Cincinnati's Expectorators Have Women Spitting Mad (2024)

New technologies consistently discombobulate the social order. So it was when some canny entrepreneurs began exploring the potential of this new-fangled sensation called radio. The electronic medium was so shockingly different from anything that came before, many graybeards announced radio was only a transient mania. The Cincinnati Post [6 March 1924] objected:

“In spite of current rumors that public enthusiasm over the radio is a ‘passing fad’ and is due for a slump, several electrical authorities who contributed to a survey of the sales for 1923 and to estimate the probable sales for 1924 reported that the sales this year are due to climb another $120,000,000.”

An editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer [20 July 1924] hailed the growing commercialization of radio and predicted only amazing improvements ahead:

“With new ideas, new apparatus and new experimenters appearing in the radio field each day, radio is entering the greatest year of its development.”

Despite such optimism, the situation on the airwaves suggested that radio had yet to get its act together. Even though Cincinnati’s newspapers devoted page after page to coverage of this emerging phenomenon – the Enquirer printed a 12-page radio section every Sunday throughout 1924 – getting access to radio was still something of a challenge.

Cincinnati’s Crosley Corporation offered bargain-basem*nt radio sets for the low, low price of $10, but that still equates to $200 in today’s money. Top-of-the-line Wurlitzer sets, at $180 in 1924, would cost more than $3,000 today. Throughout the year, almost every issue of every Cincinnati newspaper printed wiring diagrams so readers could build their own crystal sets.

All of this excitement was occurring at a time when Cincinnati had only two part-time radio stations: WLW, owned by the Crosley Corporation, and WSAI, owned by U.S. Playing Cards in Norwood. Both of those stations broadcast on the same frequency, 309 meters (equivalent to 970 kilohertz).

On a typical day, WLW broadcast from 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., then turned the airwaves over to WSAI from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., then WLW returned to the air until about midnight. The federal government back then assigned frequencies to cities, not to individual stations. All stations in each city had to share that city’s frequency.

In effect, every radio station was a clear-channel operation because no other stations operated on that frequency. Consequently, as listeners rotated their dials, they could enjoy broadcasts from throughout the continental United States. Cincinnati newspapers published radio schedules from New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Los Angeles and other cities.

All was well until the end of May that year when a third radio station, WFBW (predecessor to WKRC), began broadcasting from the Hotel Alms on the assigned Cincinnati frequency. Since WLW and WSAI had mutually agreed to schedule around each other, there was little airtime left to allocate to this upstart. Negotiations went nowhere. Powel Crosley was unwilling to give up a single minute of his airtime. The dispute, dubbed “Battle of the Air” by the local press, was finally resolved when the feds reassigned WLW to the 423 meter (708 kilohertz) frequency. WLW had to share that frequency with WBAV out of Columbus, Ohio.

Another big development from 1924 was a lawsuit. Jerome F. Remick & Co., a New York music publishing company, sued WLW radio because the station broadcast a performance of the song, “Dreamy Melody,” copyrighted by Remick. United States District Judge Smith Hickenlooper dismissed the case in a victory for radio broadcasters. Hickenlooper’s legal logic demonstrates just how disruptive radio, as a new medium, could be. Grasping for any precedent, Judge Hickenlooper noted that player piano rolls do not violate copyright each time they are played. A year later, an appeals court tossed Hickenlooper’s opinion onto the judicial trash heap and the copyright debate dragged on for decades.

Ignoring the legal and administrative haggling, what did Cincinnatians listen to in 1924? The local airwaves carried some surprisingly curious programming back then, although access to radio stations was strictly limited to white folks.

For instance, a heartbeat. On 17 February 1924, Miss Frances C. Jones, employed by WSAI as an accompanist, made radio history by broadcasting the sound of her heart. Next day, the Cincinnati Post was exuberant:

“The heartbeats were audible to listeners all over the country. Persons living thousands of miles from Cincinnati reported the ‘thump-thumps’ were heard on loud speakers.”

A month later, WLW introduced a barking dog named Nana-Hats-Off who accompanied her owner, Dr. Glenn Adams, secretary of the Cincinnati Kennel Club, to promote a dog show at Music Hall.

Cincinnati stations broadcast a lot of talk, and much of it sounds rather soporific. WLW gave Municipal Judge W. Meredith Yeatman a half-hour to expound upon “Automobile and Traffic Ethics.” Bleecher Marquette of the Better Housing League rambled about residential conditions in Cincinnati. Every speech from the annual dinner of the Cincinnati Bankers Club was broadcast in its entirety, no doubt to the delight of the populace. Dr. W.A. McCubbin fulminated for most of an hour on WSAI against fungi and bacteria.

The really popular programs offered an unusual mix of music. There were piano recitals, chimes concerts, vocal sextettes singing “old-fashioned” songs, violin solos, and musical performances from Emery Auditorium and the downtown hotels. The really, really popular broadcasts featured that nascent abomination, jazz. Alfred Segal, longtime Cincinnati Post columnist who, under his penname Cincinnatus, was considered the conscience of the city, expressed his exasperation [13 March 1924]:

“Sometimes Cincinnatus wonders that the pure air does not rebel against the waves of jazz it must carry every night. Sometimes when he tunes in New York or Chicago, only to receive another saxophone blast, Cincinnatus says to himself, ‘Was this wonderful thing invented for this – to disturb the heavens with discord, to defy the stars with the noise of tinpans?’ If Mars is inhabited and if the inhabitants receive our radio concerts, they must often wonder at the nature of the earth-beings who fill the ether with such hideous sounds every night.”

Back when children actually played outside, there used to be a phrase adults employed to get rid of bothersome tykes: “Why don’t you go play in the street?” One hundred years ago, that became the rallying cry for a Cincinnati man who sent so many kids into the streets to play that the city named a golf course in his honor.

Cincinnati (and especially the city’s children) suffered from the predatory government of George Barnsdale “Boss” Cox. The Boss’s minions famously bragged that they invested no money in public parks because squirrels didn’t vote. Consequently, even though the Cox machine was sputtering to its end by 1920, Cincinnati had very few parks for a growing population.

The solution? Set aside “play streets” in neighborhoods that lacked playgrounds or parks, prohibit automobile traffic from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., and provide adult supervision and entertainment. Until the Great Depression drained city budgets, Cincinnati set up and managed these so-called “play streets” throughout the 1920s.

The impetus for “play streets" was provided by Will R. Reeves, a New York native who ended up stationed near Cincinnati during World War I. Reeves was a musician and was recruited as organist for the Seventh Presbyterian Church in Walnut Hills. As Reeves learned about the dearth of recreational facilities for children in Cincinnati, he found work with a group named Community Services, a branch of the Community Chest.

Reeves first promoted the idea of “play streets” in 1920 and the concept was first tried out the next summer. It is obvious that the city government had nothing to do with children’s recreation. The initial funding to designate “play streets” and to provide adult supervisors was cobbled together from the Community Chest in partnership with the Jewish Settlement, Good Will (later Goodwill) Industries, and the Negro YMCA.

