A look back at historic O’Fallon events from 1919 & 1948

“Oh Girls! Wasn’t It Shocking?” screamed the Progress headline for Sept. 4, 1919.

It seems that some popular young Shiloh girls frequented a pond on the Rable farm about a mile and half south of Shiloh. Two weeks prior on a Sunday, they went to their “private bathing beach” to enjoy a swim. The weather being warm, they stayed in for longer than usual.

Before entering the pond, however, they carefully laid out their clothes on nearby shrubbery so they wouldn’t become wrinkled. The “dressing room” was in the woods some distance from the pond but they felt perfectly safe going from there to the pond in bathing suits because no one ever came back there. While in the water, everyone was having a great time — even more so than usual.

But tragedy lurked.

A cow grazing in the area happened to come across the dressing room and decided to munch on the neatly hanging clothes. When it came time to go home, two of the girls went to the dressing room to get their clothes. There they found the unconcerned cow had only left one dress and an apron untouched. Imagine the sobbing and shrieking of those still in the water when the news was communicated to them, reported the Progress.

Fortunately, the extremely embarrassed swimmers were able to borrow enough clothes from nearby residents so they could reach home, perhaps hoping that this humiliating episode could be kept secret. But news is news, and so on the front page it went.

75 years ago, March 18, 1948: A double tragedy, which cast sorrow over the entire community, occurred Saturday morning when two O’Fallon boys, members of Boy Scout Troop No. 35 met death by drowning in the artificial lake at Camp Joy, the Kaskaskia Council Boy Scout camp near Carlyle when the ice gave way and they were plunged into 15 feet of water. The victims were William J. Bittles, 13, and James H. Tiley, 12.