.”

George Barnsdale “Boss” Cox ruled this city like a private business for more than 35 years from the 1880s into the 1920s. How did he get away with decades of corruption and graft? The short answer is minions.

All crime lords require legions of minor functionaries to perform the dirty work while the ringleader impersonates a respectable citizen. Cox had his chief lieutenants, of course, notably August “Garry” Herrmann, Rudolph “Rud” Hynicka, and Mike Mullen, but hundreds of lesser factotums kept the Cox Machine humming. Among this disreputable mob was Vivian J. Fagin. We ought to resuscitate some antique words to describe Viv Fagin: He was a bounder and a cad.

In 1888, while being interviewed for a minor political plum job – assistant sergeant at arms for a City Council subcommittee – Fagin insulted the Councilman heading the hiring process. Someone on the committee calmly suggested Fagin show some respect. Fagin took offense, physically attacked the hiring committee and drew a pistol before he was overpowered and ejected from the room. Not surprisingly, he didn’t get the gig.

When a proposal to extend Court Street up into Mount Adams came before the Hamilton County Commissioners, Viv Fagin was very interested. He lived in Mount Adams, the heart of Cincinnati’s Fourth Ward. In that ward, Fagin was a force to be reckoned with, and he led a delegation of Mount Adams residents into the Courthouse to meet with the road planners. There, Fagin met John J. Rooney, City Council representative from the Fourth Ward. According to the Commercial-Gazette [25 February 1894]:

“Mr. Rooney and Mr. Fagin soon were using some very forcible language and did not desist until called to order by the Chairman. The fact that not one of the delegation was opposed to the proposed improvement struck everybody as humorous.”

In 1897, Fagin, by then luxuriating in one of his featherbed positions as deputy county treasurer, wandered into the Mecca on Walnut Street with a gang of his cronies. The Mecca was among the classiest saloons in Cincinnati and kept a table reserved for Boss Cox, whose office was located upstairs. After several rounds, Fagin and his friends prepared to depart. Bartender Billy Tahse reminded them it was time to settle the tab. Fagin replied with a “vile epithet” and Tahse agreed he could pay later. According to the Enquirer [9 July 1897]:

“This did not conciliate Fagin, who vigorously denied that he owned anyone in the place a cent. In fact the very idea of his owing for a few drinks seemed to terribly exasperate Mr. Cox’s henchman. The more he thought of it the hotter he got. Finally, with an oath, he picked up a silver ice water pitcher that was on the counter and hurled it at Tahse’s head.”

The projectile missed, so Fagin grabbed a crystal serving dish and chased Tahse around the barroom. Someone outside heard the disturbance and called the police who were very reluctant to arrest one of Boss Cox’s men. Instead, the officers escorted Fagin outside, exchanged a few words and let him walk.

Oddly, Viv Fagin was not entirely devoted to Boss Cox. His career reminds us that all politics is messy. This was especially true in the Cincinnati of the Boss Cox era. Frank Y. Grayson, chronicler of the Cox era, described Fagin as the “stormy petrel” of Hamilton County politics. He changed allegiances as the political winds shifted.

Fagin, son of a city policeman, completed high school and studied at one of Cincinnati’s several business schools. He began his professional life as a bookkeeper and returned to accountancy on those occasions when patronage jobs dried up. His business acumen served him well in the corrupt Cox morass – he could see where the money flowed.

Always chasing some political advantage, Fagin’s political life began as an anti-Cox Republican in the faction led by beer scion George Moerlein. With Moerlein’s help, Fagin represented the Fourth Ward on City Council for two terms. In return for the promise of a cushy appointment, Fagin abandoned Moerlein and threw his support to Cox. When a reform movement temporarily hobbled the Cox machine, Fagin signed on as a Democrat but reverted to the Republican fold after four years of frustration. In his 1912 apology letter, Fagin said he thought he had landed on a Democratic rose, but discovered it was only “fertilizer.”

Throughout these rotating allegiances, Fagin mostly landed on his feet, awarded various sinecures as assistant city treasurer, assistant county recorder, assistant county treasurer, and United States Marshal. Fagin’s nasty temper remained intact. According to Henry Wright’s 1905 book, “Bossism In Cincinnati”:

“United States Marshal Vivian Fagin has the reputation of a bully and a thug in his own neighborhood on Mt. Adams. One day he struck in the face one of our leading citizens, for no other offense than that he occupied a place upon the inclined plane truck that Fagin wanted. A warrant was asked for at the Police Court for his arrest, but the clerk assumed to prejudge the case and refused the warrant. Nothing was done.”

According to Grayson, writing in the Cincinnati Times-Star [5 June 1931], Fagin’s arrogance and ambition finally caused his downfall:

“Fagin dreamed of a new political empire and of a new local Republican party with himself as leader, but the dream faded.”

It was a bad move. Fagin’s scheme cratered when his closest allies revolted. For several years, Fagin ruled the Fourth Ward from his home on Celestial Street. As ward captain, it was Fagin’s job to produce the votes, which he did magnificently, assisted by precinct executives who knew they would be rewarded for the turnout with a beer and a pickled pig foot at Harry Hopkin’s saloon on St. Gregory Street. They called themselves the Pig Knuckle Gang.

In 1906, Fagin launched his coup, publicly attacking Cox’s golden boy, Mike Mullen. Suspecting that Fagin was getting a tad too big for his britches, Fagin’s own Pig Knuckle Gang turned against him. In a secret meeting with Mullen at William Degischer’s saloon on Lock Street, the Pig Knuckle Gang drew up a list of charges, real and imagined, against their former leader. Someone slipped a copy to Fagin, who had the whole lot arrested when he sued for libel. The trial captivated Cincinnati and resulted in two of the Pig Knuckle agitators, Theodore Zumstein and Harry Peet, referred to the grand jury on criminal charges. The damage, however, was done.

Testimony during the trial revealed that “Rud” Hynicka had asked Fagin to help topple Boss Cox. Fagin refused, but the fact that Hynicka even asked him made Fagin suspect among the Cox faithful. Hynicka eventually grabbed the controls of the Cox machine and Fagin’s refusal to back the new boss marked him as an outcast. For airing the Republican party’s dirty laundry in court, Fagin was removed as U.S. Marshal.

Fagin declared bankruptcy and retired from politics, operating a detective agency for a while, but ended his days as an accountant specializing in tax assessment disputes. His contacts among Republican officeholders were still useful.

When Fagin died in 1931, his “stormy petrel” days were almost forgotten. Al Segal, who built a career at the Cincinnati Post fighting the Cox machine and all its minions through his crusading “Cincinnatus” column, had nothing but compliments for the departed henchman.

“Cincinnatus salutes the passing Fagin. He was a likeable person.”

In the autumn of 1888, Mrs. Annie Jenness Miller visited Cincinnati to present a lecture at Odeon Hall on “Correct Dress.” One of several “dress reformers” active at that time in the United States, Mrs. Miller announced that she would illustrate her recommendations with a display of “varied and beautiful costumes, suitable for every occasion.”

Although she disapproved of many aspects of contemporary couture, Mrs. Miller funneled her disdain in particular at that dreadful implement of feminine torture, the corset. She told a Cincinnati Post [13 November 1888] that women were destroying their health by clinging to fashions that require a “hideously tight waist.” Her designs featured flowing lines and what might be called an empire waist.

Cincinnati women were not universally impressed by Mrs. Miller’s designs or by her opinions on the then-fashionable corset. One correspondent, signed only “A Sensible Woman,” fired off a testy note to the Post, chastising the newspaper for promulgating the ravings of a crank:

“I will leave the question of the unhealthfulness of the corset to Doctors Thorpe, Osborne, Kirk, or any other physician, male or female in Cincinnati. I have never asked these lady physicians above named about the matter, but believe that they will maintain with me that the corset is a support and a healthful adjunct of the toilet.”

