We are 21 days into the new year, have you checked your hat?
Ugly weather makes hats grubby, and since the world judges a man's character by the state of his hat, it's a shame to wear a shabby one.
Fortunately, last year's stock of winter hats is on sale today (that is, 100 years ago today) at the Gus Blass Co., Pfeiffer's, Joe D. Back and Bro., and other Little Rock clothiers. They're clearing the hat racks for the spring hats they'll start selling in February. You can tide your head over to spring for about $3.
Here is another option: have that hat cleaned and re-blocked.
With an ad in the Jan. 21, 1919, Arkansas Gazette, the Capitol City Hat Co. invited men to bring their hats to either store, at 116 Main St. or 117 Capitol Ave. in Little Rock.
Capitol City Hat Company employees are hat builders, and our work will give you complete satisfaction.
That is the sort of information a body can do something about — not like the important stuff on the Gazette's Page 1, the ongoing negotiations over the League of Nations or Congress mulling whether to make the Grand Canyon a national park.
Of slightly more immediate import, a small item atop Page 1 warned that the National Association of Clothiers in New York would petition Washington for permission to use the fabric that piled up after Uncle Sam constrained suit styles during the war. That headline:
Return of the Double-Breasted Coat Threatened
Closer to home, the Legislature was in session and threatening to make laws. Anti-suffragists schemed to excuse women from jury duty — whether they wanted to be excused or not, which they did not. Embalmers and undertakers were asking to be excused — and with the Spanish flu still a deadly reality, the remarkable thing is they weren't trying to duck work.
Wartime entities were disbanding, and so Mr. Warren of 2021 Main St. in North Little Rock and other bidders got a deal Jan. 20 on 70 "homer" pigeons the U.S. Army Signal Corps auctioned off — $3 a pair.
And all the state Food Administration's minions were going to lose their jobs Feb. 15. Hard news for them but not-so-bad news for restaurateurs and hoteliers who had been caught hoarding sugar or serving too many pats of butter per customer per day.
State Food Administrator Hamp Williams, who, for the past ten days, has been confined to his home in this city suffering from a partial physical and nervous collapse, stated today that work looking into the demobilization of the state organization was already under way.
The organization would retain volunteers "ready to respond to any subsequent call that may be made by Herbert C. Hoover" — the federal food administrator. Williams warned would-be profiteers that federal officials in far away Washington would pursue cases of overpricing in Arkansas.
Speaking of prices, the Southwestern Bell Telephone Co.'s new telephone toll rates took effect at 12:01 a.m. Jan. 21.
If (like mine) one of your parents was an impressionable youth in 1919, these rates, detailed in Little Rock newspapers, will explain why he started trying to get off the phone as soon as he picked it up.
Authorized by the Postmaster General, toll rates were assessed for calls placed to phones outside a subscriber's immediate service area.
Toll rates were based on a "station-to-station" rate determined by air-line distance between toll points, to wit: 5 cents for each six miles up to 24 miles and 5 cents for each eight miles beyond that distance.
For toll calls where the calling party does not specify a particular person to be reached at the called telephone, the "station-to-station" rate is charged. This method provides the cheapest and quickest form of telephone toll service.
But to call to-station, you needed that station's phone number. You could look in a directory or obtain the number from Information. Otherwise you had to give the name and address of the called person to the toll operator. If you then conversed with that person once the connection was established, "person-to-person" rates applied.
As this service requires a greater amount of operating effort, the rate for such calls is about one-fourth greater than the "station-to-station" rate. (Minimum "person-to-person" rate 20 cents.)
But you could pay more.
On a person-to-person call, if the calling party set a definite time at which he would talk, and the conversation was held, the "appointment" rate applied.
As this service involves the making of an appointment in addition to the operating effort necessary for a "person-to-person" call, the "appointment" rate is about one-half greater than the "station-to-station" rate. (Minimum appointment rate 25 cents.)
If you needed someone on the other end to fetch the called party to the phone, that invoked the "messenger call" rate — minimum 25 cents.
If your toll call failed for any reason the phone company couldn't control, a "report" charge was made — about one-fourth of the station-to-station rate. Minimum 10 cents, maximum $2.
But not in the dark!
The rate between 8:30 p.m. and 12 midnight is about one-half the "station-to-station" day rate, and between midnight and 4:30 a.m. the rate is about one-fourth the "station-to-station" day rate. The minimum night rate is 25 cents. Where the "station-to-station" day rate is 25 cents or less, no reduction is made for night service.
If your daytime was your interlocutor's nighttime, too bad — day rates applied.
Day rates apply on all calls other than those made on a "station-to-station" basis whether they are made during the day, evening or night.
BEVO HAS WILD RIDE
Walter Henry "Bevo" Scovell of the city Fire Department and his "road louse," a two-lung automotive contraption, sprang into the limelight Jan. 20 at Sixth and Main streets. They encountered a bigger car.
The machine which interrupted "Bevo's" peaceful navigation was of the six-cylinder type. "Bevo" in getting away from the monster, directed the front end of his pet bug west into Sixth street. But the road was not clear. A man, of average dimensions, obstructed the path, but, according to all reports, the "louse" struck him and pushed him aside.
Getting out of his buggy, Bevo saw water spurting into the air about 3 feet above the radiator.
Throwing his arms skyward he yelled, "Oh, gee! The radiator's bursted." A newsboy remarked that it was impossible that so small a radiator could squirt such a stream, and after investigation the stream was discovered to be coming from the pipe of the drinking fountain that formerly decorated the sidewalk there.
With one hand, Bevo pulled his machine off the sidewalk and chugged back to No. 2 station.
Finally, here's a nice poem from our friend C.T. Davis, the eventual inaugural state poet laureate who by January 1919 was writing poems on Gazette editorial pages:
Highbrow Stuff
I shall go
Roaring into the night
The pavement shall
Unroll beneath
the whirring wheels
Even as a scroll,
And lamp posts
Along the sidewalk
Shall flicker past.
I shall feel
The press of wind
Against my face,
And hear the echo
As the cross streets
slide past,
Rapidly one by one,
Because I shall pass them
One by one.
The silent houses
Shall vanish behind me,
As I go roaring
Into the night,
And in all probability
I shall be pinched
By a soulless speed cop.
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Style on 01/21/2019