News from 1902 (December)
December 4 - [letter to the editor and reply] Editor Evening News: Would you please inform me through your precious paper if there were any male nurses from the U.S. Army that attended President McKinley during his sickness and what were their names? READER
There were three Hospital Corps nurses, called orderlies, from the United States Hospital Camp at the Government Building at the Pan-American Exposition in attendance upon President McKinley up to the time of his death. Their names have not been preserved in the records, however, and neither Dr. Matthew D. Mann nor Dr. Roswell park, who had charge of the Pan-American Hospital, is able to name the orderlies.
December 5 - No Treasury warrants for the payment of Pan-American creditors had been received by President John G. Milburn up to this noon. They are expected, however, on every mail.
The warrants, when they do arrive, will not be sent directly to the creditors. Instead, President Milburn will turn them over to Treasurer George L. Williams. The treasurer's office will then check the accounts as audited before being sent to Washington. After they are checked off, receipts will be filled out, ready for the creditors' signatures. Then postal cards will be mailed to the creditors, asking them to call at Treasurer Williams' office to receive their warrants and sign the receipts. Until these postal cards are received, creditors will only delay payment by calling for their warrants.
"You may say that I have heard nothing more about the warrants than that the claims as audited by Treasurer Williams' office have been passed upon by the Auditing Department and turned over to the warrant clerk's department," said President Milburn this afternoon. "Until creditors receive a postal card notifying them to call they will expedite payment by staying away from Treasurer Williams' offce."
December 8 - Clerk Taggart of the Police Department will hold his annual vendue of articles picked up by the police and unclaimed by the owners, on Saturday afternoon, Dec. 20th......
...articles to be sold are as follows: one set of upper teeth (artificial) picked up in Streets of Cairo at Pan-American Exposition last year. One set of lower teeth picked up on N.Y.C. tracks at the foot of Hudson Street. This will be sold with other set or separately...
December 10 - [letter to the editor] A few citizens were recently discussing the Pan-American Exposition attendance. One remarked that there were 100,000 residents of Buffalo who never were inside the Exposition gates. Another said there was another 100,000 who attended not more than once. A warm discussion ensued. One of them, a clerk, said that he had paid 50 cents admissions and spent over $2 for meals and amusements at each visit. Can anyone beat that record? Now, Mr. Editor, can't you invite correspondence from your readers asking for information as to the number of visits persons made to the great show and what their total expenditures were? I refer, of course, to paid admissions and not to passes. I would like to know how many, especially of those who could afford it, attended the Exposition often enough to drink in all of its beauties and receive the instruction it afforded, and how many, if any, were deterred, for any reason, from attending. In other words, who were the people who failed to appreciate, and who were those that did appreciate, and how much and how often?
Do you think the offering of season tickets at a nominal rate, say $18, or 10 cents for the 180 days of the Expostion, would have added to the revenues or had any effect upon them or upon the attendance?
Expositions seem not to be profitable investments for stockholders. Are they successful in giving instruction to the masses, or do those who attend go principally for the amusements?
The Pan-American seems to have done much for advertising Buffalo. What good it did our people could be better understood if we could learn how many people never saw it except from the outside, and about how often our people attended. It would be interesting to have a published statement indicating how many different people (men, women, children) the 8,000,000 attendance represented, and how many of them were Buffalonians. M.