Strange Times 203: A Horror of Amusements

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Strange Times is a twice-monthly look at the weirdest news 1921 has to offer. Today we have a dying skeptic and a dying nation. Appropriate wheat until the peasantry starves on… 

July 22, 1921

• The Duke of York—the future King George VI—invites 200 wealthy boys and 200 work house boys to play together for the weekend, in hopes of fostering understanding between the classes.

• American Red Cross captain Emmett Kilpatrick, imprisoned in a Soviet dungeon, is threatened with torture and death for striking one of his guards.

• Lady Astor and Lloyd George criticize America in the House of Commons, saying that a country that refuses to spend money on alcohol should be able to afford to house its poor.

• The Weather: Fair today and tomorrow; no change in temperature.

Today this man would have an alarmingly popular podcast.

HAMPTON, N.J., July 21.—Samuel Case, 82 years old and totally deaf, while picking berries along the tracks of the New Jersey Central Railroad today was struck by a train and killed. Case was regarded as eccentric, and there is an unverified report that his wealth amounted to $500,000. He leaves a wife, 80 years old, and a son, 65.

Mrs. Case said tonight that although her husband inherited considerable money fifty years ago, he had bought worthless properties and became miserly. He spent a large part of his time picking coal on the railroad tracks, from which he had been repeatedly warned, as he was totally deaf.

His son, Walter Case Glen Gardner, N.J., said that his father had a horror of amusements, cut his own hair and deplored the fact that he could not make his own boots. He compelled his wife to make her own clothes. According to the son, he frequently berated Thomas A. Edison and “useless” electric lights, declared the telegraph was a “swindle,” did not believe in the existence of submarines and held every one crazy who believed anything in the newspapers.

The Soviet famine is one of those ongoing stories, like the troubles in Ulster and the West Virginia coal wars that I don't often mention in the newsletter because covering them would preclude me from covering anything else. But this story is a tidy encapsulation of the starvation that resulted from Civil War, drought and the disastrous policy of grain confiscation, plus it has the word "poods."

PARIS, July 21.—Strange stories reach Paris of an approaching convulsion in Russia, a full half of whose population has returned to the mental and physical level of the Middle Ages. As always before a great catastrophe, the minds of the ignorant and superstitious peasants are filled with mysterious reports that have swept across the country like a prairie fire.

Thus it appears that in the vast famine area from Samara to Perm great numbers of the inhabitants are emigrating westward, drawn by the belief that American bread is to be distributed to famine sufferers in Moscow, while a similar pilgrimage to the east has been undertaken by others, urged by the yet more fantastic story that a new Czar has arisen in the East who is to save Russia from her miseries.

There seems scant hope for either class of wanderers. It is stated here that no less than 3,000,000 tons of wheat are required to save Russia from famine. As a result of the commandeering of wheat by the Bolsheviki from the peasants, the latter refused to sow more than was necessary for their own families. The drought has reduced this meagre quota to nothing. Last year the harvest in the richest regions, that formerly yielded from 90 to 100 poods (a pood is about 36 pounds) per acre fell to an average of from 3 to 7 poods. This year even that is lacking, and there are no reserves.

Even should it be possible to import stocks of wheat into Russia it is difficult to see how the distribution could be carried on outside the urban centres. Animal transport is non existent because the beasts have been killed for food instead of being allowed to die of hunger. The railroads have broken down almost entirely. Between Kiev and Odessa, formerly the most active commercial centres of all Russia, the sole communication is two trains weekly. Road traffic, held up by armed bandits, “green” raiders and other rebels against Soviet authority, is a thing of the past.

Russians in Paris emphasize the importance of restraining Russia’s neighbors—the Poles, for instance, or anti-Bolshevist leaders like Wrangel or Savinkov—from trying to take advantage of the Bolsheviki’s weakness to renew armed action against them. This, they declare, would once more rally the mass of the people to the support of the Bolsheviki against foreign or reactionary invaders. The chief hope of the exiles here appears to be in the Church. They expect that in the event of the breakdown of the Soviet regime the reins of power will be taken by Tikhon, the Patriarch of Moscow. Order, they say, will be maintained as far as possible by the Orthodox Church, the only organized force in the midst of the universal anarchy that will follow the fall of the Bolsheviki until a new Constituent Assembly can be elected by popular vote, to decide the future form of government.