Another letter arrived from “Progress,” a self-proclaimed fan of dress reform:

“There is always a class of bustle-and-corset-bound bigots that cry down anyone who tries to make an improvement upon the horrible, uncomfortable deformity of the present style of dress by calling these apostles of beauty and comfort ‘cranks’ and ‘loud-mouthed reformers.’ By the way, imagine Helen of Troy in a tight corset and bustle!”

Throughout the whole brouhaha caused by Mrs. Miller’s visit, no one mentioned the real reason so many “dress reformers” were active just as the restrictive whalebone corset reached the pinnacle of its popularity – death by tight lacing. Despite the absence of clear proof that corsets could kill, death by tight lacing was a popular Victorian meme. Was it just an early urban legend?

Much like the urban legend about the girl with the bullet-proof bouffant hairdo, shellacked into place with continual hairspray applications, whose brain was devoured by roaches dwelling in her coiffure, death by tight-lacing always seemed to happen to someone a friend of a friend knew.

The Cincinnati Enquirer [13 September 1888] carried the story of a young lady from Delray, Michigan, who, in the midst of a quadrille, dropped dead to the dance floor.

“An examination revealed the fact that she had died from tight lacing, the stays in her corset having been drawn so tightly that her flesh lay in folds beneath, so that the exertion of dancing caused the bursting of a blood vessel.”

The Cincinnati Gazette [26 November 1870] told the sad tale of Susan Riekert of Springfield, Ohio, who, seated at her vanity preparing for an evening among friends, dropped dead. A doctor attributed her death to her tightly laced corset, a verdict supposedly seconded by the coroner.

A “young married woman, moving in very fashionable New York society,” died suddenly according to the Enquirer [6 March 1880]. The coroner’s report pointed an accusing finger at her corset, laced so tightly that “the heart was found to be so impeded in its action as to render life impracticable.”

The Cincinnati Star [17 October 1876] warned readers about a poor damsel in Montreal who, on arriving home from a fancy ball, found herself so tightly confined in her corset that she could neither extract herself nor utter a cry for help.

“When they found her, she was the deadest girl you ever read about.”

Notice that none of these deaths occurred in Cincinnati, nor close enough to easily verify. Despite the possibility these deaths were just rumors, there was a general agreement among the medical doctors of the day that squeezing your innards into a tiny cylinder was going to give you trouble sooner or later.

In a 1906 book so popular that it was often banned and censored, “Woman’s Guide To Sexual Knowledge, Or, What Every Woman Should Know,” doctors Frederick Wilson Pitcairn and Elizabeth J. Williard assert:

“The breathing in tight lacing, however, is not only impaired by interference with the diaphragm, but also by the constriction of the ribs. In the act of respiration the ribs move freely up and down, but when the body is gripped by a corset, the movement of the lower ribs can be scarcely possible.”

This observation was supported by science. The Enquirer [4 February 1889] described an experiment conducted at some unnamed institution in which a dozen young women ran a quarter mile in standard bloomer-style gym clothing and the same distance strapped into their corsets. The tight lacing caused an alarming increase in heart rate. The newspaper rushed to judgement:

“‘Wasp girls’ are what they call those who have become conspicuous for small waists, as well as tight lacing, and for whom an early grave is cheerfully predicted.”

While threats of death did little to lessen the fashionable woman’s addiction to tight corsets, the physicians noted that tight lacing had an unfortunate side effect that might deliver a blow to a lady’s vanity. Pitcairn and Williard subtly explain:

“A visible disturbance of the blood circulation of the face has long been popularly associated with the tapering waist, and it is a common taunt to assert of a much constricted woman that her corset is too tight to allow her to sit down without her nose becoming red.”

That theme was picked up by the Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic [12 January 1889], journal of the local medical society:

“Talking about red noses, I would say that it is not fair to accuse a man or woman of intemperance with liquors because he or she has a red nose, since there are other things that will do it. Tight lacing will also cause it. Look out for those girls with wasp-like waists— sometimes their noses will hang out the red flag, showing that some part of their internal machinery is out of gear.”

It took a long time for corsets to loosen their grip on feminine fashion. Was the threat of sudden death the main factor? Or the possibility of a ruddy schnozz? Or was it merely the ever-flowing tides of fashion?

On 6 May 1882, United States President Chester A. Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of almost anyone from China for the next decade and denying citizenship to Chinese residents currently living in the United States. The act was renewed in 1892 and again, with no expiration date, in 1902.

Among the people who objected to this law, in addition to the residents of Chinese extraction already in the United States, were the evangelical churches, who had aggressive plans to convert the “heathen Chinee.” In response to this new legal impediment, more than a few Christian congregations organized Chinese Sunday Schools to help assimilate and convert the Chinese people living in America with the intention of sending them back to China as missionaries.

Although labeled by white Americans as superstitious and ignorant, and although confined almost exclusively to restaurant or laundry jobs, the Chinese who arrived in the later 1800s were among the more educated class in their home country, according to the administrators of the Chinese Sunday Schools.

The 1880 census records only 44 residents of Cincinnati who claimed Chinese origin. Nevertheless, a Chinese Sunday School was convened at the Second Reformed Presbyterian Church on Clinton Street in the West End. The sponsor of this school was Henry Martin, a wealthy merchant who owned a very large and very prosperous store purveying dry goods and carpets at the corner of Twelfth and Main.

Born in Ireland, Mr. Martin is credited with vastly increasing the value of property in Cincinnati’s hilltop suburbs, especially Mount Auburn and Avondale, by building a cable car line up the treacherously steep Sycamore Hill. Deeply religious and scrupulous to a fault, every Saturday night Mr. Martin signed over ownership of his cable company to the line’s superintendent. Every Monday, the superintendent dutifully returned the ownership of the line to Mr. Martin. This curious arrangement allowed Mr. Martin to avoid any hint of engaging in business on the Sabbath.

Inspired by the same zeal, Mr. Martin financed any number of missionary and evangelical initiatives, including the Chinese Sunday School at his church. He was so committed to educating Cincinnati’s very small Chinese community that he arranged for his daughter Margaret, known as Madge, to become the principal of Cincinnati’s Chinese Sunday School.

The school at the Second Reformed Presbyterian Church was active into the 1890s, when operation of the Chinese Sunday School moved to the Ninth Street Baptist Church and continued into the 1920s. While still located in the West End, the pupils would gather each Sunday at Tong Hop’s laundry at the corner of Central Avenue and Clinton Street and march in formation down Clinton Street to the church.

One Sunday in August 1887, only three of the usual fifteen or eighteen pupils showed up. The faculty – all young and single women with some standing in society – prowled some of Cincinnati’s seedier dives and located their errant scholars in the backroom of a laundry, engaged in a game of cock-a-loo. They played hooky, they said, because a dozen of them had been arrested throwing dice at a Plum Street hangout the week before and they were too embarrassed to face their teachers.

It was fairly typical for Chinese Sunday Schools in the United States to be managed and taught by the young women associated with the host church. When a Cincinnati Enquirer [1 February 1885] reporter visited the school, he found all the teachers to be women:

“The troupe of Chinamen were distributed around the room, each one of the Celestials seated beside a lady, who was ostensibly his teacher. The teachers were all young, most of them pretty, and the reason why few of the Celestials rarely missed a meeting was plainly apparent.”

The preponderance of young and attractive teachers raised eyebrows across the United States. One national magazine published a cartoon depicting a distinguished gentleman attempting to walk off a wharf, restrained by a policeman. The old gent pleads, “Let me jump off — the family’s disgraced. My daughter teaches a Chinese Sunday School pupil!”

