Tag: Reminisce

In the summer of 1889 optimism about Lima’s future flowed as freely as the oil discovered four years earlier on the banks of the Ottawa River and the city, which would win renown for producing steam locomotives, seemed in the eyes of some on the verge of becoming a manufacturer of the rail cars those locomotives hauled.

In 1952, Gene Wollenhaupt, fresh out of high school, joined the musician’s union because, he told the Lima News in August 2010, “If you were a musician of any sort, you belonged to the union.”

It’s been 50 years since Patrolman William F. “Bill” Brown of the Lima Police Department offered his life in service of his community.

Winters just weren’t the old bone-chilling, snow-covered wonders of yore, the Allen County Democrat lamented a century and a half ago.

The year ahead “promises greater prosperity, greater development and more home building than ever before,” the secretary of Lima’s board of commerce told the Lima News on the last day of 1923.

It was the day of Christmas 1858 and not a creature was stirring in Wapakoneta — a state of affairs which was duly noted in the Wapakoneta Democrat several days later.

On November 30, 1929, as the world learned Admiral Richard E. Byrd had flown over the South Pole in what was hailed as a “new triumph of the air,” a visitor from the North Pole made a triumphant entry into Lima’s Public Square after, according to the Lima Morning Star and Republican-Gazette, jumping out of an aircraft.

In his more than six decades of life, Theodore D. Robb had been a lawyer, a judge, a bank president, and the mayor of Lima.

Lima merchant Gus Holstine had a forgettable autumn in 1920. In quick succession, he fractured two ribs, contracted pneumonia “and to cap the climax developed a serious attack of appendicitis, which resulted in an operation, his life in the balance for five days,” the Lima Republican-Gazette reported November 21, 1920.

It was a week before Thanksgiving and a day before the world changed forever.