Fats-v.-Leans Baseball

This game in June of 1923 was not the first fats-against-leans game that I've seen. And on holidays such as Independence Day, you might also find foot-races going on — one for the "fats" and one for the "leans." Anyway, in this case the News has left us with a record of the body type of a number of Hobart's male citizens, in case we had no photograph and were wondering!


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Hobart News, June 28, 1923.

Sorry I failed to get the beginning of the story.

As we see from the little item below the summary of the game, Hobart had another team called the Cardinals.

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Back when I was talking about the Frank family, I wondered about the Mulfinger connection. This item in the right-hand column helps a little. Not much.

Fast Time

Our friend Fred Rossow lost nearly all his cows in April 1923, as the tuberculosis testing of local herds finished up.


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Hobart Gazette, April 20, 1923.

No one else lost as many in this round of testing, and most of the herds tested clean. "John Harnes" is a misprint for "John Harms."

There is so much material on this page! In the far-left column, Bess Hayward is selling off livestock and farming implements from her parents' estate.

In the next column, just below the cow-testing story, confusion arises from the inconsistent adoption of "fast time" — Daylight Saving Time. (And below that, yet another dance at the Niksches' Deep River Hall.)

In the right-hand column, we find an entertainment planned at the W.G. Haan School.


From Plays of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Volume 27 (1884)

And at the bottom of the column, some Severance-Yager socializing. From the 1920 Census, it would appear that George (Sr.) and Agnes Severance, who always rented the farms they operated, had moved from their previous home, a Ross Township farm west of Hobart,[1] to land in southeastern Hobart Township: their neighbors are Malones, Ensigns and Fasels.

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I was able to confirm the Harnes/Harms misprint above through the News version of the cow-testing story. That paper also carried a story about Ruby Fisher's marriage to a Hobart chiropractor named Alfred[2] C. Wickham, whom I never heard of before …


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Hobart News, April 19, 1923


… or after, either — I can't find them in the 1930 Census.

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[1] "Celebrate Silver Wedding," Hobart Gazette, July 20, 1917.
[2] Indiana Marriage Collection.

Peck & Ehrhardt

John Naumann's sudden death left behind a prospering auto-repair and tire-vulcanizing shop. Scarcely two weeks later, that shop was bought by Clinton Peck and Nick Ehrhardt (who himself had gone through sudden bereavement just a few months earlier).


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Hobart News 23 March 1922.

To the best of my knowledge, the "Morton block" was at 308-310 Main Street.


A bit puzzled by why, in 1922, vulcanization was still being done in shops and not at the tire factory, I did a little research on it and, while I didn't get an answer to my specific question, I came upon an interesting article about how Charles Goodyear discovered the process (and also one about the "rubber" industry that resulted from this discovery).

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Elsewhere on the same page, we see complaints about the condition of the roads. The "Ainsworth road near the township line" would be Grand Blvd./S.R. 51 near 61st Ave.

Birth and Death

Nellie Peck had married Nicholas Ehrhardt, Jr. in November 1920; early in the morning of January 16, 1922, she gave birth to their first child, a daughter — but the little girl died at birth.

Nellie survived her daughter by only a few hours.


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Hobart Gazette 20 Jan. 1922.

I suppose the child was buried with or near her mother, but so far as I can tell neither Nellie's grave marker nor any other in the Mosier Cemetery acknowledges her child's existence, any more than the obituaries do. I would not have known about her but for the "Births" column in the News.


Additional Sources:
♦ "Births." Hobart News 19 Jan. 1922.
♦ "Funeral of Mrs. Nellie Peck-Ehrhardt Held on Wednesday Morning." Hobart News 19 Jan. 1922.

The Moehls Get Flats and the Flats Get Tenants

There were two William Moehls in Hobart in 1920, father and son. I'm not sure which one the Gazette was talking about when it announced: "Wm. Moehl is converting his brick house, corner Second and East streets, into a double flat building, with modern improvements." But I'm inclined to think it was the 45-year-old William Sr., since William Jr., only 18 years old, was a bit young to have acquired a two-story brick house.

Since both the 1930 census and the 1930 phone directory shows William living at 200 East Street, I wonder if the house still there now was his? It's still a two-flat, if I'm not mistaken, and I think it's brick under that stucco siding.

What the house had been doing up until its conversion to a two-flat, I don't know. The 1920 census shows William and Bertha Moehl, with their three sons (Ernest, William, and Elmer), farming rented land — somewhere west of Hobart, it appears, since the enumerator recorded them near Eugene and Carrie Chandler, who lived on Liverpool Road north of 61st.

In less than a month, William already had prospective tenants for his two-flat, though the conversion was not yet completed:


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"Miss Nellie" was the daughter of Clinton and Ida Peck, who had formerly been among the numerous Pecks living in Union Township, Porter County. The 1906 plat map shows their farm of about 60 acres in the center of Section 27.* The family's move to Hobart must have been pretty recent — the 1920 census shows them there, but as late as February 1919 Clinton's name cropped up in the "South of Deepriver" social column. Nellie, the youngest of five children, was about 20 years old. Nick Ehrhardt, Jr., was about a year older. His was a farming family in southeastern Hobart Township.

And these were to be William Moehl's tenants for the upper flat.

For the lower flat, a prospective tenant soon turned up. Our old friend Edward Scroggins, with his second wife, Bertha, and their two young children, rented the flat in late December, planning to occupy it in January 1921.

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*My brain is too tired to figure out where the farm would have been in relation to present-day roads.


Sources:
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1930 Census.
♦ "Ehrhardt-Peck Nuptial." Hobart Gazette 19 Nov. 1920.
♦ "Ehrhardt-Peck." Hobart News 18 Nov. 1920.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 24 Dec. 1920.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 29 Oct. 1920.
♦ "South of Deepriver." Hobart News 20 Feb. 1919.