The Enquirer reporter devoted several paragraphs to a description of one Chinese pupil fondling the floating end of his teacher’s hair ribbon while gazing lustily at her as she attempted to show him how to distinguish an O from a Q. The American Israelite [1 July 1909] printed a letter from one Lurana Sheldon accusing Chinese Sunday Schools of inflaming the lusts of the uncivilized pupils:

“Is not the young woman missionary a highly emotional, sentimental, affectionate person, prolific in the making of opportunities and situations that would tax the blood temperature of any man, not alone the Chinaman, and has she not the overconfidence of ignorance in her own ability to handle successfully such opportunities and situations?”

In Cincinnati, at least, the leadership of Madge Martin and the sterling reputation of her devout father neutralized some of the gossip, but not entirely. All this lascivious tut-tutting ignored the many unromantic benefits derived by the immigrant pupils of the Chinese Sunday Schools. Federal agents rounded up and deported Chinese men (there were very few Chinese women in the United States at that time) when they were accused of entering the country after 1882. Proficiency in English and familiarity with American customs provided strong evidence of extended residency.

The Chinese Sunday Schools also connected the pupils to a trusted network of Caucasian citizens who could assist them in a pinch. Such was the case in 1893 when four Chinese men were arrested in Cincinnati and charged with illegal immigration. Henry Martin himself appeared as a witness for one of the men, attesting that he knew him from years ago at the Sunday school. The lawyer for the four arrested men was John H. Martin, Henry Martin’s son.

It appears from newspaper reports that Cincinnati was, for many years, a way station on what might be called the “Silk Railroad,” the Chinese version of the Underground Railroad. It was almost impossible in the 1880s and 1890s for Chinese to enter the United States through major ports like New York and San Francisco, creating an alternate route that ran from Canada through Detroit to Cincinnati. Canada had no restrictions on Chinese immigration, so Chinese intent on the United States landed at Victoria or Vancouver and made their way eastward.

The border near Detroit was only lightly patrolled and the journey from Detroit to Cincinnati was convenient. Once in Cincinnati, the smuggled men hid in the basements or attics of Chinese-run business. One such way-station was Loy Sing’s laundry on Main Street just south of Liberty. Within days, the local “conductor” arranged train tickets to send the immigrants on to Chinatowns in New York or California.

When Mayor George W. C. Johnston first proposed a Mardi Gras celebration for 1876, skepticism poured in from other cities who knew Cincinnati’s rather stuffy reputation. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat [26 February 1876] was typical:

“The people of Cincinnati are a good, honest race – a worthy people, every one of them; and we can not think of them, clad in pink tights, and paraded through the streets in crimson chariots in a snow storm, as a charming or amusing spectacle. We know that they would make the sacrifice if patriotism demanded, but that is not true patriotism that requires a man to catch a cold in his head. Even if the day were fine, there would be something incongruous in the spectacle of a Cincinnati man putting on a paste-board suit of armor or otherwise adorning himself for a procession.”

Ah, but the nay-sayers had not reconned with the festive obsessions of Cincinnati’s mayor. George Johnston’s reputation was built upon his lavish holidays and parades and this strategy had got him re-elected the year before. The Cincinnati Gazette [1 March 1876] had his number:

“Mayor Johnson delights in the pleasure of his subjects – we mean his constituents. He is never so happy as when they are glad.”

So, when Mayor Johnston said he wanted a Mardi Gras Carnival, the Queen City jumped to attention. The problem was, the mayor’s brainstorm rolled in rather late. He first broached the Mardi Gras concept in early January. Fat Tuesday that year was February 29, so plans evolved over seven weeks of chaos. A committee was formed, duties assigned and reality confronted. The Cincinnati Commercial [1 March 1876] described just one of the organizational hiccups:

“The getting of costumes from New York was also an embarrassment. The inexperienced committee, unaided with instructions as to what was wanted, the procession not being organized, didn’t know what to order. A costumer came here with a large lot of miscellaneous stuff, much of it not of the best quality or condition.”

Instead of arriving a week in advance, the costumer and costumes didn’t arrive until the night prior to the festival. The shipment got picked over like a pig’s carcass at a buzzard orgy. Meanwhile, two separate committees had mapped out two detailed but totally disconnected routes for the grand parade, with neighborhoods lobbying City Hall to be visited by Rex and his entourage.

Consequently, it was a bit of a miracle when, just a few minutes after 3:00 p.m., the Margi Gras king, Rex himself, descended the grand staircase from the Burnet House to his royal carriage on Third Street. We use here the term “carriage” in the loosest possible terms. The Cincinnati Commercial described the “fantastic car”:

“A hog’s head, painted to resemble it roasted, and representing Porkopolis, eight feet high and thirteen feet long, rested in a capacious gravy dish, garnished with pieces of lemon, carrots and other fixings. In a head of lettuce between the hog’s ears, was arranged the king’s seat, with seats for his pages on either ear. His jester, during the parade, sat astride the snout, and here cut up his monkey shines.”

Unfortunately, given the abbreviated schedule for planning and constructing the parade vehicles, no one had given much thought to precisely how King Rex, encumbered by ceremonial robes and tons of costume jewelry, was supposed to mount up to his porcine throne.

“The mounting of the King was attended with some difficulty, and was not the most dignified and courtly undertaking. With considerable effort he was boosted into the gravy dish, where, with his long train dangling down, he for a few moments stood irresolute before he essayed to clamber up the sleek jaws and snout of the hog to his perch between the ears.”

Anon, four nearby clowns grabbed Rex by his hands and feet and tossed him onto the throne, an effort requiring some muscle because Rex was embodied by William I. Torrence, a local capitalist whose substantial girth was as ponderous as his bank account.

Drawing the royal “carriage” were four of Old John Robinson’s elephants, preceded by a small herd of the Robinson Circus camels. With Rex finally seated, the procession marched east toward Main Street, up to Fifth and westward through Government Square where the “city gates,” proudly assembled from scrap wood and muslin, awaited His Highness, there to receive the keys to the city from Mayor Johnstone. Alas, the mayor was detained by real business and Rex, nothing loath, marched on toward the Exposition Buildings, soon to be demolished to make way for the construction of Music Hall.

While crossing the canal, the King’s carriage bumped into the trailing elephant, who bumped the elephant ahead and sent all the pachyderms charging toward their winter quarters in the basement of the Exposition Buildings, tossing King Rex nearly out of his throne while his pages landed in the streetside shrubbery.

At length, order was restored and many of the spectators adjourned to the interior of the Exposition Hall where a masked ball occupied the hours until just shortly before dawn. Like all good Cincinnati events of the day, it was briefly interrupted when a couple of attendees commenced shooting at one another. No one was injured and the dancing resumed.

Throughout the festivities, a major, nearly disastrous flaw in the planning was uncovered. Mayor Johnston ordered the entire police force to march in the parade, meaning that some officers lined up after patrolling all day and some lined up hours before they were scheduled to patrol all night, so no one patrolled the streets for most of the day. Pickpockets ran rampant, fights erupted without interruption, a few stores were looted and drunks wandered in undisturbed flocks.

There was one Mardi Gras related death. Mary A. Thornton, a 72-year-old dowager from the West End, took an elevator to the upstairs of a pharmacy warehouse on Main Street. On her way down, she fell out of the elevator, plummeting to the floor ten feet below. She fractured her skull and died.

Despite all the missteps, the event was considered a triumph for the Queen City. The Cincinnati Commercial [1 March 1876] summed it up:

“Altogether it was a grand success, and furnishes additional testimony to the already fixed fact, that when Cincinnati starts in a big thing, she goes the ‘whole hog,’ and then smothers in glory.”

Still, the experiment was not repeated the next year. In 1877 there was no parade and only a few smaller balls. Perhaps because of the absence of citywide celebrations, Mayor Johnston was defeated at the polls.

