10/04/2026
In 1931, the strange adventure of Ida Barrett Wheaton became much more than a bit of local Walkerton gossip. Her nearly 900-mile taxi ride from South Nyack, New York, to Walkerton to meet a man she had corresponded with for some twenty years—and her almost immediate decision to turn around and go home—was picked up by EveryWeek Magazine, a syndicated newspaper supplement produced for papers around the country. Readers far from Indiana encountered the story as a full-blown romantic adventure, complete with photographs, elaborate illustrations, and the wonderfully dramatic headline, “Widow Wheaton’s Romantic Taxi Ride.” Walkerton became the distant destination in a national story about a widow, a long-distance courtship, an enormous taxi fare, a dog prone to fainting spells, a cat named Albert, and a prospective groom who proved considerably less appealing in person.
For readers in 1931, this would have been something closer to Sunday entertainment than breaking news. EveryWeek supplied participating newspapers with professionally prepared feature pages meant to be lingered over—the Depression-era equivalent of settling in with a wonderfully odd human-interest story that everyone would be talking about afterward. A reader might unfold the paper hundreds or even thousands of miles from Walkerton and suddenly find this tiny Indiana town occupying an entire lavishly illustrated page. And because the same feature was distributed through newspapers around the country, Mrs. Wheaton’s unsuccessful trip to Walkerton became, for a little while, a story shared by readers who had never heard of Walkerton before.
