Notes by Marie Beyer O’Brien

“They had to be ladies back 30 years ago — if they tried to be anything else, those long skirts would have tripped them up.”

That was the comment that came to my lips yesterday, when we were pouring through an old photograph album belonging to Atty. James McCluer.

Old photographs I was looking at just the other evening, just about broke up a bridge game when a dear friend of mine said I could go through her old photograph album, while they went on with her game. Everybody wanted to look at the pictures.

If there is a more interesting collection of old pictures in town, than in Jim McCluer’s big album, I want to see it.

There are pictures of picnics on Blennerhassett Island back in the days when there was a pavilion, bowling alley and bicycle track down there, and pictures of the old city park, and at the old homes there — most of them gone.

Then there are pictures of the people. And one of our girls here at the office, peeping over my shoulder, caught a glimpse of the young Chuck Turner, back in the days when he wore a full-dress and insisted, “He looks like Tyrone Power,” which I’m sure Chuck will find as amusing as we did.

I found the funniest, those pictures of the girls in their ankle-length skirts with prim white blouses and flat-crowned straws. There is one showing two young women so attired, trying to climb over a rail fence to a hay stack in the back, and be lady-like at the same time.

Which makes me think, earlier in the afternoon I was on my way down Juliana Street, very comfortable in a knee-length print dress and sandals and socks, when I met Mr. Ed Stephenson. He looked at my socks, stopped and let his eyes travel on up to my braided hair and caught comfortably back. “Oh, I thought it was a little girl,” he said.

Flat heels don’t go to make one behave very decorously. I might have said, I always feel as though my feet were winged, like Mercury’s and I want to skip when I’m wearing them. But if I had to wear the high-topped, proper, laced boots, and long skirts of the girls in the album, I guess I’d be as prim and proper looking as they.

Mr. McCluer had a chum, when he was growing up, who had a hobby of amateur photography, and he benefited by it.

There is the first football team at the high school here, photographed back in 1894, which included W. H. Wolfe, and you can recognize him all right, Mr. McCluer also played on that team.

There are Civil War photographs and some showing the old Maggie Paden ferry which preceded the Nina Paden, which was operated between here and Belpre, until the bridge was built.

There are fishing and hunting pictures, and some of the steamer Kanawha that went down at Little Hocking with a loss of 13 lives back in 1916. There are pictures of old Calvary Commandery No. 3 of Parkersburg, taken before the fourth Wood County court house was razed in 1860, to make room for the new.

A boy and girl group is shown at the old Franklin school that stood across from the Borman’s “Honeysuckle Hut” at Ann and Ninth streets.

And I could go on indefinitely like that. But I won’t. Instead I’ll promise you, some of these pictures will be in the Sentinel’s golden anniversary edition to be published the last of this month.

The Parkersburg News

June 2, 1939

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Note: Probably most of us older folks have photo albums, that though of a later time-period, may be just as interesting as the one described by Ms. O’Brien. Should your family not be interested in them, please consider donating them to a historical society in the local area that would most appreciate them.

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Bob Enoch is president of the Wood County Historical and Preservation Society. If you have commentsor questions about Look Back items, please contact him at: roberteenoch@gmail.com, or by mail at WCHPS, PO Box 565, Parkersburg, WV 26102.