Strange Times 202: "Mother, Get the Revolver"

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Today we have three stories of women taking the law into their own hands. Shoot a cat 27,000 times on…

July 21, 1921

• Drunk on what he calls “good whisky,” Samuel B. Hatchel, “a muscularly built young man” is arrested after punching several people in Times Square.

• North Carolina woman Mellissa J. Woodington sues a local grocer for $10,000, claiming damages because he sold her husband “flavoring extracts” whose high alcohol content caused him to beat her.

• Bill Burns, star witness for the prosecution of the baseball players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, tells the courtroom about how the players “double-crossed” their underworld backers by winning Game 3 after their backers refused to pay them for their nefarious work.

• Sergeant Alvin York, made famous during World War I for single-handedly capturing 128 German soldiers, struggles to keep his Tennessee farm afloat after refusing every offer to capitalize on his fame.

• A French priest is arrested while stealing toys for the poor children of his village church.

• The Weather: Fair today and Friday; moderate temperature; moderate and northwest winds.

Vamped! The Times loves a story of an unarmed woman thwarting a burglar and this one is of particular quality. Come for the feminine moxie and stay for the shocking turn that it takes in the third to last graf!

In fiction the heroine picks up a buttonhook and cows the burglar, who labors under a conviction that revolver is aimed at him. Early yesterday morning Miss Marguerite McDonald, a singer, saw a burglar ransacking her apartment and held him in conversation for twenty minutes until the police came. But she did not use even a buttonhook. The intruder was a Finn, 18 years old, who apparently was too frightened to try to escape, although he stood almost beside the window by which he had entered.

The dialogue between the singer and the intruder ran true to fiction. The young man told what the police called the “out-of-work, hungry-and-won’t-you-give-me-another-chance” story. Neither the singer nor her mother, who occupy an apartment on the first floor of 316 West Eight-eighth Street, just off West End Avenue, was dissuaded from calling the police, so the story of Miss McDonald’s adventure was told in the West Side Court. The prisoner, accused of burglary, said that he was John Bjorkman and that he had been sleeping along the waterfront.

“I was half awake, when, about 4 o’clock, the sound of a drawer in the front room being stealthily opened awoke me,” Miss McDonald said. “I could descry the figure of a man stooped in front of the bureau.

“What are you doing there?’ I called. The man raised his head.

“Mother, get the revolver,’ I called to my mother, who was in the next room. We have no revolver and never had any, but I heard mother get up and I knew she would call out the window to the woman who owns the house to get the police. That was just what she did.”

The young woman said she was not frightened. She slipped into a kimono. Her surprise was great when, instead of bolting through the window, the intruder put his hands above his head and waited for her.

Miss McDonald summed up all her feelings thus, after it was all over: “He did not shoot and he did not run away, so one of us had to take a chance. Anyway, I was as big as he was.”

“Have you a revolver?” she shot at the man.

“No, lady,” and the voice that answered had a tremor in it. “I haven’t taken anything.”

Miss McDonald “frisked” her prisoner, but none of the jewelry, valued at $1,000, the drawer contained had found its way into his pockets. When Mrs. Marguerite McDonald, her mother, came into the room she suggested that perhaps Bjorkman had taken some of their private papers.

“I haven’t got a thing,” repeated the young man, and took off his coat and handed it to the older woman to search. He pleaded that the police be not called. Miss McDonald took a seat and so did her mother.

“How long have you been doing this sort of thing?” she asked.

“I never did this before,” replied the prisoner. “I was desperate. You see I was out of work and hungry. I have been sleeping on the waterfront.”

What would have been a quiet arrest was made a neighborhood sensation when a policeman smashed the unresisting prisoner twice in the face and, as Miss McDonald said, knocked him out. After that windows went up along the block.

The only explanation the prisoner gave for failing to take advantage of the open window way to escape was: “I must have been vamped by the girl.”

Magistrate Raphael Tobias held Bjorkman in $5,000 bail for trial. The prisoner had pleaded guilty to a charge of burglary.

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I’d like to hear from the children on this one, but their testimony is unrecorded. I’ve said before that this entire newsletter could be understood as an argument for no fault divorce and this is another one to throw on that pile.

SYRACUSE, N.Y., July 20.—Charges that his wife, Minerva M. Langley, and three of their five children had plotted to kill him by hanging are made in an answer to his wife’s suit for separation, filed here today by Frank S. Langley, former deacon and member of the board of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in this city.

