Cincinnati Curiosities

Casimir Werk, grandson of the millionaire soap maker and vintner for whom Werk Road is named, saw a UFO one balmy Sunday evening in 1905. The unidentified flying object was soon revealed as an identified flying object but yielded an even bigger mystery.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer [28 August 1905] Werk watched an unidentified object he believed might be an airship explode while it flew westward on the previous evening:

“Mr. Werk was standing in front of his parents’ home on La Feuille avenue, Westwood, about 6 o’clock, when he saw a peculiar formation in the sky. He secured field glasses and soon had them focused upon the object which he believes to have been an airship. He claims it was about 100 feet long and shaped like a projectile.”

While following the flying object with his binoculars, Werk watched it rock up and down like a ship tossed by waves in the ocean. It then burst into flame, the entire structure consumed, and fell from the sky, lost in the evening haze. The Enquirer was unable to locate anyone else who saw the thing, nor anyone who found any wreckage:

“The police knew nothing of the doings up above the sky line of Cincinnati, nor did the Coroner receive any report of the mangled remains of an airship operator being found within the limits of the county.”

Apparently, neither Werk nor the Enquirer reporter had read the previous Wednesday’s Cincinnati Post [23 August 1905], containing a lengthy feature about a teenage boy in Camp Washington and his attempts to build an airship capable of carrying passengers.

“Undaunted by poverty, working alone on a principle he believes will ultimately succeed, even beyond his fondest dreams; toiling only in spare hours, because he had to earn a living, James Herbert, scarcely more than 18, of 3067 Colerain-av., is building an airship, which he thinks will fly.”

The Post described how young Herbert constructed large balloons out of paper, filled them with air heated by a paraffin-fueled burner, and directed their flight by a spring-powered propeller.

On Sunday, the very day Werk saw his mystery airship, the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [27 August 1905] published its own profile of young James Herbert and claimed the young inventor was inspired by a contest sponsored by the newspaper:

“James started in several years ago when a children’s contest was on in The Commercial Tribune and his drawing of an airship model and ideas of the same were accepted by The Commercial Tribune and printed with his photo.”

Herbert, according to this report, had already launched several airship models of rather impressive size:

“A few days ago one twenty feet long and seven feet in diameter was sent up from an empty lot near Herbert’s home. Its weight was fifteen pounds, and its lifting power an additional fifteen pounds. It came to earth near a large building in Lick Run, the gas having given out. It was made of heavy tissue paper.”

A Camp Washington resident informed the Enquirer [29 August 1905] that Werk’s mystery airship was among the experimental flights of young Herbert. The Cincinnati Times-Star [29 August 1905] calmed a very much relieved Werk by proving he had not been hallucinating:

“‘That’s exactly it,’ said Casimir Werk, jun., of Westwood, when the airship he saw Sunday evening was described to him Tuesday by a Times-Star reporter. ‘Yes, sir, that is just what I saw Sunday evening. No, I have not heard from young Herbert, the inventor. I never heard of him before.’”

The Times-Star interviewed James Herbert’s father, who expressed a frustrated resignation about his son’s aeronautical obsession:

“‘I’m down on this airship business. I don’t take any stock in it and pay little attention to this thing of trying to fly around in the air like birds.’ Such is the opinion of George Herbert, father of Jas. Herbert, the Colerain avenue lad who is bent on building a craft with which to navigate the upper air.”

The Enquirer chided the skeptics who refused to believe Casimir Werk:

“Those who saw fit to twit Mr. Werk yesterday for having seen what they did not will now have to back water.”

With that, James Herbert, boy inventor, fades from the annals of history. Only one additional newspaper story, printed in the Enquirer [2 September 1905], references James Herbert’s airships, but doesn’t mention him by name, identifying him only as “the young Cumminsville inventor.” That story describes two bright lights floating high above League Park – later to be rebuilt as Crosley Field – at 7:30 p.m., either remaining quite steady or traveling against a “stiff breeze.” Among the witnesses was Cincinnati Police Lieutenant John W. Scahill, who asserted that the lights were attached to a controlled aircraft and not to a kite or balloon. (The Reds were in Chicago that day, losing 3-2.)

Here is the mystery: There is no record of a James Herbert living on Colerain Avenue anywhere near this time. The censuses of 1900 and 1910 record no one by that name at all. None of the city directories from that time list a James Herbert on or near Colerain Avenue. The census and city directories do record several George Herberts, but none of them live on Colerain Avenue and none have a son named James. Additionally, the Sanborn Insurance Map for 1904 shows 3067 Colerain as a vacant lot.

The Commercial Tribune claims that James Herbert got his start in aircraft design by entering a children’s contest “seven years ago” with his portrait and a picture of an airship printed in the newspaper. In fact, the Commercial Tribune did sponsor a contest, “What Is Your Idea Of A Successful Flying Machine?”, in April 1899, six years previous. The winning entries were published on April 16 and April 23, with occasional late entries appearing later in the year. None were submitted by anyone named James Herbert.

It’s unlikely the newspapers got James Herbert’s name wrong. Miraculously, for that time, three newspapers spelled his name identically. Two newspapers cited the same address. The mystery deepens. Whatever became of Cincinnati’s airship inventor, James Herbert?

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1897, H.G. Wells published his ground-breaking science-fiction novel, “War of the Worlds,” in serial form, over several issues of Cosmopolitan magazine. Simultaneously, the United States reported hundreds of UFO sightings, with dozens of witnesses in Cincinnati alone. Coincidence?

They didn’t call the mysterious aerial objects UFOs in those days, of course. They called them airships. To be precise – despite sightings occurring in widely dispersed locations at the same time – they called it “The Airship” in the apparent belief that it was one swiftly moving aircraft. Sometimes they blamed Martians. The Washington Times-Herald [14 April 1897] opined:

“The mysterious and awful airship has been seen careering in its mad course over Omaha. There are fears that it may contain a reconnoitering party from the planet Mars.”

Maybe they were reading Mr. Wells’ new novel. The Memphis Commercial Appeal [19 April 1897] pooh-poohed this idea based on the obvious fact that the possibility of interplanetary travel was ridiculous:

“The airship seems to be an accomplished fact, and the question is Where is it from, and how is it constructed? Conceding that the inhabitants of Mars or some nearer planet have succeeded in overcoming the force of gravitation, it is impossible that human life could be sustained while making the voyage to the earth.”

This belief seems not to have dissuaded Mr. Wells, who published his Cosmopolitan serial in book form the next year, to great acclaim.

For a month or more, as airship sightings transfixed Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois and Tennessee, Cincinnatians saw nothing floating through our muggy atmosphere. The Cincinnati Post [17 April 1897] thought the airship might be avoiding the big telescopes at the Cincinnati Observatory:

“The managers of The Airship have manifested a spirit of indifference toward Cincinnati, which is duly appreciated. We have one of the five large telescopes of the country here, at Mt. Lookout, and with it would soon puncture the bauble reputation of the mysterious aeronauts.”

John J. Noonan, manager of the Ludlow Lagoon amusement park, smelled dollars to be had. Noonan sent a representative to Illinois to locate the airship’s owner and offer “any amount of money” so The Airship would soar about the Lagoon by opening day on May 2. The Cincinnati Times-Star [19 April 1897] reported:

“If there is such a thing as a real airship, Manager Noonan of the lagoon will have it here in time for the opening of his pretty summer resort.”

