ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO – July 1924 The 4th of July was a whimper; only the South Methodist Church held a celebration of record. Grasshoppers were the topic and bane of the month! AlittleParis-green (an arsenic-based poison) caused many a grasshopper to leave this earth.
While en route to Carter, Otto Pipkin was killed by the Katy southbound train. It was thought that he did not see the train or, if he did, his car stopping on track made it impossible for him to get out of the way. The back of his head was crushed and one leg mangled. He lived but a few minutes.
James M. Warren of Croton Creek west of Cheyenne broke his leg. He left the house after dinner and went about half a mile, caught a horse and jumped on him bareback but was immediately thrown off. He managed to crawl several hundred yards to the shade of a tree where he lay calling for help. About three hours later, his son, Henry, heard his father and, with the help of a friend, rescued him. As the thigh bone was broken near the hip bone, Warren was in intense pain and nearly parched from thirst.
At the age of 38, Dr. Victor C. Tisdal owned and opened one of the largest and best equipped hospitals in Western Oklahoma on July 3rd. The building was 50 feet wide by 106 long. Every floor was equipped with linen closets, clothes chutes, dumb waiter, and water from a deep well. No stairs, just ramps. Each room featured electric fans and “hot plugs.” A nurses’ call system was part of the equipment on the patients’ floor. One room was furnished with an elegant mahogany bed, bedside table and rug. Other rooms had the standard white steel furniture. The nurses’ quarters were in the basement where they spent most of their off-duty time. Each room was designed to be big enough for two people. The hospital had fifty-three rooms and accommodated forty-five patients. It provided employment for twenty people, twelve of whom were nurses.
One evening as T. C. Mc-Geehee was pushing his baby buggy and its occupant down the street and approached Ack Davis’s home, he ran over a chain. He thought nothing of it, but the goat fastened to the other end of the chain was surely scared and ran down the street taking T. C., buggy and baby for quite a skirmish as all tried to get out of each other’s way. The Story Theatre manager regretted that he did not have a moving picture machine ready at the time. While it might have made a good comic picture, T. C. did not see anything comic about it.
Sad about a farmer near Hammon who was cultivating with a fine pair of horses that he had just had shod. He stopped long enough to get a drink and when he returned to his task, he found only a small stack of bones and, a little farther on, saw several grasshoppers playing horseshoe with the ones they had just taken off the horses.
W. Sparks thought it was sorry enough when the grasshoppers ate the peaches and left nothing but the pits, but when he drove out in the wheat field and they ate all the paint from his car, he was “doomfoozled.” Another story was that a grasshopper went into a bank to get money to buy a car. Sylvester B. Lyda told one about a grasshopper seen sharpening its teeth on a grindstone so it could finish eating the plowshare it had started to devour.
It wasn’t all jokes. Earnest Creach of Hammon was laid up with a bad foot caused from running into a grasshopper catcher. Edwin D. Cantrell exhibited some fine clover from the same patch that had been ruined by the grasshoppers. He said he had 33 acres of clover but 30 of it was ruined by the insects. He figured he would have had 150200 bushels of seed from this acreage had it not been for the critters. The three acres were saved by the chickens devouring the grasshoppers.
Luanne R. Eisler authored this article, which was taken from items published in The Carter Express, The Elk City Press and The Elk City News-Democrat; you can find these newspapers on microfilm at the Elk City Carnegie Library; Ancestry.com and Wikipedia provided supplementary information.