In the summer of 1918, the New York Giants had just split a four-game series at Redland Field. Heine Zimmerman, the Giants’ infielder, awaited a ride at the corner of Fifth and Elm streets when he was startled by the sudden blast of a bugle. The Cincinnati Post [22 July 1918] tattled:

“Zim, in a patriotic mood, stood at attention with hat in hand and held over his heart. There followed giggles – the mean things – and Heine started after one of the gigglers. He happened to glance around the corner and, lo! found a hot-waffle man blowing a bugle in an effort to drum up trade.”

Poor Zim! He was certainly familiar with hot waffle men. Vendors of those tasty treats were ubiquitous at a time when pedestrians thronged the streets of all major cities. That bugle call was unique to Cincinnati, however, and there was a story behind it. In an article recounting the distinctive cries of Cincinnati’s street vendors – the sauerkraut, fruit and vegetable salesmen, the ragman and the scissor-grinder – the Enquirer [2 June 1895] gives the backstory:

“There is a hot-waffle man who used to have a distinctive cry, but he tried to construct one more bloodcurdling than any in the city, injuring his voice so that he had to exchange it for a brass horn on which he executes the old-time stage call. What it has to do with waffles is hard to tell, but it wakes people up and arouses their curiosity sufficiently to make them run to the windows to find out what has broken loose.”

For many years, the hot-waffle man was associated not so much with breakfast as with cold weather. The going rate was a nickel for four waffles, and an enterprising hot-waffle man could serve a lot of pastries. The Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette [27 January 1889] interviewed a local purveyor, who said:

“I sell about a tousan’ waffles a day but on cold days I sell fifteen hundred, maybe two tousan’. Rainy weather is bad for my business, but on a bright cold day I sell lots of waffles.”

Do the math and those nickels add up. A thousand waffles translates into 250 nickels or $12.50 a day, at a time when a lot of factory workers slaved away for ten dollars a week. The hot-waffle man admitted to the Commercial-Gazette that he made a decent living and, as proof, all his sons were in school. In other words, the boys didn’t have to drop out to support the family.

What would you get for your nickel? A waffle is, after all, a waffle. Or is it? From contemporary descriptions, it appears that the street waffles of yore were somewhat smaller than what we find today in our local diner. They were sometimes square rather than round and definitely thinner and crisper than modern specimens. The granddaughter of a Cincinnati hot-waffle man remembered her grandfather used to stand his waffles on edge to ensure they were crisp enough to suit the tastes of his regular customers. According to the old reports, toppings were limited to a dusting of powdered sugar, sometimes with a bit of cinnamon added. In practice, there might have been all sorts of unregistered ingredients. The Cincinnati Commercial [25 February 1880] described a busy hot-waffle man with far more detail than the reader’s appetite would prefer:

“The first street baker of waffles was not a very cleanly looking individual, and the fastidious might have objected to his greasing his waffle iron with a dirty looking rag tied to the end of a stick, and also to the fact that the ashes from his pipe would keep falling into his waffle batter; but the white sugar sprinkled from a tin dredge box over the surface of the well-browned waffle covered up a great deal of dirt, and his cookies went off like hot cakes, as they were.”

A dash of pipe ash might have been forgiven, but Cincinnati’s hot-waffle men were sometimes forced to contend with mischievous adulterants, as Gustave Schwind discovered to his dismay, according to the Cincinnati Post [12 September 1897]:

“A number of boys employed in a shoe factory on North Street, have been perpetrating practical jokes on G. Schwind, who operates a waffle wagon under the factory windows. While the dough is exposed in his waffle irons the jokers threw down into it from the sixth floor a handful of sharp tacks. These, though small enough to be overlooked in the dough, are still large enough to do much damage. The waffle dealer stated that he has complained to the police without relief.”

There were more than a few hot-waffle men in Cincinnati at the height of their popularity, with most servicing routes along the downtown streets lined with offices and factories. Latecomers were forced to take their waffle irons out into the suburbs, to eke out a somewhat slimmer business from schoolchildren and even households. They weren’t always welcome, as the Enquirer [2 June 1895] noted:

“[The hot-waffle man] has an uncomfortable delusion that daylight and waffles are due at the same time and wakes people up along the streets he frequents when they don’t want waffles and do want sleep. He is authority for the statement that he has never been shot at, which speaks well for the good nature of Cincinnatians.”

By 1928, it might have seemed that the days of the hot-waffle man had passed. The Cincinnati Post, in its “Do You Remember” series, recalled the hot-waffle man and his horn as if they had faded into history. And then, two years later, the Enquirer [9 August 1930] carried a squib suggesting he – or at least his horn – was still active:

“Well! Well! We saw ‘em both on Vine Street the other day, the hot-waffle man and his bugle, and a lady driving an ancient electric coupe.”

Twenty years on, and the hot-waffle man was definitely only a memory, kept alive by Julia Zimmerer of Madeira, who mailed an inquiry to Sara MacDuff Austin, women’s page editor of the Cincinnati Post. Mrs. Zimmerer [3 November 1949] inquired whether anyone had a recipe for the bygone tasty pastries proffered by the hot-waffle man from his cart in downtown Cincinnati around 1908. That simple request unleashed a flood of memories and mail for Editor Austin, who shared the correspondence for the next month in her weekly “Housekeeping” column. On 10 November 1949, she published the following recipe from Nellie Pangburn of Bethel, Ohio, who swore that this formula produced waffles exactly like those she remembered enjoying from the long-ago street vendor:

“Two eggs, 1 teaspoon sugar, ¼ teaspoon salt, 1 cup milk, 1 cup flour. Stir eggs well with fork, add sugar, then flour and milk. Beat until smooth. This will be very thin. To fry: Put the Rosette iron in the fat and get it hot as the fat heats. When hot dip the iron in batter just level with the top edge and fry. You can only fry one at a time, but it only takes a second if the fat is hot. Dust with powdered sugar. Makes about 40.”

By 1879, after less than a quarter-century of operation, Cincinnati boasted a substantial Public Library housing more than 100,000 books and 10,000 pamphlets. Still, it made national news when a donor gifted some 2,500 more books to the library. This generous patron was not a wealthy bibliophile, nor a scholar bequeathing his professional archive. No, the benefactor was a crippled newsboy named John King.

It must be explained that “newsboy” was the accepted term for any person who sold newspapers and magazines on the streets, regardless of age. John King, at the time of his substantial gift was, in fact, 39 years old.

According to the newspapers, King was born in Cass County, Michigan, just over the border from South Bend, Indiana. His family were farmers, and John intended to till the land as his ancestors had done, but for a tragic accident. The Cincinnati Commercial [3 June 1879] provided a detailed biography:

“At the age of seventeen a kick on the left thigh crippled him for life. For three years he hobbled around on crutches, when he was attacked by rheumatism, and his limbs so drawn up that he could get around only by crawling on his hands and knees. One day, while crawling about the room, he struck his right knee against a sharp object, which, with the help of a blundering surgical operation, stiffened the limb for life. Both legs were now useless, and for five years the poor boy was bedridden.”

While confined to bed, King developed a passion for reading. He read anything he could get his hands on, which, in rural Cass County was not much more than agricultural bulletins, the Bible and a variety of farmers’ almanacs. Useless on the farm, King sought work in Detroit and then moved to Cincinnati, where he found a job in the Spencer Brothers tobacco factory.

Within months, King faced a new challenge. He contracted smallpox and was admitted to the city’s pesthouse, an institution created to isolate contagious and incurable patients. Miraculously, he survived and was discharged after six months, finding work as a newsboy.

The newsboys of Cincinnati had organized a union for mutual protection and King was elected secretary of the organization, publishing extensive minutes of union meetings, usually containing some of his own editorial comments, in the local newspapers. For example, the minutes of an 1876 meeting, as published in the Cincinnati Star [9 September 1876], include this observation:

“As our Union is not incorporated, and from present appearances never will be, it has probably accomplished all that, in the nature of things, it can; and all that can be done in the future is to keep what has already been gained.”