As April ended and the month of May dawned, the airship at last appeared over the Queen City, usually in the wee hours, with no indication of owner, inventor or pilot. The Cincinnati Enquirer [5 May 1897] reported a mass sighting:

“A number of people on Garfield place saw the airship last night about 9 o’clock and are willing to make affidavit that they have sighted the mysterious navigator that has been creating so much excitement over the country.”

One observer that night, Dr. Louis Domhoff, said the airship was egg-shaped, red in color, and emitted beams of light. A retired businessman named William Thompson concurred that it was egg-shaped and looked like “an egg flying flat.”

Cincinnati Police Officer John Ringer told the Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune [29 April 1897] that he saw the airship pass right over the city:

“I was standing at the corner of Eighth and Walnut streets at 10 o’clock, when my attention was called to a string of lights moving across the sky. I could see one large light in front, like the headlight of an engine, only much smaller, while behind this was a long row of little lights not much bigger than stars, and one right behind the other.”

The next day, the Commercial-Tribune reported that Philip Meagher, a bill-poster for the Cincinnati, Portsmouth & Virginia Railroad, saw the airship at the same time as Officer Ringer. The superintendent at the county infirmary claimed to have seen the airship, as did a retired businessman in Cumminsville, as did twenty members of a men’s club meeting at the Lion Brewery.

On May 9, the Commercial-Tribune announced that it had identified the airship’s inventor – a German immigrant living in Newport. He was too poor to afford a patent application, so he tested his invention only in the late-night darkness, in the presence of very few witnesses. The newspaper gave this second-hand description:

“The ship ascended so rapidly that it was only a few seconds until it was high in the air. A few moments more and it was speeding over Newport, over the river, over Cincinnati and out of sight. At first there was only a small light shining from the ship, but its general outlines could be distinguished for all that. After the altitude of about 200 feet had been reached two other lights were turned on, and as the ship passed over Cincinnati all who saw it agree to the reddish glare of its fairly large headlight.”

The identity of the Newport airship inventor was never revealed but, as it turns out, there was an authentic airship with a known pilot that year, cavorting above the grounds of the Tennessee Centennial Exhibition in Nashville. The pilot was Arthur Wallace Barnard, born in Massachusetts and more enthusiastic than knowledgeable, although he did not object when newspapers referred to him as “Professor Barnard.”

In late May and early June, Barnard only managed to loft his airship a handful of times from the Nashville exhibition grounds, in each case returning to earth in what might be termed controlled crashes, but his airship could fly and he could control its flight to a certain extent.

Barnard’s airship was a cigar-shaped gas bag filled with hydrogen, from which was suspended a bicycle that powered a flimsy sort of canvas propeller. As it later emerged, Professor Barnard had copied the design of a prior airship, known as the “Skycycle,” invented by a New Yorker named Carl Myers, who had been sailing bicycle-powered balloons since 1892 and had – two years previously – demonstrated his invention over the small town in Maine where “Professor” Barnard worked at the YMCA.

In fact, there were at that time quite a few very similar airships undergoing testing in the United States. Almost all of them involved a bag filled with lighter-than-air gas and almost all were powered by pedals or lightweight steam engines. All were decidedly short-range vehicles and couldn’t possibly have achieved the range or velocity of powerful airships reportedly whizzing throughout the country. Some newspaper editors, noting that airship sightings mostly occurred after last call at the saloons, suggested that hallucination might be involved. The Commercial-Tribune [18 April 1897] proposed a chronic condition:

“It is a remarkably dull month when the American public does not have an attack of some kind of mental fever. This month it is the airship, and pretty nearly every section of the Nation has succumbed to the disease.”

The Cincinnati Post [29 April 1897] editor commented with wry humor:

Exactly how many Belles of Tusculum were there?

Tusculum, of course, is the verdant hilltop overlooking the old town of Columbia in the eastern reaches of Cincinnati. At least two women acquired the title of “Belle of Tusculum” and it’s possible that a third beauty lurks in the annals of time.

We shall start with Anna Rebecca “Reba” Harcourt Long Elliott, born in 1875 to Sarah Ann Greenwald Harcourt and her husband, Doctor Thomas Jefferson Harcourt. The Harcourt and the Greenwald families were both conspicuous in society. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer [5 January 1900]:

“Miss Reba Harcourt was the Belle of Tusculum. Her mother was a prominent club woman and an official in most of the fashionable clubs of that portion of Cincinnati. Her daughter Reba was very beautiful and her admirers were legion. Her future was bright for her social victories were sweeping. The one who won her favor, however, was fated to be the one who would disappoint and pain her.”

According to the newspaper reports, one Walter Long, associated with a lumber company in El Paso, Texas, saw a photograph sent by Reba to his sister and was immediately smitten. His sister encouraged Walter to correspond with her friend. For three months, many letters flew back and forth. Eventually, Walter traveled to Cincinnati where, despite the anxieties of her parents, Reba and Walter were engaged.

The couple was joined in matrimony on February 15, 1899, at the home of the bride’s parents. Reba wore white organdie. Her brother stood in as Walter’s best man. The newlyweds relocated to El Paso. By December, Walter had deserted Reba. According to the Enquirer [5 January 1900]:

“For several days, she brooded over her troubles, saying nothing to anybody about the matter. In the meanwhile she discovered that Mrs. R.G. Perry, alias Mrs. Robert T. Stillman, who boarded at the same house, was the cause of the abandonment.”

Reba’s father rushed to El Paso and enlisted two attorneys who filed suit against Mrs. Perry, known as Gusta (short for Augusta), charging her with alienating Walter’s affections. The El Paso Herald [28 December 1899] claimed this was the first case of its kind filed in the county. According to the suit, Reba alleged that Gusta Perry induced Walter to abandon her. Gusta was employed as a housekeeper by Walter’s father. Previously, she had served as governess for Walter and his sister. Hints that Walter and Gusta had an “improper” relationship were whispered through the El Paso rumor mills.

Matters escalated when Gusta, in the sight of witnesses, assaulted Reba on the street and showered her with verbal abuse. Reba filed another lawsuit seeking damages from that incident. Gusta filed her own lawsuit, alleging that Reba had circulated anonymous letters besmirching Gusta’s character and good name.

The citizens of El Paso gobbled up all the delicious details of these trials but both eventually resulted in acquittals. Throughout her trial, Reba seems to have won the affection of many El Paso residents, following her acquittal, the El Paso Herald [8 March 1901] reported:

“Last evening Mrs. Long was the recipient of many floral offerings from friends and neighbors and at 8 o’clock an orchestra was taken to her house and she was given a serenade.”

Gusta was apparently subject to a little envy, telling a Herald reporter:

“You may say that Mr. Long’s house was also crowded with the many friends who came to sympathize with Mrs. Perry over the injustice done to her by the jury system.”

In the end, Walter divorced Reba, married a totally different woman, and spent the rest of his life in Los Angeles. Reba remained in El Paso after her divorce and several years later married a grocer named William Elliott. They had two children, a boy and a girl, but William died of a heart attack, aged 49, just ten years into the marriage. Reba lived to be 70 years old and is buried in El Paso.

