The front page of the New Britain Herald for March 9, 1927, is dominated by two gripping stories: first, the Interstate Commerce Commission's landmark decision to reject the Reading Railroad's proposed lease of the Lehigh and New England railroad, a ruling that preserved competition in eastern rail networks and protected Pennsylvania's transportation access to New England. The commission decided that allowing Baltimore & Ohio to control this critical coal-transport gateway would "seriously restrict railroad competition" and leave New England's vital anthracite supply line under a single trunk system's control. Second, and equally riveting, is the heroic medical drama unfolding in Evanston, Illinois, where 33 volunteer workers from the Public Service company are keeping 22-year-old Alfred Frick alive through continuous manual artificial respiration—pressing his chest rhythmically for over 70 hours without break. Frick is paralyzed by Landry's paralysis, unable to breathe on his own, and doctors say he must survive another 21 hours to likely recover. The volunteers, working in rotating 15-minute shifts, are described as stenographers, bookkeepers, and salesmen sacrificing their bodies in a grueling scientific battle against death.

March 1927 captures America at a crossroads between competition and consolidation. The railroad ruling reflects the ongoing tension of the 1920s: whether big business mergers served progress or throttled opportunity. The ICC's decision echoed populist concerns that emerged from Progressivism—the fear that a few giant corporations could control essential services. Meanwhile, the Frick story embodies the era's faith in modern medicine and human determination. Just five years after the discovery of insulin and amid breathtaking advances in medical science, this case demonstrated how volunteer labor and emerging techniques could fight conditions once considered instantly fatal. Both stories reveal a 1920s America grappling with scale: How big should corporations grow? How far could human endurance push medicine forward?

• The commission explicitly suggested that New Haven Railroad acquiring the Lehigh and New England 'would probably be the best thing for eastern users of transportation'—yet noted 'there was no present likelihood of such a union.' This was a subtle rebuke wrapped in a policy recommendation.
• Frick was conscious throughout his ordeal and 'able to speak only a few words'—those words being encouragement and thanks to his coworkers. Even in extremis, this 22-year-old was thanking the men manually breathing for him.
• The Reading Railroad had agreed to pay $1,630,815 per year in rent and expenses for the Lehigh—which the ICC noted was MORE than the normal earnings of the entire Lehigh railroad, effectively making the deal unsustainable.
• In a darkly tragic counterpoint buried on the page: Herbert Edward Pentz, 57, a former Pennsylvania teacher blinded by overwork 20 years earlier, killed himself in Jersey City while his wife was at work scrubbing office buildings in New York to support them.
• The page reports that 'knickers have been banned as garb for girls in the Middletown school'—a small note reflecting the pitched cultural battles over women's fashion and propriety still raging in conservative 1920s America.

• The Lehigh and New England Railroad's direct line from Pennsylvania coal fields to New England was called 'the most important coal transportation inlet to New England.' Within two decades, this network would become largely obsolete as oil and natural gas replaced coal; the very railway the ICC fought to preserve would eventually become a relic.
• Alfred Frick's condition was diagnosed as 'Landry's paralysis,' a term rarely heard after the 1950s—it's now called Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition that would eventually be managed with modern plasma exchange therapies. In 1927, his survival depended entirely on human muscle and volunteer labor.
• The ICC's 1921 rail merger scheme mentioned in the article represented one of the last great consolidation pushes before the Depression; within months of this March 1927 ruling, the stock market would begin its collapse, and railroad mergers would become financially impossible for a generation.
• New Britain's request for $2,000,000 in water bonds (about $32 million today) reflects the rapid industrialization of Connecticut in the 1920s—the state was becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, and cities were racing to expand infrastructure faster than populations grew.
• The Pan-American Goodwill fliers mentioned arriving in Brazil represent a broader 1920s phenomenon: aviation as both sport and diplomacy. These long-distance flights were front-page news and symbolized American technological confidence on the eve of the Great Depression.