New York is so huge that it has a wedding every thirteen minutes. Every fourteen minutes, day and night, there is a funeral. Ten times every hour a child is born. A ship clears the harbor every 42 seconds....Thirty-seven million passengers, more than a third of the population of the United States, entered New York's Grand Central station on railroad trains.
~June 22, 1922 - article in the Fairfield (Iowa) Tribune
I was doing some research on my father's side of the family,
searching for interesting old newspaper articles. I got lucky and found all kinds of family mentions some of which I'll share down the road.
However, one of the most delightful experiences in rooting around in old papers, especially those of small towns, comes from when your eye strays to an unrelated article.
What caught my eye at first had to do with all those statistics. The author continues to quote remarkable statistics for Fairfield that conveniently (perhaps too nicely) compare with New York.
In Fairfield, there is a wedding every thirteen days, and a funeral every fourteen days, while every 10 days a child is born.....every time a train comes into town the entire population knows it by the noise and smoke....
New York has a bit the best of us when it comes to amusements, adventure and excitement, but Fairfield has ninety-four year old citizens walking its streets and breathing its pure air, the like of which New York has never seen. We don't live quite so fast here, but we live longer.
Home town pride - there's nothing quite like it. Hope you got the same chuckle out of it that I did - now to get back to researching "Civil War" Robert.....