As an officer of the newsboys union, King had occasion to visit many of the news vendors and booksellers throughout Cincinnati and he often discovered good bargains. Eventually, he accumulated a substantial library, packed up in boxes in a small rented room at the corner of Third Street and Sycamore.

While carefully building his library, King suffered two more calamities. An acquaintance, a blind man, induced King to invest in a broom-making machine, but the cost of materials and fierce competition left him $600 in debt. Then, the bank holding all of his savings collapsed in the “Long Depression” of the 1870s rendering him almost penniless.

A major fire nearby led King to worry about his precious books and he sent a letter to Thomas Vickers, director of the Cincinnati Library, offering 1,000 books to that institution so they would be kept safe. When library officials arrived at King’s modest little room, they found he had underestimated his collection, and that more than 2,500 volumes would be loaded onto the shelves of the then five-year-old Public Library building on Vine Street, south of Seventh. According to the Cincinnati Star [3 June 1879], King’s gift was eclectic:

“The collection consists of history and philosophy, some of the best specimens of ancient and modern literature, biography, legal and medical works, religious works, public documents, &c.”

The donation was reported by national media, notably Harper’s Weekly, which ran a substantial account on 9 August 1879. On reading about King’s generosity and poverty, people around the country sent money and checks to King, who turned these gifts over to the Cincinnati Children’s home.

A year after his famous gift, King married Nancy Rodgers, a very accomplished 23-year-old. Although Nancy was educated at Miami University, the death of her parents robbed her of financial security, and she was scraping by as a seamstress. Still, she loved to read and frequented the Public Library. One day, she was unable to find the second volume of a book she was reading. A librarian noted that the book was part of King’s donation and he might have retained the second volume. King had, and he gladly loaned it to Miss Rodgers. Within months they were married. King left the streets behind and opened a small newsstand and candy shop on Twelfth Street. Sadly, Nancy died from tuberculosis in 1883.

King closed up his shop and took a position as an assistant in the reading room of the Library. His health was never robust and, when he died in 1886, the coroner ruled that heart failure was the cause.

In death, King revealed that almost everything publicly reported about his life had been, if not an outright lie, substantially removed from reality. The revelation emerged with the delivery of his tombstone, paid for by the U.S. government to reward King for his military service. It turns out that King had served three years as a Union soldier during the Civil War, being regularly promoted and surviving several major battles when he was reportedly lying on his back in Michigan.

According to official U.S. military records, King enlisted with the 64th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment at Mansfield, Ohio, on 21 October 1861. He was promoted to corporal even before the regiment left training camp on 27 November 1861. He was promoted to sergeant a year later, in September 1862, and to First Sergeant shortly before he was mustered out at the end of his enlistment in 1864. Nothing in his military record mentions anything about disability or being wounded. His incapacitating injuries could only have occurred between the time of his discharge in 1864 and his arrival as a disabled person in Cincinnati in 1868, meaning he was somewhere between 24 and 28 when he was crippled, not a teenager.

Where did the story about teenage injuries come from? Why did the newspapers ignore King’s military service? Did they believe childhood injuries made a better story? Or did King intentionally not reveal that he had a successful career with a decorated Ohio regiment? Why did he cover up his Civil War years? Did he never apply for a pension?

Even the Cincinnati Post’s Leo Hirtl, who reminded readers about King’s generosity in a 1954 column, made no mention of King’s military service. Hirtl did check with the Public Library, however, to confirm that many of King’s donated books were still in circulation almost 80 years after they were unpacked at “Old Main.”

Cincinnati neighborhoods are rather obsessed with crosswalks these days, with a rash of raised crosswalk installation underway. Much of this activity has to do with “traffic calming” and pedestrian safety, especially along major thoroughfares.

Back in the day, before automobiles dominated Cincinnati’s streets, crosswalks served very different purposes. Crosswalks had everything to do with fashion, filth and sex.

Sex? Of course! Where but a crosswalk could a young blade sneak a peek at a lovely young maiden’s stockings? A fervid glance that would inspire flights of delirious extrapolation? Here is an example from the Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette [19 December 1891]:

“A single fleeting glimpse of a woman’s stocking caught as she steps from her carriage or gathers her petticoats up at a muddy cross-walk suffices the skilled student in stocking psychology to determine to what part of the country she belongs, in what phase of society she moves, and where she does her shopping.”

Women back then were almost required to gather their petticoats at crosswalks because these pedestrian pathways were originally installed not to protect humans from wheeled vehicles, but to protect their clothing from Cincinnati’s filthy streets. The Enquirer [14 December 1881] raged about the alluvial detritus clogging our byways:

“The awful condition of the Cincinnati streets was never more apparent than yesterday. The mud on every street, on every cross-walk, and from curb to building, was sticky, and slimy, and greasy. A new cloak or overcoat worn out yesterday for an hour was spattered by passing horses, spattered by pedestrians, and involuntarily spattered by the wearers themselves as they walked. As adhesive as glue, it is never thoroughly removed, and a muddy old garment becomes a greasy old garment at once. Street-cleaning in Cincinnati is a lost art. The Board of Public Works lost it.”

The atrocious mire oozing from Cincinnati streets had much to do with the materials employed to pave streets in the past. Today, it is rare to see anything other than an asphalt or concrete pavement. The few cobblestone or brick streets left in the city are minor tourist attractions. Before the automobile, Cincinnati’s streets could have been paved with dirt, crushed rock, granite, or even wood.

Yes, wood. A glance through old newspapers easily uncovers hundreds of references to “Nicolson pavement” which means wood blocks pounded into the ground and protected by a thick coating of creosote, tar or oil. No sane person would waddle through such a morass – even when covered by a layer of oil-absorbing sand – so Nicolson pavements went hand-in-hand with gravel crosswalks, offering pedestrians a rubbly but dry pathway through the oil slick.

Despite the cost of installation and continual maintenance, Cincinnati employed Nicolson wooden pavements well into the 1900s. A 1916 publication of the Brooklyn Engineers Club described the drawbacks of Cincinnati’s then-new wooden streets “bleeding” oil:

“Numerous photographs were taken by the Bureau of Municipal Research in Cincinnati of pavements laid with blocks impregnated with this oil and they illustrate most accurately the frightful bleeding that took place. The writer saw Rose Hill and Beechwood Avenue shortly after they were laid with blocks treated with this oil. The surface of the pavement had about an inch of sand saturated with the preservative oil which had oozed from the blocks.”

Confronted with such impassable pavements, crosswalks were in demand to protect pedestrians and their fashionable attire from Cincinnati’s muddy, oily and dusty roadways. As far back as 1867, citizens demanded crosswalks near key attractions, as indicated by this letter [23 July 1867] to the Enquirer:

“Messrs. Editors, Will you be so kind as to ask the City Commissioners to place a double crosswalk from the two corners of Laurel street toward the gate of Lincoln Park? Please say that when the ladies are attired for an evening promenade they are much inconvenienced by the rough travel, dust and mud. By obliging, they will receive the thanks of both ladies and little ones.”

Even then, with automobiles far in the future, Cincinnati’s pedestrians had to contend with inconsiderate drivers of horse-drawn vehicles. Traffic jams and vehicles blocking crosswalks are not a new development. The Enquirer [25 December 1881] provides the proof:

“Pedestrians were at the mercy of reckless drivers in Cincinnati yesterday. There was not a cross-walk on any of the public thoroughfares that was not monopolized by vehicles in procession. So closely were they wedged together that people in a hurry to complete their preparations for Christmas were compelled to wait five or ten minutes till a procession of a dozen wagons, buggies and drays could pass by. If perchance there appeared a space as big as a man’s hand between the rear of one vehicle and the nose of the horse following, ladies, with skirts in hand, would fly over the cross-walk in peril of being crushed by other vehicles hurrying up to close the brief gap.”

