The family's Hawethorne farm included plans for stables for thoroughbred horses as young Townsend was reported to be quite fond of riding.
He once participated in a town popularity contest sponsored by Baird's pharmacy. They posted the weekly tallies for 25 names and 12-year old Townsend came in solidly in the middle of the pack, somewhere behind the town doctor.
He was thirteen when he participated in a recital by four pianists, each performing their own compositions.
After his first flight in a Curtis Hydroplane, at the age of 14, he reported that it was "Bully fine!"
He was part and parcel, and perhaps originator of a very large and active local wireless club, originally thrilled to be able to pick up signals from as far away as Pittsburgh, PA,
By the age of twenty, the papers were casting him as a local expert in all things electric. Not only was his "Gravitus Proclamus" front page material, he was headlined for his expertise in estimating the cost of the crash of the USN's blimp, the Saratoga, carrying all the helium that was presently available in the US.
When he only 22, he, somehow, had the clout to arrange with AT&T and J.P. Morgan, for the Zanesville News staff to have a local listen in on a Transatlantic conversation between Morgan and a Mr. Smith in England. This event led the reporter to marvel that one day communication "between Hades and Mars" might even become possible. The listening post on Townsend's end was a large Military antenna, built in 1917 and procured and set up on the grounds of the Hawthorne farm.