100 years ago in The Record
Monday, May 13, 1918
Four people are killed, including a former Troy man, when the New York Central railroad’s Buffalo Special derails at Schodack Landing tonight.
Forty-two people are injured in the wreck, three of them seriously. Twenty-four remain in Albany hospitals as tomorrow’s Record goes to press. No Trojans are among those hospitalized.
Shortly after 10 p.m., the locomotive and nine cars go of the rails while switching from the outer track to the middle rails. The train is reportedly traveling at 50 m.p.h. on wet tracks at the time of the derailment. Along with the human casualties, most of the thirty horses in a stock car have to be destroyed due to injuries.
Among the dead are the engineer, Richard Sherwood of Rensselaer, and fireman A. Joslin. Also a Rensselaer resident, Joslin used to live at 3037 Sixth Avenue, where his mother, Mrs. Julia Joslin, and three siblings continue to reside. He’s also survived by his wife and three children in Rensselaer. The other two fatalilties are a New York City salesman and a Brooklyn clerk for the bureau of internal revenue.
“The exact cause of the derailment has not been ascertained,” our reporter writes, “but it is reported that the train neither ran into an open switch or jumped a frog.
Laureate Boat Club
Troy baseball hero Johnny Evers will play second base for the city’s Laureate Boat Club team this year, manager George Van Arnum announces at the formal summer opening tonight.
Evers is currently out of Major League Baseball after sixteen seasons in the big leagues. He won two World Series championships with the Chicago Cubs in 1907-8, and another with the Boston Braves in 1914. After finishing the 1917 season with the Philadelphia Phillies, he signed a coaching contract with the Boston Red Sox but was released just before the start of the 1918 season. He recently rejected an offer to become player-manager for the minorleague Jersey City Skeeters.
The Laureates have at least seven games on their 1918 schedule. Their season opens on May 25 with a game against the Watervliet Arsenal’s Provisional Company No. 1. They play a Memorial Day doubleheader with the AllTroys on May 30 and a July 4 doubleheader with the Submarine Corporation of Newark, a team with Major League talent of its own.
Record sports editor Martin J. B. McDonagh, aka Marty Mack Dee, gives a talk on “Team Play in War, Sport and Business” at tonight’s event. He reports that “There was clam chowder and smokes, good singing, fine music, just enough speechmaking and a general get together good time for all.”