A regular feature looking back at what was being printed around 100 years ago in the Bristol Daily Courier. This week’s entry comes from the August 19, 1916 edition of the newspaper.
Quarantine Cause Of Bad Auto Smashup
(Context: The quarantine happening in the summer of 1916 was for infantile paralysis that swept the East Coast. It impacted young kids and led to schools delaying the September start of classes in Bucks County. The illness that caused thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths that year in Pennsylvania was later better known as poliomyelitis, or polio. The illness was nearly entirely wiped out thanks to a vaccine that rolled out in the 1950s.)
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Roped-off streets, because of quarantine regulations, caused the wrecking of an automobile at Langhorne, in which the driver of the car was severely injured.
Mr. Hetherington, a business man of Philadelphia, with his family, spend the summer months in Langhorne, and it was while driving his car along the street that the accident occurred.
Mr. Hetherington failed to take notice of the rope across the street at the end of the block which was quarantined until he was closed upon it. In order to escape hitting the rope, Mr. Hetherington swerved his car to one side and struck a telegraph pole.
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The car was badly damaged, and the driver had a rib broken and received severe lacerations about the face and head.
An advertisement from the August 19, 1916 edition of the Bristol Daily Courier:
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