Perhaps the original Belle of Tusculum is memorialized with a magnificent monument in Spring Grove Cemetery. She is Mary Stites Nixon, known as Mollie, and she was a descendant of the Stites family who founded the town of Columbia in 1788. Mollie, born 1837, was raised in the Stites House, built by her father, Hezekiah Stites Junior, known as Kiah. He was the nephew of Benjamin Stites, the founder of Columbia. The Stites house still stands just off Eastern Avenue and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Mollie was known as the Belle of Tusculum and her beauty brought suitors from all around. After breaking the hearts of many young men, Mollie chose the dashing William Penn Nixon, an aspiring journalist. Sadly, Mollie succumbed in 1862 to tuberculosis just six months after her wedding, and her grieving husband erected that remarkable pillar over her grave.

William went on to an illustrious career as editor of the Chicago InterOcean newspaper. He remarried and named his first child, a daughter, after his late wife. The daughter, Mary Stites Nixon, founded the Florentine School for Girls in Italy, a sort of finishing school for expatriate debutantes.

The third Belle of Tusculum is a mystery, specifically the type of mystery found at the bottom of a bottle. From 1877 until Prohibition, Cincinnatians August Kayser and Fred Hegner owned a company engaged in distilling and wholesale liquor distribution. The company boasted their sole proprietorship of four trademark brands of whiskey: “Yacht Club,” “Short Horn,” “Small Still,” and “Belle of Tusculum.”

By the time Kayser and Hegner formed their partnership, Mollie Stites Nixon had been dead for 15 years. Reba Harcourt was 2 years old. It is therefore unlikely that either of them inspired the spirituous concoction that shared their sobriquet. Neither distiller offered a backstory for their flagship brand.

Curiously, the firm after 1913 became Kayer, Hegner & Siemer when the original pair welcomed a competitor, Frederick Siemer into the partnership. Siemer, who lived atop Mount Tusculum, marketed a bourbon named “Belle of Columbia” before the merger. It’s not clear whether Columbia in this case refers to the Cincinnati suburb or to the nickname for America.

Way atop Mount Tusculum, there are some streets that remind us this marvelous hill was once a vineyard. The streets named Chardonnay Ridge, Riesling Knoll, and Catawba Valley are fairly redolent of the vine. Curiously, those obvious streets may have less connection to that old vineyard than three nearby streets, namely Delaware Ridge, Creveling and Elsinboro, and therein lies a tale.

The prominence we know today as Mount Tusculum was once known, according to the 1943 WPA-published “Guide to Cincinnati,” as Bald Hill, supposedly because “the Indians had cleared away the trees in order to spy on the invading white men.” This is absolute bunkum, baloney and claptrap. If the Native Americans wanted to spy on the settlers downhill in Columbia, they would have kept the trees in place so they wouldn’t be seen, right? Additionally, the settlers were just blaming the Shawnee for their own deforestation. With lumber needed for housing and fuel, the white folks timbered all of Cincinnati’s hills within a few decades.

Bald Hill became Mount Tusculum when Nicholas Longworth planted his grapes there. He named his vineyard after a wine-producing hill located just south of ancient Rome. Longworth was, for most of his life, the second-richest man in the United States after only John Jacob Astor in New York. Most of his wealth was in land. He owned half the downtown area, all of Mount Adams and what later became Eden Park, as well as large tracts out on the surrounding hills, including the hill overlooking the old settlement of Columbia that he called Mount Tusculum.

Longworth planted most of his suburban plots with grape vines and reaped a fortune as he inspired a winemaking fever in Cincinnati. By 1850, Longworth was the biggest local winemaker at a time when Cincinnati counted 300 vineyards, amounting to 900 acres. In its peak year, Cincinnati’s vintners bottled 320,000 gallons of wine.

Although Longworth propagated dozens of grape varieties as he endeavored to find the grape ideally suited to Cincinnati’s climate, the Catawba was his cash cow and the grape that built his reputation. U.P. Hedrick, in his 1919 book, “Manual of American Grape-Growing” gives kudos to Longworth:

“At that time the center of American grape culture was about Cincinnati, and an early shipment of [Major John] Adlum's Catawbas went to Nicholas Longworth of that city and was by him distributed throughout the grape-growing centers of the country. As one of the first to test new varieties of American grapes, to grow them largely and to make wine commercially from them, Nicholas Longworth is known as the ‘Father of American Grape Culture.’"

Longworth shipped his Catawba wines all over the planet and made many fans, notably the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote a very long poem praising Longworth’s vintages, ending with:And this Song of the Vine, This greeting of mine,

The winds and the birds shall deliver To the Queen of the West, In her garlands dressed, On the banks of the Beautiful River.

This poem, inspired by Longworth’s Catawba wines, is among the earliest references to Cincinnati as the Queen of the West, later shortened to the Queen City. And the grapes for those wines were grown in what is now Alms Park. You can still see the entrances to Longworth’s wine cellars around the hillside there.

All good things must come to an end and Longworth’s wine empire – along with most of America’s wine industry – collapsed due, among other things, to a blight just as the Civil War ended. Nicholas died and his only son Joseph inherited a lot of now barren vineyards in Tusculum, Mount Adams, Delhi and elsewhere, which he promptly began selling off. The Delhi plots were turned into flower gardens and The Garden of Eden was sold to the city as Eden Park.

Joseph Longworth grew up in what we now call the Taft Museum when his daddy owned that fine mansion before selling it to the Sintons, who married the Tafts. It was Joseph’s task to monetize all of his father’s former vineyard properties. He filed a plat to divide Mount Tusculum into a very exclusive subdivision, centered on a couple dozen substantial hilltop estates, most of which are named after grape varieties. He also platted more than 100 small lots along Eastern Avenue at the bottom of Mount Tusculum. None of the hilltop lots were smaller than five acres and some were as large as twelve acres.

The grape varieties Joseph Longworth employed in naming his hilltop estates were very popular in the early 1800s but are far less famous today. The grapes he memorialized included Alvey, Creveling, Delaware, Diana, Elsinboro, Iona, Isabel, Logan, Muscadel, Norton, Traminer, and Venango. Today, all of those estates have either been absorbed by Alms Park or have been further subdivided.

Of all the grape varieties cited by Joseph Longworth and presumably cultivated by his father, only three remain today, as the names of residential streets: Delaware Ridge, Creveling and Elsinboro. Curiously, Delaware Ridge acquired its current name fairly recently; previously, it was known as Herbemont Lane. Herbemont is yet another antique grape variety.

There used to be a Logan Avenue and a Muscadel Avenue on Mount Tusculum but, because those streets were swallowed up by the expansion of Alms Park, they were officially vacated by the City of Cincinnati in 1932, along with Wine Press Road. You might think that some of today’s streets are remnants of those bygone vineyard days, like Catawba Valley Drive, Chardonay Ridge and Riesling Knoll but, no. Chardonay and Riesling weren’t named until the mid-Twentieth Century. Catawba Valley Drive dates from the 1880s, but apparently existed for decades only as a paper street.

