100 Years Ago: 1918

Miss E. Belle Williams of Livermore received the following letter from her brother, Cpl. Frank Williams, now with the American Expeditionary Forces, at the front. He writes as follows: “Dear Sister, I am going to try and answer a few of your letters but don’t know how I shall make out. I am Commander of the Guard tonight, and it is very still now but you can’t tell when the boys may start something. Once in a while, you can hear a shell burst off in the distance and down the valley at short intervals the machine guns patter. patter. patter; it may be some of the Yanks are going over the top tonight, or perhaps old Fritz is out nosing around. Gee, but I didn’t anymore then get that line written when He.. broke loose up the line. It sounds like an air raid or maybe the Boches are shelling a small town above us. Well, I just went out and posted my reliefs. It is now one o’clock a.m, and there are two more hours before I go out again. The shelling is gradually dying down and hasn’t come very near yet. The last night I was on guard, there was a terrific bombardment. It is certainly great when your side is doing the shooting but when the other fellow is doing it one begins to think there is no place better than the center of the earth and believe me. I am one of those guys who get just as close to It as possible. I am not able to describe one of these bombardments but the nearest I can come to it is that if you imagine about 1,000 thunderstorms all done up in one and the lightning striking in the same place you will have a good idea of the beginning of one minus the rainwater.”

50 Years Ago: 1968

A woods fire in a set of pine owned by the Auburn Water District on Turner Road. “northerly of the causeway,” burned deep into the bed of pine needles yesterday but was confined by firemen. It erupted shortly after 6 p.m., when a storm was passing over the area. A portable pump was used to pump water from Lake Auburn to flood the pine bed, and three fire engines were put to use.

25 Years Ago: 1993

The Little League team from Orchard Park, N.Y., will not want to hear the name Dumais for a long time. Greg Dumais threw a five-hitter, collected two hits and drove in a run Friday afternoon, leading Auburn Suburban Little League to a 3-1 Eastern Regional win, thus eliminating the New York entry.

The material used in Looking Back is reproduced exactly as it originally appeared, although misspellings and errors may be corrected.