As the automobile arrived to dominate the streets, crosswalks took on a very different role, becoming (at least on paper) safe zones for pedestrians. The United States Post Office even got involved with the Assistant Postmaster General, as reported in a special dispatch to the Enquirer [25 February 1923], insisting that “good continuous sidewalks and crosswalks” were mandatory if city residents expected mail delivery to continue.

As early as 1916, the transformation was in place. Crosswalks no longer involved fashion or lust. They had become a refuge from the mechanical monsters rumbling down our once-peaceful streets. And also, according to an editorial in the Cincinnati Post [19 January 1916] a lesson in moral hypocrisy:

“We tell others not to cross streets except on cross-walks, but often we cross streets in the middle of a square, and without taking the precaution of looking to the right or left.”

The Cincinnati Automobile Club papered the city with billboards in 1921 essentially blaming pedestrians for getting hit by automobiles because they crossed the street away from the crosswalk. Although crosswalks were intended as safe zones for pedestrians, it made news [Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune 14 June 1925] when a motorist actually stopped as required to allow a woman with a young child to cross Vine Street at a designated crosswalk.

Over the course of the spring and summer of 1866, a Cincinnati photographer named John Wildman Winder climbed to some of the highest elevations around the Queen City and created three breathtaking panoramas, preserving a record of our city as it existed in a long-lost age.

Unlike the far more famous daguerreotype panorama by Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter, documented to have been photographed on September 24, 1848, we do not know precisely when Winder exposed his images. We know the earliest possible date is March 25, because there is a huge gap in the skyline where Pike’s Opera House once stood. That venerable edifice burned on March 24. We may assume he finished the series around August 15, 1866, because the Library of Congress assigned a copyright to one of the panoramas on that date. In each of the panoramas, the Roebling Suspension Bridge, which did not open until later that year, appears near completion, but lacks its essential deck and roadbed.

Since we don’t know the exact order in which Winder captured his images, labelling them in order is entirely arbitrary. Let us begin with the images collected from atop the Suspension Bridge itself. The four albumen prints that constitute this panorama are preserved at the Library of Congress.

To create this spectacular series, Winder positioned his camera on the summit of the south tower of the bridge. From that vantage point, he made four images encompassing the entire riverfront from the Gas Works at the foot of Rose Street in the West End to the Water Works at the base of Mount Adams. Far in the distance to the east, we can see the hillsides of Mount Lookout and Columbia-Tusculum, with Bellevue, Kentucky peeking in from the other shore. To the west, we see Ludlow, Kentucky, with Price Hill in the background.

Looking due north, to the west of the bridge, we see the foot of Vine Street and to the east of the bridge we get a good view up Walnut Street. There we identify the College Building, home to the Mercantile Library. On the Vine Street side, what appears to be another church steeple is, in fact, the city’s fire tower. Installed on the roof of the old Ohio Mechanics Institute on the corner of Sixth and Vine, Cincinnati’s relatively new professional fire department kept watch from this tower and assigned steam fire engines to respond by lighting color-coded lamps on the pole above the tower, while ringing the fire bell. To the west of Vine Street, we see some familiar spires that are still around today – St. Peter In Chains Cathedral and the Isaac M. Wise Temple. Their present-day neighbor, today’s City Hall, had not yet been constructed. Each of the four albumen prints is approximately 10 inches tall and 15 inches wide. Stitched together, the whole panorama is about five feet in width.

Almost simultaneously with the bridge panorama, Winder climbed up on the roof of Mozart Hall, located on Vine Street just south of Sixth and created another panorama by swiveling his camera a full 360 degrees to take in the totality of Cincinnati at that time. Writing in the Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin [October 1967], Walter S. Glaser summarized the comprehensive nature of the 10 images that comprise this encompassing view:

“The panorama shows the entire Cincinnati basin and surrounding hilltops; eastward across Deer Creek to Mt. Adams, southward across the Ohio River to Covington and Newport, westward across the Mill Creek Valley to Price Hill, and northward across the Miami and Erie Canal to the Vine Street Hill and Mt. Auburn. Indeed, the field of the panorama includes over half of the entire corporate area of the city and most of the places where Cincinnatians lived, worked, and carried out their daily affairs a century ago.”

According to Glaser, The Cincinnati Historical Society displayed a 30-foot-long enlargement of all 10 panels of this panorama at the opening of Cincinnati’s Convention and Exposition Center in 1967.

Among the ten constituent images, we can see Mount Adams, the African-American enclave known as Bucktown and the East End with Kentucky behind. Looking southward down Vine Street, we see the nearly completed Suspension Bridge. Turning clockwise westward, we see the densely packed West End, the spires of St. Peter’s and the Wise Temple (which was not formally dedicated until November of that year) and the imposing Sixth Street Market.

Winder’s third panorama of 1866, also preserved at the Library of Congress, involves seven albumen prints, each 9 inches high, of varying widths totaling 96.5 inches, or just over eight feet in width. The images were copyrighted on 23 July 1866 and were already on display at Winder’s gallery that week. The Cincinnati Gazette [21 July 1866] describes the series:

“We saw, yesterday, at the photographic gallery of J.W. Winder & Co., a photographic view of Cincinnati and Covington taken from a point on the Kentucky side, opposite the Gas Works. It was taken in sections, but so well joined as to form one complete picture eight feet long. The sweep of the river is well shown, the suspension bridge appearing as an airy cobweb, while many of the prominent buildings in the city can be distinctly seen.”

Photographer Winder was not a Cincinnati native. He was born in 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio, to a somewhat prominent Quaker family. He relocated to Cincinnati by 1855, setting up shop as a daguerreotypist at various studios around the city. Soon after arrival, Winder married Martha Adams and they had two sons, Lewis and Albert.

Photography was a relatively new technology at that time, having been invented just 15 years earlier in France. Winder advertised his studios with appropriately fanciful names such as “Winder’s Sky Light Gallery” and later the “National Art Palace.”

In addition to his trio of remarkable 1866 panoramas, Winder is the unsung documenter of the early days of Spring Grove Cemetery. Many of the iconic views of the cemetery prior to 1873 are his work, especially the stereoscopic cards prized by collectors. Early in his Cincinnati career, Winder had a contract with the city to photograph criminals for the police department.

Although he was an exceptional artist, Winder seemed to lack business savvy. He had to relocate his studio frequently, apparently for nonpayment of rent. He was also a tad absent-minded. On one occasion, the Enquirer reported that someone stole Winder’s camera while he was photographing Spring Grove Cemetery but, three days later, Winder placed a classified advertisement in the same paper, asking for help finding the camera he had lost. During the Civil War, he paid a substitute to enlist in his place when he was drafted, perhaps a reflection of his Quaker upbringing. Winder left Cincinnati and spent the rest of his life in the South, where he took up beekeeping and honey production. He died in New Orleans in 1900 at the age of 71.

With temperatures near freezing one hundred years ago, Elsie Hirth, aged 51, and her daughter Antoinette, 37, drove all night from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Cincinnati in search of a lost pet. In those days before interstate highways, when even federal routes outside cities were iffy, what domestic creature inspired such an arduous odyssey? No, it was not a pampered feline nor a prize-show pooch. Elsie and Antoinette sped through the darkness to Cincinnati in search of a Baltimore oriole they had named Hansi.

This was no wild goose – er, oriole – chase. Fred Biehl, a farmer in Bridgetown, had discovered an oriole on his property the day before. As a bona fide resident of the Western Hills, Fred tried to shoot the feathered intruder. Good thing he missed, because neighbors directed Fred to an article in the newspaper through which he learned that a man in Grand Rapids was offering a $1,000 reward for the safe return of his family’s wayward oriole. Based on the advertisement, this was no ordinary oriole.

“If you should see this bird hold out your hand so it will light on the top of your hand. Do not try to grasp it, as it will dodge and fly away.”

