Local history from the pages of The News Leader in Staunton, Va.
Created by newsleadernow on May 27, 2011
Last updated: 06/21/12 at 10:42 AM
STAUNTON - Herbert Winckelmann doesn't like to write letters but his children somehow coaxed him into writing a 200-page autobiography, preserving stories of his life as a German soldier and the more than three years he spent in a Russian prison camp.
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In the city skyline backdrop over his computer screen Tuesday morning, Steven Wine saw an orange halo appear to envelop the top of the World Trade Center.
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WAYNESBORO - Throughout the day, community churches became a place of refuge. Many in the area turned to their houses of worship to express concern, questions and disbelief about the morning's reports.
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Amy Sands, deputy director of the Nonproliferation Center in Monterey, Calif., was awakened at 6 a.m. Tuesday by a colleague. She along with thousands of others across the country tuned in to the same images - the collapsing Twin Towers, flames at the Pentagon and smoke engulfing Manhattan.
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STAUNTON - In most schools across the area, officials said it was "business as usual" as teachers and educators grappled with the effects of the terrorist attacks on their students.
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STAUNTON - Fire and smoke still were pouring from the World Trade Center and Pentagon as the attacks numbed the Shenandoah Valley.
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STAUNTON - Students scattered across the Mary Baldwin College campus were in tears today, reacting to the terrorist attacks that led to three downed planes, and the fall of the Twin Towers.
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"By any culture's definition, this is pure evil," said Dan Kalas. He stood outside the adoration chapel at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Staunton this afternoon.
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STAUNTON - It's the last of its line. Actually, it's the last of two identical lines of stately cottonwood trees believed to have run the length of a long driveway that would one day become Selma Boulevard.
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The Country Church in Town, as Second Presbyterian came to be called, is celebrating its 125th anniversary in November with a weekend of special events Nov. 11-12.
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Four decades of Dunsmore Business College graduates will meet at the Staunton Holiday Inn to swap memories about one of the most respected of the city's once plentiful "practical" schools, of which all are now defunct.
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STAUNTON - With considerable effort, the 81-year-old Rev. Billy Graham ascended Mary Baldwin hill Sunday to attend the graduation of his daughter Ruth Graham McIntyre.
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STAUNTON - When downtown's Trinity Episcopal church began its colossal renovation two years ago, the problem of just how not to disturb its surrounding burial ground - the oldest surviving cemetery in the city - had already been addressed.
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They traveled by day, taking their passengers on short, one-way trips that few would have consented to willingly.
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When the Wayne Theater closed its doors, the city lost more than another struggling business. It lost a piece of its heart.
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Take a deep breath and it all comes rushing back in a deluge of retro-atrocities: Poufed hair, polyester pants and shirts flayed open to the sternum.
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Until the age of fast food, you could go out for the noonday meal and get back to work on time, but with a feeling of actually having been somewhere and eaten something memorable. In the glory days of the lunch counter, there was food, company and a sense of place to be had on virtually every commercial street corner in America.
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Staunton's "Grand Old Man," the celebrated centenarian John F. Brooke, was in the news again. Having turned 103 just over a week after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the man who had experienced five American wars was suddenly noteworthy for more than the observance of his birthday.
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A long-dead body found as the Staunton Fair office building was being torn down continued to puzzle local officials.
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"The 'death car' in which Clyde Barrow, once Public Enemy No. 1, and his sweetheart, Bonnie Parker met their death," reported the Leader September 16, 1940, "which ended the ghastly, bloody career of two of the United States' most notorious members of the gangster world, will be on display at the used car lot on North Central Avenue.
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Less than a month after Hitler invaded Poland, a local newspaper reported that Staunton's 116th Infantry Regiment was combat-ready should it be required.
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Memorial Day, May 30, 1939, took on an ominous significance with the unusually large number of local observances.
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Best-selling author Peter Maas began his career writing about Charles "Swede" Momsen, the Naval lieutenant commander who led the most daring submarine rescue in history.
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WAYNESBORO - Small things get lost in old newspapers, but thanks to archives full of indelible microfilm, they can always turn up again. In July of 1937, the News Leader's interview with retired Waynesboro Police Sgt. S.B. Shumate came and went, finally resurfacing when an unrelated research project accidentally unearthed it last week, exactly 63 years later.