It’s Cincinnati, so of course complaints erupted immediately. Some streets who had volunteered for the program pulled out because of the noise and because the program didn’t restrict participation to children who lived on that street. Businessmen complained that children having fun outside their factories drew workers’ attention away from the machinery. Still, the program grew each year and reached more and more neighborhoods. It also attracted national attention. The November 1921 issue of The Playground, a magazine for parks and recreation directors, devoted an entire page to Cincinnati’s “play streets.”

“When the streets were first opened for play, it was discovered that there were several families in each block that objected strenuously, fearing that the noise would be a nuisance. But frequent visits to each street made by members of the Community Service staff were helpful, not only in ironing out the trouble but in acquainting people with the philosophy back of the play street movement and the individual responsibility of every citizen for the maintenance and expansion of the present playground system in Cincinnati.”

And there certainly was a philosophy underlining the “play street” project. In a report at the close of the 1923 season, Reeves presented his philosophy.

“The child in the crowded industrial city needs as healthy a substitute as can be found for the open fields, the running streams and open spaces which most of the older generation enjoyed. Even playgrounds and play streets are danger spots without intelligent supervision, and this is what Community Services has been providing. The public gradually is realizing that play streets are educating fathers and mothers to the need for proper playground acres and to the further need of supervision.”

Cincinnati’s “play streets” were not simply pop-up urban parks, but stringently supervised play areas with adults selecting and overseeing almost all activities. The Community Services staff organized children on the “play streets” into team games, circle games, relay races and individual competitions involving jacks, marbles and pocketknives – indeed, elaborate mumblety-peg matches were a highlight of “play streets” throughout their existence. Reeves expressed his musical interests by organizing children on each “play street” into choirs, choral groups and dance ensembles. Reeves trained college students in the art of storytelling, dressed them in “gypsy costumes,” and sent them out to entertain the young people with folk tales and stories. A troupe of affiliated thespians put on short plays aimed at a juvenile audience.

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Perhaps the most popular activity of Cincinnati’s “play streets” were fireplug showers for the children. Every day, from 2:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. and again for a while after 6:30 p.m., the nearest fire hydrants were opened to allow children to shower right there in the street. According to the article in The Playground:

“The use of hydrants as shower baths met with an enthusiastic response on the part of the children and it is hoped that this will become a permanent custom.”

The location of Cincinnati’s “play streets” tells a lot about Cincinnati in the 1920s, including a glaring lesson in institutional racism. The streets cordoned off as “play streets” in 1924 included Clay Street and Green Street in Over-the-Rhine, and Clinton, Sherman and Richmond in the West End. Those streets were for white children only. Streets set aside for African American children included Barr, Cutter and George, all in the West End. Three other streets – a section of O’Bryon in O’Bryonville, Spaeth in Cumminsville and the far eastern portion of Sixth Street beneath Mount Adams – were set aside for Black children one evening each week. According to the Enquirer [30 June 1924]:

“Additional colored work will be carried out one weekend each week in Hartwell, Steel Subdivision and Madisonville.”

Reeves reported that 36,150 children participated in “play streets” activities during the summer of 1924. More than 10,000 attended the program’s one-act plays and more than 4,000 joined singing groups.

The success of the “play streets” program led directly to the creation of the Cincinnati Recreation Commission and the hiring of Will R. Reeves as Cincinnati’s first recreation commissioner. Sadly, Reeves’ career was cut short when he succumbed to a stroke in 1931, when he was only 47 years old. The Reeves golf course at Lunken Playfield is named for the man who sent Cincinnati kids to play in the streets because there were no parks.

For the height of entertainment, early Cincinnatians enjoyed dropping by one of the local museums to watch their fellow citizens get stoned. The intoxicating agent was not cannabis or opium or shrooms, although all were readily available, but nitrous oxide or “laughing gas.”

The Western Museum started the trend. Founded in 1818 as one of the earliest scientific museums in the United States, the Western Museum is the ancestor of our Museum Center at Union Terminal. Regardless of its heritage, the institution struggled throughout its existence. Although stocked with fossils, minerals, Native American artifacts and animal specimens, the most popular attractions were grotesque wax figures and monstrosities like two-headed piglets and eight-legged lambs.

The museum directors, Robert Best and Joseph Dorfeuille, soon learned that lectures on scientific topics sold more tickets if they tacked a laughing gas demonstration onto the end of the program. An advertisem*nt in the Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette [30 November 1822] is typical:

“Messrs. Best and Dorfeuille will lecture on various departments of Natural History, and Natural Science, the latter to be illustrated by a great variety of amusing and instructing experiments; among others, they will frequently repeat the administration of the Nitrous Oxide, which has always proved in so high a degree interesting.”

By 1834, the Western Museum had replaced laughing gas with a waxworks replica of Dante’s Inferno, and found a young man to spice up the infernal regions with flashpots and fireworks. His name was Samuel Colt, and he would later build a huge firearms company. While he lived in Cincinnati, however, Colt was a 20-year-old hustler fascinated by laughing gas. He billed himself as “the Celebrated Dr. Coult of New York, London and Calcutta,” and pumped nitrous oxide into anyone who paid for a ticket. His on-stage antics here made news far away. The Albany, New York, Argus [30 July 1833] reported:

“A certain Dr. Coult is administering the nitrous oxyde gas at Cincinnati, and by way of making the entertainment ‘peculiarly attractive,’ the gas is inhaled by a ‘curiously deformed black man.’”

The Daily Cincinnati Republican & Commercial Register [6 November 1834] assured readers that Dr. Coult’s exhibitions at Frederick Frank’s art gallery on Front Street contained “not the least shade of impropriety,” and insisted – no matter how entertaining the effects – this was all about science:

“Dr. Coult’s exhibition presents some of the most pleasing and laughable scenes one can well imagine. – Although the peculiar effects of Nitrous Oxide keeps the audience in a state of almost continual merriment, yet there is a great chance for the learned and curious to exhaust all their wits in sober contemplation of the effects of Nitrous Oxide upon the human system.”

Although nitrous oxide had been known and described by English scientists in the 1700s, the gas remained a psychotropic curiosity until its anesthetic properties were discovered in the 1840s. Its potential as an pain reliever was discovered during an on-stage performance by a medical school dropout named Gardner Quincy Colton. Although Colton later built a dental empire by promoting laughing gas for tooth extractions, he stuck with his profitable stage shows for years. In October 1847, Colton filled the auditorium of Cincinnati’s Melodeon Hall over several nights and the Cincinnati Commercial [2 October 1847] reported on the effects of his laughing gas on some selected subjects.

“The effects were different upon different individuals.
“A. after the gas bag was removed from his lips, he stood for a moment, staggered about the stage, and finally fell to the floor.
“B. commenced dancing a regular hoe-down with arms and legs in the most violent motion, leaping with all his might into the air, and exhibiting the most tremendous strength. This he continued until the excitement wore off.
“C., a young merchant on Liberty street, of slight build, at some imaginary insult became enraged and commenced a furious battle upon those on the stage. Small as he was, it took five or six stout men to hold him until the effects of the gas passed away.”

