Each week, we’ll bring you a selection of notable stories that happened this week in Dayton history, chronicled by the same newspaper that continues to serve the community today.
Here are some headlines from the week of March 22-28, 1976.
March 22, 1976: Pioneer fades: Stettler Lutheran Church was Ohio’s oldest
On a Miami Twp. hilltop on S. Union Road the wind of a late winter’s day of 1976 blew gently through the leaning fir trees, then over the fading inscriptions on pioneers’ tombstones that rest not far from the rooftops of Miamisburg’s suburban sprawl.
Next to the cemetery was Stettler Lutheran Church, that was known as Ohio’s oldest Lutheran house of worship. It had closed and was not expected to be reopened.
“We closed last fall (1975) when we would have had to have heat,” said Mae Shupert of Carlisle, who with her husband, Carl, held title to the church and cemetery.
“It got down to where there was at the most, nine members and we couldn’t afford the oil bills they are charging now. We ran out of money.”
When Stettler was founded by the Rev. John Jacob LaRose in 1803, the same year Ohio became a state, the Great Miami River to the east was one of the reasons why. The settlers west of the river had difficulty getting across it to worship at Gebhart’s Church or St. Jacob’s.
Ruby Holland and her husband, Howard, rented the “parsonage” across from the brick church at 8510 S. Union Rd.
“I think the last burial in there was in 1936,” Holland said.
The names of those who gathered to sing Luther’s mighty hymns, in their Pennsylvania German tongue, were still visible on the old stones: Stettler, Pontious, Hoffman, Kuhn, Libecap, Gephart, Focht and Shupert.
Mrs. Shupert had the names of the pastors: LaRose until 1806; the Rev. Paul Henkel, 1806-1808; the Rev. Samuel Mau, 1808-1810; the Rev. Andrew Simon, 1810-1815; the Rev. John Caspar Dill from Giessen, Germany, 1815-1824. And so forth.
“We had somebody mow that cemetery every summer for the last two or three years. We kept it up, yes, but that’s about over with,” Mrs. Shupert said. “We’re getting pretty old. I’m 72.”
Many of those early residents died young.
Near Thomas Stettler’s grave (d. 1881, aged 78) are three tiny stones bearing the inscription “Infant.” Sarah Shupert was only 20 when she died in 1859. John George Stettler only 19 when they laid him in the ground in 1860.
And “D. & S. Pontious” lost their 21-day-old daughter Jan. 26, 1847, and their two-year-old son the following day.
March 22, 1976: Furniture store owner Andrew Hallum had unique selling methods
When Andrew B. Hallum showed a customer through his furniture store, he pulled a light cord from time to time to show his wares, then turned the light off again as he moved on.
Hallum didn’t like to waste money, and he didn’t leave the lights on when they weren’t needed.
“I’m probably the tightest and stingiest businessman in Dayton,” said Hallum in 1976. “I won’t spend a nickel unless I have to.”
Hallum who was a spry, gray-haired 79, did not haggle or bargain. The price was the same to everybody.
“I treat every customer alike,” he said. “I feel like I’ve cheated someone if I offer someone else a lower price.”
Hallum’s specialty was honesty. “At Hallum’s you can buy furniture with your eyes shut and never get hurt,” he said. In return, he expected customers to be honest, too.
When he first opened his store, his advertisements said, “Out of High Rent.” Objections from downtown stores forced the newspapers to tell him to stop it, he said.
Then the ads said, “No Carpeted Floors.” That drew objections, too, so he wrote, “Buy from Cement Floors.”
“The buyers got the point,” Hallum said.
A few years prior, Hallum picked the hottest summer days to stand on the curb atop the hill at S. Main and Wyoming streets near his store and tossed handbills through the open windows of cars stopped for the traffic light.
“I could pass out maybe 1,000 an hour,” Hallum said. “I did it because the young men don’t have the nerve.”
Hallum thrived in an advertising market most furniture stores avoided. He put $10,000 to $15,000 worth of his best furniture in each of several model homes at area developments. At one point he had 22.
The developer paid him $400 to put the furniture in, plus $85 each month it’s there. When the home was sold, the buyer usually bought half the furniture.
“And each Sunday thousands of people see my best furniture and I’ve been paid to show it to them,” Hallum said.
Hallum refused to retire and he said those who do are “leeches on society.”
March 24, 1976: Dreadnought lives! Man builds scourge of South Pacific in miniature
Loren Zimpher was building a scale model of the giant Japanese battleship which, he says, “helped kick the hell out of the U.S. Navy in several World War II sea battles,” in 1976.
