Tag: Reminisce

When a stray chimney spark started a fire on the roof of a Shawnee Township home in late April 1912, the Lima Times-Democrat marveled that “within ten minutes after the alarm had been given there were automobiles, motorcycles, buggies, etc., completely blockading the road in front of C.A. Rusler’s home, everybody eager to help put out the fire.”

It started as a way to bring Lima together in the turbulent year of 1973. Now it’s an annual holiday tradition that generations of residents couldn’t imagine living without.

Barely three months after marking VJ Day and the end of World War II with a raucous celebration in a driving August rain, Lima settled in for a quiet Thanksgiving in 1945.

Charles C. Marshall’s mail route was long — real long, stretching from Piqua in the south to Defiance in the north. And roads were rare, though roaming Shawnee, Ottawa and Wyandot hunters were not.

Lee Cary was a 20-year-old sailor a long way from home when he witnessed the beginning of a terrifying new chapter in the Cold War.

A century ago, on Oct. 31, 1922, Lima’s downtown burst into life in a spontaneous celebration of Halloween.

On Good Friday, April 6, 1917, the day the United States reluctantly entered World War I, Pfc. Charles J. Watson, who had enlisted in the Army at Lima in 1913, was killed in an accident at West Point, N.Y.

Four thousand fans turned out on a cold Thanksgiving Day in 1936 to watch Lima’s two high schools – South and Central – in the inaugural football game at the city’s new stadium, which had been completed earlier that year.

Charles W. Justus was born in Massillon in 1863, moved with his family to Shawnee Township as a child and grew up on a farm near the intersection of Shawnee and Fort Amanda roads. As a young boy, he left the farm with his brother, Louis, to, in the words of his grandson, Kenneth Justus, “walk into Lima to seek his fortune.”

LIMA — Ruel W. Steen was out for a Sunday drive in late August 1939 when he noticed a man along the Pennsylvania Railroad near Elida whose actions he thought “were peculiar.”