Another subject was rendered “wonderfully polite and self-complacent” and wandered about the stage, rubbing his hands and bowing to the audience, while the next man up erupted in “silly laughter” while staring dumbly at the assembled onlookers. One young lawyer inhaled deeply, then stood in the most erect posture and recited a poem by William Cullen Bryant. According to the Commercial:

“The effects of the Gas lasted from two to five minutes, and seemed to pass off suddenly, dropping the taker of it down from the highest heaven to earth in an instant. We do not know why this gas should be called laughing gas. Most of the persons who took it on Tuesday evening were most solemnly serious. The whole performance passed off remarkably well, nothing occurring of the least unpleasant nature.”

Twenty years later, Doctor Colton was quite successful with his dental franchises, but still presented public demonstrations. On his 1866 tour through the Queen City, Colton not only recruited women as his subjects, but used them to promote his dental practice. An advertisem*nt in the Cincinnati Gazette [17 April 1866] provides a rather shocking description of his show:

“On the above occasion, after the lecture, twelve ladies will inhale the gas, showing its amusing effects. Breathed in small doses, it exhilarates and develops the character. After which Dr. C. will administer it to several ladies in larger doses, producing profound anesthetic sleep during which he will extract their teeth without their knowledge. He will demonstrate that he has ‘a blessing’ to offer to the citizens of Cincinnati.”

Inevitably, once society latches onto some new exhilarant, reports emerge that insanity lurks within the depths of recreational chemistry. Call it the “Reefer Madness” effect. A Mrs. John Boyer of Cumminsville was sent to Cincinnati’s Longview Hospital for the insane in 1871 after weeks of increasingly erratic behavior were attributed to getting a tooth pulled by a Sixth-Street dentist using laughing gas. In 1867, the death of a Mrs. Bolum on Accommodation Street was found, on the result of autopsy, to have been caused by a strangulated hernia, but her family insisted it was dental nitrous oxide. And the Cincinnati Star [30 September 1876] carried this squib:

“There’s a young woman living in Glendale who, her relatives say, has become mildly insane by the use of laughing gas.”

Wasn’t that the whole point of huffing it anyway?

You can blame the Civil War for Cincinnati becoming the home of professional baseball. Well into the 1860s, this was a cricket town with “town ball” and “base ball” taking a distant second place to bowlers and wickets.

The curious researcher can still find references to Cincinnati’s early cricketeers today, but most often as footnotes to the history of baseball. However, it is not too much of a stretch to say that baseball would not have prevailed in Cincinnati without the boost it received from the old-time cricket clubs.

Cincinnati’s cricket clubs were formidable opponents, hosting international matches with Canadian teams and participating in home-and-away rivalries with cricket clubs in Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Cincinnati cricketeers were professionals long before the nascent Red Stockings decided to pay their players.

Cricket was most definitely an Englishman’s game and Cincinnati before the Civil War was largely a city of English origins. The Cincinnati Gazette [6 October 1853] summed up the popularity of the “manly old game”:

“Cricket matches are now quite in fashion. We see notice of them in numerous exchanges, East, North and West. Wherever Englishmen are found, there a Cricket Club is found with them.”

Although Cincinnati newspapers carried stories about out-of-town cricket matches as early as the 1820s, local cricketeers didn’t get organized until the 1840s. The Queen City Cricket Club convened in 1843 every Thursday at 2:00 p.m. at “Wade’s Woods” northwest of the intersection of Liberty Street and Central Avenue. By 1845, the Western Cricket Club offered some stiff competition to the Queen City club and the two teams battled it out on grounds located “at the foot of Eighth Street” in the Millcreek bottoms near the Whitewater Canal. It appears that the players were solidly middle-class – salesmen, plumbers, carpenters and shopkeepers – the sorts of folks who could spare a weekly afternoon to indulge in outdoor recreation.

By 1850 the Union Cricket Club, apparently a merger of the Queen City and Western clubs, was the dominant local team. Cricket grounds were hard to come by and the Union Club played variously at the Orphan Asylum lot where Music Hall now stands, on a wood-ringed field off Madison Road in East Walnut Hills, near the canal in Camp Washington and at the back of what later became known as Lincoln Park, location of Union Terminal today. From time to time, reports indicate that adherents of “town ball” or “base ball” also made use of the Union Cricket grounds, but only on days when the cricketeers were otherwise occupied.

Among the Cincinnati cricket stalwarts back in the day was Jonathan Hattersley, born in Sheffield, England, in 1835. Hattersley emigrated to the United States as a young man, arriving in New Orleans and working his way up the rivers to Cincinnati. After a failed start as manager of a weaving operation, he set himself up as the sales agent for a number of British steel refineries. He later joined the firm of Thomas Turner, manufacturer of cutting and slicing equipment. Hattersley married the owner’s daughter, bought out his father-in-law, and set up a saw manufactory with his son, Harry. Before the Cincinnati Fire Department went professional in 1853, Hattersley battled blazes with the Franklins, one of the amateur companies active in the city. He was among the founders of the Western Cricket Club and later became president of the mighty Union Cricket Club. His office in the saw blade factory on Third Street served essentially as the club’s headquarters.

The Union Cricket Club dominated Cincinnati cricket from the 1840s into the 1870s. Its bench was so deep that the club supported two teams – the stars and a farm team both under one roof. While the “first eleven” participated in matches from Chicago to the East Coast, the “second eleven” kept the hometown fans occupied by playing clubs from Northern Kentucky, Lawrenceburg and some smaller Ohio towns. The Union Club even challenged a championship English club then touring the states but couldn’t reconcile schedules. About half the Union Cricket Club players were paid professionals.

It was Jonathan Hattersley who recruited George and Harry Wright to Cincinnati from New York’s stellar St. George Cricket Club. Although the Wright brothers carried the original Cincinnati Red Stockings to baseball glory, they arrived in the Queen City as professional cricket players. Harry Wright was also from Sheffield, born the same year as Jonathan Hattersley. One may assume they had met in childhood. In an interview with the Enquirer [20 August 1875], Harry, by then manager of the Boston Red Stockings, recounted his arrival in Cincinnati:

“I was under contract, and was offered very fine inducements to leave New York. When I arrived in Cincinnati cricket was all the rage, but it finally subsided, and from the club I managed the old Red Stockings of that city was organized. I would like to say in this connection that the uniform I used as the cricketer was adopted by the Base-Ball Club.”

Wright glosses over what specific factors caused the “rage” for cricket to “subside,” but baseball scholars generally point to the Civil War, which brought young men from all over the United States together and gave them a great deal of free time when they weren’t busy shooting each other. Simon Worrall, writing in Smithsonian Magazine [October 2006] describes the wartime conditions that promoted baseball over cricket:

“A year before the Civil War broke out, “Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player,” published in New York City, sold 50,000 copies in the United States. Soldiers from both sides of the conflict carried it, and both North and South embraced the new game. It was faster than cricket, easier to learn and required little in the way of equipment: just a bat (simpler to make than a cricket bat, which requires sophisticated joinery), a ball and four gunnysacks thrown on a patch of ground, and you’re ready to play.”