Langley charges that the “props were set and the noose prepared” in the effort to make away with him, and that the attempt was the culmination of a quarter century of turbulent, tempestuous matrimonial existence.”

During that time, he admits, he has been taken before the courts eight times to answer to charges of alleged failure to provide properly for his family.

The former deacon and church official charged that the plot to hang him was perfected and almost carried out Feb. 5 of this year. He declared that his wife and three children had ropes, clubs and knives ready; that a noose was about to be slipped about his neck, when, with the aid of neighbors, he broke loose from the alleged conspirators and ran across lots to the home of his brother.

He further asserted that his wife and children “Set upon him and attempted to overpower him,” so that the wife could slip the noose around his neck.

He said that during their married life she threw all sorts of missiles at him, scratched and choked him, fed him dry bread for breakfast, throttled him when he broke the seals of his pay envelope and otherwise treated him with extreme cruelty.

In her suit for separation Mrs. Langley charges that he left her destitute for eight years, his actions caused her to call for his arrest eight times, he beat her severely, held a butcher knife over her head, threatened her, hurled her down a flight of stairs, and choked her son and struck her when she interceded.

The denouement of the case will come at the special Fall Term of the Supreme Court.

In which West Orange decides it was probably a bad idea to let its residents stalk through the streets firing guns at cats.

WEST ORANGE, N.J., July 20.—The proposed West Orange cat ordinance, providing for the killing of stray cats, died a painless death at the meeting of the Town Council last night. A number of women appeared before the council and objected so strenuously that the ordinance was defeated.

The ordinance, which was drawn up by School Trustee Stanley Babson, would have given permission to any one to kill any cat at sight, when it was off its own premises. Among the leaders of the protesting women were the Misses Mary and Gertrude Knevels, sisters, of Wheeler Street. The latter declared that the proposed ordinance would be contrary to the fish and game laws, under which no one may fire a gun without a license.

Another objection pointed out by Miss Knevels was that not all men can shoot straight, and “bullets would be as thick as flies” in West Orange. Moreover, she said, the cats would be only wounded, and would crawl off to suffer and die, and then the town would have the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals after it.

Two men also joined the objectors. John Gianni said that he lived near the town dump, and his house would be infested with rats if the cats were killed. Michael Blessington said that it would take nine hits to kill each cat, as each cat had nine lives. Military experts have found that there are 3,000 misses for every hit, he said, so that 27,000 shots would be necessary to kill each cat. Thus West Orange would be turned into a “lead mine.” The ordinance had no defenders.

Strange Times 201: Policemen Weep

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Today’s issue is all about cops, baby—cops who are crying and cops who are hurt. Cops who are American and cops who are French. Cops who are running in terror and cops who just want to know if the stove thief is insane! Watch where you sit on…

July 20, 1921

• As the Russian famine intensifies, millions are reported to be fleeing their farms and traveling west in search of food and an escape from what they perceive to be “divine wrath.”

• The attack on the Spanish sloop Antonia Torres is said to be the work of “Moorish pirates” operating off the Moroccan coast.

• After a devastating riot at Pittsburgh’s Western Penitentiary, the men and women who led the uprising are held in straitjackets while the rest of the prisoners are confined to their cells.

• Visiting the deposed Kaiser, a German opera singer declares him cheerful but subdued, saying the former ruler greeted him with, “It’s very friendly of you to visit a lonely man.”

• The Weather: Fair today and Thursday; mild temperature; fresh northwest winds.

To organize this tearful event, the police superintendent had to first sort the Philadelphia police from least husky to huskiest. From there it was a simple matter of blasting them with perfectly harmless tear gas.

PHILADELPHIA, July 19.—The effectiveness of tear gas as a mob dispeller received the emphatic endorsement of 200 stalwart Philadelphia policemen today after the gas had thrice sent them into hasty and wet-eyed retreat during an official test here.

Police Supt. Mills took a battalion of his huskiest men into a roped-off enclosure, with instructions to capture six men who were armed with 150 tear gas bombs. Three times they charged, but each time were driven back, weeping violently as they came within range of the charged vapor. Major Stephen Delanoy of the Chemical Warfare Division, United States Army, inventor of the gas, assured the men before they entered the mimic battle that the substance was “absolutely not dangerous.” “It is merely a tear-producing, choking, nauseating gas,” he said. “But be careful you don’t swallow too much.”