“People are simply amazed,” Zimpher said with a chuckle, when they saw the Rising Sun flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy flying from a tiny halyard and are told it is a replica of the Yamato.
Zimpher, who was employed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, was a history buff whose main interest was the naval battles between the Japanese and American fleets in the Pacific.
Colonel (a nickname he got as a child) Zimpher served in the Air Force from 1959 to 1963. He began sketching plans for the Yamato on Thanksgiving eve 1973.
“Our aircraft carriers sank the Yamato on route to Okinawa” on Apr. 6, 1945, Zimpher said.
With help from his family, Zimpher had spent close to 2,000 hours assembling and rigging the model.
The replica was 9 feet 8 inches from bow to stern and had a 29-inch beam. It weighed between 80 and 100 pounds, and it took three people to carry it in its glass display case.
The awesome dreadnought, which the Japanese commissioned in August 1940, weighed 72,809 tons.
Charles Heinl of Maria Stein had cause to remember the Yamato, he said, as he talked to Zimpher about the model. He was a seaman aboard the Gambier Bay, a U.S. Navy Jeep carrier, when the flotilla he was sailing with was attacked by the Japanese in October 1944 in Leyte Gulf. That battle has been called the greatest sea battle ever fought. Heinl’s ship was struck repeatedly. He believes at least some of the 50 hits came from the 18-inch cannon of the Yamato.
“Within a half hour to 45 minutes we sank,” Heinl said. “I spent two days and two nights in the water before I was rescued.”
Seven hundred of his shipmates were saved; about 250 perished.
Zimpher said he got a kick out of hearing sea stories from ex-swabbies who served in the Pacific fleet during WWII. Efforts to get information from the Japanese embassy in Washington about the background of the ship had failed, he said.
He figured it would take almost two more years to complete the details on his model.
“I hope to put in radio controls and float the ship. The turrets will turn and the barrels will elevate,” he said.
Zimpher did complete the model and in 1977 he donated it to the Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant, SC, where it is still on display.
March 25, 1976: 22,000-mile ‘elevator’ for satellite use feasible, WPAFB engineer’s study shows
In 1976, Jerome Pearson, a 37-year-old aerospace engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, wanted to build an elevator 22,000 miles into space.
“It would be a big, expensive project, but it’s theoretically possible,” said Pearson, who was to present a technical paper on his idea at an upcoming symposium at Wright-Patterson.
Pearson’s plan called for an “orbital tower” extending from the earth’s surface up to a satellite in stationary orbit 22,300 miles above the earth’s equator. A sort of elevator would travel up and back on the tower.
He said such a tower could be used to launch spacecraft into earth orbit with small amounts of energy and to send spacecraft out to explore the planets or to escape the solar system.
Pearson, who said he was a space buff before there was a National Aeronautics and Space Administration, got the idea during the 10 years he worked for the space agency before coming to the Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson.
But he couldn’t get any official interest in it, and his work in vibration and structures here had to do with airplanes, not space.
So, he said, he worked out the static and dynamics analysis equations in his spare time at home. His paper on the orbital tower was published in Acta Astronautica, the journal of the International Astronautical Federation, in 1975.
“You couldn’t possibly build a tower from the earth up,” he said. “It would buckle and collapse.”
The solution was to start from a satellite or space station already in orbit and extend the tower down toward the earth, like dropping a rope from a hovering helicopter.
To keep the system in balance, Pearson said, it would be necessary to also extend the tower up from the space station. The upward pull of the outer portion would offset the pull of gravity on the lower end.
It turned out the tower would have to extend out about 90,000 miles, about a third of the way to the moon, Pearson said.
He said this arrangement would keep the entire length in tension to avoid buckling.
Pearson used some intricate mathematics to show that the whole assembly would be stable despite the effects of the moon’s gravity and would not go flipping around in space like a gigantic buggy whip.
He visualized a tower built of three tubes, perhaps eight inches in diameter, arranged in a triangle. Walls of the tubes would be three times as thick at the space station as at the ground.
“The tower would weigh about 20 billion pounds or one million tons,” he said. “That’s about as much as 20 battleships.”
Pearson estimated that it might take 10 or 20 years to construct the giant tower and could cost $250 billion or more.
Carbon, the main raw material, perhaps obtained from coal, could be hauled up to synchronous orbit by 15,000 flights of an advanced space shuttle with 30 times the capacity of the shuttle scheduled to go into service in the 1980s.
March 27, 1976: Architectural protection: Dayton prepares for the Big Kaboom
The new Elder-Beerman department store building in downtown Dayton had sparked numerous rumors and speculations in 1976 that had various suburban communities upset that they might be missing out on something.