By the time the war ended, Cincinnati seethed with baseball fever. Even Jonathan Hatterley’s son, Harry, took up baseball, catching for the junior-league Pickwicks in Cincinnati. A group of young executives – many of them Civil War veterans – organized the Cincinnati Base Ball Club on 23 July 1866 and quickly allied with the Union Cricket Club, who already had very nice facilities ready for play. According to Harry Ellard’s 1907 “Baseball in Cincinnati”:

“In 1867 the club moved to the grounds of the Union Cricket Club, with which was made a quasi alliance. These grounds were situated at the foot of Richmond Street. They were used in the summer for cricket and baseball and in winter were flooded and used for skating purposes, where great enthusiasm was manifested in this winter sport, with a series of interesting carnivals.”

Harry Wright and his brother George were convinced to give up cricket to lead America’s first professional baseball team. The rest, as they say, is history. Still, Harry, George and the rest of their team did not totally abandon cricket. It is not often reported that the Cincinnati Red Stockings, during their undefeated inaugural season, actually played a cricket match. In San Francisco, on 28 September 1869, the Cincinnati baseball team engaged the “All California Eleven.” According to Ellard:

“For the sake of variety and amusem*nt they played a game of cricket with the California eleven, in which they showed that they could play cricket as well as baseball.”

The former cricketeers now known as the Cincinnati Red Stockings prevailed 118 to 79.

Roller skating seems to ebb and flow in popularity from generation to generation, or so it has seemed in Cincinnati. Older folks may remember the roller-disco craze of 1980 which swept through the Queen City from the West Coast.

Cincinnati’s first exposure to roller skating occurred just after the Civil War when a group of businessmen opened the Queen City Rink in the autumn of 1866. Their rink was located on Freeman Street between Laurel and Betts in the West End, opposite Lincoln Park. The partnership included Enoch Carson, seller of lighting fixtures; Charles Wilstach, stationer and later mayor; and Frank Alter, shoe store owner.

Queen City Rink was popular, but apparently none too profitable. The business model was based on renting skates and did not bring in the volume required to turn a profit. The Cincinnati Post [4 April 1885], recalling this inauspicious start, said the enterprise produced “Irish dividends” – losses – throughout its existence. This despite booking stars of the roller-skating world, such as “Professor” Alfred Moe, who did tricks like skating on stilts. The rink seemed to attract an unsavory clientele. One newspaper sniffed that the customers were “far from select.”

That risqué atmosphere earned the Queen City Rink a starring role in a drama, “Heart of the Queen City,” staged in 1868 at the National Theater. The scenes in this play, described as “not at all moral in its character” and offering “peculiar attractions of the sensational kind,” were set at various Cincinnati locations, including the old Millcreek House tavern, the Public Landing and the Queen City Rink. The rink scene incorporated comic and trick roller skating routines by then-famous skaters Eugene St. Clair and Henry Levi.

As the 1880s dawned, skating began to attract increasing numbers of fans. When the very high-tone Highland House atop Mount Adams opened a roller-skating rink in 1881, the city took notice. So did the Methodists. A bishop in that church told the Cincinnati Enquirer [15 February 1885]:

“Roller-skating in public rinks is not a whit different, in its moral aspects, from dancing in ballrooms. The discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church is construed to put dancing in mixed assemblages under the ban which it explicitly pronounces against ungodly and demoralizing amusem*nts.”

By 1885, Cincinnati boasted eight roller rinks including the revitalized Queen City Rink, Highland House, Melodeon Hall, Princess Rink on Linn Street, new rinks in both Cumminsville and Brighton and two rinks patronized exclusively by African Americans on Sixth Street in the West End.

The aroma of impropriety still clung to roller rinks. A Cincinnati Post review [4 April 1885] of skating in town confessed that it could not be truthfully stated that the rinks attracted “all the best people in town.” Still, the management generally maintained a level of decorum:

“The managers can not prevent ‘mashing’ or the voluntary cultivation of any sort of acquaintances by young ladies – the class in most imminent danger – but they can and do prevent the entrance of nearly all of both sexes who have forfeited all rights in respectable quarters.”

Despite the managerial vigilance, the fact remained that roller rinks brought in young people from both sexes and mixed them together in an activity that invited close if not intimate contact. Whether fondling a young woman’s ankles while helping her lace her skates or catching her as she fell, young men found salacious opportunities at every turn.

The Cincinnati Gazette [6 June 1882] reported the misadventures of a young bookkeeper named W.R. Goodall, “not deficient in personal attractions,” who spent so much time at the Queen City Rink that he was known as an informal instructor “in the graceful manipulation of that modern breakneck invention called roller skates.” Young women sought this charmer to elucidate the finer points of skating. It appears that Goodall couldn’t keep himself from bragging about his many “students” and said some unflattering things about some of them. Their boyfriends were not amused. Zeke Workum accosted Goodall on Fourth Street and bloodied his nose and Louis P. Ezekiel cornered him on Baymiller Street a pulled a knife on him.

Cincinnati was transfixed by a Commercial story [8 February 1885] about a Bucyrus, Ohio, heiress who eloped with a roller-skating instructor. Her clandestine husband, Sylvester Osborne, when confronted by his wife’s very unhappy father suggested that he might consent to disappear after having the marriage annulled if Daddy would give him a mere $20,000.

Still, Cincinnati generally escaped the more sensational skating scandals that plagued other cities. A lot of the local skating activities were just peculiar. For example, the opening of the Highland House rink led to the creation of a Highland House Roller Skating Club, organized to not simply skate, but to play an indoor version of polo on the rink. Although known as “polo,” contemporary descriptions of this game sound more like hockey.

The Cincinnati Tennis Club introduced roller skating as entertainment during pauses in their matches at Music Hall and the Cincinnati Gazette [29 October 1881] suggested that tennis on skates was the next logical step.

The Princess Rink, which hosted regular “polo” competitions, introduced a new attraction by staging a game of baseball on skates. Rink manager John M. Cook told the Enquirer that a wholly different set of skills is required from participants in this game.

“Base-ball on roller-skates, he said, depends more for success on expert skaters than it does on expert ball-players. The game will, no doubt, be productive of lots of fun and amusem*nt.”

Mayhap, although it does not seem that the experiment was repeated more than a few times.

Like all fads and crazes, roller skating had dwindled into a childhood pastime by the end of the decade. While it lasted, however, the amusem*nt made a substantial contribution to the economy. The price of boxwood – used then to make the wheels of roller skates – doubled in the early 1880s, launching a search for an agreeable substitute. Richmond, Indiana, according to the Enquirer, kept 19 factories busy manufacturing roller-skating paraphernalia, employing a thousand men.

A sporting equipment dealer told a Cincinnati Times-Star reporter that he was raking in money because of the fad.

“Everybody in town will be on wheels and I am going to get rich selling skates. Can’t I sell you a pair?”

On the north side of Montgomery, a couple of nature preserves perpetuate the memory of Hazelwood, a once wild corner of Hamilton County. The Harris M. Benedict Nature Preserve is owned by the University of Cincinnati and the adjacent Johnson Preserve was donated to the City of Montgomery.

