GAMBIER — Sometimes, things do change.
Today, there’s not much of a chance that your could flip your car on a country road without your full name and a traffic citation being plastered all over the news. But modern, responsible ways of handling automobile incidents were still being developed 100 years ago, when automobiles were still newfangled gadgets.
In mid-January, 1922, a brief news item ran in the Democratic Banner about a motorist flipping his Ford car on a road east of Gambier late the previous Saturday night. The notice says that the man lost control of his Ford — which in 1922, was most likely a Model T — causing it to flip over.
The man either had a pocketknife or some sort of blade in the vehicle, for he was able to free himself by cutting his way out through the fabric of the vehicle’s cloth top, and shimmying out the back of the wrecked vehicle.
According to the news brief, the man gave his name only as “Livingood.” It sounds like a flippant joke, perhaps of a young man who had discovered the dangers of driving fast after having a few drinks. He was “living good” until he flipped the Ford.
A search of Knox County names for the period yields no one by that name on Knox County’s census reports, making the joke name look probable. Yet a further search turns up a surprise: There is a local link to someone who really sported that lively name.
Frank Merle Livingood was from Portage County, and he lived in a number of various areas around Ohio throughout his life. As for as records show, he never lived in Knox County, but he most certainly had a connection here, for he married his wife Anna Cooper in Knox County in 1907.
Anna Belle Cooper was born in Miller Township in 1889 to Elias and Osee Cooper. After Elias died while Anna was still young, Osee and her daughter moved to Wayne Township by the time of the 1900 census, which is where Osee had grown up with her parents Robert and Ann (Burkholder) Gregg.
How Frank Livingood came to meet Anna is unknown, but they married in 1907, when he was 27 and Anna was 18. They moved to Kentucky and had two children, with Anna dying in 1927 and Frank in 1938.
So, it is in fact possible that a very real person by the name of Livingood flipped his car near Gambier in January of 1922, while in Knox County visiting his wife’s relatives. Either that, or it really was just a fictitious name.
The only further information is that the damaged car was “brought to Mt. Vernon” for repairs. One wonders if they even had tow trucks yet at that time. Maybe it would just have been pulled by a team of horses!
No follow up articles occur, so this vignette of a late night road mishap stands as a snapshot of the day, 100 years ago this winter, when the driver of a Ford wasn’t livin’ so good.