When the construction began, it looked normal enough, with a basement and floors filling in across the girders.
It was only when the outside wall started getting bricked up thick and plain that citizens began wondering if the structure was really a department store or a bomb shelter. If it was a bomb shelter, they reasoned, why was Dayton expecting a direct hit?
When the builders denied that they were building a bomb shelter, that only heated up the rumors: Why were the builders denying this? What were they hiding? Why else would someone build another fortress downtown when the convention center was already there?
Experts, called in by concerned citizens, surveyed the structure and reasoned that, even if it couldn’t take a direct hit, it was as secure against the outside elements and nuclear attack as any building could be. They reckoned the alleged Elder-Beerman store could survive a hit if ground zero were in Dayton View.
Military authorities said that Dayton probably was a Russian missile target since Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is nearby. However, the accuracy of Russian missiles was not yet up to American standards, so civil defense officials speculated that Dayton probably would get hit by a missile that overshot Detroit.
Nevertheless, the suburbs around Dayton felt that the center city was a target and that some developers, such as Elder-Beerman, were preparing for a hit by having a building in which shopping can take place even during a holocaust.
Thus the suburbs felt they are being discriminated against because they weren’t targets, too.
Arms experts tried to assure the outlying communities that it didn’t matter if Dayton alone received the incoming missiles, that there was enough fallout for everyone, and probably enough firestorm, too.
Townships officials said they don’t accept that assurance. They believed Dayton was going to take the hit all by itself in order to get federal restoration and aid funds, and that once again the smaller areas will be deprived.
People in the townships wanted Elder-Beerman to build more such shelters in their areas, too.
March 28, 1976: Boys play TV ping pong for 17 eye-glazing hours
Three Wayne Twp. boys loved playing television ping pong in 1976.
One day, Roger Baldwin, 12, Brian Nickel, 11, and David Ashley, 13, quit playing the popular game after 17 hours straight. They believed they had set a record.
The boys said they got the idea by reading the Guinness Book of Records and decided they wanted to get in it.
The game was played on home TV screens by using a special adaptor.
Roger said the record book gave directions on how to get an achievement published.
“It said you could only take a five-minute break an hour,” Roger said.
So the boys started at 9:30 a.m. Using one man as a relief player, they finished up at 2:30 a.m., sleepy and proud.
Nobody slept during the marathon and nobody kept score either. They guessed they probably scored more than 2,500 points.
“Roger probably won, though,” Brian declared.
The boys said there was no established record for their feat, so they were busily preparing the required log to be sent to the Guinness people in England.
March 28, 1976: Roth basketball wins AA State Championship
Roth became Dayton’s first team to capture a State Boys’ Basketball title since Chaminade did it in 1970, nipping Lorain Catholic, 82-81, to capture the 1976 Class AA championship at St. John Arena.
The contest pitted two quick, fast-breaking teams that refused to give the other an inch and battled at full speed until the final buzzer before 13,951 fans.
“This was the way a championship game should be played between the two best AA teams in Ohio,” said losing Coach Jim Lawhead. “Our kids played their guts out and got beat by one hell of a team.”
A parade in the Falcons’ honor was scheduled for the day after, beginning at the Dayton Board of Education administrative building on W. First St.
Roth sophomore Dwight Anderson, who was named to the first team by both The Associated Press and United Press International All-Class AA tournament teams, hit three of Roth’s first four buckets as the Falcons grabbed an early 8-5 lead.
Roth trailed only once in the first quarter, and led 20-17 at the buzzer.
Roth exploded early in the second quarter with four straight buckets in just over a minute, two by substitute center Tony Peters, who was a first team AP tourney pick and second team UPI. The Falcons twice held an 11-point lead, their greatest of the game.
Lorain came right back with its own string of points, outscoring Roth 12-2 in a three-minute stretch.
Lorain tied it up, 31-31 with 3:49 left in the half, but the Falcons moved away again to take a 41-38 halftime lead.
The Falcons maintained their lead until midway through the third, when the Spartans went from a 47-42 deficit to a lead of 58-49, their biggest of the game.
From that point, with 3:08 to go, Roth dominated the action, outscoring Lorain 12-2 behind balanced scoring to lead, 61-58.
Although the game was never tied in the fourth, no more than three points separated the team for the first five minutes after they matched buckets.
With 22 seconds left, Lorain was within two again, 81-79.
Roth stalled the clock down to :08, when center Paul Moore was fouled in desperation by Dave Grubic. Moore hit the first, missed the second.
Lorain hit a 25-footer with two seconds left but Moore’s free throw gave the Falcon’s the edge and their first state title.
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