One hundred years ago, Hazelwood was rural enough to need its own deputy game warden. That role was filled by a truly eccentric gentleman named Louis Kuertz. Warden Kuertz knew the land around Hazelwood intimately and he knew many of the woodland creatures individually.

Rube, a crow, would alight on his hand or shoulder upon being called. When Kuertz hollered across the lake on his property, a turtle named Monte would rise from the lacustrine depths and waddle up to his feet. Kuertz was instrumental in having quail designated as a songbird – and therefore exempt from hunting – in Ohio.

Kuertz worked variously as a truck farmer, a cabinetmaker and as game warden, and passed along his devotion for the natural world to his wife, Anna Belle, and especially his daughter, Gertrude. When Gertrude was just 12 years old, she inspired newspaper coverage because she would trek into the autumn woods to help her father locate poachers. The Cincinnati Post [4 November 1914] noted that Gertrude knew how to identify snipe, plover and quail and was proficient with a gun and fishing rod.

“Gertrude also studies butterflies and flowers and prefers books on botanical and avicular subjects to fairy tales. In winter she goes about in the woods scattering food for wild creatures that otherwise might starve.”

Gertrude’s affection for animals extended as well to domesticated varieties. In 1916, the Post ran a series of articles, allegedly composed by a turkey named Trixey as that chubby bird awaited the arrival of Thanksgiving. With all the build-up, the Post’s readers would have expected a traditional and savory end to the gag. Instead, on Thanksgiving Day, the Post located Trixey “in full bloom of life, smiling pleasantly” at the Kuertz farm. Gertrude was there to explain:

“’We do not slaughter our pets,’ said Miss Kuertz proudly.”

The article went on to list other animals who would not provide sustenance to the Kuertz family, including a red-haired pig named Ruddy, Nana the pony, Bossie the cow and Nanny, a goat of unusual variety donated to the Kuertzes by the Cincinnati Zoo.

“Ganders and geese, ducks and drakes, pigeons and chickens and pheasants and quail – all immune from the swish of the butcher’s knife.”

Gertrude also had a pet hawk. Her interests extended to the vegetable kingdom as well. When the Association for Preservation of Wild Flowers launched a campaign in 1921, Gertrude served as poster girl, holding a sign encouraging flower lovers to leave enough blooms to reseed for the next year.

There came a time when Frank Mills Jr. came courting and the Kuertz family naturally wanted to be sure he was as committed to environmental matters as their daughter. Mills derived from a well-known Cincinnati family. His father, Frank Senior, was the longtime director of the Cincinnati Athletic Club. A nude photograph of the elder Mills hung for many years at the club as an example of perfect manly physique. Apparently the Kuertzes approved, for a wedding date was set.

These days, it is considered conventional, if not downright old-fashioned, to be married in a church. A century ago, church marriages were the gold standard. Pretty much the only alternative to a religious venue was the local magistrate’s office. No one got married outside. Unless you were Gertrude Kuertz.

When Gertrude and Frank Mills said their vows on 3 October 1925, it rather caused a stir in Cincinnati social circles because the ceremony took place under the trees at the Kuertz family farm out in Hazelwood. The Cincinnati Post [8 October 1925] devoted several columns to the event:

“In what church was she to be married? She knew no place more sacred than the woods in which she had seen Creation march among her trees and touch them with life and where she witnessed since her childhood the gentleness of the divine love, even to the least of creatures. The woods were to be her church.”

As irregular as it might have seemed at the time, Gertrude’s outdoor wedding was officiated by the very proper Dr. Edward P. Whallon, described as “a minister of the Old School” in an official history of the Presbyterian Church.

The wedding culminated in a good-sized banquet, also served under the boughs of the great trees, illuminated by several bonfires. After the wedding, Gertrude’s appearances in the newspapers were largely confined to the gardening columns. She and Frank, a chemist by trade, excelled at growing almost anything except corn. Frank told the Post [7 July 1965]:

“There are too many varmints around. First the chipmunks dig up the seeds, then the rabbits eat the tender shoots and if there’s any left, the woodchucks strip the ears.”

And, of course, Gertrude would be opposed to shooting any of the brigands.

Gertrude and Frank lived most of their married life in a house personally constructed by her father on the family farm, next door to the house she grew up in. They raised a son and a daughter there.

Louis Kuertz had his own idiosyncratic architectural style that involved knocking together a rough iron framework and covering it with layers of stone and concrete. Kuertz built several such structures, including a bell tower for the local school, in the Hazelwood area. The house Kuertz built for his daughter was known to the nearby community as the Gingerbread House. It looked very much like the houses pictured in fairy tale books and had unique touches including dozens of nooks and crannies and a fireplace sculpted to look like a tree. All the doorknobs turned backwards and all the light switches were installed upside-down. Louis Kuertz died in 1933 and his ashes were placed under a memorial stone on the family estate.

Over the years, bits of the Kuertz farm were sold off. The Gingerbread House survived on a remnant acre until 1992, when it was sold to a developer by Gertrude’s daughter and was promptly demolished.

In the long and sordid roster of Queen City scalawags, Byron H. Robb holds a prominent place. He was delightfully incorrigible, congenitally incapable of telling the truth and absolutely unrepentant when exposed.

Robb fabricated so consistently that it is often difficult to separate any facts from the overwhelming flood of mendacity in his wake. It appears that he was born around 1836 in or near Parkman, Ohio, a tiny hamlet east of Cleveland and northwest of Youngstown. His parents named him Harvey, but he found that name uninspiring and relegated it to a middle initial. He began calling himself Byron, after the British poet.

At the age of 19, Robb launched a lifelong career as a bamboozler, selling a concoction guaranteed to produce luscious curls when applied to the scalp. At least one unfortunate customer went totally bald when she saturated her hair with the stuff. He got into the oil business by purchasing a dry well, then pouring oil stolen from nearby tanks into it. He then fobbed the now “productive” rig onto some credulous farmer. During the Civil War, Robb raised a cavalry company he dubbed the “Geauga Rangers” and offered it for service, claiming the rank of lieutenant on the basis of his own fabricated experience as a Texas Ranger. The United States Army wasn’t that desperate.

Among Robb’s myriad victims was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Mrs. Stowe ordered some “mammoth gourd seeds” from Robb to plant at her winter home in Florida. Robb claimed these seeds yielded gigantic gourds that could be used as washtubs. When her first shipment failed to sprout, Mrs. Stowe ordered another, and sent a letter inquiring what she had done wrong!

At various times, Robb popped up in St. Louis, New Orleans and a number of other locales, usually one step ahead of the law. When the constabulary sniffed too close to his fraudulent enterprises, Robb would “rent” another man’s name and resume business under that appellation until the coast was clear. During the 1860s, Robb paid a gardener named William Chappell $25 annually so he could advertise yet another hair tonic under the “Chappell’s Hyperion” brand.

It was reported that Robb dumped his first wife by encouraging her interest in another man. Robb sent her to Indiana to secure a divorce while he romanced an employee who would become the second Mrs. Robb.

