100 YEARS AGO — 1920

 

Mr. and Mrs. Chas. Rodes have announced the engagement of their daughter, Mary Rodes, and Henry Ewing Harris of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Seldom has there been an announcement of wider interest than this one. Miss Rodes, a member of the younger set in Danville, is an unusually beautiful girl, with all the graces that go to makeup a well rounded woman. She is deservedly popular among the young people and greatly loved by all the older ones. Danville will lose one of her most loved young women and the place to which she will go will be the richer for having her.

 

Lost: On Main Street Saturday night a pay envelope containing $24. Finder, will please return the envelope to Miss Geneva Alexander at the Hub Department Store and receive a liberal reward.

 

Sheriff M.M. Farris yesterday rounded up the stray dogs in West Danville and Lebanon Pike, capturing 26 without licenses. Unless the owners apply at once, pay the penalty and license fee, the dogs will be killed in a few days.

 

The regular monthly meeting of the Danville Board of Council approved a license for Robert Beddlow to conduct a poolroom on Beatty Avenue. A councilman said if the city’s bell tower would have to be torn down the bell should be removed to the fire department. However because of the expense, he suggested that the board adopt a siren instead of the bell. This matter was left in abeyance, but will likely come up at the next meeting when the apparatus may be adopted.

 

75 YEARS AGO — 1945

 

Answering numerous inquiries as to why the Junction City fire truck may not go to Shelby City to fight fires, the town board, through Mayor Irvine Lausman and Fire Chief Nelson Dunsmore stated that it is acting in accordance with an order from the Kentucky State Fire Marshal and the Kentucky Actuarial Bureau and on their advice passed the ordinance that limits the fire truck must stay within the city limits. However, 1,000 feet of hose may be laid outside the city limits from the truck, inside the limits, which may be used as a booster.

 

Jim Davis, 88, a resident of Duncan Hill who became janitor at Centre College in 1905 and remained there for many years, remembers the days when he was “water boy” for the college teams. He takes credit for having reared Mr. Nelson, Mr. Clifton and the late Mr. “Boyle Rodes, because he went to work for the boys’ father, the late Mr. Charles Rodes in 1885. He was born March 18, 1857 in Mississippi, near Vicksburg and was brought north by his slave mother when she came to nurse in the family of Miss Alice Johnson and the Hogsetts, she said. Getting on now in years, he is quietly consoled by the “religion in his heart and proudly boasts of being a good old Baptist.”

 

The curtailment of certain street lights in Danville has been made in compliance with a direct order of the War Production nBoard of the U.S. government, said James Sheehan, chairman of the Light Committee of the Danville City Council. Many residents have been inquiring about why they have been cut off. The lights dispensed with were those which did not interfere with public safety.

 

50 YEARS AGO — 1970

 

The Kroger Co. was pleased to present a 25-year service award, which is a tie tac, to Sewell Woodward, a co-manager at the Walnut Street Kroger store, who began working there in 1945.

 

A list of 20 projects under consideration for Model City Action is being studied by the Danville City Council and Model City staff. They are proposed for implementation during this first action year. The amount of money involved as the project stands right now is about $1.25 million. The projects include; airport improvements; child care services; economic forecast; employment and training; Family Services and Community Development programs; historical preservation; housing subsidies to developers; information system and training in government; construction of a middle school; mental health staffing; Parks and Recreation for all of Boyle County; increased public health services; regional health center; develop a master plan for improving the central business district; vocational rehabilitation; purchase land for solid waste disposal; street improvements; and consolidation of police services.

 

Within the next three weeks Boyle County will have its first bookmobile. It is being furnished by the state and partially financed by the Boyle County fiscal Court. About 1,600 volumes have been supplied by the state for the bookmobile.

 

25 YEARS AGO — 1995

 

Boyle County Fiscal Court is working with Cellular One in trying to get a communications tower on Persimmon Knob. The county wants to put up a tower that will allow it to mount a relay station so emergency services can talk to each other throughout the count. A tower has been purchased and a platform built, and all that is needed is to erect the tower. A representative from Cellular One proposed another choice that would allow it to use the county’s high location and give the county a 180-foot tower at no cost on the condition the county will allow the company to put its equipment on the tower.

 

Representatives from the Boyle County and Danville School Districts and Kentucky School for the Deaf recently attended the National Association for Year-Round Education’s annual conference in San Diego, California. 

 

Shortly before 1 p.m. on Friday, several of the two dozen licensed practical nurse students in a second-floor classroom of the South Third Street building were showered by pieces of plaster that fell from the ceiling. “We were just sitting there talking when, all of a sudden, the roof started falling, said a student. “There was screaming, mass hysteria for a few moments.” A few weeks earlier, the other classroom on the second floor was closed after plaster fell from its ceiling. After Friday’s incident, the upstairs classrooms have been locked which leaves only one of the first floor. The Kentucky Tech-Danville Campus was leasing the building from Kentucky School for the Deaf.