Elmira's First Black Firefighter

 By Susan Zehnder, Education Director

In 2007, Thomas J. Reid, Jr. was interviewed about his status as Elmira’s first Black firefighter. His reply that “I suppose I was a trailblazer…” reflects only part of his story. He was born in 1923 to Viola and Thomas J. Reid Sr. The family had two daughters and would add a second son a few years later.

Reid Sr. was a World War I veteran, and the family lived on Elmira’s Eastside. After returning from the war, he worked driving trucks for Remington Rand. Reid Jr. attended Elmira Free Academy, where in addition to his studies he lettered in varsity football, basketball and track. He graduated from EFA in 1941. His standout sports achievements earned him an athletic scholarship to Lincoln University, the nation’s first historically Black college and university, located in Pennsylvania. At Lincoln he played both football and basketball and majored in physical education.

It was wartime and just a year into his college career he was inducted into the Army. He left for boot camp, however due to a previous sports injury, he was honorably discharged one month later and returned to Lincoln University. Sometime before 1945 he married Wilhelmina Woods, a nursing student from Tennessee. She went on to pursue graduate studies in nursing at Syracuse University. The couple had a daughter and settled in Elmira. Over the next few years, they had two more children.

In 1950 Thomas J. Reid, Jr. joined the Elmira Fire Department, he was the first African American firefighter hired by the department. Wilhelmina worked for the County Health Department as a public health nurse. She also taught health classes and served on the Board at the Neighborhood House. In the fall of 1963 Wilhelmina died leaving her widowed husband with three young children to raise. Reid remarried in 1965 to Marjorie, a widow with three young children of her own. Marjorie worked at Iszard’s Department Store.

While he was with the Fire Department, Reid received two commendations. In 1961 he was credited with saving a woman’s life, carrying her out of a burning building. During the rescue he suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized. In 1965 he was named Fireman of the Year for rescuing an elderly man who had fallen asleep while smoking. This rescue was intense, and he and another firefighter suffered severe smoke inhalation.

Star Gazette photo

After 35 years of service, Reid retired from the Elmira Fire Department in 1985. It would be fifteen years before the second African American firefighter was hired.

Whether or not he was influenced by his father’s work driving trucks for a living, Reid was always interested in anything with wheels. That fascination was part of the reason that in addition to firefighting, he was a successful inventor. He enjoyed creating things with wheels.

One of his early inventions was for a sled wagon with front and rear steering capable of turning 360 degrees. He received US and Canadian patents for this vehicle he called the Cen Ten Ion 200.

Another invention he received a patent for was an inline skate:

Patent drawing for inline skate

The skate had front and back wheels in addition to two center wheels.

After he retired from the Fire Department, he invented a scooter bicycle, seen here and modeled by his wife Marjorie. It was produced for many years by a bicycle manufacturer in Pennsylvania.

Star Gazette photo

One of the last inventions Reid came up with, he built himself in the early 2000s. It was a one-of-a-kind bike designed to accommodate riders of two different heights. He and Marjorie often rode it around town.

Thomas and Marjorie were married for forty-six years before he died in 2012 at the age of 89.  Marjorie died six years later in late 2018.

Thomas J. Reid, Jr. was a man with various talents: an elected member of Elmira’s Sports Hall of Fame, the first Black Fire Fighter in Elmira, and a successful inventor holding multiple patents.

For more about the family read our blog The Reids of Elmira, and listen to Wilbur Reid’s interview archived as part of our Black Oral History project.

 

Bob Mack and the Rooster

By Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

It was 1882 and Haverly’s Colored Minstrels were playing Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, England. Up on the stage was Bob Mack of Elmira dressed as a giant Shanghai rooster, complete with vibrant green tail. Clucking and cawing, he faced off against a more conventionally sized bantam rooster called Little Dick. After several minutes of play fighting, Little Dick drove him from the stage and the crowd went wild. Up in the royal box, the Prince of Wales laughed himself silly. He was so delighted with the show that he later presented Mack with a gold medallion engraved with a rooster and set with diamonds valued at £20, quite a princely sum for the time.

