Your Local Government's Work Is Never Done

This story in today's New York Times' Week In Review section amused me this morning. It's from 100 years ago this week:


Back Then: Dec. 3, 1909

The Improvement Association of Edgewater Park, N.J., has found much cause for complaint recently in the whistle shrieks of the Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives. ... Men placed near the tracks by the Improvement Association noticed that one train, which passed through the town three times a day, was the principal offender. A fair-haired girl was found to be the cause of the tooting of this train, for no sooner would the shrill sound issue forth than this young woman would come out on the porch of her home and throw kisses to the engineer, who would return them, and give a few extra blasts in recognition of the salutation.

The Improvement Association has decided that if the engineer cannot woo his fair young friend without annoying the whole town he had better have her home moved further away.


This sounds like just the sort of thing that might come before our own village council in 2009. And it also sounds like just the sort of way we'd investigate it. However, given the general depopulation and real-estate collapse in Metro Detroit, we're not enouraging anyone to move farther away, no matter how annoying her beau's train whistle is.

(And I can't help but whatever happened to that engineer and the blonde.)