Tag: Reminisce

The Sawyer sisters shared a birthplace, a love of music and, seemingly, little else.

For nearly a century, for as long as there had been a Spencerville, the mill stood at the heart of the village, grinding grain into flour and, being the tallest building in town, serving as a handy point of reference.

Elmer McClain was born in 1883 at the family farm and died there nearly eight decades later in 1963.

In July 1965, the Lima News, which had just completed a two-story addition to its plant in the 100 block of East High Street, devoted three pages in a Sunday edition to explain the newspaper’s operation for the benefit of subscribers, and to do a little bragging with statistics about its dominance in the region for the benefit of advertisers.

On a Saturday in mid-February 1925, five years into Prohibition, two Lima policemen on the lookout for anyone in possession of illegal liquor instead happened upon a man in possession of a dead skunk and a dead possum in a burlap bag slung over his shoulder.

With unbridled and, as it turned out, completely unwarranted optimism, the Lima Citizen in June 1961 declared that a late August doubleheader between the then-Cleveland Indians and the Chicago White Sox “should have a big bearing on the American League baseball race.”

In early February 1899, as finances for Lima’s first hospital were being firmed up, one of the city’s first doctors made what the Allen County Republican-Gazette described as a “splendid offer” to the hospital’s board.

On a summer day in 1988 the resident of a home in the 900 block of West Wayne Street answered his door to find, though he didn’t know it at the time, a recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee on his porch.

Servicemen returning to Lima from World War II who were anxious to finally tie the knot didn’t have to look far to find a ring. Downtown Lima in the fall of 1945 was packed with jewelers, 10 of them within four blocks of the Public Square.

The building has stood for nearly a century at 545 W. Market St. Constructed in 1928 for Timmerman Motor Sales, it has been home to large firms like the Marvel Maid Garment Co. and the Perry Corp. as well as dozens of smaller ones.