Bert Williams in reproduction costume, 1910

Born into slavery in Kentucky around 1850, it was a long, strange road which brought Bob Mack before royalty. At a young age, he was set to minding the plantation’s poultry. It was there that he perfected the art of bird calls and mimicry. When the Civil War broke out, his master became an officer in the Confederate Army and dragged young Mack along as a body servant. In short order however, Mack found his way to freedom in the Union Army and amassed a small fortune entertaining the troops. After the war, he eventually found his way to Elmira were he fell for and married a local girl, Lucinda Washington, the daughter of the city’s first Black policeman.

Bob Mack worked as a barber, but his true passion lay in entertaining. Sometime around 1873, he performed his bird calls for the manager of Callender's Georgia Minstrels while they were in town and was hired on the spot. For the next ten years, he toured the United States and Europe, first with Callender's Georgia Minstrels and later with Haverly’s Colored Minstrels. Mack performed bird imitations, staged mock fights with Little Dick, and also kept a small flock of trained chickens who performed various tricks. In 1883, at age 2, Mack’s son Bob Jr. joined the act, often stealing the show with raw cuteness. 

 Minstrel shows developed in Northern states in the 1830s and 1840s with white actors in blackface portraying racist caricatures. The shows tended to follow a three act structure. First, a crowd-gathering parade would draw the audience to the theater. Bob Mack, evidentially a skilled horseman, often lead the parade for Callender's Georgia Minstrels. The show itself would open with a musical number featuring the entire cast followed by a group comedy routine and dance number. The second act was more like a variety show with a series of short, individual acts including music, dancing, acrobatics, etc. The second act was usually capped by a long stump speech delivered in dialect and filled with jokes, malapropisms, and puns.  The third act consisted of a short play, often times a plantation scene or sometimes a parody of a classic or popular contemporary play.

The shows were hugely popular throughout the 1840s and 50s, but were also considered controversial. Minstrelsy both played into and created negative stereotypes about Blacks and many African Americans were rightly appalled by it. Abolitionists worried that the shows’ sanitized depictions of plantation life and slavery undermined their cause. At the same time, many Southern cities barred minstrel acts due to their Northern origins. Interest in minstrel shows declined sharply during the Civil War and continued to do so throughout the rest of the 19^th century. Blackface musical acts persisted until well into the 1960s, but the whole three act structure was lost. Still, a lot of the songs and racist tropes and stereotypes linger in our popular culture today.

Black minstrel troupes first started appearing in 1855. Callender's Georgia Minstrels was established in 1872 and was eventually acquired by J.H. Haverly in 1878. It was bought out again, this time by the Frohman brothers in the 1880s. Bob Mack worked for all three. The promoters of Black minstrel shows tended to highlight their authenticity, but, in reality, their content tended to be similar to white shows. Still, there were some key differences. Black shows often featured spiritual music and overtly religious themes in a way which the white shows did not and usually ended with a mock military drill and brass band. While many Blacks avoided white minstrel shows, they attended Black minstrel shows in droves and tended to treat the performers as celebrities.

 

For Black entertainers like Bob Mack, Black minstrel shows were pretty much the only large-scale avenue towards show business and fame. As a Black man, Mack made a fraction of what white entertainers made, but it was still more than he ever could have hoped to make as a barber. When he died of tuberculosis in Elmira on January 21, 1885, he was one of the richest, if not the richest Black men in Elmira. He is still regarded as one of the best chicken trainers and his signature rooster outfit was recreated by Bert Williams for the 1910 Ziegfeld Follies and for Barbara Streisand’s TV special The Belle of 14^th Street in 1967. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery and his descendants continued to live in Elmira throughout the 20^th century.

John Turner’s Freedom

By Kelli Huggins, Education Coordinator

On October 30, 1904, the Elmira Telegram ran a single paragraph about a “remarkable colored man,” John Turner. That one paragraph outlined Turner's undeniably remarkable story, one that was also heartbreaking. Turner was the well-known manager of the stables at the Platt House hotel in Horseheads. Turner, who had lived in Horseheads for 18 years, started his life in the North as an escaped slave.

The Platt House

Turner was enslaved on the plantation of Turner family in Virginia, near Fredericksburg. From the little information given in the blurb, it is difficult to ascertain what plantation he was enslaved on, but it might have been Belle Grove in King George, VA. At the time of his Turner’s enslavement, the plantation was owned by Carolinus Turner.

