Did you know?
I’ve mentioned in the past, a number of visits the man known as the “greatest athlete of the 20th century,” Jim Thorpe, made to Fayette County.
But there was even a chance, at one time, that Thorpe may have entertained the notion of moving to Uniontown.
According to the Dec. 5, 1951, edition of the Uniontown Evening Standard, a local man, Ben T. Silman, offered Thorpe a modern, rent-free home for him and his family to occupy in South Union Township.
Silman had seen a television broadcast featuring Thorpe, who was being treated for cancer and who was in need of help at the time.
“He will not have one cent of expense but can come out here and spend the rest of his life,” Silman said.
He added, “He has been a great guy and well deserves it all.”
There is no evidence Thorpe took Silman up on his offer. Thorpe died two years later after suffering heart failure at his home in Lomita, Calif.
Back in October of 1921, “scores of persons throughout Western Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia” came to Uniontown for what they mistakenly thought was a cure for cancer.
According to the Oct. 10 edition of the Soda Springs Chieftain of Soda Springs, Idaho, a 50 year-old butcher and his 30 year-old son were selling cancer treatments for $5 each.
They’d been extracting salves from the animals they butchered in their slaughterhouse and declared them “highly beneficial in the treatment of cancer.”
Unfortunately for them, two women _ one of them from Smithfield, and the other from Masontown _ and a man from Fairchance, died after administering the salve.
Both of the butchers-turned-medicine men were arrested for murder.
It seems there are better ways of professing one’s love than writing the words “I Love You, Darling,” on your wife’s foot.
Especially since, as was written in a front-page story in November of 1937, that inscription leads to having your wife rushed to a hospital with serious burns and a nasty infection.
According to the Nov. 30, 1937, edition of the Uniontown Daily News Standard, a “Pittsburgh playboy” and his new wife were returning to Pennsylvania from a trip to Baltimore, when they decided to stop at a hotel in Grantsville, Md.
While there, the husband decided to write his little love note on his wife’s foot. Well, the foot eventually got infected. The husband took his doctor’s advice and soaked his wife’s foot in hot water. But the water was so hot it scalded his wife’s foot.
The article said the wife was at Uniontown Hospital, being treated for the scalded and infected foot. But it also added her alcohol-punished system was being treated for over-indulgence.
I found another rather bizarre story involving feet and Uniontown women that was printed in a Syracuse, N.Y., newspaper in 1919.
According Syracuse Herald’s July 3, 1919, edition, there was a “crusade” growing among the “good people of Uniontown,” to get the city fathers to establish that socks should only be worn by men.
Some Uniontown residents were asking city council members to pass an ordinance that would make it unlawful for women to wear low-cut hosiery. According to the article, the first hint that women were starting to wear socks came, when “a young woman in a hug-me-tight skirt took a high step on a streetcar.”
Ladies, you can breathe easy! I haven’t found any subsequent articles which seem to indicate that such an ordinance was ever passed.
Normally, the announcement of a wedding between two Fayette County natives wouldn’t be the stuff of national news.
But, in July of 1954, when Uniontown’s Ann Marie Gergel and Brownsville’s A.G. Grueser tied the knot, a few newspapers around the country took note.
But it wasn’t just the marriage that was newsworthy. It was where the newlyweds decided to enjoy their honeymoon.
According to the Greeley (Co.) Daily Tribune, “Five years ago pretty Ann Marie Gergel created a mild furor in a beauty contest in Daytona Beach, Fla.”
It seems despite winning that contest, because she wasn’t a southerner, the judges would only crown her “Miss Yankee.”
Apparently, Ms. Gergel didn’t hold any grudges. According to the Uniontown Evening Standard, after their wedding at the White Swan Hotel, Mr. and Mrs. Grueser embarked on a two-week honeymoon in, of all places, Daytona Beach, Fla.
Here’s an unusual occurrence I found on the front page of the Nov. 12, 1937, edition of a local newspaper.
When Kenneth Bittner, Jr. of Pennsville was born earlier that month, all four of his grandparents, and six of his great-grandparents were still alive.