100 years ago in The Saratogian

Sunday, Aug. 12, 1917

An automobile belonging to a Saratoga Springs woman is involved in a fatal accident on the Schenectady road this afternoon and its driver is briefly jailed, The Saratogian reports.

Following the reticent style of the time, the reporter identifies the owner of the car only as “Mrs. J. Blair Scribner.” She’s better known to history as Lucy Skidmore Scribner, founder of the Skidmore School of Arts.

Scribner is traveling with her secretary, Charlotte A. Smith, in a vehicle driven by James J. Case when the accident takes place at Stop 33.

Case tells investigators that it was too late for him to hit the brakes when Willis Bernhardt, an 18 year old Albany youth, suddenly emerged on his bicycle from behind a car traveling in the opposite direction.

“The young man was thrown thirty feet by the force of the blow,” the reporter notes. Bernhardt is taken to Albany City Hospital, where he dies a halfhour later of complications from a fractured skull. Case is taken into custody, but is set free after Coroner Warren S. Hasting determines that the collision was entirely accidental.

SPEEDERS ARRESTED

In Ballston Spa today, “Some of the drivers seemed to have an idea that Milton avenue was a speedway” until the local police start arresting them.

The local police chief spends the day “trying to regulate the auto traffic through the village.” He has his work cut out for him as more than 400 cars pass through every hour.

Chief O’Brien makes nine arrests. Most are for speeding, while some are for cutting past a “silent policeman” (i.e. an automated traffic signal) at the corner of Saratoga and Milton. “One driver who was arrested told Police Justice Groat he did not think he was exceeding fifteen miles an hour,” The Saratogian reports, “but others in the car made the remark that they were not going ‘over fifty-five miles an hour.’”

Village trustees have given O’Brien the green light, so to speak, to install four more “silent policemen” at busy corners. “These silent monitors have a great tendency to slow up automobilists,” the reporter writes, “especially when it gets noised around that arrests will follow if the corner is cut.”

HIT BY WATER TOBOGGAN

In the sort of story that would get more coverage a century later than the single paragraph it merits Monday, a five year old boy is injured at Kaydeross Park when he paddles too close to the “chute the chute” and is hit by a water toboggan. The unidentified child is “knocked out” and bites his tongue, but suffers only a lacerated chin.