The residual streets represent grapes far out of fashion in the United States but still cultivated for sale. The Elsinboro (also known as Elsinburgh or Extra) and Creveling grape varieties are difficult to find under those names but are reputedly still grown as table grapes. Cincinnati’s own Skeleton Root Wine Makers offers a wine from Delaware grapes they describe as “Dry, medium body, soft and easy on the palate. Copper hue in the glass with bright aromatic notes of mango and sweet melon.” Skeleton Root also offers a Catawba that sounds very much like Nicholas Longworth’s prize vintage – a sparkling Catawba Pet Nat that may even now inspire a contemporary Longfellow.

The pillars of Cincinnati society shook in 1910 as two very wealthy and very much respected women tussled over a man neither had ever met. The man in question was Abraham Lincoln, and he had been dead for 45 years.

It was Eleanora Alms, or, as she was called in those days, Mrs. Frederick H. Alms, who first stirred the kerfuffle. Eleanora Cors Unzicker Alms was born in 1846 to Joseph and Margaret Unzicker. Her father was a very popular and successful doctor. Eleanora married Frederick Alms in 1870. Alms founded the very successful Alms & Doepke department in partnership with a brother and a cousin. When Frederick died in 1898, his entire estate, valued at $662,000, passed to Eleanora. In today’s dollars, that’s a bit more than $26 million. Eleanora moved into the Alms Hotel, another of her late husband’s successes, and lived there for the remaining 23 years of her widowhood.

Cincinnati got a sense of Eleanora’s generosity when she offered to give the City of Cincinnati $100,000 to install a statue of Abraham Lincoln on the centenary of his birth and to honor Cincinnati’s Union veterans, including her husband. She convened a committee to identify a sculptor who would fulfill the commission. Chairing the committee was Harry Probasco, who continually denied that he was Mrs. Alms’ attorney despite repeatedly performing legal tasks for her. The other members, chosen by Probasco, were William W. Taylor, president of Rookwood Pottery and president of the Cincinnati Municipal Art League; Rabbi Louis Grossmann of the Plum Street Temple; architect Alfred Oscar Elzner and Charles Phelps Taft, owner of the Cincinnati Times-Star, the city’s leading newspaper at that time.

The committee quickly narrowed their search to two potential recipients of the Lincoln commission. One was Gutzon Borglum, who had already created a massive bust of Lincoln still displayed at the U.S. Capitol. The other was George Grey Barnard whose work to-date had primarily dealt with allegorical subjects. Probasco informed the committee that Mrs. Alms was leaning toward Borglum, but the rest of the committee favored Barnard.

Leading the opposition to Borglum was Charles Taft, and it was assumed he was following his wife’s preference. Although Mr. Taft had quite a stellar résumé himself, and although he had been raised in comfort by his father, attorney Alphonso Taft, the real money in the Taft household derived from Mrs. Taft’s father. David Sinton amassed substantial wealth from investments in transportation, strategic metals, utilities and amusements. On Mr. Sinton’s death in 1900, all that money settled upon his daughter, Anna Sinton, and her husband, Charles Taft.

Anna Sinton, known as Annie, in 1873 married Charles Taft in a ceremony performed at the Sinton family home on Pike Street. We now know that house as the Taft Museum. As the only surviving child of David Sinton, Annie inherited something like $20 million, roughly equivalent to around $800 million in today’s dollars. She became, without question, the wealthiest woman in Ohio.

Flush with cash, Annie and Charles commenced an aesthetic buying spree, amassing one of the largest collections of fine art, mostly European old masters, in private hands. It was on her buying excursions to New York that Annie likely made the acquaintance of a rising star in the American sculpture community, George Grey Barnard. Although Charles Taft held the seat, and the vote, on the Cincinnati Lincoln monument commission, it was understood that he served as Annie’s proxy. The Cincinnati Post [19 December 1910] made it very clear who was running the show:

“Abraham Lincoln, who, during life was the embodiment of the proletarian, moneyless ideal, is today the central figure of an art controversy between two of Cincinnati’s richest women who are anxious to honor him. Mrs. Frederick Alms two years ago conceived the idea of giving to the city a monument of Lincoln in memory of her husband, a veteran of the Civil War and one of Cincinnati’s merchant princes. Mrs. Charles P. Taft, heiress of the Sinton estate, now also offers to give a statue of Lincoln worth $100,000 to the city.”

In addition to having his wife’s money on his side, Charles Taft also had the city administration behind him. Taft was deeply involved in Cincinnati’s local politics at a time when George “Boss” Cox ruled the city like a private fiefdom. Taft’s Times-Star supported Cox so overtly that the scrappy upstart Cincinnati Post regularly lambasted Taft as nothing more than Cox’s stooge. Taft might have been a minion, but he was loyal to the man who held the reins and he could pull a few himself. The other members of the committee certainly knew who had the clout and the cash and voted along with the Tafts in support of Barnard, to the dismay of attorney Henry Probasco, the titular chairman of the committee. Probasco told the Cincinnati Post [7 December 1910]:

“Mrs. Frederick Alms, who, in memory of her late husband, donated the $100,000 which is to pay for this statue, is very much disappointed and dissatisfied over the selection of Barnard.”

Mrs. Alms was so disappointed in the committee’s preference that she took to her bed, but not before withdrawing her offer to the city. Mrs. Taft quickly stepped up and offered to replace the $100,000 from her own piggy bank, so long as Barnard created the sculpture.

With $100,000 on the line, the prospective artists themselves took up arms. Borglum was so incensed by the Taft’s preference for Barnard that he came to Cincinnati personally to accuse the Tafts of “the grand larceny” of Mr. Alm’s original idea and in selecting a sculptor who was “crassly out of taste” and “improper.” Borglum’s remarks made the front page of the New York Times under the headline, “Borglum Attacks Tafts.”

For his part, Barnard decided that his Lincoln would be the most important sculpture in Cincinnati, and therefore required a very special location. Barnard recommended scrapping the Genius of Waters and putting his Lincoln on Fountain Square. He told the Post [6 December 1910]:

“It is a beautiful object and may have an interesting history, but it is only a fountain – not a vital thing, and in a hundred years it will be forgotten, while the memorial of Abraham Lincoln, as great as it will be, would live forever in the daily life of every person who passed through Fountain Square.”

Barnard took his sweet time on the Lincoln commission. It was unveiled at Lytle Park in 1917, not on Fountain Square and not even at his second choice, Eden Park. Although much beloved today, the statue was quite controversial in its day. The New York Times [26 August 1917] editorialized:

“In his statue of Lincoln he was governed by a perverse spirit. Barnard’s Lincoln is not only plain, but grotesque. We doubt the accuracy of the portrait.”

There seems to be no record of Mrs. Alms gloating while reading the reviews. For her part, she gave the city Alms Park, a new wing for the Cincinnati Art Museum, a building for the art programs at the University of Cincinnati and a charitable fund, the Eleanora C. U. Alms Trust, the interest from which still supports projects in Cincinnati to this day.

Among the most commonly viewed images of old Cincinnati is the so-called “Wienerwurst” photograph. Reproduced in almost every book on Cincinnati history, the image portrays a sidewalk full of men standing near a couple of saloons and a tobacco shop. Prominent in the center of the image is a big sign offering “A Wienerwurst With Each Drink.”

