Sunday, December 20, 1964 was a red-letter day in Alto. No more “Number Please”. No more “That line is busy”. No more “She’s not home. I just saw her going in the drug store”. Alto was joining the 20th century. Alto was going “dial”. The dial telephone was invented before 1900 by a funeral director whose calls from bereaved families were being hijacked by a competiing undertaker whose wife worked at the telephone office. However the system was not in general use until about the 1940’s. By 1962, the Alto City Council decided it was time to upgrade. They informed…

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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…

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It was March 1934. Bonnie and Clyde were terrorizing small-town banks around the state, but the pair had not yet been mentioned in the Alto Herald. Alto had its own two gunmen to deal with. As the editor of the Alto Herald told the story “It was more than a thousand wonders that both of them were not killed along with Messrs. Rounsaville, Shattuck and Earle, as there were more than 50 shots fired with a minute’s time all but two in the wide open street.” It seems the two robbers, who gave their names as Leo Spencer and Fred…

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Originally published in the August 12, 2015 edition of the Cherokeean It’s summer – time for the churches to have Vacation Bible School. So let’s see what the Alto Herald had to say about Vacation Bible School. Vacation Bible Schools are a relatively new form of outreach for churches. The first mention in the Alto Herald was in 1933 when there were two held. Each lasted a full 2 weeks and the interesting thing is that they overlapped. The Methodist school was from July 17 – July 28 while the Christian Church held theirs from July 24 – August 6.…

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Originally published in the July 15, 2015 edition of the Cherokeean Modern computer and IPhone users pride themselves on being able to find “everything about everybody” with a few savvy searches. You hear a name and you start with Google. Then you move on to Facebook or Twitter and soon you can piece together a person’s life history. The method may be new, but the information is not. People who grew up in small towns during the 20th century had the highlights of their lives, and many times their daily activities, documented in the local newspaper. Several months ago I…

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Originally published in the June 17, 2015 edition of the Cherokeean As we come up on the 74th anniversary of the beginning of World War II, I began to wonder what the Alto Herald had to say about Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, I found that 1941 is one of those years, along with 1943 and 1944, which is missing from our collection. However, I did find 1942, and I was shocked and impressed at how quickly our country was able to prepare for war. Someone in Washington must have been thinking ahead. By January 7, 1942, barely a month after Pearl…

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Originally published in the February 4, 2015 edition of the Cherokeean Frank L Weimar, whose column LITTLE ADO ABOUT SOMETHING was the subject of my last article, died at his home on November 8, 1957. The newspaper came out on Thursday, and Mr Weimar conveniently died on a Friday morning, so that the next week’s issue appeared right on time with the only change being that the Masthead now read Mrs F L Weimar and Son instead of F L Weimar and Son. The son, Frank Ed Weimar called his column LOOKING AROUND and he continued to follow his father’s…

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Originally published in the January 28, 2015 edition of the Cherokeean Long before there was Chris Davis and HIGH POINTS ON THE EL CAMINO REAL, there was Frank L Weimar (pen name A. Hick) and A LITTLE ADO ABOUT SOMETHING. Mr Weimar, who came to Alto and took over the Alto Herald in 1920 started his column in 1935. I can’t help but wonder how many of the faithful Alto Herald readers understood and were impressed by the column’s title, which was, of course, a take-off on the name of a Shakespearean play, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. At first the…

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Originally published in the September 24, 2014 edition of the Cherokeean Fifty years ago last month a big change came to everyday life in Alto. That was the month that the Alto Theatre closed its doors for good. The August 6 1964 issue of the Alto Herald offered the advertisement for coming features. The August 13 issue did not. The last movie to be shown was WHO’S BEEN SLEEPING IN MY BED? starring Dean Martin and Elizabeth Montgomery. Alto had been seeing moving pictures occasionally since about 1912 in the Opera House or the Air Dome and later in the…

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Originally published in the June 25, 2014 edition of the Cherokeean Reading about the couple who found the jars of gold coins buried in their back yard brings to mind Alto’s own “gold story”. In the summer of 1958 word began to be whispered around town about the guy who claimed to have found some gold bars while he was out picking berries. There was nothing printed in the newspaper at that time, but anyone who was living here in ’58 probably remembers hearing the rumor. By the time the story hit the Herald with a big headline and an…

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