Henceforward you could count on finding, about once every month (sometimes twice or thrice) the same item in the Ainsworth news column: "A public dance will be given this week Saturday in the hall at Ainsworth. Good music will be furnished. The dancing public is invited."
Sometimes the dance would be a masquerade ball, with tickets at 75 cents per couples and prizes awarded for the handsomest costume and for the most comical. Once it was a "married people's" dance.
In October 1911, Gust started running separate dance advertisements in the Hobart News:
(Click on image to enlarge)
These ads appeared only in the News, as if Gust believed that paper to be the favorite of the partying types. After a few weeks, he discontinued the ads. They probably were not necessary to attract people; the brief mentions in the social columns were enough. And now and then the papers carried reports of good attendance at a dance that Gust had not even bothered to advertise. So popular were the Ainsworth dances that Hobartites often took the mile-long jaunt south to attend them.
Gust's promise, in the ad above, to maintain "good order" was probably inspired by previous incidents. In February 1909, for example, a fight broke out at one of those Saturday-night dances between two locals, Ed Maybaum and Louis Weiler. (They settled the matter in court the next week, with Ed, who started the fight, assessed about $20 in fines and costs.) An August 1910 item in the Ainsworth new column hinted at further trouble: "What was the fight about Saturday evening?"
I have the impression that Ainsworth could sometimes be a bit rough on weekends, and that's just from the dust-ups that got reported; I expect there were others that didn't. The incidents might be treated with wry humor — some sort of fracas in January 1905 was reported thus: "Ainsworth ranks first in the line of pugilists as it went to show Saturday evening. Anyone can get particulars by asking Ed. Mankey"; a December 1907 incident came out as: "A little shooting affair is reported to have taken place Sunday morning at Ainsworth but no one was hurt." In October 1906, as we've mentioned already, a brutal Saturday-night fight between George Young and Duffy DeFrance had the latter facing a charge of murder. My guess is that fights, when they occurred, tended to start either at the dance hall or just around the corner at the saloon.
And Gust Lindborg, while fundamentally kind-hearted, was a serious man, sometimes to the point of sternness, and definitely not the type to be amused by such antics. So I think it suited his inclination as well as his business sense to maintain order at his dances.
However, his good intentions and best efforts could not always prevail against liquored-up rowdiness, as in July 1912, when, according to the Gazette:
A disgraceful fight occurred last Saturday evening in the dance hall at Ainsworth and one of the drunken whelps struck a Hobart girl and felled her to the floor, according to a report. Boy's [sic] who can't behave themselves in public should not be permitted to attend a dance and should be made to suffer for any wrong done. A young man, whether drunk or sober, who strikes a girl with his fist should be made to pay dearly for the act.How the "drunken whelp" in question was made to pay for his act was not reported. I can only imagine what Gust had to say about it all.
The dance hall was only a side business, of course, and Gust's main business, the blacksmith shop, was humming along. Starting in 1911, he began running a weekly advertisement in the Gazette (and only in the Gazette — apparently he thought the serious, businesslike people preferred that paper to the News):
(Click on image to enlarge)
This ad ran on the same page with those of Hobart's doctors, lawyers and architects, Main Street livery stables, and a competing blacksmith, August Mueller.
The quality of Gust's blacksmithing and machinery-repair skills was such that by 1910 Trustee Calvin Shearer entrusted to him repair work on Ross Township's school buses.
In July 1911 the two men made a trip to the Studebaker Company in South Bend, where Calvin purchased a new bus for the township, with Gust handling the sale. The newspaper report does not specify whether this bus was horse-drawn or motorized. The Studebaker Company had begun manufacturing gasoline-powered vehicles in 1904, and by 1912 it was producing handsome automotive school buses like this:
(Click on image to enlarge
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.
But whether the rural Ross Township school system could afford such a high-end machine is another question.
That same month Gust sold a horse-drawn wagon to a neighbor, William Foreman.
By now Gust and Anna had two young children: Mildred, born 1906, and Franklin, born 1909. The young family still found time to visit with relatives and friends in Chicago. Anna had family in south Chicago, possibly including Andrew and Agnes Palm, who show up there in the 1910 census;* the Lindborgs also visited the family of William Kimball, whose wife, Elma, was a recent immigrant from Sweden. Gust had a relative in Chicago named Emil Lindborg, who visited Ainsworth at least once. On occasion the Lindborgs drove out to Miller to visit friends there.
In August of 1911 Anna suffered serious health problems. She entered a hospital in Chicago, where on August 22 she underwent an operation for what the newspaper described as "liver trouble." She remained hospitalized until mid-September, and shortly after returning home she became so ill that a doctor had to be called. She recovered, apparently, since by early December the Lindborgs were out and about again, visiting friends. No more was heard of Anna's being sick until March 1912, and then she seems to have suffered only a brief illness.
I said in my previous entry about the Lindborgs that I wasn't sure where they lived when they first came here — and now I'm even less sure, for I now know that the little house at 6310 Ainsworth did not arrive until June of 1912, when the Gazette reported:
Gust Lindborg who bought the old Sullivan schoolhouse has moved it to the side of his dance hall and carpenters are remodeling it for a cottage.The name of the school may indicate that it had been built on land belonging to Patrick and Sarah Sullivan; they had lived in Lake County since 1860, and by 1891 owned 100 acres southwest of Ainsworth and bordering on present-day Route 30. Evidently the old schoolhouse was no longer sufficient, for a new Sullivan school was being built — brick, two-roomed, with a basement. So the little frame schoolhouse was picked up and moved to the heart of Ainsworth, where it started its new life as the Lindborg home.
[To be continued]
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*[8/2/10 amendment] It was more likely Anna's brother, Peter Palm, and his wife, Hulda. They are harder to find in the 1910 census because the style of the census-taker's handwriting makes their name look like "Palen," which is how the Ancestry.com search engine interprets it.
Sources:
1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ "Ainsworth Pick-Ups." Hobart Gazette 27 Jan. 1905; 5 Aug. 1910; 19 Aug. 1910.
♦ "Ainsworth." Hobart News 20 July 1911; 17 Aug. 1911; 24 Aug. 1911; 31 Aug. 1911; 7 Sept. 1911; 21 Sept. 1911; 2 Nov. 1911; 7 Dec. 1911; 14 Dec. 1911; 21 Dec. 1911; 28 Dec. 1911; 14 Mar. 1912.
♦ "Dance at Ainsworth." Hobart News 25 Oct. 1911.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 20 Dec. 1907; 6 Mar. 1908; 8 May 1908; 26 June 1908; 7 Aug. 1908;
♦ Lindborg, Gust. Advertisement. Hobart Gazette 21 July 1911.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 26 Feb. 1909; 22 Dec. 1911; 16 Feb. 1912; 21 June 1912; 12 July 1912.
♦ Penrice, John. "Studebaker History Timeline." Studebaker History. http://www.studebakerhistory.com/dnn/Timeline/tabid/65/Default.aspx (accessed 1 June 2010).
♦ Personal interview with a Lindborg descendant, May 2010.
♦ "Personal Mention." Hobart News 30 May 1912.
♦ "Ross Township Notes." Hobart Gazette 25 Aug. 1911; 1 Sept. 1911; 22 Sept. 1911.
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