Around 1875, Robb rented a house in Bellevue, Kentucky, establishing his business offices in Cincinnati. Entries in the city directories for the next half-dozen years indicate the constant churn of his schemes. At first, he listed himself as a “general agent,” which covered a multitude of sins. Next, he became the proprietor of the Monitor Manufacturing Company, then manager of the Monitor Lamp & Glass Works, and then President of the American and European Secret Service Company, then manager of the Electro Magnetic Hair and Flesh Brush Company.

Interestingly, at least two of these companies had some basis in actual inventions patented by Robb. In 1877, Robb was awarded a patent for a device that extinguished a kerosene lamp if it was knocked over. In 1879 and 1880, he earned patents for “galvanic” hairbrushes. Unfortunately, Robb preferred fraud to manufacturing. People who ordered his lamps often got nothing at all, while customers of his galvanic brushes received nothing but a cheap comb with a bit of copper wire wrapped around it.

It was his “Secret Service” company that achieved the pinnacle of Robb’s infamy. The American and European Secret Service Company placed hundreds of advertisem*nts throughout the United States, offering to enlist any correspondent as a bona-fide detective, complete with a frameable certificate and a shiny new badge for the low, low price of only $3.60. After paying this fee, applicants were advised to keep their day jobs in order to remain undercover until an assignment came up. Young men throughout the country signed up in abundance – many of them career criminals who believed that an appointment as a detective offered a credible alibi. There are reports of bushels of mail arriving every day at Robb’s Fifth Street office, half containing money orders for $3.60 and half containing dunning letters from newspapers that were never paid for running Robb’s advertisem*nts.

Eventually the postal inspectors caught up with Robb and he was subpoenaed to court. Robb procured the cream of the Cincinnati bar for his defense, including Stanley Matthews, later appointed to the United States Supreme Court, and George Hoadly, later elected governor of Ohio. His lawyers reviewed the evidence collected by the Post Office and informed Robb that he was undoubtedly going to lose the case. His best option was to plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court.

Robb responded by firing his crack legal team. He then sent telegrams to a dozen or so of his “detectives,” directing them to take the next train westward, to proceed to some remote location and to apprehend a red-headed, one-eyed man missing one finger and walking with a limp. The young operatives, delighted to finally be on assignment, followed orders and reported back that no such man could be found. Robb thanked them for their diligence, paid their salary and expenses and told his proteges to await their next assignment.

In court, Robb produced several of these young men as witnesses. They testified under oath that they had applied to the Secret Service Company, paid the initiation fee, received their badge and certificate, and had received an assignment from Robb and had been paid for it. The Post Office case crumbled. No matter they could prove nothing in court, the United States Postmaster announced in 1880 that nine Cincinnati companies controlled by Robb were prohibited from using the postal service in any manner.

Byron H. Robb responded to this temporary setback with his usual flair. First, he went to court and had his name legally changed to Byron H. Van Raub, claiming it was the ancestral version of the family surname. Then he relocated to Texas and acquired some property he claimed was the famous Don Carlos Ranch, which it was not, and then got into the Shetland Pony business, and then the cowboy school business, and then the bloodhound dog business, and then the Buff Leghorn egg business and then the milch goat business. And he had the nearest Bexar County railroad whistle stop renamed Van Raub, after himself.

Every time Robb, or Van Raub, embarked on some new scam, newspapers around the country published scathing exposés of his extensive rap sheet. Newspaper owners were delighted to attack him because the one constant in Robb’s career was his reluctance to pay for advertising. Still, there was always someone willing to believe his folderol. One newspaper, reporting that Van Raub was seeking young men willing to become cowboys (and willing to send him $5.00 for particulars – sound familiar?) claimed he was a retired Prussian cavalry officer who insisted on stern discipline. When Robb died in 1913, the obituaries included some highly unlikely embellishments such as selling Shetland ponies to European nobility.

Amazingly, Robb’s bullsh*t endures to this very day. Out where Van Raub, Texas, once existed – by the 1920s, his namesake was nothing more than a ghost town – there is an official historic marker that reads in part:

“This community, named after Byron Van Raub, an English gentlemen rancher, was established along the route of the Kerrville Branch. It is said that this successful gentleman rancher developed the first dude ranch in Texas as a means to train fellow Englishman in the rigors of creating successful Texas ranching operations.”

The shifty little shyster from rural Ohio got himself memorialized as an English gentleman, capping a positively breathtaking life of unrelenting chutzpah.

Although the city’s newspapers regularly cited unsafe conditions on the city’s streetcars , the trolleys were popular and heavily used by Cincinnati’s commuters. The hilltop neighborhoods would not have developed without mass transit. Even so, riding the streetcar included some unusual situations.

For instance, halitosis. The Cincinnati Enquirer [10 April 1898] reported that a delegation of women “whose sense of smell seems to have been abnormally developed” invaded the private offices of John Kilgour, president and general manager of the Cincinnati Consolidated Street Railway, to complain about the malodorous exhalations of his streetcar conductors.

“Only last week about 20 Cumminsville ladies rode into town with a conductor who had eaten onions for dinner, and so soon as they landed in the city they adjourned in a body to Mr. Kilgour’s office. Many ladies of Mt. Auburn are kicking, while a great many more who live in Clifton are up in arms. Walnut Hills has sent in her petitions, but from all sides the kicks and the petitions are from ladies, and all are down on onions as used by the street car conductors.”

The Enquirer, hopefully tongue-in-cheek, offered a variety of remedies for onion-hungry conductors including salting his onions with chloride of lime, strapping a horse sponge soaked in carbolic acid and asafetida to his mouth, and ingesting onion-heavy dishes such as Hamburg steak in capsule form. (It is not surprising that breath mints – not yet a common thing – are not mentioned here, but it is odd that cloves – on-hand at every saloon in town – are not listed as an option.)

While the society ladies petitioned the streetcar company for pleasanter olfactory experiences, younger women blamed courtship hurdles on the streetcar schedule. Many young men back then lived in town but courted fair maids out in the tonier suburbs up the Millcreek Valley. The city’s streetcars ran late enough to get their dates back home to Glendale and Wyoming, but not late enough to convey the ardent swains back to town. According to the Cincinnati Post [16 October 1902]:

“Maidens of the Mill Creek Valley are making a strenuous effort to secure better street car accommodations for the young men from the city who take them to theaters. At present these young men have to walk anywhere from seven to 14 miles to the city, according to the part of the Mill Creek Valley in which the girl lives, and a long, lonesome promenade by night has proved enough to take the keen edge off many an incipient and promising love affair.”

According to the Post, parents were mum on the issue and those who did voice an opinion thought the streetcars ran late enough as it was.

Meanwhile, the folks who rode the streetcars during the normal business hours had regular trials of their own, among them Cincinnati’s beloved totem, the pig. The Commercial Tribune [13 February 1898] reported a situation in which a fattened hog on the way to the slaughterhouse decided to delay the inevitable by napping under the wheels of a streetcar, causing a delay of some minutes.

“But why growl, and fuss, and fume, and blame the Consolidated? It can’t help it. It might make a thousand laws against pigs getting under the car, but every now and then a pig would break the rules.”

