Ed Weiss
Ed Weiss Writes of Local History
Writing recently in the Chillicothe Scioto Gazette, Ed Weiss, has the following of interest locally:
I described an adolescent effusion from an ancient Metropolis in the story just preceding this, concerning a picture coupon selling campaign, which ended in financial failure and named those participating in it.
Ed Renick lived here a rather uneventful life, following his return and McDougall Emmitt entered into the newspaper game with one on The Scioto Gazette. He left here and became active in Lima. His Lima experience was with the Galvin Boys, John and Roy, now successful publishers of the papers there at the other points. The first visit the Galvins made to Chillicothe, was with Emmitt in 1903 to the state centennial celebration.
Emmitt, after leaving Lima, went to Dayton, and he with his wife, who was the beautiful Edith McKenzie, of Waverly, were in Dayton in the 1913 flood. They were isolated in a fourth-story room during the flood and had to rescued by being taken on planks out to telephone wires and thence down the poles.
After the Dayton experience, Mr. Dougall Emmitt went to Chicago where his cousin Thomas McDougall, was among the employed personnel of one of the big packing companies. The last I heard from Emmitt was a letter he sent asking me to give, him credential endorsement to fill a position with one of the companies. I think it was Swift and Ci. Shortly there after he was crushed fatally by a truck in Chicago. He was buried at Waverly. His wife, I think married again and lives in Columbus where her 2 boys, Harry McKenzie, also lives. Harry was for a short time editor of the Waverly Republican.
Maurer, upon his return here, resumed his activities as a brick mason and then married Flossie Renick and with her removed to Indianapolis. He was employed for a time by William English, the owner of the very opera house in front of which the picture sales group stood and waited until I connected with Colonel Hamilton to secure a haven. Now, both he and his wife have gone to their final reward.
Sam Emmitt had a very checked career. Rather a handsome tall man he won the heart of a very estimable and charming girl in Evansville, Indiana. Her home originally was in Illinois on a farm. Emmitt was a roving stone and traveled all around the country for many years.
One day he ran into Johnny Raper, of Cleveland, who was then engaged in Buffalo, and Raper became interested in rehabilitating him. He talked to Emmitt and finally got a friend of his in Utica, New York, to take him in hand and try him out. It worked. Emmitt straightened up and went to work. He went from Utica to Buffalo, and in the winter tie secured a berth as the ship printer on one of the Ward Line boats, sailing from New York to the West Indies and South America. In the summer he worked in Buffalo.
Later he came back to Chillicothe and after a short visit went to Columbus where his mother lived. He secured employment on the Columbus Dispatch in the circulation department and then he came back to Chillicothe again and told me he was going to re-establish relations with his wife. He did so and joined her on her Illinois farm. He did not live long after that and so another in the group passed on.
So Time and Fate have left only the writer to survive that adolescent experience and to him happy memories of the good times is offered and of the contacts he made with some splendid people in Hillsboro, and of charming girls over there, among whom were the two daughters, of Dr. Hoyt, a brother of Dr. Charles Hoyt, of Chillicothe. One of them married a young man named Myers, and the other I have lost track of.
Incidentally, I might mention that Mrs. E. R. Erdmann, of Chillicothe, was a student at that Hillsboro seminary at the time of this foray of Chillicotheans in to the capitol of Highland County. George Kramer and his wife have answered the call. Ulrica Sloan, Hi Du Bruin and the other of the clique at the Kramous House have also joined that silent majority. And so memory’s spur brings to light once more experiences from an earlier day which were all too vivid at the time of their enactment.
May 1939
Republican Herald
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