Fred Biehl, dollar signs before his eyes, fired off a telegram to the Michigander: “Your oriole found. Wire disposition.” The recipient of Fred’s telegram, by coincidence, was another Fred – Fred H. Hirth, in particular – proprietor of a stone-cutting business located along the banks of the Grand River. Mr. Hirth immediately wired back four telegrams of his own, providing detailed instructions on how to care for the bird if it was, in fact, Hansi. Those instructions probably involved firing up the radio. Hansi apparently enjoyed the musical broadcasts. The Flint, Michigan, Journal [17 December 1925] quoted Hirth at length about Hansi’s winning personality:

“The Baltimore oriole is the shyest of birds, but Hansi was different. When he was here, even if the house was empty, the house was full. He was the lovingest, most cheerful thing that ever lived. We never kept him in a cage, for we wanted him free to come to us when we were lonesome. He came to everyone – all they needed to do was to hold out their hand and call ‘Come, Hansi.’”

Mr. Hirth was, if not exactly wealthy, certainly more than merely comfortable. His offer of $1,000 in 1925 would be equivalent to more than $18,000 today. That kind of cash inspired a lot of amateurs to develop a sudden passion for ornithology and eager bounty hunters telegraphed the Hirth family with reports that turned out to be pigeons, robins and a dozen other non-oriole representatives of the avian family. The volume of mail and telegrams – most from cranks or gold-diggers – was so overwhelming, Mr. Hirth reduced his reward to $100 to discourage the greedier correspondents.

There is no question that Fred Hirth was a generous guy. When a local radio station broadcast his offer of a reward for the return of Hansi, Hirth sent them a check for $25 to cover the cost of airtime. The station donated that contribution to the local Audubon Society chapter. On hearing that some miscreant had shot a robin, Hirth posted a $10 reward for the identification and arrest of the perpetrator. When one reward-seeker, ignoring Mr. Hirth’s requirement that Hansi be returned alive, shipped a dead oriole, Mr. Hirth paid to have a taxidermist preserve it in a lifelike arrangement in memory of his lost Hansi.

Among the pile of letters claiming to have found Hansi, there were accusations of animal cruelty. What were the Hirths doing with a wild, migratory bird? Aren’t there laws against such things? There are, and there were. In fact, while news of the Hirths’ escaped oriole made headlines across the country, the Boston Transcript editorially disparaged the State of Michigan for allowing songbirds to be imprisoned without penalty. The Grand Rapids Press [21 December 1925] rose to the defense of its subscriber:

“Hansi was not caged. He was a deserted baby oriole left alone in the nest after all the family had flown south. He was sheltered and raised with the Hirth family, given ample opportunity to leave them in summer and proved there are exceptions to every rule by preferring domestic life.”

Because Hansi flew away from home in December, the Hirths were convinced that Mr. Biehl must have located their bird. Orioles migrate to the Carribean at the end of summer and so, the Hirths reasoned, the only oriole still in the Midwest in December must be Hansi

However, after their long nocturnal drive, Elsie and Antoinette found nothing but disappointment. Farmer Biehl, to save the women a long drive out to his home in the wilds of the Western Hills, directed them to the Hotel Sinton downtown, where he waited until midnight. When they did not arrive by then, he retired to his farm.

The two arrived at the hotel after 2:00 a.m. and early next morning discovered that the bird rescued by Farmer Biehl, although it was indeed an oriole, was not Hansi. According to the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [18 December 1925]:

“’It isn’t Hansi,’ Mrs. Hirth said, after one look. ‘It is an oriole, but much bigger than ours and of a different color.’ They turned sorrowfully away and began their tiresome journey back to Grand Rapids, still weeping for ‘Hansi’.”

Within hours after the Hirths’ departure, the oriole that was not Hansi died at the Biehls’ homestead. According to the Commercial Tribune, the Biehl bird was buried on their property under a carefully chosen stone. One wonders if that stone might still be there. Most of the former Biehl farm is now a subdivision constructed along Biehl Avenue.

For the Western Hills Press, the year-old newspaper created to promote development of the West Side, the whole affair was hot stuff. Under a breathless headline (“Eyes Of The Nation Focused on Western Hills for a Few Days”), the paper related the gist of the Hirths’ quest and concluded:

“The Biehls have only the excitement and unusualness of the incident to remind them of a hectic forty-eight hours; but the whole country knows, through the Associated Press and the newspapers, the story of Hansi and of the strange bird that for a short period found haven at the Biehl home before its bird soul winged its way to the bird heaven. And the Western Hills came in for no end of national publicity.”

Hansi was, alas, never seen again. News reports about potential sightings continued for much of the next year, but none ever resulted in a happy reunion.

One hundred years ago, a mere century into the past, Cincinnatians awoke not only to a new year, but to the dawning of a new city. The City Directory for that year encapsulated the change succinctly:

“With the advent of 1926, Cincinnati’s new Council-City Manager form of government became effective on the assumption by the new members of Council of the offices to which they had been elected in November 1925. At the same time, the City Manager, appointed by Council, Colonel Clarence O. Sherrill, became the city’s executive head.”

Gone were the last rotten vestiges of Boss Cox’s graft-fueled political machine. Gone were the bribes and corruption. Gone the patronage jobs offered only to the faithful minions of the Cox machine. Within a decade, Cincinnati would gain renown as the best governed city in America. Vice that flourished under the Cox administration was banished (mostly) from the city, much of it slithering across the river, transferring to Newport a reputation once stained the Queen City. The 1926 City Directory noted changes already underway:

“Determined efforts are being made, with good success, to stamp out gambling of every kind. The city is assured that a continued effort will be waged to eradicate these evils, and already the situation is vastly improved. Pool-rooms are sharing in the blows directed against evil and evil environment.”

The Cincinnati Post’s Al Segal, the conscience of the city under his “Cincinnatus” byline, noted that some of Cincinnati’s problems were caused by national trends, not just local corruption. Segal [2 January 1926] observed there were 77 murders in Cincinnati during 1925, with 90 percent of them directly related to Prohibition and the sale of illicit hootch. Just three years earlier, Segal reported, Cincinnati suffered only 23 murders.

Although Boss Cox and his cronies were electorally retired, the city continued to suffer from years of neglect due to shady contractors favored by the Cox machine and from shoddy work overlooked because of bribes and kickbacks. As the City Directory complained:

“January 1926, the highways of the city were in a deplorable condition and cried aloud for repairs. Lack of care and funds to repair such conditions had not been forthcoming. Management and the allotment of funds for specific repairs needed readjusting before order could come out of chaotic conditions.”

The City Directory anticipated a much brighter transportation future once the Cincinnati Subway, then known as the “rapid transit loop,” was completed:

“The rapid transit loop, belting the city and calculated to co-ordinate and speed up the city’s car system, nears completion after many years of labor and the expenditure of more than as many millions of money. It is believed that the basin of the city will thus be relieved of residential congestion and that the general health of the city will be, by reason of an exodus to the hill-tops, much higher than at present.”

Unbeknownst to the editors of the City Directory, that brand-new, squeaky-clean city government was even then plotting to shut down the rapid transit loop, concerned that its success might lead voters to think that Cox’s machine, who initiated that project, might not have been that bad. Rumors about cost overruns and flawed design, all spurious, were concocted in the back rooms of city hall.

The 1926 City Directory spilled a lot of ink bragging about Cincinnati’s other major transportation modes – railroads and river – while not, apparently recognizing the tectonic shifts approaching. Touted as a social service, and not as the harbinger of the next stage of urban evolution, the City Directory gave the automobile club a little pat on the head:

“The Cincinnati Automobile Club is by far the largest civic organization in the great Ohio Valley, and the fifth largest club of its kind in the world, bringing to Cincinnati international fame for the building of such an organization devoted to the betterment of motoring. With more than 20,000 members, the Cincinnati Automobile Club, affiliated with the Northern Kentucky Automobile Association branch of this club, renders a service to members throughout the entire Ohio Valley, from the point where the broad Ohio River cuts the Indiana fine, along its entire course until it reaches across into Pennsylvania. Service stations, giving emergency road service at any hour of the day or night, have been located in several hundred cities.”