The Commercial Tribune described a situation in which a horseshoe, cast off by some farmer’s dray, settled into the groove in which one of the city’s cable car’s lines ran. Cars backed up for blocks as gripmen and conductors and then passengers and passersby attempted to remove the blockade or offered advice on how to make it disappear.

Coal deliveries regularly brought streetcar service to a standstill. The Commercial Tribune opined that basic geometry dictated that coal wagons and streetcars did not mix:

“Take the great big lumbering coal wagons. It is all they can do to turn around in a narrow street. When they dump a load of coal something more than half a street is needed. It matters not to the driver that a loaded street car is coming with forty or fifty passengers, some of whom will be docked if they are late. He must get that coal off.”

Cincinnati has always loved a parade, but parades played hob with streetcar schedules. The Commercial Tribune dreaded the disruption the Grand Army of the Republic reunion in 1898 would inflict on the city’s transit system.

“When the veterans are here this summer there will be a blockade that will be a blockade unless arrangements are made in the line of march to permit some of the [streetcar] lines to continue in operation. If 40,000 veterans are to be in line, and this is by no means improbable, it means a winding mass of humanity that will cross every line of cars near and far, a line that will be hours passing any given point.”

Even when the streetcar routes ran smoothly, commuters complained about the outrageous fares charged by the streetcar companies. When Cincinnati charged five cents for a ticket and a penny extra for a transfer, Columbus, Cleveland and other cities offered eight tickets for a quarter, with free transfers.

Complicating matters, Cincinnati had multiple transit companies operating with totally different fare structures. The big player in town was the Cincinnati Street Railway Company, owned by the Kilgour family, followed by George Kerper’s Consolidated Lines based around the Mount Adams Incline, the Mount Auburn Cable Line, the Main Street Line and other players. A mourner wishing to place flowers on the grave of a loved one in Spring Grove Cemetery had to pay a ten-cent fare to ride an electric trolley to the end of that line at Knowlton’s Corner, and then pay an additional ten cents to ride a horse-drawn trolley out to the cemetery.

Overcrowding was a perennial issue. The Cincinnati Post – possibly exaggerating – recorded 117 passengers stuffing one struggling car. An editorial cartoon recommended that the transit company directors should be drafted to personally pull one of the overloaded cars.

Many of the streetcars were “open,” meaning they were not enclosed at all and even those cars fully encapsulated with windows had open platforms at the front and rear of each car on which overflow passengers had to stand. A Cincinnati Post cartoonist advised commuters to bring their own pot-bellied stoves along for the ride.

The “modern” trolley cars introduced in the 1920s must have seemed like celestial chariots to Cincinnati’s long-suffering strap-hangers.

Artists and their models have attracted uncharitable suspicion for centuries. A nude woman behind closed doors with a bohemian man? Fervid imaginations erupted in the form of novels, movies and Broadway shows to insinuate all sorts of hanky-panky.

In Cincinnati, the male gaze was no less intense, though, in typical Midwest fashion, Queen City men indulged in their fantasies vicariously, enlisting disreputable journalists such as Lafcadio Hearn to actually infiltrate a painter’s studio. Hearn’s exposé in the Cincinnati Enquirer [18 October 1874], headlined “Beauty Undraped: What A Wicked Reporter Saw In An Artist’s Studio,” was very much on-brand for our most peculiar scribe. The premise of the article involved a local artist informing Hearn that a “ravishingly beautiful female model” had been procured for a sitting by one of Hearn’s artist acquaintances. Hearn’s source was most likely his pal, artist Henry Farny.

Of course, Hearn cadged an invitation to the atelier and did his best to imitate a student artist or a wealthy patron or both. Inside, while a couple of students sketched on paper tablets, the master daubed a canvas mounted on an easel. Hearn was gobsmacked by his first glimpse of the naked nymph:

“She lay at full length upon a long sofa, unclad and unadorned save by the matchless gifts of nature, her white limbs lightly crossed, both hands clasped over her graceful little head, and her luxurious blonde hair streaming loose beneath her in a river of tawny gold.”

By the close of his brief essay, Hearn was overcome by the vapors and had retired to a convenient divan, cigar dangling from his tremulous lips.

For the artists themselves, nudity was business, just another product line like flowers or landscapes or grandiose portraits of corporate magnates. Posing was also business for the models, and good times yielded fewer models than recessions. The Cincinnati Post [27 March 1907] headlined a report “Prosperity Causes Famine In Models.” The recent boom in business, according to the newspaper, created a scarcity of models because so many other, less demanding, jobs attracted women and men who declined to sit motionless for hours underdressed in a drafty studio.

“All the artists are busy preparing for the spring exhibition, and without models they can’t paint pictures.”

In Cincinnati, only Wilson Russell, who apparently possessed a classic “dad bod,” was committed to posing full-time. Russell was recruited to portray “Burgomasters and peasants, devils and St. John the Baptist.” His repertoire serves as a reminder that nudity was rarely a necessity in the art world. Cincinnati artists churned out all sorts of subjects, from religious icons to genre scenes, from civic murals to family portraits.

Posing was hard work. The Commercial Tribune recounted the declining career of a once in-demand model who fell asleep while posing and had been ignored by artists ever since. Even a strapping young man was unprepared for the rigors of artistic modeling:

“An artist was lately searching for a youth with a finely developed physique to pose for the figure of a stalwart Roman. After many discouraging efforts, a young athlete was found. He performed feats of strength for the edification of the artist. Notwithstanding his accomplishments, after he had been posing for, perhaps, fifteen minutes he became so fatigued that he gave up in despair. He has not since been seen about the ateliers.”

Sometimes it was the artists who turned models against posing. Arline Haworth, an in-demand model, told the Cincinnati Post [13 November 1903] that women artists were the worst:

“Who wants to pose for women? They open the windows, give you a cold, scold you when you get tired and discuss your weak points most unfeelingly right before your eyes. Those girl students at the Academy won’t paint me, I guess. Not while there is a man artist left in this burg.”

Others found the chores of standing stock-still more appealing. If you look up at the sculptural frieze above the cornice of Memorial Hall, you will see multiple statues of soldiers and sailors, all of them replicating the virile form of James Rollins, known as the “best man-model” in the city. Rollins told the Post [23 February 1909] that years of posing had cured his chronic pleurisy. Rollins posed for painters and sculptors on the side. In his day job, he was a butler for one of Cincinnati’s Blue-Book families.

Cincinnati artists, in their own way, promoted a diversity of subjects. African Americans frequently posed for local painters. Martha Ward, an African American woman, was among the go-to models at the Cincinnati Art Academy for many years before her death in 1904.

Native American models also enjoyed artistic favor, especially for Henry Farny and his Fourth Street colleagues Joseph Henry Sharp and John Hauser. Farny was particularly attached to a Sioux tribesman known locally as Indian Joe, but among his people as Ogallala Fire. Farny got his friend a job as janitor at the Cincinnati Art Club on Fourth Street. The Art Club offered generous flextime and Ogallala Fire could take off for weeks at a time if a decent vaudeville gig came around.

