A fair haired “golden boy” with a powerful black bat stepped up in the ninth inning to punch a tremendous wallop in front of bleachers that bounced playfully into somebody’s lap.
Doesn’t sound familiar to the games you’ve been following? That’s because it was the story of the day 100 years ago, when Harry Hooper’s home run, described in the pages of the New Haven Evening Register, powered the “peppery Bostonians” to win the World Series.
You can listen to bit of the recollected play by play, captured in “This Day in New Haven History,” by clicking on the audio below.
Sports was competing for our attention, but so was the quietly threatening news that if you hoped to evade the recently passed national income tax law. You had better watch out: 500 new Internal Revenue agents had come on board and were being put officially under the civil service. That probably meant chances of bribes and evasion were pretty seriously reduced.
At home, the New Haven Automobile Club, two attorneys strong, went before the alders adamantly opposing turning busy central downtown streets into one-way affairs. Terrible for business, no place for customers to park.
That’s where the past informs the present. I was so pained in my reading that I was compelled to turn to an ad for Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root, the good doc’s newest elixir hawked in the pages of the paper. It claims to cure liver, kidney, and bladder pain. But no word on how it works on all this bad news.
