Sunday afternoon a crew of men were working on Lake Auburn clearing the ice preparatory to cutting.

Without warning one of the teams, a large pair of horses weighing about 1400 pounds each, went down through the ice and did not come up in the open but were caught under the ice and before they could be rescued both were drowned.

The accident happened off the point as it is called, near Perry’s cottage. The driver said that the ice did not crack any but seemed to open right up and the horses were through before he hardly realized it.

50 Years Ago, 1956

• An explosion in the furnace started the $80,000 fire which destroyed the Whiterock Distillery on the No Name Pond Road early Saturday morning.

• NEW YORK – Francis Cardinal Spellman, making one of his rare appearances in the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, today denounced the Warner Bros. film “Baby Doll” as “an immoral and corrupting influence.”

• The sun boosted the mercury to a near-record high yesterday, and aided in removing the slippery glaze of ice left on Twin City streets. The mercury reached 44 degrees at 2 p.m. to rest four notches away from the record high of 48 in 1918.

25 Years ago, 1981

If you look for the word “evolution” in the index of a new high-school textbook, “Experiences in Biology,” you won’t find it. The reason is simple. The publisher instructed the authors to include the concept, but not the word.

Why? “Because it’s a volatile issue at the present point,” explains Eugene R. Frank, director of publication for the book’s publisher Laidlaw Brothers, a division of Doubleday.

Such shying away from evolution is growing more common in science education as the battle between the “creationists” and natural scientists escalates. The center stage is a federal courtroom in Little Rock, Ark., where the two sides are fighting over a state law requiring schools to give equal treatment to both evolution and “creation-science.”