100 YEARS AGO IN THE SARATOGIAN

Saturday, May 18, 1918. A Saratoga Springs couple and a 12 year old passenger are killed this afternoon when their car is hit by a northbound train at the West Circular Street crossing.

Mr. and Mrs. Peter L. Gassert , along with Anthonin Masse of Henry Street, are instantly killed in the crash just before 3 p.m. A fourth passenger, two year old Louis Gassert, is treated at Saratoga Hospital after escaping with only slight scratches and bruises.

Gassert is an express driver who recently acquired a Ford car to replace a horsedrawn delivery wagon that was wrecked by a car last fall. “Since obtaining the car, it was Mr. Gassert’s habit to take his wife and their small child with him much of the time he was delivering,” The Saratogian reports.

“How the accident happened could not be learned…. None of the train crew could say how the accident happened. The fireman said that he was shoveling coal and did not see anything. [Conductor James] Patten stated that he was changing his clothes when he felt the train stopping. The towerman who operates the gates at the crossing absolutely refused to talk.”

The crossing gate apparently was open, enabling Gassert to drive onto the track even though the Delaware & Hudson train, bound for North Creek from Schenectady, was rapidly approaching.

“The train ran several hundred feet after striking the Ford, carrying the wreckage of the machine along with it,” a reporter writes, “The bodies were strewn along the track. The body of Mr. Gassert was nearest to the crossing and the body of his wife was a hundred or more feet further up the track.”

Masse’s identity is initially a mystery, since the Gasserts had no older children. His sister tentatively identifies the body by a “peculiar button” on a sweater. An older brother confirms her identification and explains that the Gassert and Masse families were friends, both fathers belonging to the Saratoga Aerie of Eagles. Education of Foreigners At this afternoon’s meeting of the Saratoga County Women’s War Conference at the Worden Hotel, Dr. Sherman Williams “made a strong appeal for the education of foreigners so that they may be truly American.”

Williams represents the state department of education. He tells the conference that “All the foreigners who come here have strong social longings which America has not tried to satisfy so that they would be made into good citizens.” The failure of many to become properly Americanized is “as much our fault as theirs.”

Along with satisfying “social longings,” Williams also suggests “the abolishing of the schools in which the English language is not spoken.”

— Kevin Gilbert