This image is occasionally misidentified as portraying the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Not so. The photograph was taken on the west side of Vine Street a little south of Fifth. It portrays the block where the Carew Tower stands today. At the time, it was known as the Nasty Corner, obviously an insulting nickname. How it got that name is a story about money and power and public relations.

The earliest mention of the term "Nasty Corner" to designate the southwest corner of Fifth & Vine streets is the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette of Sunday 14 April 1889. A front page item reports the passage by the Ohio General Assembly of a bill authorizing the "incorporation of companies to construct buildings for hotels, businesses, houses, offices & c." This bill, it is stated, is intended to wipe out the "Nasty Corner."

The real story begins with the arrival in Cincinnati of Joseph T. Carew in 1877 as advance man for Christopher Richards “C.R.” Mabley, a Detroit clothier who wanted to expand into the Queen City. Carew succeeded so well he was made partner and eventually president in 1885, when the company was renamed Mabley & Carew.

Carew opened his first store on the corner of Fifth and Lodge (a long-abandoned street running north-south halfway between Vine and Walnut). Eventually, he bought up all the property on the north side of Fifth Street from Lodge Street westward to Vine. At the northeast corner of Vine and Fifth, he built a very modern six-floor department store.

That store became famous for its marketing events to bring in customers, including Yuletide pantomime performances. The Cincinnati Art Museum displays a delightful painting by Joseph Henry Sharp portraying dozens of people packed onto the Fountain Square esplanade to watch one of these Mabley & Carew shows.

For Joseph Carew, the problem was, from his new vantage point on the northeast corner, the dilapidated buildings on the southwest corner, known as the Este Block. He spent his days fuming about the "Este Corner" and he knew that his customers were offended by it. The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette [15 Dec 1889] summed up Mr. Carew’s distaste:

"There is no more prominently located spot in the city. It faces the widest part of Fifth Street and nearly all of the car lines of the city pass either close under its shadow or within a square of it. The Fountain is at its door and the ceaseless tides of Vine and Fifth streets mingle beneath its walls. For years it has been the eyesore to everyone who liked to see Cincinnati advance. It has been a synonym for all that is foul and unsightly. The visitor to the city has marveled at such squalor crouching in the middle of such opulence. People have passed by on the other side to avoid its stenches and unwashed loafers."

Although photographs and newspaper drawings reveal that the Nasty Corner housed other businesses including a sign painter, a ticket broker, and even a shop selling lemonade and milk shakes, complaints centered on the saloons. There must have been five or six watering holes crammed into that corner, and they attracted nothing but lowlifes. The Commercial Gazette [23 June 1889] nails it:

“The lower floors are, it has been said, occupied by saloons. Here a wienerwurst or a hard-boiled egg accompanies a drink. The ceilings are low and blackened with the product of many a cheap cigar. The floors are stained with the liquid combination of many a plug of tobacco with the outpouring of many a salivary gland. Near the door of each saloon stands a table, covered with a cloth, the original gay red and white pattern of which is lost beneath innumerable coats of spattered lunch. On the cloth is set forth a lunch which would scarcely tempt a maggot.”

It goes without saying that Mr. Carew spent a lot of money advertising in the pages of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. He lobbied all of Cincinnati's daily newspapers. He lobbied the owners of the Este Corner. He lobbied the Ohio General Assembly. He lobbied City Hall. He lobbied anyone with any influence so that he could buy the property and put up a building that would not offend his customers.

It was only at this time that news reports began referring to the property as the "Nasty Corner." As far back as the 1860s, newspapers consistently called this property the Este Corner or Este Block. The evidence is strong that it was Mr. Carew who coined the disparaging epithet. He found a catchy rhyme on "Este" to call attention to the blighted block – an action that today we would call a public relations strategy.

The "Nasty Corner" fell into decrepitude because the previous owner, David K. Este, had died in 1876, leaving a great number of heirs who could not seem to agree on anything. In particular, they could not agree on what sort of building to construct on this increasingly valuable plot of downtown real estate.

Joseph T. Carew corralled all seven heirs and convinced them to sign a lease with option to purchase for $360,000, a payment of $39,000 as "consideration," and a guarantee that he would construct a building costing no less than $100,000. According to the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette [16 June 1889]:

"'Yes,' said Mr. Carew of Mabley & Carew to a Commercial Gazette man last night, 'I propose to erect a handsome building on the Este Corner and the new structure will cover all the ground exactly as my sign says on the old building, which reads, as you may see, like this, "Joseph T. Carew of Mabley & Carew will erect a handsome building over this entire property from Fifth Street to the Emery Hotel - and don't you forget it."'"

The Carew Building opened in 1891. Not quite 40 years later, it would be demolished to make way for the new Carew Tower. The Nasty Corner lives on only in antique photographs.

At nighttime, Cincinnati shines like a jewel these days, with lights and lamps of all sorts. A panoply of neon, incandescent, LED, and fluorescent sources spray photons in a dazzling array. Electricity, however, has only dominated the past century or so of our city’s history. Before 1900, when Cincinnati’s nightlife was legendary, every single source of illumination involved some sort of flame.

It took a long time for Cincinnati to adopt electricity on any substantial scale. For one thing, it took a long time for the city to adopt a standard electrical distribution system. Before 1910, if you wanted electricity in your house or business, you had to install your own generator. Some of the first Cincinnatians to buy generators were saloonkeepers. In his wonderful book, “Pioneers of Night Life on Vine Street,” Frank Y. Grayson describes one of the first electric signs in Cincinnati:

“The first electric light sign caused a lot of enthusiasm. Of course it had to be swung from the northern exposure of a saloon. Wasn’t many other kinds of places on Vine Street to display one in those days. Before then perforated gas pipes formed into letters sufficed. Sometimes the wind blew out the gas, but Vine Street could not be asphyxiated. People wanted to know what made the new lamps burn, and there was always a wise guy around who would tell them it was air combustion. Used to see throngs of aimless mutts rubbering up at that sign, wondering what made it go.”

Stop right there and back up a bit. Is Grayson saying that Cincinnati once had signs that were essentially just copper pipe leaking flammable gas? Yes, he was. The American Gas Light Journal of Oct. 2, 1905 describes just such a sign:

“Then the letters are properly shaped over forms and each letter is secured to its proper position in the design to make the sign read as desired. Then comes the boring for the jets. Sometimes tips are put in, but in many cases the tips are not used and the escaping gases are lighted on the pipe surfaces direct. This results in a serial line of many little gas jets, which when all burning in line, present an attractive appearance.”

Remember, these were the days when almost everybody smoked, and every Cincinnati saloon had cigar-puffing patrons standing within feet of signs pumping out flammable gas.

As with electricity, Cincinnati had yet to standardize gas distribution. Before 1909, Cincinnati did not pump natural gas throughout the city. Instead, Cincinnatians burned a manufactured gas known as “town gas.” Town gas, also known as “coal gas,” was manufactured by heating coal and siphoning off the resultant gases. The coal turned into coke, and the town gas was pumped throughout the city. Town gas lit Cincinnati’s streetlamps as early as 1840. What we now know as Duke Energy and previously as Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company started out as the Cincinnati Gas, Light & Coke Company.

