1951 – Is this Alto or Egypt?
If you watched the recent TV series The Bible, you saw how the Egyptians suffered from a series of plagues. Citizens of Alto during the year 1951 must have felt like Pharaoh’s children. They faced one catastrophe after another.
The year started off with a three-day “blizzard” accompanied by many car wrecks and a lot of burst water pipes.
Then there was an epidemic of mumps and flu that caused the schools to close for a whole week.
At the same time, the town was beset with foxes, some of them rabid. Hugh Goff had the tip of his thumb bitten off by a rabid fox that was attacking his chickens. Frank James, who lived across the street from the school, shot a fox in his yard, and Willis Holcomb’s dog got into a fight with a fox under the Holcomb house. This plague of foxes lasted for several months. The March 15 Herald states that CHEROKEE COUNTY IS HOTSPOT FOR RABID FOXES.
It was not only foxes that were roaming the town. The newspaper reports on March 1 that the city police had killed 11 stray dogs. There was concern, of course, that the foxes would attack the dogs and make them rabid.
By late spring, the trouble with the foxes had subsided, but in June came the worms in the tomatoes. Inspectors were very critical of tomato quality. There were only two sheds operating and the price was very low.
July brought the heaviest infestation of boll weevils the area had seen in years.
Farmers were advised that if they did not spray immediately, they might lose the entire cotton crop.
In August it was flies. Readers were being warned to be sure their doors and windows were well screened to prevent flies getting in the house. The state health officer named 6 diseases that were carried by flies.
Later that month, Alto was hit by a tornado which did some really freaky damage. It lifted the roof off the Texaco filling station garage in its entirety and carried it about 200 feet then dropped it on Highway 21 bottom side up. The lights were on in the garage when the storm hit, and it carried the wires along with the roof. Three 100-watt bulbs were still burning when the roof landed.
After a short respite of mainly good news in the Herald, the November 22 issue reported that large numbers of cattle were dying of “white muscle disease”. Hogs and sheep were also affected to a lesser degree.
That just about finished the year of bad luck, unless you take into account that the Alto Yellowjackets won only 2 games that season.
Welcome, 1952!