This day in The Saratogian in 1916

Saturday, September 30, 1916

A Mechanicville man is killed by a Delaware & Hudson train near the Dutch Gap tonight, and at least two hours go by before anyone finds his body.

The Saratogian reports that Truman A. Kelso, a resident of Ellsworth Avenue, most likely was struck by the evening passenger train that arrives in Mechanicville at 8:50 p.m. “Authorities believe that Kelso was walking along the tracks and did not see the train owing to a sharp curve at the point where the accident occurred,” a reporter writes.

Hours later, William Dumphy is out for a walk. When he gets about 150 feet south of Dutch Gap, he steps on “the body of a man in mangled condition” that “had been tossed between the two tracks.” Dumphy summons a doctor, who summons a coroner.

“Kelso was well known in Mechanicville, where he had always resided,” the reporter notes. The victim is survived by his father and sister.

COLLEGE PEOPLE IN POLITICS. President Woodrow Wilson faces a tough fight for a second term this fall. Does his standing as the first President to earn a Ph.D. help or handicap him against former New York governor and Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes?

The Saratogian doesn’t mention Wilson’s name in its editorial on “College People in Politics,” and the paper has endorsed Hughes for President. But the editorial concedes that college-educated politicians face some prejudice from voters.

Citing the case of a candidate in another state, the editorial writer observes that “It is said he could surely be elected were he not a college professor. He has had good business experience, has worked on political committees, so he is no mere theorist. Yet it is estimated that the fact that he is a college professor will cost him 1,000 votes.”

The candidate is handicapped by an assumption that “people who live in the college atmosphere have little idea of business.” The Saratogian’s opinion is that “The college professor type is probably misjudged by the average man. He may not be able to milk a cow or mend a wheelbarrow; but he ought to see clearer than many others the folly and cost of our pork fed politics.”

However, “the college type of man, to become a political and social force, needs to come closer in touch with average life. He needs to meet the mechanic and the business man and the farmer on an every-day level. He will find that the major part of the world’s wisdom is not contained in books. Every laborer and every farm hand can tell him something that he needs to know.”