Town gas, it must be admitted, was poisonous. Unlike natural gas, which is mostly methane and burns to produce carbon dioxide and water, town gas consists of carbon monoxide and hydrogen in roughly equal quantities.

Although Cincinnati was introduced to electric signs as early as 1895 when the Walnut Street Opera House installed one, for something like 15 years, gas-powered signs coexisted side-by-side with electrical signs. By 1910, the completion of an electrical grid and the brighter appearance of electrical signage saw the decline of gas signs. The first electric signs were arrays of light bulbs, lots of light bulbs. One Cincinnati department store bragged that its electric sign contained more than 500 light bulbs.

For many people, however, gas flames offered a charming radiance unknown to incandescent light bulbs. The Illuminating Engineer, a magazine for lighting experts, had this to say in 1909:

“We are familiar with types of gas-lighted signs which are made of metal pipework, out of which the gas issues by numerous small orifices. Such designs have frequently been employed for festive occasions in the streets, and the trembling gas flames have sometimes a certain decorative value which is claimed to be less readily obtained by a steady unwavering light, such as is furnished by electric glow lamps.”

Until electricity took over, gas-lighted signs were common, and often achieved breath-taking size for special occasions. When Cincinnati celebrated the centennial of the United States in 1876, the Cincinnati Times raved about a thirty-foot eagle, blazing with gas jets, stretching across Plum Street in front of the Cincinnati Gas, Light & Coke offices. Gas-lit eagles were apparently popular in old Cincinnati, because the Gibson House Hotel brought one out to mark Cincinnati’s grand Industrial Exposition in 1879. According to the Cincinnati Star [10 September 1879]:

“The Gibson House, as usual, on occasions of this kind, has hanging from each window a national streamer and a wreath of evergreen. In addition to this the building is covered by flags of all nations, and the perforated gas-pipe eagle has again been put in position over the front entrance.”

The headquarters of Cincinnati’s Democratic Party was the Duckworth Club on Seventh Street. The Enquirer [26 November 1893] reported on decorations installed by the club to attract a crowd on the night they elected officers:

“Above the entrance was displayed a brilliant gas sign that could be seen for squares, attracting the straying ‘Duck’ from afar.”

Town gas was not the only flammable option. Because town gas was expensive, many shops and saloons fueled their gas signs using carbide to produce acetylene, or even hydrogen gas supplied in tanks. On Fountain Square, during the 1876 Centennial, the Genius of Waters fountain was bathed in limelight, with colored shades transforming the cascading streams into ribbons of red and gold. Limelight – commonly employed to illuminate theatrical stages – is created by heating a cylinder of calcium oxide, known as quicklime, in a flame of hydrogen and oxygen.

The effect produced by all these open flames must have been breathtaking. The morning after Cincinnati’s grand Centennial celebration on 4 July 1876, the Cincinnati Times reported general satisfaction with the gas-powered flaming displays throughout the downtown and recorded a specific appraisal:

“A gentleman standing near the Lookout House, last night, watching the great roaring, blazing city, with its strange sounds and weird lights in the darkness below, remarked, ‘It is like the day of judgement!’”

Your proprietor has it on good authority, from a retired Duke Energy employee, that many signs still connected to gas lines were removed from buildings downtown and Over-the-Rhine in the 1970s and 1980s.

Throughout our city’s long history, interest in croquet has ebbed and surged, sometimes in cycles briefer than a decade. One year, the Enquirer [19 September 1895] dismissed croquet as horridly passé:

“Only a bold man would dare to be known nowadays as the croquet champion. Proficiency in that sport has come to be rated by the vulgar in the same class of accomplishments as superior skill in tatting.”

And yet, less than two years later, the Enquirer [18 July 1897] carried this pronouncement:

“The famous old-time game of croquet has again achieved prominence, and this year the indications are that it will forge to the front as a society amusement, and leave tennis and golf in the background.”

It is true that subsequent revivals failed to achieve the passionate interest croquet enjoyed in the 1860s and 1870s when, for example, the croquet junkies of Oxford, Ohio, attempted to convince the town council to install a croquet pitch on the town square, the younger doctors at Cincinnati’s hospital mourned when construction of a new wing demolished their croquet lawn, and residents near Cutter and Everett streets in the West End knocked balls through wickets until midnight by lantern light.

Croquet even factored into real estate during the 1870s. The owner of a house at the corner of Mansfield and Liberty advertised it for sale in 1877 by noting its convenience to town, its fountain-equipped garden and its croquet ground. Similarly, a rooming house in Walnut Hills offered two furnished rooms to a gentleman “with unquestionable reference” adding that access to a croquet pitch was included in the rent.

When croquet regained its cachet at the turn of the century, it is obvious that the enthusiasts were Cincinnati’s wealthier residents, with croquet grounds established in Walnut Hills and Avondale. This, despite downtown sporting goods stores advertising full croquet sets for less than a dollar. The Enquirer [23 June 1902] reported that games in Walnut Hills attracted not only players but spectators:

“The grounds are on Grand street, between Nassau and Morris, 30 by 60 feet, and as perfect as it is possible to make them, with rows of seats for spectators. It is the intention to have arc lights placed about the grounds in order that during the heated term games can be played at night.”

It is also apparent that some of the high-society croqueters had been knocking balls around the pitch for years, despite the sport’s alleged fall from favor. The Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune [18 July 1897] reported on one such cadre of old-timers who had been competing for decades:

“Norwood has a coterie of famous players, who lock horns with the Avondale old-timers, resulting in honors in favor of the Avondales. The picturesque lawn of Robert T. Morris, Avondale, is the battleground for the several Cincinnatians who play the game scientifically. Every Saturday afternoon from April until November the merry war goes on.”

That “scientific” aspect attracted many upper-class players to the croquet revival. According to the Enquirer [25 August 1894] a good croquet player must have keen mathematical skills:

“It is justifiably claimed by croquet experts that their game is ‘as scientific as billiards.’ Indeed, there is even a greater field for strategy, and perhaps also for deliberate judgement and boldness of play. It is the time allowed for deliberation that marks the chief difference between croquet and tennis.”

Throughout croquet’s early years, the newspapers continually reminded readers that croquet mallets were potentially deadly weapons, and often figured as the implement of death in some shocking murders. The Cincinnati Post [13 May 1913] reported that Joshua Bell, a patient at the Cincinnati sanitarium in College Hill, had murdered an attendant, John Hoover:

“Bell and Hoover were playing croquet at the sanitarium Monday and Hoover had bent forward to drive a ball through a wicket. As he did so Bell raised his croquet mallet and brought it down on the attendant’s head. Hoover became unconscious. Bell struck the man several more blows, according to a woman patient at the institution.”

In Lebanon, Ohio, residents were shocked that the mayor’s wife had attacked her father-in-law with a croquet mallet, sending him to the hospital with little hope of survival. Mayor M.E. Gustin told the Cincinnati Post [30 June 1904] his father had caused a dispute when he washed his dirty hands in water his wife was using to wash dishes. She remonstrated the older man and, according to the mayor:

“He answered her disrespectfully, and, as both are high-tempered, harsh words ensued. Becoming very angry, father struck my wife on the mouth with his hand. She happened to have a light croquet mallet in her hand, and naturally endeavored to defend herself with it.”

