Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor:

Chess was Pecksburg’s “prevailing amusement” in early 1896.

Mid-December a dozen years earlier, checkers was “all the go” in Brownsburg. Top town news was the question, “Who killed the cat?” Whose cat? How did it die? Someone gets run over by a train and every gory detail is provided. Is not a cat’s demise worthy of faint description?

Two Pittsboro fellows laid claim as checkers champions two Decembers later. The decisive game would be a sports reporter’s dream assignment.

Around which store’s pot-bellied stove did the two battle? Was either title-seeker considered rather aged for the sport? What did they wear? Did they sit, stand, or lounge languidly, feigning desultory moves to confuse their opponent?

Were there downright unnerving high-decibel tennis grunts when one player triple-jumped his way to demanding “king me?”

Dear Editor, Pecksburg often had the best news. Mart Roberts reported he had occasional “well defined” symptoms of pink eye in June 1883. Dogs had killed 36 of Scipio West’s “fine flavor” Southdown sheep in the past 10 months. Amo was suspected for planting smallpox fake news against Pecksburg. Today, that kind of stuff would appear on Facebook, garnering innumerable “likes.”

I found myself riddling how many grains of wheat fit on a chessboard if the first square holds one, the second one two, the third four, and each successive square doubling again.

The answer, of course, is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains. The hard part is ensuring a single grain doesn’t spill onto a neighboring square.

Progressive euchre was becoming popular in Danville early in 1885, and so was the Wabash Scratches if repeated mention in local news is any indication. Woolford’s Sanitary Lotion cured it in 30 minutes on humans, and horses.

Arguments over Scripture and chess seemed “to go together pretty well” at an unnamed Brownsburg drug store in February 1888. Try that at Walgreens today. The town’s Thomas Canary was “fond” of the game.

Bud Boteman was considered Montclair’s checkers champion in March 1888. A doctor was rumored to arrive. Village barber and cobbler Andrew Weddle was busy.

Danville’s Dr. Frank Huron and Professor Tuttle played chess during their spare time in August 1889, but far bigger town news was the paper’s exhortation to “kill the rest of the dogs” and admonishing those with no manners not to attend church.

Amo men played checkers in the street in mid-1890 while their wives chopped wood “for their dinners. Think of this, good people.”

“Crack” checkers player Orlando “Lannie” Powers was the man to beat in Danville in 1893. Several players practiced to topple him and, responding to rumors, he dropped in at Keeney’s livery stable one November Sunday, where the “schemers” immediately challenged him.

When Lannie left the livery victorious, the vanquished declared “they did not care to play checkers anymore.”

Anyone wanting to be “up to the times” in Danville in 1894 had a checkerboard ready for play. Visitor Theo Gibbs offered the locals hints during an early January visit. Lannie Powers was the only Danville player to beat Gibbs.

Powers was Hendricks County’s last harness horse trainer when he died in April 1945, his obituary reported. He trained from around 1884 to 1917. He and his family lived awhile near the racetrack west of Danville. He had worked for Klondike Milling Company and then Farm Bureau Cooperative.

Following the death of a “phenomenal” chess player in 1893, examining anatomists declared molecules in part of his brain had arranged themselves into squares resembling a chessboard and that each square bore “position” marks of the last 12 games he’d played simultaneously while blindfolded.

The reprinted report avowed microscopes “of the highest power” discerned the discovery that was “true in every particular.”

Did Liberace’s brain resemble a piano? Did Walt Disney’s hemispheres pass for a pair of over-developed rodent ears?

The Daughters of Rebekah put on a two-game checkers “social” one October night in 1898, with the ladies serving as living checker pieces. Dr. Harlan won one game and Mell C. Masten won the other. What did the ladies do when either of the two players reached the king’s row?

During play, did they actually jump over each other, and was that proper behavior for those times?

Paul Miner

Lizton