Strange Times 175: Legless, He Fights Police
Today brings a legless mendicant and an heiress on the lam. Skip town without warning on…
June 24, 1921
Displaying her “attractively regular” teeth in court, Mrs. Beverly Grayson Chew proves that she was not the woman spotted with her husband at the Hotel Washington, as that woman was said to have had “very irregular teeth.”
Vilhjalmer Stefannson, an absolute bastard, announces plans for a new expedition to explore the Arctic.
World champion cow Bella Pontiac sets a new record by producing 17,017 pounds of milk in a single year.
A nationwide gathering of spiritualists and mediums refuses to ask dead spirits for horse racing tips, stating that, “There is no horse racing or similar sports in the other world.”
The Weather; Fair and somewhat colder today; Saturday, partly cloudy, moderate to fresh northwest winds.
Quite a lot to unpack in this short story, but the part that most jumped out at me was the knowledge that the NYPD once had a “Mendicant Squad,” whose entire job was literally just making poor people’s lives harder.
William Steward, 23, a legless, homeless negro, accused of fighting two detectives and biting one of them severely, was held yesterday in $1,000 bail for the action of the Grand Jury by Magistrate Charles E. Simms in Jefferson Market Court.
Detectives Plagge and Halstead of the Mendicant Squad arrested Stewart in Forty-second Street for soliciting alms. The negro, they charge, grabbed Plagge about the legs, threw him to the ground and began to bite him. Halstead joined in the fight, while a large crowd gathered and openly sympathized with the negro.
Steward was taken in an auto to the Jefferson Market Court, where his loud cries of rage from the pen interfered with business in the courtroom. He told the Magistrate he was from New Orleans and had been traveling about the country looking for a lost brother. He lost his legs two years ago in a railroad accident in Alexandria, La.
An exceptional story of an heiress on the loose, featuring “Balkan intrigue and jealousy” and more long fancy names than you can shake an aviator at.
PARIS, June 23.—The secret police and a score of detective agencies are ransacking Paris seeking the whereabouts of Mrs. Frances Agnes Quinn Bellaris, wife of the British aviator and heiress to $50,000,000, who disappeared with her three weeks old baby from the maternity home next door to the American Hospital at Neuilly on Monday morning.
Austin Chamberlain Newton Bellaris, the English aviator, who has been speculating in the American army’s automobile stocks since the war and is husband of the missing heiress, is watching every boat departing from French ports to ascertain if his bride is fleeing from him to join her mother, Mrs. Florence Quinn, who sailed on the Olympic June 15 and was due to arrive at her New York apartments, 36 West Fifty-ninth Street, yesterday.
Bellaris fears his mother-in-law has estranged his wife because Mrs. Bellaris’s father, named Woodfin, a millionaire plantation owner living in Iago, Wharton County, Texas, has left a will bequeathing his entire fortune to his granddaughter, and Bellaris alleges the bride’s mother, Mrs. Quinn, seeks to break the will, as it cuts her off.
Balkan intrigue and jealousy may be responsible for his wife’s disappearance, Bellaris says, as a year ago, before Bellaris’s marriage to Frances Quinn, a Rumanian Prince fired revolver shots at Bellaris because of jealousy.
Mrs. Bellaris, who had been at the Maternity Home, 37 Boulevard du Chateau, Neuilly, next door to the American Hospital, since the birth of her daughter, Florence Sonia, three weeks ago, received a telephone call Monday morning at 10 o’clock, a nurse says. The person telephoning said the husband, Bellaris, wished to meet his wife and daughter immediately. Mrs. Bellaris answered the telephone and replied yes, called a taxicab, snatched up her baby and left the hospital. Nothing has been heard of her since.
“The whole thing is a mystery,” said Bellaris. “Firstly, is Mrs. Quinn my wife’s mother? Mrs. Quinn’s passport says she is 35. My wife is 21. Mrs. Quinn, married in Houston, Texas at the age of 18. I believe John S. Kirby, a Houston lumber dealer, is my wife’s father. My wife never saw her father, but thinks he is Kirby.”
Frances Quinn Bellaris’s passports, still in possession of her husband, show she was born at Brevard, N.C.
The couple were married fifty-five miles off the French coast at sea on June 15 of last year, after an airplane trip from Paris to England to obtain a marriage license, as Mrs. Quinn objected to her daughter’s wedding.
Mrs. Quinn is well known in Paris society. She is a close friend of the Princess Rospigliosi and lived at the Hotel Continental during her last stay in Paris, which lasted two months.
Friends of the Bellaris couple assert that they seemed happy and contented and apparently were still much in love. Bellaris stated that he remained at the Maternity Home until 11 o’clock Sunday night before his wife’s disappearance, and that she seemed happy and nothing appeared to be impending.
Mrs. Florence Quinn said last night at her home 36, West Fifty-ninth Street, that she had no knowledge of the disappearance of her daughter, Mrs. Bellaris, from a maternity home in Paris, but did not indicate any particular surprise.
“Why shouldn’t she come to her mother, if she wants to?” she asked when informed that Mr. Bellaris had expressed the belief that his wife was returning to her. “My baby can come to her mother at any time.”
Mrs. Quinn refused to discuss the report that her daughter was the heiress to $50,000,000 or to give any information concerning her father. She intimated that she considered such questions none of the inquirer’s business.