The Post’s Segal was sure to point out the dark side of the automotive trend, reminding his readers that automobiles killed 130 Cincinnatians during the previous year.

The City Directory spared not a word on the plans to build the magnificent Union Terminal, whose project manager, Henry M. Waite, during the Terminal’s 1933 opening ceremonies, was quoted as saying:

“We will have visitors from all parts of the country to view this station, and I hope it is not too much to wish that they would come by train. I presume, however, they will use their automobiles.”

It goes without saying that the City Directory made nary a mention of airplanes or air travel.

Some other tidbits from the 1926 City Directory:

• Cincinnati’s population was estimated at around 411,000. Today’s estimated population is 315,000.
• The metropolitan area population was estimated at 650,000. Today’s estimate is 2.3 million.
• Although Cincinnati had combined major street railway lines in 1923 to consolidate streetcar operations, the Cincinnati Street Railway Company hadn’t accepted buses as a viable option yet, so 11 independent bus companies competed in the Queen City.
• Cincinnati was still a major industrial city, with more than 3,000 factories making soap, clothing, foundry and machine-shop products, radios, woodworking machinery, as well as firms devoted to meat packing and slaughtering, printing and publishing, boots and shoes.
• In a city of 411,000 people and a metro area of 650,000, the entire Cincinnati Bell system totaled just 170,000 telephones. The shrinking number of telephoneless people were nicknamed “notels.”
• Cincinnati was the third-busiest convention city in the United States with two major couture expositions that year: the Spring Fashion Show at the Hotel Gibson Roof Garden and Fall Fashion Pageant at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden.
• The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra presented twenty pairs of concerts each year at Emery Auditorium on Friday afternoons at 2:30 p.m. and Saturday evenings at 8:15 p.m. Music Hall was used only for Pop concerts at 3:00 p.m. on Sundays.
• The Cincinnati Art Museum was free to all on weekends, but cost 25 cents on weekdays, except Thursdays, when admission was just 10 cents.
• It was fairly common, during the dry season, for the Ohio River level to drop as low as 9 feet in depth, stifling river traffic.

What’s on your gift list this year? If you were a young lady (or, rarely, a young man) in Cincinnati from the 1860s to the mid-1880s, your wish list might have included rare or fancy buttons because you would have been busy assembling a “charm string.” The ancestor of today’s charm bracelets, the venerable charm string is all but forgotten these days but was once ubiquitous and could – even today – be quite valuable. The Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune [25 August 1907] remembered charm strings as an activity from “thirty and forty years ago”:

“Some of the older folk remember the charm string. They remember how they used to be begging buttons of all their friends and how they importuned the shopkeepers to give them the odd buttons, for there could be no two buttons alike on the charm-string, which was simply a long string of buttons of great variety. There was a good deal of rivalry as to who should have the greatest number of buttons on his or her string, but just why it was called a charm-string is beyond my knowledge.”

If the Commercial-Tribune’s writer had visited the library and reviewed some of the more obscure ethnographic literature of the time, they might have discovered a clue. It seems that anthropologists studying the indigenous peoples of North America observed among several tribes the custom of stringing objects imbued with magical potency onto a leather thong. The ethnologists called these talismans “charm strings.”

The magic a button collector sought was far more domestic. As legend had it, if a young woman collected 999 unique buttons on her charm string, the 1,000th would be added by her fiancée. According to Bernardine Rathmell, quoted in the Cincinnati Times-Star [28 November 1940], that legend had been passed along for decades:

“Old ladies have told me how belles of the 1880s used to string 999 buttons on a ‘charm string,’ then wait for the right man to supply the thousandth.”

(Curiously, there was an alternate legend that, if a woman achieved a charm string of 1,000 buttons, she would be condemned to spinsterhood for all her days.)

Throughout their heyday, charm strings were the focus of parties in which young ladies exchanged buttons and regaled their friends and relatives with stories associated with each one. The informal rules dictated it was prohibited to purchase buttons. Each exclusive button could be acquired only through exchange with other collectors or as a gift from suitors, friends or family. The gift of a button was considered lucky and the activity of stringing of the buttons amplified the good luck. Button collectors did not squirrel their charm strings away but displayed them prominently in the family parlor both to brag about their hoard and to advertise that contributions were welcome. Exceptional charm strings could earn ribbons at the Ohio and Indiana state fairs throughout the 1860s and 1870s.

It wasn’t long before “charm string” became a metaphor for any list of accomplishments. When a young woman in Covington announced her engagement, the Cincinnati Enquirer [18 October 1891] suggested that her personal charm string involved something other than buttons:

“The wedding of Miss Retta Boyd, of Covington, and Mr. Russell C. Johnson takes place November 11. Miss Boyd is a great favorite in society, not only in Covington, but in Cincinnati and suburbs. Any number of hearts have been wrecked with her beauty and hang captured on her charm string.”

And that metaphor wasted no time wandering onto the sports pages. By the 1890s, the assembly of button-laden charm strings had become passé, but reference to that erstwhile pastime served to brighten many a baseball lede, as demonstrated by the Cincinnati Times-Star [22 September 1894]:

“Thus far Cincinnati has the Louisville, Washington and St. Louis series on its charm string, while Chicago has broken even.”

While the fashion for charm strings waned, interest in unusual specimens persisted. In 1888, Kohl & Middleton’s Dime Museum, a sort of long-running freak show at the corner of Sixth and Vine streets, featured Bully the Wizard (real name possibly Calvin Morris) who had, over many years, assembled a charm string measuring 208 feet long, incorporating some 20,000 buttons.

It appears, as charm strings faded in popularity, the initial button focus diversified to include a variety of objects, with almost anything fair game so long as it offered a hole through which to string it. A writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer [9 November 1949] found one such miscellaneous string in one of the local antique shops:

“I was wandering about in an antique shop a few years ago and noticed a long loop of buttons, beads, coins and other trinkets hanging from a spinning wheel. The fine old lady running the shop willingly answered my questions as to what it was. She told me that years ago many people collected small articles, strung them and hung them up as charm strings.”

By that time, authentic charm strings were rare and mysterious because so many had been cut apart and redistributed, or lost, or eaten by a cow. Really. The Enquirer [26 July 1887] reported the good luck of Peter Funk, a local butcher, who found a gold coin worth $2.50 in the stomach of a cow he had just butchered. Because the coin had a hole punched in it, and because that cow’s stomach also yielded a small pile of miscellaneous relics, Mr. Funk believed he must have discovered the remains of a charm string that had slipped off into a slop bucket and slurped up by the cow.

It is no surprise the Enquirer writer found a surviving charm string in an antique shop. The classified advertisement pages frequently displayed pleas for old charm strings. In some cases, dealers sought entire assemblages, still hanging from their original strings. In other cases, the strings held buttons worth a lot of money to button collectors. Here’s a typical advertisement from the Enquirer [9 October 1953]:

“Have you an old button charm string? Why not turn it into Christmas cash? Excellent prices paid for the right kind.”

The Cincinnati chapter of the Early American Glass Club hosted Professor George E. Gould of Purdue University at one of its meetings. Dr. Gould was, by trade, an entomologist known for his dazzling photographs of insects, but he was also a dedicated buttoner who employed the same photographic techniques to illustrate his lectures on buttons. His talk, according to the Enquirer [16 April 1953] featured a variety of buttons:

“The ‘Charm String Buttons,’ so popular some 75 years ago, will be shown in color radiated, dewdrop and glory specimens.”

Remember the old game: “Button, button, who’s got the button?” Allegedly, that game emerged at charm string parties, back in the day.