Modeling was among the routes followed by young folks, mostly women, to careers on stage or in films. One of the ingenues discovered by the Cincinnati art crowd was Autumn Sims, who left small-town Indiana for the lures of Cincinnati’s Fourth Street, where she was proclaimed the “ideal type of American beauty.” Throughout the 1920s, in addition to gracing the downtown studios and the Art Academy classrooms, Miss Sims parlayed her good looks into a handful of film roles and prominent placement in a couple of magazine advertisem*nts for cosmetics.

Cincinnati had some scandalous models, such as Elizabeth McCombs, who graced hundreds of life-sized posters advertising Cincinnati’s Fall Festival. Miss McCombs had the eye of many Cincinnati artists, but she also acquired a taste for beer and for the better things in life. She was pursued by a German baron, who decided that money was more important than beauty and transferred his affections to a Cincinnati heiress. When the police raided an after-hours saloon on Liberty Street, Miss McCombs was hauled into court and attempted to disguise herself but everyone in the courtroom knew her on sight.

Although they continually complained about the dearth of women models, Cincinnati artists were not desperate enough to hire just any young thing who strolled through the door. Farny told the Post [1b August 1904] about one such applicant who wandered in from deep in Kentucky, drawn by the allure of romance. To quote Farny:

“She was a six-foot, slab-sided woman with a face like half-ripe blackberries, and sunburnt hair, twisted in a hard, tight knot at the back of her pear-shaped head.”

The applicant refused Farny’s offer of a position as a cleaning lady, her head full of the romance she had read about in some dime novel or unsavory magazine.

Other applicants were more warmly received, although some were considerably timid about the prospect of that romantic stuff. The Post [11 July 1907] reported the arrival of a young woman, identified by the pseudonym “Miss Peachblossom” at the “Little Bohemia” on the top floor of the Harrison Building on Fourth Street. It was summer and female models were nonexistent in Cincinnati, so when she knocked on the door of David Rosenthal, she was immediately admitted and offered an opportunity to sit the very next day. She appeared promptly on time, in the company of her mother and a maiden aunt, who sat on either side of the model while the artist painted, determined that Miss Peachblossom would be exposed to as little romance as was humanly possible.

Talk about optimism! In 1905, the Cincinnati Post ran a contest looking for ideas on how Cincinnati could increase its population to 600,000 in time for the 1910 census, only five years hence.

Although Cincinnati was still a growing city – no census marked a decrease in our city’s population until 1960 – any notion that the population might top half a million, much less 600,000 was beyond ambitious. It was flat-out crazy. Still, the progressive Cincinnati Post [16 November 1905] persisted, announcing monetary prizes for the best ideas on how to achieve a population explosion in a few short years.

“If someone should start a 600,000 club in Cincinnati, it would become the biggest organization in the world. This is evident in the fact that every one in Cincinnati, and nearly every one in Southern Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, would join it. Not only are the people of Cincinnati interested for the greater city, but those outside the city also.”

In the event that folks needed a little incentive beyond civic pride, the Post offered monetary rewards for the best ideas on how to increase the city’s population to 600,000 by 1910. First prize was $50, second prize was $25 and five third prizes of $5 rounded out the awards. From November 1905 into mid-January 1906, the Post published ideas as they arrived and interviewed city dignitaries about the ingenuity of the contest.

Among the celebrities interviewed about the initiative was Joseph B. Foraker, former governor of Ohio and current U.S. Senator from Ohio. He told the Post [15 November 1905]:

“Keep building skyscrapers. One can scarcely realize the great change that has come to the city. Why, from my window they are jumping up until the city is looking like an oil field. They are filled, too, just as rapidly as they are built. Make room for the people, and they will come along.”

Compared to some of the other ideas submitted to the Post, Senator Foraker’s suggestion was rather tame.

J. Louis Bunn, a house painter, suggested rerouting the Ohio River from Coney Island to Sedamsville southward into Kentucky, so that Covington, Newport, Bellevue and Dayton would be transplanted to Ohio and therefore become part of Cincinnati.

Frank Boies, a shoe-cutter, was convinced that closing all saloons on Sunday would do the trick.

Harry Dilg, an express delivery driver, lobbied for more championship prize fights being hosted by Cincinnati.

A contestant who signed his entry “Stranger” made a list of obstacles to Cincinnati’s growth. Would Cincinnati ever achieve 600,000 population? According to “Stranger”:

“Not as long as the Traction Company is not compelled to give the people better service. Not as long as the sweeping of any old rubbish, especially paper, off the sidewalk and into the street is allowed. Not as long as property-owners or their agents are indifferent to the appearance of property that has become vacant. Not as long as corporations are not compelled to think of others as well as themselves. The worst case of this kind will be found in the so-called ‘waiting room’ at the foot of Art Hill, sometimes called the Lock-st. Incline. W. Kesley Schoepf [president of the Traction Company] would not think of using it as a garage for his automobile, yet he expects patrons to ‘wait’ in there until one of his 5-cent carriages that you are compelled to stand up in half the time comes along.”

No newspaper contest, of course, would be complete without an entry from an adorable schoolgirl. The Post [28 December 1905] prominently blazoned the ideas of 13-year-old Gladys Schultz of Linwood, who wrote her contribution in verse:

“Annex all the villages in Hamilton County;
Give all small manufactories a bounty.
Exempt from taxation all chattels;
Help the businessman fight some of his battles.
Tax real estate all it will stand –
The banker can lend a helping hand.
Fill the Mill Creek Valley above high-water mark.
Build factories thereon with space for a park.
An underground railway, with a boulevard top,
Our unsightly canal will make a beautiful spot.
A union depot for all railroads to come in,
Will bring 600,000 by 1910!”

The Post encouraged contestants to submit multiple entries and John Miller, a harness maker, complied by compiling 36 ideas into a single entry. Mr. Miller [11 December 1905] covered quite a bit of territory with his suggestions, ranging from the mundane …

“22. For Cincinnati to send a letter of thanks to President Roosevelt and Secretary Taft for the good they did in the last election.”

… to the idealistic.:

“36. Abolish capital punishment.”

Along the way, Mr. Miller lobbied for more monuments, an eight-hour work day, honest elections, free schoolbooks in the public schools, more parks along the riverfront and better service at the city hospital.

The winner of the big $50 prize was Marion L. Pernice Jr., assistant advertising manager of the Fay & Egan Company, manufacturers of woodworking machinery. His suggestion boiled down to essentially one word: Advertise! Pernice suggested that all goods manufactured in Cincinnati be labeled “From Cincinnati” and that only goods manufactured in Cincinnati be eligible for that slogan. All suburban manufacturers would lobby for annexation to Cincinnati to carry that prestigious mark.

Alas, the contest did not achieve its stated goal. Cincinnati’s population in 1905, approximately 340,000, reached only 364,000 in 1910. Evan worse, the census of 1910 marked the first time since 1830 that Cincinnati was not ranked among the largest 10 cities in the United States. It would be 1950 before Cincinnati achieved 500,000 residents and 60 years of population decline followed until an uptick in the 2020 census.

And yet, no serious discussion about re-channeling the Ohio River.