1917

View of 20th Street North with a banner promoting 2nd Liberty Bonds in 1917

1917 was the 46th year after the founding of the city of Birmingham.

Events

• January 7: Accused murderer Louis Walton killed himself by breaking a bottle of nitroglycerin in the lavatory of a Southern Railway car as it rolled through Woodlawn toward the Terminal Station.
• May 27: A deadly tornado swept through Walker and Jefferson Counties.
• July 14: The City of Birmingham purchased East Lake Park for $65,000.
• The Civitan Club was founded in Birmingham by Courtney Shropshire.
• Glenn Messer joined the U. S. Army Signal Corps, Aviation section.
• The unfinished Roden Hotel was dismantled and sold for scrap.
• Nathaniel A. Barrett was elected mayor with an anti-immigration platform.
• The Kiwanis Club of Birmingham was founded.
• The 1917 Presbyterian Church in the United States General Assembly was held in Birmingham.
• The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company hired Lloyd Noland to head its health department.
• Ottokar Cadek founded the Cadek String Quartet.
• Edna Gockel Gussen won a statewide competition sponsored by the Alabama Federation of Music Clubs to set Julia Tutwiler's poem "Alabama" to music.
• Emma Gelders Sterne founded a school for delinquent children.
• First Baptist Church of Sylacauga hosted the annual meeting of the Alabama Baptist State Convention.

Business

The Sanitary Market opened in 1917

• January 1: American Cast Iron Pipe Company inaugurated its employee pension plan.
• May 1: The Smallman-Brice Construction Company was incorporated.
• The Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company opened the new Fairfield Works.
• The Birmingham Railway, Light & Power Company purchased the Birmingham Tidewater Railway out of receivership.
• Books-A-Million founded as a newsstand in Florence.
• Raymond Rochell began bottling Grapico soda in Birmingham.
• Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Company acquired furnaces in Gadsden.
• The Alabama Brewing Company's ice manufacturing business closed.
• June 30: The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company purchased the North Branch of the Birmingham Mineral Railroad from the Louisville & Nashville Railroad.
• September 1: The Sanitary Market opened on 2nd Avenue North.
• Woodward Iron Company sunk the Redding Shaft to access the workings of the Songo No. 1 Mine.
• The Eureka Coal Company opened Eureka No. 4 Mine in Helena.
• Charles Carraway moved his infirmary to Norwood as Norwood Hospital.
• The Jo-Pe-Nut Products Co. was incorporated.
• J. F. Rushton, P. R. Jordan, J. H. Tidmore and R. T. Daniel founded the Powhatan Coal & Coke Co..

Sports

• The University of Alabama football team went 5-2-1 in Thomas Kelley's last year as coach.
• The 1917 Birmingham Barons finished 3rd in the Southern Association with a record of 87-66.

Works

Books

• William Henry Graves (1917) Junius Finally Discovered Birmingham: Dispatch Printing Co.

Buildings

• 1917 Birmingham News building on 4th Avenue North
• Loveman's Annex on 3rd Avenue North
• St Anthony's School
• Wenonah School

Individuals

• William Bankhead began serving in the U.S. House of Representatives
• Cliff Hare was elected to the Auburn City Council.

Births

R. G. Armstrong, born April 7, 1917

Virgil Trucks, born April 26, 1917

• January 12: Jessie Hale Downs, co-founder of the Jimmie Hale Mission in Moundville
• January 24: Jazz pianist Avery Parrish in Birmingham
• February 3: Newspaper publisher and entrepreneur Pat Courington Sr in Saragossa
• February 4: Nation of Islam minister Chester McNutt
• February 14: Hardware salesman Robert Tyler in Bluff Park
• April 7: Actor R. G. Armstrong in Pleasant Grove
• April 20: Actress Virginia Mae Schmitt
• April 26: Pitcher Virgil Trucks in Birmingham
• May 17: Arts promoter Hermie Friend in Mobile
• June 12: Contractor John Baird
• July 1: Psychiatric researcher Humphry Osmond in Surrey, England
• July 3: Baseball player and manager Piper Davis in Piper
• July 3: "Miss Vulcan" Evelyn Tulley in Wren, Mississippi
• July 29: Pediatrician Leo M. Bashinsky in Troy, Pike County.
• August 7: Journalist and historian Marguerite Johnston Barnes in Birmingham
• August 24: Chemist and environmental activist Bob Burks in LaGrange, Georgia
• October 2: Educator Ernest Palmore was born in Richland, Georgia
• October 30: Baseball player Bobby Bragan in Birmingham
• November 24: Builder Houston Brice Jr in Birmingham
• December 11: Ill-fated newspaper boy T. E. McGiboney in Birmingham
• Interior designer Ruby Ansley
• Bus company owner Worcy Crawford in Hurtsburo
• Auburn University dean of students James Foy
• Socialite Marie Ingalls
• Heart surgeon John W. Kirklin
• Advertising executive Robert Luckie Jr in Clanton
• Tuskegee airman and Tuskegee University professor Herbert Carter in Opelika

Graduations

• Asa Rountree Jr graduated from the University of Alabama.

Marriages

• Gus Jebeles married Catherine Chunn in Kentucky.
• Roy Sterne married Emma Gelders in Birmingham.
• October 17: Dyer Talley married Elizabeth Byrd.

Deaths

Kelly Ingram, died October 16, 1917

• January 7: Louis Walton, suicidal business man and accused murderer.
• February 8: Attorney Walker Percy died at home.
• October 16: Kelly Ingram, the first US enlisted serviceman killed in WWI.
• December 15: Joseph Woodward, president of Woodward Iron Company

Context

1917 was the year that the United States declared war on Germany, entering "The Great War" (World War I). "Our Lady of Fatima" was sighted by three children in Portugal. 300 acres of the city of Atlanta burned in that city's "Great Fire" on May 21. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded. The Supreme Court voided local segregation laws relating to the sale of real estate in Buchanan v. Warley.

Notable people born in 1917 include actors Ernest Borgnine, Raymond Burr, Phyllis Diller, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Robert Mitchum; architect I. M. Pei; artist Andrew Wyeth; authors Arthur C. Clarke and Carson McCullers; bandleaders Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk; cartoonists Dik Browne, Will Eisner, and Jack Kirby; president John F. Kennedy; prime minister Indira Gandhi of India; scientist Ilya Prigogine; singers Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Vera Lynn; and the racehorse Man o' War.

"Buffalo Bill" Cody, Scott Joplin, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin all died in 1917.

1910s

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