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Under the most suspicious of circumstances, Staunton's palatially elegant New Theater burst into flames sometime between 11:20 and 11:45 on the night of January 23, 1936, shooting plumes of fire and smoke high into a clear, wintry sky.
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A Staunton woman born during the Andrew Jackson administration was alive and well and celebrating her 101st birthday, the Leader reported on Jan. 23, 1936.
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After 27 1/2 years, without having missed a single day due to illness, C&P telephone operator Augusta V. Hedrick announced her retirement.
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With the rise of the railroads came the age of the wanderer - the homeless, jobless person who took the advent of freight car-hopping and transformed it into the American way of economic desperation for well over a century.
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Only a full-blown calamity could have knocked the unfolding saga of the Lindbergh baby's kidnapping off the local front pages in March of 1932, diverting the public's attention from the most dastardly crime of the decade.
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A. Robert Dickson, the county's out-of-control alcohol control officer, was in trouble again according to reports from Aug. 26, 1930.
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A bolt of lightning peeled the bark off a tree at Folly Mills, the Leader reported July 29, 1930, killing "four fine steers" and sending an electrical charge through the ground into "a filling station about 50 yards from the tree.
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Local newspapers were much more graphic in the 1930s.
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Conservative banking policies helped Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County weather the Great Depression better than many communities.
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It was unique in the annals of medical history, declared the Leader on Aug. 28, 1928. During a routine operation for an appendicitis at King's Daughters' Hospital the previous morning, a 29-year-old Augusta man was found to have a rather amazing configuration of internal organs.
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No doubt the Rev. Billy Sunday considered his five-week-long stay in Staunton to be one of the most unpleasant of his evangelistic career:
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Ernest Hamilton suffered the after-effects of an automobile accident he had suffered the day before while attempting to quench his craving for a cigarette.
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In January of 1926, workers had all but finished blasting a mile-long tunnel through the solid limestone of Lookout Mountain.
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Much as they might have hated to admit it, by the spring of 1925 it was obvious to local officials that Prohibition had done little more than swell the number of criminal cases in county courts.
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A look back at Staunton's once-prosperous fur trade tells us much about wild animal populations as they existed in the area 75 years ago -- and also why so many have either dwindled or disappeared entirely.
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Outlaw the police? Good luck.
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WEYERS CAVE - Readers of this column may have noticed a historical marker just east of Weyers Cave that looks a little different. Instead of a number at the top identifying it as sponsored by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, this one has the seal of the Future Farmers of America.
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Towering over the Victorian storefronts that make up most of the city's downtown, the Stonewall Jackson Hotel is conspicuous for much more than its size. That it exists at all is remarkable enough. How, in fact, did the smaller, village-like Staunton of the early 1920s manage to build for itself one of the South's grandest hotels?
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Muzzled or not, all dogs found running wild in the streets of Staunton would be put to death, city officials announced.
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Staunton was contest hungry in the early 1920s, using any excuse to throw out a challenge and then feverishly try to meet it.
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Horses were on their way off the streets of Staunton, but some still refused to go quietly.
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It was the winter of 1920, and Staunton was closed on account of the flu.
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Mike the police bloodhound added fresh laurels to his fame yesterday," the Leader reported in January 1920.
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One look at a Staunton Leader of the 1920s and the frantic pace of the local economy becomes exhaustively apparent: Giant display ads compete like sideshows for public attention.
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Staunton announced its intention to bring buffaloes to Gypsy Hill Park, since "buffalo life on the government ranges in the West is thriving rapidly and that additional `hunting ground' is being sought in which to place them.
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"The Mennonite graveyard at Mt. Clinton," wrote the Harrisonburg Times on Aug. 20, 1919, "has on one of its stones perhaps the most unique epitaph in the country. David R. Ray, half Indian, was a soldier under Jubal Early and Stonewall Jackson, and served valiantly through the war. He was also the father of about 14 children. Upon his demise, one of his sons conceived the following, which now delights the visitor to the old man's grave:
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