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Flashback Friday Archive 2021-22: Flashback Friday: Week of August 20

August 19, 1871 – 150 YEARS AGO
Rockland County Journal

LEAVES
       It was reserved for this age, we believe, to find out how exceedingly droll children can sometimes be, and we believe that Mr. Clarke, formerly of the Knickerbocker magazine, may be regarded as the great discoverer of juvenile wit and wisdom. In the palmy days of his Editor’s Table, he would have been delighted to serve up his toothsome story of an Iowa youngster, who, being asked by his Sunday-school teacher, “Why are we commanded to ‘gird our loins’?” instantly answered, “To keep our breeches up!” It would not be surprising if this lad should turn out in time an eminent Biblical commentator.

August 19, 1921 – 100 YEARS AGO
Rockland News

WOMAN’S OWN AFFAIR
[Image: 1920s sheet music from the collection of Marianne Leese. The image appeared in Rockland County: A Century of History, 2002, (c) HSRC.]
       In our humble judgment, if some employers would pay more attention to readjusting business to post-war conditions, and less to the study of styles and fashions for their women employees, it would be better for them and for the country at large. Woman has been emancipated in more ways than one. Her new privileges are not all political. And she is not going back to the old-fashioned, preposterous, sex-accentuating costumes and manners of her grandmother.
       She is going to keep right on wearing short skirts in the interest of health and comfort, and if she wishes to bob her hair, a most sensible and sanitary method of wearing it, she will do so, whether business in general or the business man for whom she works in particular, like it or not.
       There is too much disposition on the part of the government to control the personal conduct of others already. Firms and corporations may well keep out of the “Thou Shalt Not” ranks. Saleswomen dress as modestly as their customers, and that is sufficient. The mercantile firm in Chicago that has forbidden bobbed hair for its employees, to be consistent, should advertise that it does not wish the patronage of women who affect that particular style.

HOME BREW SAFE
       The Lower House of Congress has voted to keep the home stills boiling. Under an amendment to the anti-beer bill, just approved by the House, the cellar still and home-brewing outfit would be safe from interference by Federal prohibition agents, providing no attempt was made to sell the product.

August 18, 1971 – 50 YEARS AGO
Rockland Independent/Leader

LADENTOWN TO FIGHT POWER LINE
       The history books say Ladentown, a tiny hamlet tucked in between Suffern and Mt. Ivy, used to be a “bad town” where workers from nearby Haverstraw brickyards gathered at night to get drunk, brawl, and disturb the peace.
       Now all that is left is a tiny cluster of homes, a few stores, and a church—hardly enough to make a dot on the map.
       But out of the stillness of the mountainside in Ladentown a new controversy is brewing that threatens to make Ladentown noisy again. The issue is Orange and Rockland’s determination to push high tension power transmission lines through the hamlet.
       Miss Rita Miller has been living on a 19.5 acre tract of densely wooded land in Ladentown since 1948, moving in to her pleasant white house every spring when the snows thaw.
       Next to her property is a 31 acre parcel of land, once known as the Dilts Farm, which Orange and Rockland bought last spring, to build a switching station.
       Power lines coming from New Jersey, now extend across Palisades Interstate Park lands, just above the mountain from Miss Miller’s home.
       In April, Miss Miller was notified by Orange and Rockland that the utility would seek an easement across her property to hook up the power line on the park land, with the switching station on the Dilts property.
       That easement would place power lines right next to a cottage Miss Miller rents to William Schneider.
       “Our feeling,” explained Schneider, who is helping Miss Miller in the fight to prevent the lines from cutting across her property, “is that now that they own the 25 acres there, why can’t they use their own property and leave us alone?”
       Orange and Rockland has brought proceedings in state Supreme Court to condemn a five acre parcel of Miss Miller’s land to be used for the easement.
       “This is not somebody standing in the way with no other possibilities or no other access or no other route that they can follow,” Schneider points out.
       Orange and Rockland had made successive offers of $7,500 and $,9000 to obtain the easement. Miss Miller claims the utility’s appraiser found the real value of the land to be $5,120.
       But Miss Miller refused to have the transmission line cut across her property where deer can still be seen in the morning and hikers follow the path of an old road up the face of the mountain.
       Instead she offered to sell the property to Orange and Rockland for $85,000, but she could not come to terms with the company and in August returned to her home one evening to find a summons under the door.
       “I thought I was going to have a heart attack, I was so upset,” she remembers.
       Within the next month, Miss Miller expects the court will impose terms on the granting of the easement. And the court has already mandated the power line be connected across her property by April 1972.
       Miss Miller intends to fight the whole proceeding, every step of the way. “I cannot understand why they couldn’t go straight up alongside their own property,” she remarked.
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This Week in Rockland (#FBF Flashback Friday) is prepared by Clare Sheridan on behalf of the Historical Society of Rockland County. To learn about the HSRC’s mission, upcoming events or programs, visit www.RocklandHistory.org or call (845) 634-9629.

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