On this day 100 years ago
Sunday, Oct. 6, 1918. A local man who tried to shoot his way into a home to see his supposed girlfriend is seriously wounded by her brother this afternoon, The Saratogian reports.
Ralph Rando is being treated at Troy Hospital for gunshot wounds to the throat, left side and abdomen. The man who shot him, Joseph Shine, is also wounded but flees the scene and remains at large as the Monday paper goes to press.
Rando, a brickyard worker, “had been a friend of the Shine girl [but] his attentions were objected to by the girl and her family,” explains deputy sheriff James Hill. When the Shines see Rando heading their way this around 3:30 p.m., they barricade themselves inside their home near Stillwater.
After walking around the house a while, Rando starts shooting through the windows. Mother Shine faints from fright, and as Joseph rushes to catch her, he takes a bullet through his right wrist. “Becoming enraged, he secured a shot gun which he fired at Rando,” a reporter writes. The Shines call an ambulance for Rando as Joseph heads for parts unknown.
Black Watch Chaplain Preaches
The flu epidemic has forced the cancellation of most public gatherings in Saratoga County, while churches have been restricted to morning services only on Sundays. That still provides speakers an opportunity to promote Liberty Bond sales during the Fourth Liberty Loan fundraising drive.
At Christ Church in Ballston Spa, Rev. Fred Swindlehurst, chaplain of the Canadian Black Watch regiment, is the guest preacher.
“He took for his text the slaughter of the innocent children [by] Herod, comparing this with the tramp of the Kaiser’s troops through Belgium and France,” The Saratogian’s Ballston Spa correspondent reports, “The preacher spoke of what he had seen of German culture [sic] while in service at the front.
“As one of the incidents of German barbarism he spoke of the shelling of dressing stations and ambulances; of the bombing of hospitals by German airmen who often swoop down and turn their machine guns on the Red Cross nurses as they carried out the wounded from the wrecked building.”
Swindlehurst raises the question, oft-asked recently, of whether the world war proves Christianity’s failure to improve men’s souls. “Christianity has not failed,” he concludes, “It was because Germany put more faith in its so-called efficiency than in God and put armaments before Jesus Christ that caused the war.”
In fact, resistance to German aggression is “conclusive evidence that Christianity is not a failure [while] the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man is still a living vital force” among Germany’s enemies.