Police officials said the test had undoubtedly proved the value of tear gas in police work. Not only is it immensely effective in dispersing a mob, but it might be used to drive a fugitive from a barricaded building, they said. A container of the substance, placed in a bank vault in such a position that it would be released if the door were opened outside of banking hours, would also thwart burglaries, the authorities said. The gas leaves reddish-brown stains on clothing, which would aid in identifying those taking part in riots or crimes.

Victims who inhale the fumes become helpless for a short time, but are not endangered. Officials asserted it was likely the gas would replace means hitherto used to subdue mobs and criminals.

During the second attack a small dog joined the policemen with enthusiasm. As soon as he got a good swallow of the gas, however, he turned with his tongue hanging out and fled to a near-by pond and immersed himself.

The only mishap occurred when a rotund policeman spectator unintentionally sat down on a loaded grenade that had slipped into the side lines. His weight exploded the missile and the result sent him flying after the dog for a drink of water.

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I just think it’s nice that the stove thief and his wife found something they could do together.

PARIS, July 19.—The man who owns a chateau in 200 acres of ground has a successful wine business and 1,000,000 francs for a fortune and who goes out at night as a burglar is such an unusual phenomenon that the Magistrate at Orleans who is trying Ernest Boitier has had to call in doctors to see if they have any theory. One of the most baffling sides to the question is just why Boitier chose to steal always and only copper stoves. In a shop which he robbed on July 13 were many other more valuable things and things much more easily removed. But the millionaire wine merchant seems to have had a passion for stoves.

And now the curious fact has been established that his wife was at least cognizant of his midnight activities if not an active participant. Owing to the state of her health she has not been arrested, but will appear in court with her husband. The whole collection of the couple’s stolen goods which the police found in the cellars of the chateau has been valued at only about 1,000 francs. So the theory that the burglaries were carried out for the purpose of gain has been definitely set aside. Now it remains to be settled whether Boitier is suffering from kleptomania or is even more seriously deranged.

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Strange Times 200: Rich Man’s Weakness

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Today we have silent spouses and a wealthy man who just loves stoves, okay? Ignore your loved ones on…

July 19, 1921

• After sending a pair of shoes to the cobbler, a woman remembers she was using them as a hiding spot for $5,000 worth of jewels. When she recovers the shoes, the jewels are gone.

• The National Commission for Famine Prevention reports that the Chinese are still starving.

• After a spate of burglaries in Riverdale, a wealthy Bronx neighborhood, police establish a firm curfew, checking the papers of everyone who passes through after 10 at night.

• A man rendered mute by thunder, believed to be a veteran recovering from shellshocked, lies insensible in the hospital as officials try to learn his identity.

• At Pittsburgh’s Western Penitentiary, 1,000 prisoners riot, burning 12 buildings and brawling with guards.

• The Weather: Partly cloudy today; Wednesday, showers; no change in temperature; fresh south and west winds.

When they say "live apart from," I suppose they mean emotionally, since as the headline makes clear, they're literally living together. A clip of the original confrontation is available here.

One of the most unusual agreements between husband and wife was signed yesterday by Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Baumann of 422 Seventeeth Street, West New York. By it Mr. Baumann agrees to live apart from his wife in the same apartment and never speak to her unless it is absolutely necessary.

Mr. Baumann, who is a braid worker, is 75 years old, while his wife is 45. Nine years ago they agreed to disagree and drew up an agreement to live apart for nine years. This agreement expired yesterday and was renewed by both parties.

“Under the agreement,” Mr. Baumann admitted last night, “I disavow all control over my children. They are accountable only to my wife.

“My wife is relieved of all responsibilities toward me and I toward her. Under the agreement she must support herself and the children and I take care of myself. Three of my boys who are working live with her and contribute to her support.

“Nine years ago we found that we could not get along together, owing to the great difference in our ages. We did not think alike on any subject, so we agreed to disagree.

“I rarely ever see my wife. She comes and goes as she pleases. We have got along very well that way for the last nine years, which is why we are going to continue living in the same manner.”

Mr. Baumann has been twicde married, his first wife dying in 1890. He is the father of seven boys and five girls, several of them the offpsring of his second marriage. Four daughters and two sons are now married.

