Tag: Reminisce

The Shawnee returned to Shawnee Township when Helen Jean Spyker was a child.

As large ads for blanket sales covered pages of newspapers in the early 20th century, many ads had one label in common: St. Marys. Department stores across the nation boasted that they sold high quality blankets created by the St. Marys Woolen Manufacturing Company.

They were once the pride of Lima, concrete examples of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Eighteen eighty-three got off to a blazing start.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor wrecked the U.S. Pacific Fleet in far-off Hawaii and shook America’s sense of safety at home. On December 7, 1941, the world became suddenly, terrifyingly, smaller.

What can a couple of fruit cans, wood from store cases, piano wire, type lead and other found items make? In 1935, 25-year-old Jacob E. Zint created a seismograph using items intended for the trash. One of only three seismographs of that caliber in Ohio, his sturdy homemade machine made clear and accurate recordings of earthquakes as far as China and Guatemala.

Lima in the first half of the 20th century was a city of lunch pails, factory whistles, hard work, hard workers, and, of course, lunch-hour folk dancing.

St. Rita’s hospital opened its doors in December 1918 at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic. Lima native and newly minted nurse Miriam Hall arrived soon thereafter.

Elizabeth MacDonell, who was born into a horse-and-buggy world and lived until the eve of the Atomic Age, possessed what a biographer described as “a strong sense of the historic.”

“Helen Jacobs New Auglaize Court Clerk,” announced The Lima Morning Star and Republican Gazette. “County’s First Woman to Hold Office Succeeds Robert C. Howell.” In a special meeting, county commissioners Frank Springer, George Sheipline and Emil Thieman unanimously elected Helen Louella Jacobs to be the Auglaize County clerk of courts on August 5, 1931.