BACK TO BRADFORD: As the holidays are over and a good chunk of winter still looms ahead, we thought we’d find something fun to share with readers today.

We found a few old Era articles about a huge town-wide reunion held in the city’s Old Home Week from Aug. 9-15 in 1925.

The event was touted as Bradford’s centennial celebration, which confused us, as we wrote in December about a centennial celebration Bradford held in 1979 — 54 years later.

We found the answer on the Bradford Landmark’s Society website, which said the event planners figured the first settlers came to the Bradford area around 1825.

Perhaps event planners just wanted an excuse to party. Sounds like our kind of people. We think it’s about time for another centennial, personally.

And what a party it was. The week-long celebration included a sham battle, a mass meeting, a beauty pageant and not one — but four — parades, among other things.

The celebration was truly a city-wide reunion, as former Bradford residents from all over the country returned. Knowing the hotels would fill up, City Hall took a registry of local homeowners who were willing to rent rooms to visitors.

Guests were asked to register, too, so the city could keep a list of who came to visit. Each day of the celebration an article appeared in The Era naming guests who found their way to Bradford.

One article appearing on Thursday, Aug. 6, 1925, read, “Back to Bradford — this is the slogan that has been broadcasted throughout the county and it has brought results. Many visitors have arrived and many more are expected, as three days remain before it will become a seething mass of humanity, renewing old friendships.”

Another article that day announced, “Every motor car owner in the city of Bradford will have his machine in line for a mammoth automobile parade during Old Home Week, making up a procession of nearly 100 cars.

“Now don’t get excited, all you Bradford boosters who claimed there are more cars per capita in this city than in any other town of 17,000 in the entire world.

“The above statement was taken from press advance notices of Bradford’s Old Home Week celebration away back in 1909, when the life of a pedestrian was not one constant reign of terror, when horses trotted complacently in the center of the streets and when the police department was not required to employ any contentious traffic officer to see that the laws were not smashed to smithereens by speeders.”

Imagine if the writer could see Bradford today. More on the centennial tomorrow.