Today a trip to the heritage library to read hundred year old news items from my hometown paper led me to this topic. Frontier journalism in those days, especially in the small town publications, printed lots of fun reading like this: "The Sheldon ball team was prepared to go to Leonard Tuesday morning and glom the cotton, or in plain lucid English, win the purse at the big ball tournament, but Jupitor Pluvius got in the job first with his sprinkling cart and Monday night and Tuesday morning the sky juice fell in such copious quantities that playing ball was out of the question..." and "The Owego ball team went to McLeod last Sunday and the swatters from that burg cleaned them up by a score 0f 11-5."I liked this one, too: "A Brooklyn woman who sued a man for kissing her has secured damages in the amount of six cents. The man who got the kiss must feel pretty cheap." And the Mormons came around then, too: "Two Mormon elders were in Sheldon last Saturday attempting to convert our residents to the Mormon faith. We presume there is a shortage in the wife market and they were making an attempt to obtain a fresh supply. As far as we can learn they met with no success, even the bachelor girls being able to escape their eloquence."
The picture of the cattle car was posted to relate to this item: "The Southwestern Stockyards cafe is serving excellent meals a la carte to transients of the hobo genus. The vicinity of the stockyards is a favorite rendezvous for tourists of the side door Pullman class and when the pangs of hunger begin to afflict them they repair hither for the purpose of replenishing the inner man. Every man is his own cook and furnishes his own 'eats'". Seldom, if ever, have I ever seen reference to the stockyards in Sheldon, but I can still see it in my little-boy-eyes. It sat on the west side of town along the tracks, and I still clearly remember going to town one Saturday night and hearing one of my pals say, "I saw a bum hanging around there today, but Dad said to stay away from there!" So we did, but colorful stories were conjured up in our young minds.
How an image in a person's mind changes. When looking around the internet for cattle cars most of the references to them were associated with words like Bergen-Belson, Auschwitz, Jews, etc. My first thought would have been that of hauling cattle, but to many it means The Holocaust.
