75 Years Ago in Macon: Fire guts railroad shop; season’s first snowfall dusts streets

The war effort was already full-throttle in Macon and Middle Georgia 75 years ago today. The attack on Pearl Harbor had happened barely a month before, and news of world events dominated the front page.

The Telegraph that day, Jan. 10, 1942, was full of news about U.S. troops and all that was being done locally to support them and the American cause.

One measure involved a suggested six-day school week with longer school days and no summer vacations.

“Selective service officials proposed the change ... to make young men available for military and defense industry jobs quicker,” the Telegraph reported.

All but buried among the two dozen or so headlines on the paper’s front page was a five-paragraph blurb about the weather. It had snowed overnight and temperatures were in the teens:

Flurries of snow dusted Macon streets last night, alternating with dashes of sleet and lightly falling rains.

Page 3 of the paper that day was topped with a photograph of a roaring blaze at a shop building that belonged to the Georgia, Southern and Florida Railway.

“Several carloads of waste paper, increasingly valuable in the nation’s war effort, were lost yesterday morning when fire of undetermined origin destroyed” the facility, the newspaper reported.

An article beside the black-and-white photo of the flames mentioned that the county’s superior court would soon begin its January term “with seven murder cases, a rape case, and six burglary cases.”

Another story that day told of a Valdosta truck driver who had become “the county’s first traffic fatality of 1942.”

He was struck by a car driven by an Athens man on Houston Road, south of Macon, while walking to get help after his truck “developed tire trouble,” the paper reported.

This story was originally published January 10, 2017 at 6:11 PM with the headline "75 Years Ago in Macon: Fire guts railroad shop; season’s first snowfall dusts streets."