LIVING IN CIN
Happy Old Year! CELEBRATING ONLY A CENTURY LATE, BUT JUST IN TIME.
I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO DESIRE TO LIVE IN 1922 INSTEAD OF 2022, AND NEITHER DO YOU. We might sometimes feel attracted to the “simpler times” of a century ago, when the air was cleaner and the streets were safer and Cincinnatians were friendlier, but wait—were those things really true? Sure they were, if your last name was Procter, Kroger, Nippert, Moerlein, or anyone listed in Mrs. Devereux’s Blue Book of Cincinnati. Ordinary people, though, couldn’t afford simpler times. The air was foul, the streets were a car/horse/pedestrian death match, and if everyone was so damned friendly back then, why did Cincinnati Bell’s newspaper ads warn people to stop their “abusive language” or their phones could be confiscated? Even Mrs. Devereux’s snooty little book 3 0 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 2
printed those ads, so don’t get cocky, you Nipperts and Tafts. Like Jail in Monopoly, let’s “just visit” the Cincinnati of 1922 from a safe distance of 100 years. What did people think were the notable events of that year, and do we care about any of them today? It’s easy for us to see the differences between then and now, but trickier to place them too solidly in the Better or Worse column. Our blurry impressions from 1922 are of speakeasys and flappers, of people holding newspapers the size of bathmats, and of life moving jerkily in black and white. Let’s try to bring back some of the color and sound. Put on your VR goggles. PROHIBITION WAS JUST TWO YEARS OLD in 1922, but its failure was already fully mature. Cincinnati’s moonshiners and PH OTO G R A PH BY H AT S U E
P H O T O G R A P H (PA P E R T E X T U R E ) BY DA B O O S T/ S T O C K . A D O B E .CO M
BY JAY GILBERT