Past Pages for Sunday, Feb. 11, 2018

150 Years Ago

Yesterday afternoon James O’Donnell, foreman of the Yellow Jacket Mine, was astonished to find the roof of his house on fire. He at once sprang to the rescue, telling his wife to go to a trunk in which was several thousand dollars in checks, certificates and mining stocks, and papers therein. O’Donnell, with others, succeeded in putting out the fire. Mrs. O’Donnell, when advised by her husband, at once started after the papers, but found the trunk had been broken into and all but a $400 check stolen. Payment of the checks and stocks has been stopped. P.S. As we go to press we learn all the articles stolen were returned last night. They were left in a package on the porch of the house.

130 Years Ago

A Sublime Desert Dance: The Waltzing Sand Augers Which Reach Miles High in Nevada. “You have heard of the dance of death, and the dance of this, that and the other,” said Joseph Granlemyer, the White Pine mining man to an Examiner reporter. “Out in Nevada we have what we call the dance of the giants, and any observer would think so too if he looked at them. They are no less than great cylinders of sand which waltz over the desert with graceful motions and reach high into the sky.”

100 Years Ago

“If I ever take another drink I hope I choke, so help me God!” That terse but determined line, punctuated with the tremendous bang of a tremendous fist on the bar of a Terre Haute saloon, is popularly supposed to have ended John L. Sullivan’s riotous se-to with Demon Rum.

70 Years Ago

(Photo Caption) May be America’s First Church: The authorized excavation of this stone structure may prove it to be the earliest Christian church in the Western Hemisphere. If research now being undertaken by the Preservation Society of Newport, R.I., authenticates the claim, it was built by Norsemen more than 100 years before the arrival of Columbus. Similar churches wee common in Scandinavia at the time.

50 Years Ago

A sheriff’s rescue party was organized today to reach the wreckage of a light plane near the top of 10,000-foot Pyramid Peak. Civil Air Patrol searchers spotted the downed four-seater plane with three Sacramento area men aboard shortly before sundown Thursday. There was no indication of whether the men were dead or alive.

30 Years Ago

Nevada’s congressional delegation is protesting the planned closure of a Coast Guard station at Lake Tahoe, but time is running out.

Trent Dolan is the son of Bill Dolan, who wrote this column for the Nevada Appeal from 1947 until his death in 2006.