During the Civil War, John Turner took one of his master’s horses and rode across Union lines. He asked for freedom, proving his master was an officer in the Confederate army. He was not made to return.

The article mentioned that Turner had since been working to locate his mother and brother, from whom he had been separated during his enslavement. He had written to former master George Turner (Carolinus had a son named George who would have been a child when John escaped) asking for assistance locating them. The report said that he had received two letters in response, but that neither could give him any information. It is unlikely he ever heard from them again.

Turner’s experience looking for lost family members was not unique. After emancipation, formerly enslaved people had little recourse to locate lost family. “Lost Friends” columns appeared in some newspapers and people placed ads looking for any information about loved ones. You can read some of their heartbreaking notes here: http://www.hnoc.org/database/lost-friends/index.html

Henry Wilson’s Walks

By Kelli Huggins, Education Coordinator

Elmiran Henry Wilson took something rather mundane, in his case, walking, and made it extraordinary. He could walk a lot and over long distances. To my knowledge, he made two such long, walking “tramp” journeys: one in 1895-96 and one in 1901-2. This is what I can piece together about his trips. They’re a rather remarkable look at the life of a local black man that transcends many typical narratives of that time period.

In July 1895, the local papers reported that “local colored boys” Henry Wilson and Frank H. Jones were planning to walk across the country if they could get enough money to do so. There was no real mention of their motives for doing so. At some point, Jones must have dropped out of the plan, because on August 4, Wilson alone departed from Elmira wearing a “black velvet suit with knickerbockers” and pulling a little red wagon.

By August 7, Wilson made it to Hornellsville. There he laid out his itinerary with the local paper. He planned to go though Salamanca to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and the Santa Fe route to California, all the while following train lines. He suspected it would take 13 months. Wilson planned to collect signatures from newspapermen and hotel proprietors “as evidence of good faith.”

By the end of November 1895, made it to northern Arizona. He sent a letter to an Elmira friend saying he was doing well and making some money giving lectures. He next would have to cross the Mojave Desert, however, facing about 200 miles “without water or shelter along the route.” Everything he needed he had to carry in his wagon. He wanted to be in California by Christmas.

There is a bit of a gap in the record at that point, but we do know that he made it to San Francisco and then started the return trip home. In August 1896, Wilson’s half-brother was killed jumping off a train in Ohio. At the time of his death, he may have been going west to see his brother, who was in a hospital in St. Louis. Wilson reportedly had been held up significantly in his return with “mountain fever,” which required substantial hospitalization. Wilson eventually recovered and made it back home. In April 1897, he lectured about his trip at the Bethel A.M.E. Church.

Wilson’s walking career didn’t end there. In 1901, he and another Elmira man, William Boggs, were hired to walk across the country and to go to England and France to promote the 1903 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, by handing out promotional images and flyers.

Ticket for the Louisiana Purchase Expo

On November 12, 1901, Wilson and Boggs set out at 10 am pushing a three-wheeled wagon with an American flag atop the canopy. They started at the corner of Lake and Water Streets and were sent off by a small crowd, including two sad young women who “followed along for a few blocks gazing wistfully after the stalwart young men.” Wilson and Boggs were wearing “knee bicycle trousers and stockings, russet shoes and canvas hunting jackets. Each man had a tight-fitting skull cap.”

The paper praised the two men, but did also include some racist commentary about them; they were reportedly “pushing their cart and looking as happy as if they were bound for a water melon picnic or a cake walk.”

The men were scheduled to first go north through wine country and then on to Buffalo. When they reached St. Louis, their contracts with the Exposition were said to begin. From there, they would go to Charleston, S.C. for the Midwinter Exposition. Then they would head back to New York and board a steamer to Liverpool, from where they would go to Ireland and France. France was a big part of the plan; the men were supposed to tell the French people how “the American people are to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana purchase from Napoleon in 1803.” Along the way, Wilson and Boggs were also doing vaudeville-style performances and dances, in part to draw attention to their advertisements and to also make a little extra money.

After their departure, the last reference I can find of them is from early January 1902. After that, the trail goes cold. I have no idea if the trip was a success or what happened to either man. Understandably, this could have been a dangerous assignment, and something could have gone wrong. So for now, this story ends abruptly. If I find more information, I’ll post an update.