Other Times
100 Years Ago – 1916: Complaints from citizens relative to the smoke nuisance were threshed out in Chester City Council when a petition was presented from the taxpayers living in the vicinity of the Fayette Manufacturing plant regarding the heavy soot falling over the houses, yards, etc. An envelope containing a glass full of soot brushed off clothes hanging on a line near the plant was presented as evidence of the conditions now existing.
75 Years Ago – 1941: “A bicycle built for two” was a common sight before the turn of the century, but not today. This has been learned by the committee in charge of Collingdale’s historical pageant, which has been trying for the past three weeks to secure the use of a tandem in the pageant. The county has been scoured for such a “bike,” and Philadelphia has been searched from one end to the other with no result. If anyone has a bicycle of that type they are asked to contact Collingdale borough hall.
50 Years Ago – 1966:
“The hoodlums who are tearing up their draft cards and desecrating our flag and refusing to serve in Vietnam are communists,” Vincentian Father Frederick P. Gehring, pastor of St. Vincent’s Roman Catholic Church, Germantown, said at Springfield Country Club
during Communion brunch of Court Christina 1283, Catholic Daughters of America of Chester. A former Naval chaplain known as the “Padre of Guadalcanal,” Gehring served with the First Marines on the island on World War II.
25 Years Ago – 1991: Burglars broke into the Chester City Hall Annex over the weekend, destroyed a safe and took $800 in the latest of a rash of break-ins at the building. City council has hired a locksmith to change the locks at both the annex and City Hall; some suspect an inside job. Nobody knows how many keys to the buildings are now circulating from years of employee changeovers. 10 Years Ago – 2006: In the mid-1990s, county school districts started allowing mechanical “eyes” to watch students when teachers and administrators weren’t around. Ten years later, only two of Delco’s 17 districts — Garnet Valley and Southeast Delco — are camera-free. Prior to graduation last year, three Interboro High School students poured glue in the building’s exterior locks and stole 26 license plates from the district’s bus fleet. In the past, similar pranks would have gone unpunished because no one could identify the pranksters.