Cincinnati police scoured the city in August 1893 on word that John Weatherwax was hiding out here. Weatherwax had bludgeoned John Nagel of Portsmouth, Ohio, with a croquet mallet and was last seen boarding a train bound for Cincinnati.

Mirax Castleman of Warsaw, Kentucky, was arrested in 1899 for the murder of Dr. G.W. Ferrell during a croquet match in Glencoe. Arguing over a maneuver, Castleman smacked Ferrell upside the head with his mallet, then pounded him until he was dead. The two men had reportedly been friends for many years.

An Indiana teenager, Frank Ross, murdered his friend William Lock in an altercation over a croquet game, according to the Commercial-Tribune [29 November 1896].

“He struck Lock on the head with a croquet mallet, crushing his skull, causing death within an hour.”

The insanity of Alice Schroeder, 21, of Laurel Street in the West End, was attributed by the Cincinnati Post [2 January 1890] to a blow from a croquet mallet, which flew off its handle and struck her on the temple.

“Since then she has been manifesting insanity, which of late has become violent in character. As she was no longer controllable, the family brought her before the Probate court today, and she was committed to Longview.”

Everyone, in the opinion of the Commercial-Tribune [3 July 1899] was taking the game far too seriously:

“No longer are there engaging flirtations indulged in by agreeable partners at odd corners of the lawn. Everybody is too intent on obtaining a mathematical degree of precision concerning the different ‘angles’ to worry about such light-minded considerations.”

It was seasonably cold, with temperatures hanging in the 20s, as thousands of spectators poured into Cincinnati’s Exposition Hall on Monday morning, 14 February 1876. Once inside, the crowd packed into the stands to watch five days of . . . walking.

Yes, walking. For a couple of decades in the Nineteenth Century, walking was a major spectator sport, attracting huge crowds and, this being the age when everyone bet on baseball, it attracted huge wagers, too. Cincinnati’s Exposition Hall, replaced just two years later by Music Hall, was the largest indoor arena in the city at the time. It swelled to capacity for a sport, all but forgotten now, that was awarded the elevated name of pedestrianism. Participants were pedestrians or, on this particular occasion, pedestriennes.

The pedestriennes in question were Millie Rose of England and Anna Mattice, a Canadian. Although she billed herself as “the champion female pedestrian of America,” Rose’s biggest walking feat to-date was walking 500 miles in 500 hours in Indianapolis the year before. She was inspired to stage the Cincinnati race when, earlier in the month, she inserted herself briefly into a six-day walking match in Chicago between Bertha Von Hillern and Mary Marshall. Marshall won that race, logging 233.9 miles to Von Hillern’s 231.5, and claimed a $500 prize. Rose saw dollar signs. Exposition Hall, according to the Enquirer [15 February 1876] had all the trappings of a major event:

“An excellent sawdust track has been laid in the main Exposition Hall, and the place is warmed with good stoves. A band of music is in attendance, and everything is orderly and decorous.”

After five days of perambulation from 2:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Millie Rose covered 207 miles, while Anna Mattice tallied only 185 miles. The purse went to Rose, but both women competed in other races throughout the country for the next several years. The Enquirer [19 February 1876] saw the race as a victory for equality of the sexes:

“This is a wonderful record for women walkists, and would do credit to many male professional pedestrians. Quite a large crowd of respectable people were present to see the end of the contest.”

Pedestrianism as a curiosity and as an amateur sport had been around for centuries. As walking took on a professional dimension, many newspapers pointed to Jonathan Swift, author of “Gulliver’s Travels,” who, in the Seventeenth Century, bragged about his skill as a perambulator. In the United States, the sport really took off after a 27-year-old Boston bookseller named Edward Payson Weston wagered that Abraham Lincoln would lose the 1860 presidential election. Lincoln won and Weston honored his wager by walking from Boston to Washington, a distance of 478 miles, in 10 days to attend Lincoln’s inauguration.

The trek garnered so much publicity that Weston pursued walking as a new and very remunerative career. As a world-famous pedestrian, Weston walked throughout Europe and made several appearances in Cincinnati, most notably in 1871 when he failed on three attempts to walk 113 miles in 24 hours at the Union Grounds in the West End.

In November 1875, Weston and Irish-born Chicagoan Daniel O’Leary astounded the sporting world by walking for six days straight. O’Leary ultimately claimed the honors by logging 503.3 miles to Weston’s 451. O’Leary also enthralled Cincinnati audiences on several occasions, notably in June 1878 when he walked 220 miles in a little over 55 hours at the Pavilion atop the Price Hill Incline.

When pedestrienne Bertha Von Hillern appeared in Cincinnati she usually presented a lecture on “her exemplification of health” in addition to displaying her walking skills. Von Hillern walked only in exhibitions, competing only against herself and time, never in competition with other pedestrians and absolutely never for wagers. She earned her reportedly substantial income from ticket sales and endorsements. During one visit, the Cincinnati Gazette [18 December 1878] carried an advertisement for “Giles Liniment Iodide Ammonia” noting that Von Hillern “bathes freely” with it.

Von Hillern and her colleagues were among the very first athletic role models for women, and attracted crowds of admirers wherever they appeared. The Cincinnati Commercial [25 January 1878] described the electrifying effect of Von Hillern’s visit among Cincinnati women:

“Ladies, wherever Bertha goes, begin to straighten themselves up, and to feel the muscles of the calves of their legs. If she causes women, even temporarily, to go out doors and view the beauties of nature on foot, then heaven speed her, though she is walking for money. The ladies’ walking club here have pledged themselves to eat an oatmeal breakfast, put on a loose, light Bloomer walking dress and take a long walk in the country at least three times a week.”

Another pedestrienne, Ada Anderson, had no qualms about competing against other walkers, whether men or women, but made a point of cultivating fandom among her female devotees. She was a fan favorite, creating quite a show in addition to setting walking records. At most of her performances, Anderson would sing a song or two, accompanied by the orchestra, during breaks. And, if she saw any man in the audience dozing off as she made her rounds, she would smear a bit of charcoal or lampblack on his face. During one of her several appearances at the Highland House, Anderson, according to the Enquirer [21 April 1879], spoke exclusively to her feminine fans:

“She addressed a few words specially to the ladies, in which she said she more particularly desired their attendance, as she liked to have women around her, and she liked to have them see what a woman could do.”

Although several Cincinnatians tried their hand (or feet) at pedestrianism, it doesn’t appear that any locals found their way to national stardom. A Cincinnati bookkeeper, a Covington rolling mill laborer, and a couple of young men from the Cincinnati gymnasium made appearances, but if any walked away with prize money, it is unrecorded. Perhaps the most colorful local pedestrian was a Middletown native. According to the Enquirer [15 May 1880]:

“Chris. Putz, the eccentric individual – hybrid Gypsy-Indian – who created such a sensation on the streets the other day, decorated with ribbons and feathers, a semi-barbarous pedestrian habiliment just well fitting him, and sparse enough to display a wonderfully well made form, which admits of no doubt that the brilliant performances claimed for our eccentric friend are at all imaginary.”

