Buckman News from 1916

 Larry's not feeling good so I'm on my own here tonight.  But not to worry, I won't have to make stuff up since we had great uncle Math Hesch reporting the Buckman News for the Little Falls Journal.

This first excerpt ◄ (cut and pasted) is from the 24 November 1916 edition .  Evidently, Math (M.E.Hesch) owned a motorcycle already then, but it probably wasn't the sidecar Excelsior since a few weeks later he reports someone from Hillman coming to fix the thing...lol

But the "news" gives us answers to odd questions, too, like did the Jansons in Buckman keep up with the Jansons in Rice? (Yes).  And, did the Mueller Brothers just run the bar, or did they do events? (Both!)  and, was the 'Buckman opera house' just the church Hall?  (☺ As a matter of fact, no.  Anon says the Hall wasn't built till 1925.  He said the old church was used as a hall till it was dismantled in 1924.  THANKS, Anon!)

(You'll have to excuse the green highlighter on these copies--I was pretty excited to find these columns, and even more delighted to recognize family names, so I started highlighting till I realized I could do pretty much every line..lol.  That was 2 years ago, I think).

Thank goodness some folks talked to Math when he came around looking for news, or we wouldn't know some interesting facts, like that Mary Grittner was the hired girl who took care of dad when he was a baby ☺.   These next two pieces of Math's column are from the 29th December 1916 edition of the Little Falls Journal, BTW.  It's interesting how many folks owned cars by 1916: Beyond the Brandl brothers, evidently Anton Janson, Ed Poster, either Lawrence Voigt or Frank Peschel, Hubert Nagel, Pete Blake....but maybe so many people owned cars by then, it wasn't very remarkable.  Still, because it was almost Christmas, there were a lot of people coming home for the holiday, or going to visit others--great fodder for Math's pay-by-the-inch.  There are tidbits here just by accident, that help with others' research, too--like, Anon will be interested in this: "Joe Weisbrick now has the Mischke Hardware Store finished". December, 1916.

When I first saw these pages, I was thrilled with the names I recognized.  NOW, after all the research we've done about Buckman and all the families who settled there, these columns are positively crammed with connections. 

 This last column is from earlier: October 8, 1916, and it's another gold mine of info.  Two items stands out to me.  One is about John Hesch getting home from eye treatments in Minneapolis.  This John was Math's brother, and my grandpas' brother too.  He was, I think, a hypochondriac.

The other item is at the end of the first column, about John Winscher--wow!



P.S....Sometimes, I get tired of my own commentary.  These columns speak for themselves--click to enlarge, and enjoy reading them!