The Reno Times, an eight-column folio that ranked with the foremost weeklies in the State, was started in 1865 and expired in May of 1866. A department was assigned each kind of news, the matter was classified and set in minion and nonpareil, oil-operations were noted fully and local affairs received due attention. Samuel B. Page, the editor, understood how to glean from exchanges and correspondence. George E. Beardsley, whose parish lay along Oil Creek, about Pithole and the Allegheny River from Franklin to Tidioute, a section thirty miles by seventy, managed the oil-columns admirably. E. W. Mercer kept the books, collected the bills and had general supervision. W. C. Plumer, J. Diffenbach and Edward Fairchilds stuck type and the average edition exceeded ten-thousand copies.
CHARLES C. WICKER.
Pithole, the most kaleidoscopic oil-town that ever stranded human lives and bank-accounts, gave birth to the Daily Record on the twenty-fifth of September, 1865. It was a five-column folio, crammed with news piping-hot and sold at five cents a copy, or thirty cents a week. Morton, Spare & Co. were the publishers. Col. L. M. Morton—he earned his shoulder-straps in the civil war—edited the Record, winning laurels by his wise discernment. He was a manly character, incapable of deceit, a brilliant writer and conversationalist, the soul of honor and courtesy, “a knight without fear and without reproach.” He served as postmaster at Milton and spent his closing years as night-editor of the Bradford Era, dying at his post, loved and esteemed by thousands of friends. W. H. Longwell, another brave defender of the Union, bought out Spare in May, 1886. Charles C. Wicker and W. C. Plumer were taken into the firm shortly after. In May of 1868, Pithole having crawled into a hole, Longwell changed the base of operations to Petroleum Centre, then at the zenith of its meteoric flight. He sold the paper in 1871 to Wicker, who held on until formidable rivals in Oil City and Titusville forced the Record to quit. Generous to a fault and faithful to those who shared his confidence, Wicker left the decaying town in 1873, was foreman of the Titusville Courier, worked as a compositor at Bradford and died there years ago. He was never satisfied to accept ill-luck without emphatic dissent. He always wore a blue-flannel shirt, a fashion he adopted in the army, and was eccentric in attire.
Charles C. Leonard was “a bright, particular star” in the days of the Pithole Record, to which, over the signature of “Crocus,” he contributed side-splitting sketches of ludicrous phases of oil-region life. These felicitous word-paintings, with additions and revisions, he published in a volume that had a prodigious sale. He was an Ohioan, born in 1845, and a soldier at sixteen. Arriving at Pithole in 1865, he saw that wonderful place grow from a dozen shanties to a city of fifteen-thousand at a pace distancing Jonah’s gourd or Jack-the-Giant-Killer’s bean-stalk. In the fall of 1867 he came to the Titusville Herald, remaining five years. After short terms with the Cleveland Leader and St. Louis Globe, he returned to Titusville to write for the Evening Press. He went back to St. Louis and died at Cleveland on the twelfth of March 1874, wounds received in battle hastening his demise. He was a natural wit, whose keen jokes had the aroma of Attic salt. Mrs. Leonard removed to Detroit, her home at present. One of Charlie’s favorite creations was “The Sheet-Iron Cat,” written for the Cleveland Leader. It passed the rounds of the newspapers and was printed in the Scientific American. The sell took immensely, lots of persons sending letters asking the cost of the “cats” and where they could be procured! The article, which revives many a pleasant memory of “auld lang-syne,” follows:
“A young mechanic in this city, whose friends and acquaintances have heretofore supposed there was “nothing to him,” has at last achieved a triumph that will place him at once among the noblest benefactors of mankind. His name will be handed down to posterity with those of the inventors of the “steam-man,” the patent churn and other contrivances of a labor-saving or comfort-inducing character. His invention, which occurred to him when trying to sleep at night in the sky-parlor of his cheap boarding-house, with the feline demons of mid-night clattering over the roof outside, is nothing more than a patent sheet-iron cat with cylindrical attachment, steel-claws and teeth, the whole arrangement being covered with cat-skins, which give it a natural appearance and preserve the clock-work and intricate machinery with which the old thing is made to work. Among the other peculiarities of this ingenious invention are the tail and voice. The former is hollow and supplied by a bellows (concealed within the body) with compressed air at momentary intervals, which causes the appendage to be elevated and distended to three times its natural size, giving to the metallic cat a most warlike and belligerent appearance. By the aid of the same bellows and a tremolo-stop arrangement, the cat is made to emit the most fearful caterwauls and “spitting” that ever awakened a baby, made the head of the family swear in his dreams, or caused a shower of boots, washbowls and other missiles of midnight wrath to cleave the sky.
“Such is the invention. The method of using and the result is as follows: Winding up the patent Thomas-cat, the owner adjusts him upon the house-top or in the back-yard and awaits events. Soon is heard the tocsin of cat-like war in the shape of every known sound that the tribe are capable of producing, only in a key much louder than any live cat could perform in. Every cat within a circle of a half-mile hears the familiar sounds and accepts the challenge, frequently fifty or one hundred appearing simultaneously upon the battle-ground, ready to buckle in. The swelling tail invites combat and they attack old “Ironsides,” who no sooner feels the weight of a paw upon his hide than a spring is touched off, his paws revolve in all directions with lightning rapidity and the adversaries within six feet of him are torn to shreds! Fresh battalions come to the scratch only to meet a like fate, and in the morning several bushels of hair, fiddle-strings and toe-nails is all that are seen, while the owner proceeds to wind the iron cat up and set him again.
“But a few pleasant evenings are needed to clean out a common-sized country town of its sleep-disturbers. We understand the inventor will make a proposition next week to the common council to depopulate the city of cats for a moderate sum. We do not intend to endorse any invention or article unless we know that it will perform all that it is claimed to do, and therefore we have not been so explicit in our description as we might have been; but the principle is a good one, and we hope to see every house in the city surmounted with a sheet-iron cat as soon as they are offered for sale, which will be about April the first, the inventor and patentee informs us.”
J. H. Bowman and Richard Linn sent forth the Petroleum Monthly at Oil City in October, 1870. Their purpose was to treat the oil-industry from a scientific stand and present statistics and biographies in magazine-style. The Monthly, which lasted a year, was ably edited and supplied matter of permanent value. Bowman, a fascinating writer and agreeable companion, went westward and the snows of twenty winters have drifted over his grave. Linn aided in compiling a history of petroleum, spent some years in the east and meandered to Australia. Pleasantville evolved the Evening News in 1888 and the semi-monthly Commercial-Record. The former has sought “the dark realms of everlasting shade,” to keep company with J. L. Rohr’s Cooperstown News, Tom Whitaker’s Gatling Gun, the Oil-City Critic, the Franklin Oil-Region, the Petroleum-Centre Era and a score of unwept sacrifices on the altar of Venango journalism. James Tyson, a hardware merchant at Rouseville, in 1872 issued the Pennsylvanian, a superior weekly, which subsided with the waning town. He migrated to California, living in San Francisco until last year, when he located in Philadelphia. At the age of seventy-nine his faculties are unimpaired and he stands erect. He is an earnest member of the Pennsylvania Historical Society and compiler of a “Life of Washington and the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.”[Independence.”] This timely and interesting work, published in two handsome volumes in 1895, is dedicated to the public schools of the nation. It fitly crowns the literary labors of the revered author, who is “only waiting till the shadows are a little longer drawn.”