Almost every possible venue in Cincinnati, whether suitable or not, hosted pedestrian events at one time or another, from the hilltop resorts on Mount Adams, Price Hill or Bellevue, to a beer garden on John Street, to Geyer’s dancing academy studio, to an immense canvas tent at 12th and Vine, to a new opera house on the Canal at Vine, to a Walnut Street hotel. Cincinnati just couldn’t get enough of watching people walking. And there was money to be made. According to the Enquirer [2 January 1879]:

“The profits of pedestrianism are again brought to public notice by the printed assertions that O’Leary pocketed $10,000 or $12,000, and Campana $2,000 in last week’s contest. In his walk two months ago with Hughes, O’Leary was said to have made $7,000, while in his Chicago tramp he and Weston divided $18,000. Multitudes are paying to see Miss Anderson in Brooklyn, and Miss Von Hillern and Miss Von Berg, who for a year have walked in cities and villages, from one ocean to another, draw many spectators.”

In 1901, Cincinnati City Engineer Louis Gustave Frederick Bouscaren appeared before the Water Works Board with a rather expensive request. Bouscaren asked the Board to approve a $500,000 brick cover for the Eden Park reservoir.

That immense artificial lake, covering 13 acres and more than 30 feet deep, held 100 million gallons of water, divided into two basins. Exposed to sunlight, the reservoir blossomed with algae that imparted a nasty flavor to the city’s water. Running the Water Works in 1901 was August “Garry” Herrmann, one of George “Boss” Cox’s chief lieutenants. Herrmann and Cox cared not a whit about the taste of the municipal effluent and so Bouscaren’s request was denied.

Thirty years later, with Cincinnati’s government now completely reformed by a new charter, Alber S. Hibbs, Water Works superintendent, repeated Bouscaren’s proposal but, according to the Cincinnati Post [7 May 1931] added a most peculiar clarification to his request:

“Hibbs favors the expenditure not on saving lives of persons who want to drown themselves, but rather for the sake of keeping Cincinnati’s water supply pure.”

Say what? Superintendent Hibbs said the quiet part loud, admitting that a human corpse ended up in the city’s water supply about once a year. Ever since the immense reservoir had gone operational in 1878, the Water Works had fished a body out on a regular basis, and considered it no big deal. According to City Health Commissioner Dr. William H. Peters, as quoted in the Post [26 April 1933]:

“Peters said that two bodies found in the 54,000,000-gallon east basin in Eden Park within the last week did not pollute the water particularly because of its great volume, but the idea of drinking from a source containing the bodies of two human beings was naturally offensive to the public.”

It appears that the public was naturally offended on a regular basis due to the scenic but inviting pools in Eden Park.

Charles Bachman left his home on Prospect Hill one August night in 1906 to hear a Sunday concert in Eden Park. His body was found several days later, floating in the reservoir, half-eaten by fish. The Water Works was uninspired to do anything, according to the Cincinnati Post [22 August 1906]:

“The fact that the body of Bachman, fish-eaten, was found in the Eden Park reservoir does not pollute the water anymore than it is polluted, according to Chief Engineer Hill of the Water Works Department.”

Apparently unfazed by corpses floating in the water supply, the Water Works seemed more concerned about fish. The Water Works didn’t care that the fish were there, pooping in the drinking water. Rather, they were outraged that someone had allowed anglers to fish in the reservoir. The Cincinnati Post [18 August 1894] reported:

“Supt. Willis Tharp, of the Water Works Department, has discovered that someone is permitting people to fish in the Eden Park reservoir. Among other evidences, a trot line was found in the reservoir. To whom it belongs no one seems to know. It was also learned the people allowed to fish in the reservoir nightly amount to a crowd. Tharp will make a searching investigation and some of his subordinates may lose their jobs."

Although the Water Works worried more about fishing than drowned bodies, the Cincinnati public was fascinated by the macabre discoveries. The body of George Sankey, a prosperous carpenter, had marinated in the depths of the reservoir for more than four months when it popped to the surface in 1919.

Sankey was no suicide. When his body was found, several acquaintances remembered him flashing a large wad of bills every time he paid his rent or settled a restaurant bill. It appeared that someone murdered Sankey for his money. The murderer then trussed Sankey up like a turkey, strapped on a weighted suitcase, and tossed their victim into the water. When he was found, a suitcase handle remained attached to his ankle. As the east reservoir was drained, huge crowds gathered to watch the water slowly drain, curious about what that suitcase might hold if it was found. When, after several days, investigators located the suitcase, it contained nothing more than five paving bricks, just enough to keep Sankey’s corpse submerged. His murder was never solved.

Some people demonstrated a meticulously obsessive urge to drown amid the beauties of the park. In 1927, Wiley Nicodemus, 65, walked up to the reservoir, slashed his wrists with a pocketknife, refolded the knife and put it in his pocket, climbed the reservoir fence and jumped. He missed the water and landed in some bushes on the bank but scrambled to his feet and crawled into the depths and oblivion.

Sometimes, the Eden Park reservoir got a little crowded. Cincinnati Police Officer Edward Boenke, aged 42, drowned himself there in April 1933. It seems Patrolman Boenke caused a fatal traffic accident a few years back when he was driving in hot pursuit. Although he recovered from physical injuries caused by the crash, the guilt precipitated a nervous breakdown. It had become standard procedure to drain the reservoir and clean it after a body was removed, and so the long process was underway when a second body, that of 79-year-old George Walker of East Walnut Hills, was found submerged in the muck. Mr. Walker’s remains had been soaking for about three weeks before he was extracted.

Within days, the city received an order from H.G. Southard, Ohio health director, ordering Cincinnati to cover its open reservoirs. “Public health of water consumers in Cincinnati is endangered by these open structures,” Southard wrote, reminding the city that the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, established to fund public works projects to ease the effects of the Great Depression, had money available to pay for the project. Cincinnati ignored the order.

The body of a Hyde Park teenager, Elaine Ludlow, was pulled from the reservoir in 1940. A wadded note, with its ink almost dissolved away, offered no motive. A week later, Harry L. Hamilton ended his life in the reservoir. Hamilton was an agent for Warner Brothers Motion Pictures and a former vaudeville promoter. He stuffed cotton in his nostrils before he consigned himself to the deep and wrote a note asking that an undertaker in Maysville be notified.

The drive to cover the reservoir revived in 1952 when a Cincinnati Post investigation revealed that the west basin of the Eden Park complex contained measurable levels of bacteria. Spot checking found bacterial contamination at several locations in the city, but the Water Works insisted the contamination did not require an order to boil water. The Water Works blamed autumn leaves falling into the reservoir and rotting for the presence of bacteria.

Water Works Superintendent Carl Ebberling recalled an effort to cover the reservoir in the 1930s, when opposition halted the project because it would ruin the scenic beauty of the open pools of water. It’s true. And that opposition was led by the Cincinnati Board of Realtors.

The Eden Park reservoir was finally drained, reconfigured, and covered over through a $4.5 million project in 1964. The large reflecting pool we see today in Eden Park is a decorative flourish that has nothing to do with the city’s water supply. The new reservoir is still there, buried beneath Mirror Lake. The gargantuan cistern holds 80 million gallons of water, is 39 feet deep and contains 780 concrete columns, each two feet wide. And not a single body for the past 60 years.

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:

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.)

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.”