If you read my last Lately post, you know that January 30 would have been my maternal grandmother’s 100th birthday. Born in Kempton, Germany, in 1925, Alwine Dietel Obergefell didn’t have an easy start to life. (My parents shared part of her story in their annual Thanksgiving card, which I’ve included at the end of this post.) Shortly after World War II, she met and married my grandfather, Helmut, and they and their two young sons immigrated to the United States where my mother was born in 1956. We had Oma with us for almost 99 years and I still think about her almost every day.
My Oma was a generous and joyful spirit who taught me so much about gratitude, resilience, and the value of a good routine. Reflecting on the centennial of her birth had me wondering what else was going on in 1925. Turns out it was a pretty significant year, take a look!
NATIONAL & WORLD EVENTS OF 1925
1. January 3—Benito Mussolini declares himself dictator of Italy.
2. January 5—Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming becomes the first female governor in the United States. (Twelve days later, Ma Ferguson of Texas becomes the country’s second female governor.)
3. March 4—Calvin Coolidge is sworn in for a second term as President of the United States in the first inauguration to be broadcast on radio.
4. March 18—The “Tri-State Tornado,” the worst tornado in U.S. history, passes through eastern Missouri, southern Illinois, and southern Indiana, killing 695 people and causing millions of dollars of property damage.
5. June 6—The Chrysler Corporation is founded as an automobile manufacturer by Walter Percy Chrysler.
6. July 21—The Scopes Monkey Trial concludes, and Tennessee high school teacher John T. Scopes is fined $100 after being found guilty of teaching evolution.
7. November 28—The Grand Ole Opre is first broadcast on WSM Radio in Nashville, Tennessee.
8. December 12—The first motel in the world, the Milestone Mo-Tel, opens in San Luis Obispo, California. (Sadly it closed in 1991.)
LITERARY MOMENTS OF 1925
9. February 21—The New Yorker publishes its inaugural issue.
10. April 10—F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby.
11. July 18—Hitler’s Mein Kampf is published.
12. Bernard Shaw is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shaw is one of only two people (along with Bob Dylan) to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (which he won for Pygmalion in 1938).
NOTEWORTHY BIRTHS OF 1925
13. January 25—Paul Newman, American actor, director, and entrepreneur, is born in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
14. January 30—Alwine Dietel, my grandmother, is born in Kempton, Germany.
15. May 12—Yogi Berra, professional baseball player, is born in St. Louis, Missouri.
16. October 13—Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, is born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England.
17. October 16—Angela Lansbury, British and American Actress, is born in London, England.
18. October 23—Johnny Carson, American comedian and television host, is born in Corning, Iowa.
19. November 20—Robert F. Kennedy, American politician, is born in Brookline, Massachusetts.
20. December 13—Dick Van Dyke, American actor, is born in West Plains, Missouri.
LIFE IN 1925
21. Life expectancy in the US is 57.6 years for men and 60.6 years for women.
22. The average household income (based on 1920 data) is $3,269.40—about $49,341.13 in today’s dollars.
23. The average cost of a new house is approximately $6,296—about $95,017.97 today.
24. Couples spend an average of $400 ($6,036 today) on a wedding (compared with the average of over $6,000 for a wedding today).
25. The Top Ten baby names in the US are Mary, Dorothy, Betty, Helen, Margaret, Robert, John, William, James, and Charles. (Strangely, not Alwine. . . .)
26. Most influential Songs include Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea For Two by Marion Harris.
27. Among the top movies of the year are Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Battleship Potemkin, The Big Parade, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Gold Rush.
28. With a population of 7.78 million, New York City surpasses London as the most populous city in the world.
For more fun insights into the 1920s, check out this roundup of 1920s slang and this look at fads, fashions, and crazes of the 1920s. One hundred years doesn’t seem like all that long in the grand expanse of history; it’s amazing how much has changed in such a short time!
I hope you enjoyed this trip into history as much as I did! And now, please enjoy this beautiful image and story that my parents shared in their holiday card last year.
This is cool. I appreciated your history, as well as fun facts about 1925. My paternal great grandmother emigrated from Germany in the late 1800s, her name was Anna Kappes, and I have her death certificate, but I have been unable to decipher or verify her place of birth, and at any rate often the descendants in America were uncertain about facts or spelling from the Old Country. On my mother’s side, my great great grandparents emigrated from Germany in the middle 1800s, they were Barnharts, and I do not know where they hailed from. My great grandparents were well established in Kansas City, MO, by the turn of the century, and my grandmother was born there in 1907. Apparently during the war, their German name didn’t inconvenience them, because they kept it. My great uncle was always called Uncle Barney because of his name.
Uncle Barney, I love it! Thanks so much for sharing some of your history.