Showing posts with label Kemmerer Wyoming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kemmerer Wyoming. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Wednesday, August 15, 1923. The toll of the explosion.


The papers reported followup information on the Kemmerer mine disaster.

At the same time, De Valera made the front page of the Casper page for his arrest.

De Valera, like other Irish Republican leaders, had come out of hiding and many of them were being arrested.  He was campaigning for a position in the Dail, oddly enough, but under the abstentionism thesis in which people were elected and refused to take office.  It's a policy I've frankly never grasped and De Valera was soon to abandon it.

Tidal waves killed over 300 people on the west coast of Korea.

The first U.S. Navy Reserve air station was founded near Boston.

A KKK rally was broken up in Steubenville, Ohio by a crowed that reacted to their presence in a hotel violently.

Monday, August 14, 2023

Tuesday, August 14, 1923. The Kemmerer Mine Explosion.

Today In Wyoming's History: August 141923  An explosion at the Frontier Mine in Kemmerer killed 99 people. 

The explosion was caused, it is believed, by a fire boss attempting to relight his flame on a safety lamp by striking a match.


The death toll was smaller than initially feared due to quite a few workers being out for vacation.

The British Marine Air Navigation Co. Ltd. commenced the world's first flying boat passenger service.  The flight was from Woolston, Southampton to the Channel Islands.

Martial law was declared in Tulsa due to a KKK murder of an accused drug peddlar.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Monday, December 29, 1941. The growing restrictions on Japanese Americans and a Japanese American Tragedy.

As we earlier noted in Today In Wyoming's History: December 29: .

1941  All German, Italian and Japanese aliens in California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington and are ordered to surrender contraband. (WWII List).

"Contraband", in this context, was defined to include short-wave radios, cameras, binoculars, and weapons, or in other words items that the authorities  feared could be used for espionage, or defend a person engaged in espionage.

The US and Canada were moving rapidly towards internment of their ethnic Japanese residents who lived on the coast.

1941  Sunge Yoshimoto, age nineteen, killed in the Lincoln-Star Coal Company tipple south of Kemmerer.  He was a Japanese American war worker.

He lived in the household of his father, Charlie, who had been born in Japan.  Mr. Yoshimoto was widowed, but he still had six children at home in Rock Springs, ranging from 23 years old to eleven.  A daughter-in-law, Hatsuko, of his also lived in the household at the time.  Sunge had been born in Rock Springs as had all of his siblings.  His sister-in-law had been born in Idaho.

On the same day, the Japanese bombed Corregidor for the first time.

Douglas MacArthur was on the cover of the Time magazine released on this day.  An aerial gunner was on the cover of Life.

The Red Army took back Kerch in Crimea.  Elsewhere in the East the Germans were completely on the defensive.

Eddie Rickenbacker announced that the 1942 Indianapolis 500 would be canceled for the duration of the war.  He was then the President of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.



Saturday, May 16, 2020

Rain

Pennys started out as Gold Rule.  This is the first one back in the day, in Kemmerer Wyoming.

Earlier this past week we published this:
Lex Anteinternet: Storm Clouds: Yesterday we published this: Lex Anteinternet: Gathering Storms. : Economists are openly speculating now that we may be entering a period ...
Which took note of this within it:
Lex Anteinternet: Gathering Storms.: Economists are openly speculating now that we may be entering a period of deflation. A drop in petroleum prices combined with a drop in so...
Today we have the news that JC Pennys, a company founded in Wyoming, is in bankruptcy.

I have to agree with this Forbes headline, however:

Don’t Blame The Pandemic: JCPenney Goes Bankrupt After Decades-Long Struggle To Reinvent Itself


Pennys has been having trouble for awhile, as anyone who has toured the former retail giant in recent years would know. Still, I hate to see this happen as I did occasionally buy clothing there.

And this isn't unique to Pennys.  As Forbes also noted:
The retailer joins Neiman MarcusJ.Crew and Stage Stores in seeking bankruptcy in recent weeks. It also follows in the footsteps of Sears, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018.
Which isn't to say that this should be taken lightly.  Pennys was a big store, but it wasn't a Walmart.  I.e., it was higher quality and this reduces customer options fairly seriously.

And its one more blow in something that's rapidly reaching a depression level economic trend.

Monday, February 25, 2019

Lex Anteinternet: Dare we, and should we, Wyomingites that is, ponde...

The question we asked last week.
Lex Anteinternet: Dare we, and should we, Wyomingites that is, ponde...: It's a scary thought for a lot of folks. Burkburnett Texas, February 17, 1919.  Clearly a boom was on when this photograph was tak...
In the Sunday Tribune, the paper was asking the same thing.

Or rather featuring miners from Kemmerer where mining has been a feature of local life, and employment, for generations but where that seems to be rapidly passing away.

Passing away with it, it seems, are pension plans that a bankrupt mining company has received permission from a bankruptcy court to apparently dishonor.

Kemmerer was in the news locally due to a couple of generators in a coal fired power plant being shut down, which is part of what consumes the locally mined coal.  It's also been in the news as a solar energy farm is going to be established there.  It seems, accordingly, to be the sharp focal point of a lot of economic evolution in the state, something that isn't fun at all for those enduring it.

Friday, January 20, 2017

Today In Wyoming's History: January 20. The Legislature sends Prohibition to the voters.

People tend not to think of Wyoming in the context of Prohibition, but the state was part of the big sweep that lead to it.  Indeed, while the story lays in the future from this post, Wyoming would push prohibition over the top with Sen. Francis E. Warren's vote in favor of the Volstead Act.

On this day, a century ago, the Legislature, which was predicted to pass a pro-Prohibition bill, did:
Today In Wyoming's History: January 20:

1917   Legislature passed an act submitting an act for a constitutional amendment that would allow people to vote on prohibition. Attribution:  On This Day.
The introduction of the bill had been widely predicated by the Cheyenne newspapers, in the form of predicting some bill.  That it would have taken the form, in 1917, of a proposed amendment to the state constitution is a bit of a surprise, but that would have served the dual purpose of making anything that passed really difficult to get rid of and, additionally, sort of passing the buck to the voters, as such an amendment requires the voters to approve it.

Which they didn't.

I'm not certain how it played out, but if the regular process took place, the voters rejected the measure that following fall.  Wyoming was the last state in the Rocky Mountain region to adopt Prohibition and the proposed amendment did not become law.

Which might have been a sign of things to come. While the state did pass Prohibition into law voluntarily, and in fact pushed it over the top nationally, it took to violating it nearly immediately.  Indeed Western Wyoming would become a bootleg liquor center, with wine being fermented in the Italian sections of Rock Springs and, ironically, heavily Mormon Kemmerer becoming a location for the distillation of high quality bootleg whiskey made with locally grown grain.

As outlined by Phil Roberts in an excellent article in Annals of Wyoming recently, Prohibition did break the back of the saloon trade in Wyoming, which in the end was a good thing. When alcohol returned in the 1930s it was stepped in over time, and with a new system which we retain today. That system, oddly enough for "free enterprise" Wyoming, runs all alcohol through the State Liquor Warehouse, which is the wholesaler for Wyoming, with no legal exceptions.

Prohibition would have the unfortunate impact of killing off a lot of local breweries, including those in Wyoming.  This has changed only recently, although there are quite a few small breweries now and even two distilleries.

A bottle of Wyoming Whiskey.  Something the legislators of 1917 would probably not have appreciated seeing at the time.