Strange Times 115: Pit-Dwelling Newcomers
Strange Times 115: Pit-Dwelling Newcomers
Strange Times is a newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. If you like it, you will probably like Westside Saints, my latest Jazz Age mystery novel, as well.
Today brings naked Berliners and slumming salesgirls. Live like common people…
April 25, 1921
Wealthy Detroit sportsman Garfield A. Wood sets out from Miami on his motor yacht, attempting to beat the Havana Special’s 41-hour pace on its 1,240-mile trip to New York City.
After a Cornell freshman is “ducked” in the water at Beebe Lake for refusing to wear first year’s customary “little cap,” medieval history professor George Lincoln Burr threatens to resign in protest.
An insurance investigator reveals a New Jersey insurance scam that involves using cats trained to start fires to burn buildings down.
Despite Georgia law enforcement’s insistence that the peonage murders on the John S. Williams plantation were an isolated case, the bodies of three more murdered Black workers have been unearthed on a nearby farm.
The Weather: Fair and warmer today; increasing cloudiness tomorrow; south winds.
Nudists!
BERLIN, April 24.—A few days ago residents of the village of Spreehagen, on the borders of Berlin, were excited at the sight of a group of men and women digging what looked at first glance to be trenches. The rumor spread that the advance guard of the Red Army was intrenching itself.
Inquiry disclosed the fact that some apparently peaceable though decidedly eccentric people were setting a small communistic republic of their own. Thirty in number, under the chieftainship of a Berlin doctor, they are living in houses dug in the ground and covered with fir branches.
The doctor told curious visitors that his title was “Guardian of the Crowns of Zarathustra.” He and his companions, some of them young girls, wish to live as children of nature and to establish a new sect. Their neighbors, however, are inclined to regard these children of nature as rather too natural, complaining that they go about half-clothed and use the adjoining lake for mixed bathing.
In answer to complaints the doctor produced a genuine document from the city authorities of Berlin authorizing him to colonize the waste land where the members of the group are staying. The enterprise, however, is likely to be suppressed, for it is understood that the city fathers thought the doctor intended building houses instead of establishing a sort of Garden of Eden.
Cue Pulp. (As an aside, I truly love the way that Jarvis Cocker dances like a drunk person doing Jarvis Cocker at karaoke.)
WELLESLEY, Mass., April 24.—Four Wellesley students, Miss Katherine Dorence of East Orange, NJ; Miss Lear Lyons of Yonkers, NY; Miss Cornelia Evans, of Franklin, Ohio, and Miss Janet Smith of Evanston, Ill., had certain theories about girls who worked for a living in big department stores. To test them out they “disappeared” from college about the time their Easter vacation began and got positions [as salesgirls].
The experience over, they report that they were not only able to live on what they earned, but were able to save a dollar a week. They concede, however, that they bought no clothes during the test period.
At the start they found some difficulty in finding work in the Boston department stores, but finally succeeded, receiving $2.50 a day each. They paid 75 cents a day for their meals, although they explained they “really could have lived on 50 cents.” All agreed that they would have tired quickly of the fare obtained at the latter figure. The girls found a room in the south end of the city for which they paid $3 a week.
They admitted that they had to count their pennies and said it would have been a dull, drab life had they been compelled to follow it indefinitely. The girls also said they “learned a lot of things about women” from dealing with the customers, and agreed that while vanity was a dominant trait with many, most women knew how to make a dollar go the limit in buying.
