Maruned with the Gasser!

            

 Scary Books, Kiddies!

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria.  By Scott Maruna.  Swamp Gas Publishing Company, 2003.  Cover art by Michael Schwab.

            Yes, friends, my parents’ hometown was the site of an intrusion of the outré into WWII middle America. 

            The Mad Gasser incidents stirred up a fuss all over the country, but the actual so-called attacks happened in two brief months in the fall of 1944.

            Believe me, Mattoon, Illinois is not a big town.  It’s the anchor of a hundred square miles of farmland.  Nowadays it has a few hotels along the interstate, and some chain restaurants.  But in 1944 it was not that big.  It had a population just over 15,000 in the 1940 US census.  In 1944, Ralph Smith became Mattoon’s first black mailman.  Mattoon’s first radio station was WLBH (1170 AM), signing on in November 1946.  During the Mad Gasser days of August-September 1944, radio signals streamed in from Chicago, but otherwise the Mattoon Journal-Gazette was the prime local “official” source of information.

            Maruna does a good job of describing the incidents and their surrounding hysteria.  Something happened and made a few people turn dizzy.  Then public panic and hysteria popped up.  What?  Why?  Who?

            Well, Maruna has a theory, involving a town pharmacist and his son.  Is this likely what happened?  I don’t know.

            But my cousin Jane was nice enough to check out the subject in the Mattoon library.  Everything of that vintage was on microfiche and thus a little hard to access.  But she found the above retrospective set of articles from the February 28, 1986 Review & Herald of nearby Decatur.

            What do you think?  (By the way, if you want to sound like an authentic Mattooner, you refer to the local paper as the “Gaze-at-it.”)