Email
Print
FeedAll Work and No Play ...
A look back at how Main Liners made the most of their downtime.
(page 1 of 4)
There is, says Ecclesiastes, “a season for every activity under heaven.” That, of course, includes time for goofing off.
Regardless, the Quakers who first settled these parts were not convinced. They were famously intolerant of anything that wasted time. Time, they believed, was best used to save souls. So, colonial Pennsylvania’s laws banned “all prizes, stage plays, cards, dice, May games, masques, revels, bull-baitings, cock-fightings, bear-baitings and the like.” The courts, meanwhile, were authorized to punish any sort of amusement that “excites the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness and irreligion.”
And that, of course, pretty well describes most of the things we do for amusement today. Back then, they’d be shutting down Eagles games faster than thee could say, “Thee.”
In the centuries since the Quakers lost control, we’ve found many ways to play—some strange, some familiar, some illegal.
Here’s a selection.
Bathing Beauties
Water has always been a fast way to a good time. In Media, the Broomall’s Lake Country Club was founded in 1919 “for social enjoyment” on an artificial body of water the Broomall family had created in the 1880s by damming a tributary of Ridley Creek. They used the lake to harvest ice and, later, rented it to a fishing club. As the Media Swimming and Rowing Club, however, it came into its heyday—drawing crowds for Fourth of July celebrations, children looking for a place to swim on a hot day, and young couples who rented rowboats for a turn around the lake (and some socially appropriate semi-privacy).
In 1926, the club hosted champion Johnny Weissmuller (later “Tarzan” in a dozen movies) and other top swimmers for competitions connected with the U.S. sesquicentennial in Philadelphia that year. A popular annual event was the “savage” dance, for which members dressed as jungle natives, smeared themselves with lake mud and cavorted around a fire. Things were quieter during World War II, when most young men were overseas, leaving their wives and girlfriends—like these six
lovelies in 1945—waiting for their beaus to return from the front.
Equine Extravagance
Once, the horse was an essential piece of machinery. It moved heavy loads and provided transportation. By the 1890s, those days were mostly gone. Railroads moved goods; the first automobiles had appeared; self-propelled reapers brought in the harvest; streetcars were switching to electricity. Suddenly nostalgic, Americans re-imagined the old nag as a high-performance pet.
Europeans started the trend. Ireland’s Royal Society staged the first Dublin Horse Show in 1864. In England, the Easy Surrey Society Show dates back to 1837, providing an early model for new-money Americans longing for British “class.” In 1896, a “meeting of gentlemen” at the Devon Inn (today the site of Waterloo Gardens) launched what is now the United States’ oldest multi-breed horse competition. Most of the first shows—including the 1898 event shown above—were held on the inn’s lawn. Competitions were popular, but the mingling of the glitterati’s unmarried sons and daughters was also a desirable spectacle.
