100 years ago in The Record
Friday, Jan. 4, 1918
Dr. John T. H. Hogan of 3228 Sixth Avenue is somewhere in France as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Medical Corps, attached to the British Expeditionary Force. His latest letter home, dated December 14, appears in today’s Record.
“I am now hearing the boom of the big guns and have seen some of the horror they bring,” Hogan writes to his brother, John A. Hogan, “Cannot tell you, of course, in what part of the big area of warfare I am, but it is in a very active one just now.
“Can you imagine home in Troy, every house with its roof caved in, its streets lined with debris and not a living civilian to be seen; trees cut off at the trunk by shells and fruit trees deliberately sawed down, the earth plowed in all directions and like old-fashioned crazy quilt stitched with miles upon miles of barbed wire … Can you imagine any such thing? Of course not, but such are the conditions here.”
Dr. Hogan’s letter may be meant at least partly for public consumption.
“Could the people at home but see these things as I did to- day, the utter desolation and destruction, needless, cruel, inhuman, not to say unChristian for a country professing Christianity and civilization, they would buy Liberty bonds and go without luxuries.
“They do not know what that German kultur really is. Wait until some of us go home and tell what we have actually seen, then they will really wake up to their present and future peril. Can’t they know that to bring an everlasting peace, the order of things must be changed? Justice must be administered by right and might.”
Time ripe for ball club
Troy lost its New York State League baseball franchise in the summer of 1916, due to a lack of fan support. With an influx of war workers expected for the Collar City, Record sports editor Marty Mack Dee thinks that “Troy should be able just now to support a club” again.
Thousands of people are scheduled to take war-related jobs in Troy businesses and at the Watervliet Arsenal this year. Dee sees them as a ready-made audience for “a representative team in a fast league.”
“What is needed is money,” Dee concedes, “Why then doesn’t a committee of local business men get together and raise the money? It could be done without working a hardship on anyone.”
Key to Dee’s plan is raising enough money to lure Troy baseball legend Johnny Evers, currently a free agent, back home to become the new team’s manager.