100 years ago in The Record

Friday, Dec. 13, 1918. More than a month after an armistice ended the world war, local families are still just learning of loved ones killed in action during the final weeks of fighting.

James H. Hendy, who represents Troy’s Eleventh Ward in the Rensselaer County board of supervisors, receives a telegram today from the federal war department reporting that his son, Private Joseph C. Hendy, was killed on September 28.

Private Hendy was a 17 year old senior at Troy High when he enlisted following the U.S. declaration of war against Germany in April 1917. He fought with Company L, 107th U.S. Infantry regiment, at the time of his death.

In Cohoes, Johanna Fennen of 16 Oak Street gets word tonight that her son, Marine Private Timothy Francis Fennen, was killed in action on November 2. Private Fennen enlisted in March 1916, and was one of the first Marines deployed to Europe in July 1917.

Talcott Enters a Plea of Guilty

On the day of his indictment by a grand jury, former Burden Iron Company manager Daniel W. Talcott pleads guilty to stealing $9,400 from the Burden Benevolent Association while he was its treasurer. The amount is equivalent in buying power to more than $144,000 in 2018 money.

Defense attorney John T. Norton tells the court that Talcott was a loyal Burden employee for 42 years before an abrupt promotion. “By the death of men he was associated with in business for years responsibilities came to him which threw him into social relations of an expensive nature,” the lawyer says, “The environment was one of temptation and he fell.”

Norton notes that the Burden Benevolent Association has “no desire for revenge or a heavy sentence.” Justice Wesley O. Howard “expressed sorrow at the downfall of one who had stood so high” before sentencing Talcott to a minimum of 30 months in Dannemora. The Paaschen Case

In Troy police court, magistrate James F. Byron orders William H. Passchen to pay his wife $15 a week (approximately $230 in 2018) after his conviction for nonsupport, but Passchen’s attorney plans to appeal the decision.

Passchen threw his wife of ten years out of their Fifteenth Street home last week after she refused to relocate to the family home in Bennington, while he remained in Troy. Mrs. Passchen has refused to divorce her husband or move at his expense to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

Defense attorney Thomas F. Powers argues that Mrs. Passchen should have been satisfied with the hotel room, however poor its view, but Byron rules that she “should be maintained as becomes her husband’s standing in the community.”

—Kevin Gilbert