PARIS, July 18.—A Jekyll and Hyde mystery of the kind that would have delighted Robert Louis Stevenson has just been discovered by the police of Orleans. Today they arrested on a charge of burglary Ernest Boitier, owner of one of the finest residences in the district and controller of a big wholesale wine business. The burglary in which he is alleged to have been concerned took place last week and was in itself of a somewhat peculiar character. The burglar, or burglars, climbed in through a window of an iron-monger’s shop and removed by means that have not yet been discovered a large copper stove. How they got it out, whether through the window or through the door, the police cannot discover, but by accident they have succeeded in tracking the stove to the cellars of Mr. Boitier.

Not only have they found this one, but when they searched the house they found in the cellars nearly a score more stoves of similar pattern to that which had been stolen from the ironmonger. How they came there and from where they came remains a mystery, as Boitier absolutely refuses to tell. All that he would confess to the police was that he robbed the ironmonger’s store and dislodged the stove.

“It was in a moment of weakness,” he declared, and the police are left to puzzle out how a successful business man and owner of one of the finest properties in the district came to have such curious weakness for copper stove.

The arrest has caused consternation in Orleans where Boitier is well known and respected as a merchant and owner of the Château Desporbeauz.

According to the police the copper stoves in the cellars of the château have been stolen from houses and shops at different times in the last ten years. Complaints were made to them, but as no one suspected the merchant they could never be traced. But whether Boitier was a burglar for the sake of adventure or because he had a mania for the collecting of copper stoves is yet to be discovered.

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Strange Times 199: Stripped, Tarred and Feathered

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Today we have twin stories of horror in Louisiana. Fear mob justice on…

July 18, 1921

• When a trolley fails to stop for him, Bostonian James Stone smashes the car door, breaking the glass and bloodying his arm.

• Marian McGovers, a 19-year-old telephone operator, is found in the Bronx crying hysterically. She remains hysterical for several days and is finally taken home.

• During a backyard card game in Brooklyn, accusations of cheating result in a stabbing. One player is sent to the hospital while the others flee. The police find five stilettos in the yard.

• The Weather: Fair and warmer today and Tuesday; moderate southwest winds.

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White uniforms, you say? Jeez—I wonder what they looked like. This is a strange story because it reads so much like the Klan attacking a Black woman, but Mrs. Johnson’s race is never specified—which in the 1921 Times means they probably considered her white. History’s most famous Beulah is probably the fictional maid, who was played by white men on the radio and Black women on TV. The best known Beulah of the 1920s, however, was white—Beulah Annan, whose murder trial inspired the play “Chicago.” But that’s all in the future as far as 1921 is concerned. Why this Beulah was attacked is not even speculated on. Let your imagination run wild.

SHREVEPORT, La., July 17.—Mrs. Beulah Johnson was taken from the porch of a hotel at Tenaha, Texas, stripped, tarred and feathered, according to advices reaching here today.

The attack on Mrs. Johnson, which occurred last night, was said to have been made by masked men wearing white uniforms. They are said to have driven up to the hotel in three automobiles and filed out, displaying firearms, and to have taken the young woman into one of the cars.

The automobiles proceeded to a point several miles into the country, where Mrs. Johnson’s clothing was removed and a coat of tar and feathers was administered. She was then placed in the automobile and returned to the town.

Mrs. Johnson, who claims to have been working at the hotel as a maid and cook, says she did not know any of the men in the party.

Beating of a man named McKnight of Nacodoches, Texas, by masked men at Timpson, a nearby town, is reported here as another Saturday night development in border towns.

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In this story, on the other hand, the racism is unambiguous. There were many ways for Black people to die during Jim Crow, including, “Because a white boy said a woman you know beat and choked him for swimming in the nude.”

MONROE, La., July 17.—Four negroes were killed and one white man was injured in a battle at Rayville, near Monroe, last night when a Sheriff’s posse, seeking to arrest two negro women, met resistance from armed negro men.

Trouble started at a plantation in the vicinity of Rayville Friday, when a number of small boys using a swimming hole got into an altercation with the negresses, who complained at the youngsters’ lack of clothing, and were alleged to have beaten and choked several of them. Parents obtained warrants for the arrest of the women. Deputy Sheriffs sent to serve them were forced to return and secure aid.

The blacks were alleged to have intrenched themselves, and to have stood off the attacking party with rifle fire for some time. Monroe Ferguson, a member of the posse, was hit in the thigh but the posse marksmen killed Cleo Collins, Charles Kelly, Scott Sheffield and William Gibbs.