1928: Bronchos keep plugging

Football excitement: During the 1928 Wink-Odessa High football game, which was played at Wink, George Tripp, an Odessa High School halfback, carried the ball. As he started to get up, a Wink player tried to jump on him, and Tripp aimed a timely kick, sending the player sprawling. After the game ended, the Wink player's mother, armed with a butcher knife, waited for Tripp to leave the field. Tripp, Buck Harris and Nash Tucker ran for safety, jumped in Tucker's car, and made their escape.

Telephone service: In May, Bell Telephone Company purchased the Odessa Telephone Exchange service, at which time there were 365 phones operating in Ector County. The multitude of newcomers who poured into Odessa during the oil booms caused long delays in setting up new telephone services. Some customers waited more than a year for their phones to be hooked up.

Gas company: On Feb. 29, West Texas Gas Co. was franchised to do business in Odessa, and set up shop on East Highway 80. Gas was furnished from a field north of Amarillo until 1930. The first manager was O.R. Reed, who handled 234 accounts. When first started, the company handled service with a single Ford truck. In Odessa's early days, pioneers used fireplaces and cookstoves to heat their homes and cook their food. Mesquite limbs, scrap lumber, cow and buffalo chips served as fuel. The old cookstoves had stove pipe chimneys that extended through the ceiling, warmers above the cooking plates and ovens below. They often had reservoirs for heating bath water attached to their sides. A "whistling" tea kettle was used to boil water for dishwashing and tea. Kerosene cookstoves were used from around 1900 to the early '40s. They had to be pumped up and emitted an oily odor.

    Headlines

    * The city of Odessa buys a motorized grader for $3,105, but all street repair work halts Aug. 31 because of financial difficulties. On Sept. 20, a $55,000 street improvement bond issue was approved by Odessa voters, 112-26.

    * Angelo State University is established in San Angelo.

    * Gen. Alvaro Obregon, president-elect of Mexico, is assassinated on July 17.

    * Shell Oil Company builds a huge open tank near Monahans with a capacity of one million barrels of oil. The site is now the Million Barrel Museum.

    * The Church of Christ in Odessa builds a small church at the corner of Sixth and Jackson.

    * The discovery well in Hobbs, N.M., is brought in on Nov. 8 on what now is the corner of Stanolind Road and South Grimes Street.

    * The "Iron Lung" is invented. The mechanical device allowed polio sufferers to breathe.

    * In November, Republican Herbert Hoover is elected president, defeating Democrat Al Smith by a wide margin. Smith was the first Catholic to run for the office on a major party ticket.

    * Mickey Mouse makes his debut in a Walt Disney cartoon, "Plane Crazy."

    * Amelia Earhart, accompanied by two passengers, becomes the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

    * On May 11 the first scheduled television program is broadcast by station WGY in Schenectady, N.Y.

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