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This Week in Rockland: Newspaper Excerpts: Flashback Friday: Week of August 9

August 8, 1874 – 150 YEARS AGO
Rockland County Journal

CLARKSVILLE HOTEL
[Image: Lithograph of Knapp’s hotel. F. A. Davis, 1876. From the Combination Atlas Map of Rockland County, New York, compiled, drawn, and published from personal examinations and surveys. Image courtesy of the Palisades Public Library, via NYHeritage.org.]
       This, for many years, popular hotel has recently changed hands, and is now the property of Captain Abram Knapp, late of Haverstraw, under whose management the house will be all that it has ever been in its palmiest days. Mrs. Knapp is a deadly foe to untidiness, and, consequently, under her superintendence the Hotel cannot fail of being one of the most inviting resorts in the county. The Hotel will be open for the reception of visitors on the 11th inst., and the public are invited to call when they come that way.

AROUND HOME
   ☞ Our people refuse to vote an appropriation for lighting street lamps, and the majority will not expend fifty cents a month for oil to light those in front of their own premises. This is pitiful.
   ☞ The morning papers of Thursday announced that Supervising Inspector General of Steamboats, D. D. Smith, of this place, had been removed from the position. We doubt the truth of the statement.
   ☞ One of our lads recently went to bathe, and a hickory limb not being handy to hang his dry-goods on, he used a picket fence. When last seen he was trying to solve the mystery of the fifth knot in his unmentionables.

August 7, 1924 – 100 YEARS AGO
Pearl River News

FETE PLANNED FOR COLONEL AT BLAUVELT — ELABORATE AFFAIR ON AUGUST 23 IN HONOR OF COLONEL TRAUB.
       The biggest affair ever undertaken by the Come Back Club has been planned for August 23 when the “Fete Militaire” will take place in honor of Col. Traub and the reserve officers under his command who are receiving training at Camp Bluefields.
       There will be races of all kinds and for everybody from the children to contest and a tennis tournament. Handsome prizes and loving cups will go to the winners. All those interested in these contests are urged to send in their names without delay.
       From present indications there will be more than 2,000 people on the grounds for the fete. Reservations are coming from many friends of the Come Back Club in Rockland County and in New York City.
       Women’s clubs of Englewood, Nyack, Pearl River and Haverstraw are each to have a bazar [s on the grounds from which will be sold delicacies, pastries, needlework and other articles of handiwork of the members of these various clubs. The various articles have been donated by the women. The returns from these bazaars will go to the respective clubs operating them.
       In the evening, a grand costume ball will be held in the main lodge at Camp Bluefields. There will be costumes of every color and character. A handsome prize will be given for the best costumes.

August 9, 1974 – 50 YEARS AGO
The Journal News

FINAL HOURS OF AGONY
       WASHINGTON – Slowly, the story of Richard M. Nixon’s last agonizing hours in the White House emerges as a drama of a man torn between the pleadings of his daughters, urging him to fight on, and the gentle, but firm, unmistakable warning from Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and other Republican congressional leaders, that resistance to resignation was futile and could only harm the nation and Nixon himself.
       And it is a story of a behind-the-scenes role of White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig that one insider called heroic. Haig, a retired Army general and former diplomatic troubleshooter, conducted the most critical, difficult negotiations of his career this week as the go-between who arranged the resignation.
       “Haig has been a great American in this crisis situation,” said one of Gerald R. Ford’s closest associates.
       “He has had to play a very, very difficult role, and he’s done it honorably and in the interests of the country and the President,” said this associate.
       Complicating the decision was the question of immunity for Nixon against any criminal prosecution for Watergate wrongdoing. Edward W. Brooke, R-Mass., was pressing his colleagues to adopt “a sense of the Senate,” resolution that Nixon should not be prosecuted, but some Republican leaders felt strongly that no such action should be taken, at least in advance of Nixon’s resignation. And this became the final decision.
       A White House official said Nixon apparently had decided to resign sometime on Tuesday. He changed his mind, reportedly upon the urgings of his daughters, Julie Eisenhower and Tricia Cox, in one of several emotional, tearful family conferences.
       On Wednesday morning, Ford met with Haig and, according to reports from Ford’s staff, Haig said that he and Nixon’s senior staff all felt he should resign, but Nixon was holding back.
       The Republican senators met at 10 a.m., but were told by their leaders that everything that could be done was being done, and any formal pressure from Capitol Hill would not help.
       Then Haig had lunch with Goldwater, the GOP’s 1964 presidential candidate and “elder statesman.”
       From there, Goldwater went to Capitol Hill to report to the Republican congressional leaders, dodging reporters by going to the third-floor Senate office of Sen. Wallace F. Bennett of Utah, a member of the GOP Senate policy committee.
       Goldwater reported that it had been arranged for him, Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, and House Republican leader Rep. John J. Rhodes of Arizona to meet with Nixon late Wednesday afternoon.
       This meeting was to be at Nixon’s invitation, so that the GOP leaders could advise him on the impeachment outlook in the House and Senate, one of Ford’s associates said.
       But before this meeting occurred, there was a meeting between the President and his family, an informed source said.
       “If I were to pick a time when the President made up his mind, this would be it,” said Ford’s associate. “The family finally came to grips with the decision,” he said.
       Whether Haig and Nixon met during this period hasn’t been disclosed.
       It is known that as of mid-afternoon Wednesday, Ford was still not absolutely certain that Nixon would agree to resign.
       Then came the meeting between Nixon, Goldwater, Scott, and Rhodes, at 5 p.m.
       Nixon made it very clear he didn’t want to discuss immunity, pensions, salary, or anything else in that vein, said one Republican leader. All he was interested in, he said, was the outlook on impeachment.
       “He asked me,” Scott said. “I said ‘Gloomy.’ He said, ‘Damned gloomy?’ I said, ‘Yes. sir.’”
       “I doubt if he heard anything new,” said another Republican leader, but hearing it from an ally like Goldwater made the message bite.
       Perhaps the most wrenching moments for Nixon came at the day’s end, when he met with his family upstairs at the White House for supper.
       Nixon called in the White House photographer Oliver Atkins for a final family photograph of the Nixons in the presidential residence and the picture had to be taken again and again, as the President’s daughters tried—and failed—to hold back their tears. Nixon hugged his daughters as they wept unconsolably, said one White House source.
       “It was pathetic. I had tears in my eyes,” Atkins said. His last photographs will not be made public, a White House spokesman said.
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