Strange Times 195: The Squirrels Were Routed
The first season of I’ll Watch Anything went out with a seasonal bang last week, when Henry and I subjected ourselves to the nightmarishly mediocre 2000 thriller (??) Reindeer Games. We’ll be back in a couple of months with something far more interesting—listen to the episode to find out what!
All right folks—this is an important one! In a couple of weeks I’m launching what I hope to be my biggest Kickstarter campaign of all time, for a scifi roleplaying game called Letters to the Stars. I’ll share more on here as the campaign draws closer, but for now I’d like to humbly ask that if you have even the remotest interest in tabletop gaming, you ask Kickstarter to notify you when the campaign launches. The more people who follow the project, the harder Kickstarter will promote it when it goes live, so you’d be doing me a huge favor. Thank you!
Today we have four absolutely ludicrous stories of poets and postmasters, oil and cotton, robins and squirrels and Adams and Eves. Steal another varmint’s nuts on…
July 14, 1921
Nashville’s Southern Methodist Sabbath Saving Crusade demands Congress pass a law banning all interstate and federal business, trains, amusements, and newspapering on Sundays.
In Troy, Alabama, a Civil War monument is removed and destroyed after it becomes known that its text honors John Wilkes Booth for assassinating President Lincoln.
17-year-old Bronx laundry worker Anna Hughes is given a cash reward after finding $10,000 worth of gems in a batch of soiled linen.
The Zionist Organization of America honors President Harding for his support of their cause, thanking him for a letter he wrote to Chaim Weizmann in which he said, “It is impossible for one who has studied at all the services of the Hebrew people to avoid the faith that they will one day be restored to their historic national home.”
After fainting twice in a day and screaming loud enough to startle the women in the courtroom, Mrs. Eva Kaber, charged with murdering her husband, may see her trial suspended until her mental condition improves.
The Weather: Partly cloudy today; Friday, showers; not much change in temperature; southerly winds.
A simply phenomenal story—a classic “They printed WHAT in the New York Times?” And I love that all the trouble started because the maniac residents of Eleventh Avenue, Mount Vernon, expected the animals to understand that the nuts were for the squirrels and the bread for the birds. On a related note, do any of you fine people find squirrels repellent and even frightening? I think they’re neat but I have friends who loathe them.
The squirrels and robins in Eleventh Avenue, Mount Vernon, have declared war on each other and the daily battles are becoming fiercer. Eleventh Avenue residents have been throwing peanuts on their lawns for the squirrels and bread crusts for the birds. A week ago a few robins, after eating the bread, helped themselves to the peanuts, and the squirrels ran away. The same thing happened the next day and the next. On Monday a few squirrels attacked the robins and there was a short but furious fight, in which the squirrels saved their supplies.
On Tuesday about twenty robins swooped down and the squirrels were routed. Yesterday the squirrels returned reinforced by an equal number and there was a battle royal for a quarter of an hour. It was a drawn battle, both sides leaving most of their peanuts and crusts on the field.
Well here’s a creepy story. I appreciate the first paragraph’s implication that the finest things a person could hope to see are, in this order: women, trains, streetcars, newspapers and pulp rags. I’m sorry that the reporter failed to ask what Mr. Gillis thought of any of it. Even if the women of Omaha aren’t doing it for you, man, you might as well treat yourself to a raid on a train.
Moody and Sankey, the fellas who inspired Mr. Gillis to go west, were a pair of evangelists who got popular in the 1870s. Sankey, a pioneer of gospel music, would start a hymn, then Moody would preach a little hellfire, then Sankey would wrap it up. You can hear him singing here. It’s, um…not to my taste.
OMAHA, July 13.—Tracy Gillis, 33 years old, has just let his eyes first fall on a woman. He has also had his first remembered view of a railroad train, a street car, a daily paper and fiction magazine. Upon seeing a woman for the first time, Gillis visited a barber shop and had his long hair cut and his face shaved.
Gillis was born in Chicago. His mother was an actress and his father a disciple of Moody and Sankey. But for a third of a century, father and son have lived alone on a Western Nebraska ranch, forty miles from a railroad, with no stranger stepping within its fence posts.
George Gillis, the father, died recently, two years short of four score and ten. Tracy, the son, buried the body on the ranch and went on with his farm work. Today he came to Omaha on his pioneer journey with a load of cattle.
According to his story the elder Gillis trafficked with his neighboring farmers only on their property and never on his own for fear his son’s ears should pick up hints of worldly civilization. The father fled to the WEst with his son to save him from the dancing, singing actresses in Chicago’s old Haymarket Theatre.
A few weeks earlier the boy’s mother, whose name was Maggie Isles, had deserted her husband and gone with another man to the Twin Cities. Gillis himself at about the same time had proclaimed himself a convert in a Moody and Sankey prayer meeting.
“A devil lurks on every street corner, father taught me,” Tracy Gillis said today. “He told me the sad story of my mother and warned me to avoid all sinful men.”
This extremely strange and horrible story cuts off in mid sentence. Who said alleged domestic trouble in the Billings family DID WHAT?! We shall never know.
ENID, Okla., July.—Crude oil and cotton were substituted for the customary tar and feathers by masked men who last night removed Walter Billings, a wealthy theatre owner and real estate dealer, from his automobile to the country and whipped him. After the oil and cotton were applied, Billings, clad only in trousers, was freed. He complained to the police, who said alleged domestic trouble in the Billings family
After a pair of disturbing missives from the Midwest, Dr. C. J. Gose swoops in to redeem the middle of the country. Take it away, Gose!
WASHINGTON, July 13.—Whether or not Postmaster General Hays is an admirer of verse is a question, but evidently Dr. C. J. Gose, Postmaster at Kinderhook, Pike County, Ill., thinks he is. Dr. Gose, who calls himself a “First-Class Fourth-Class Postmaster,” believes that the old-fashioned couplet is the most effective vehicle to use when asking the Postmaster General for reappointment. Dr. Gose sent the following poem to Mr. Hays:
A FOURTH-CLASS POSTMASTER.
I do wish that Mr. Hays
Could see my sweet and charming ways,
And how polite and nice I am
When some guy comes to mail a ham.
How sweetly to those nuts I smile
When they are asking all the while
For stuff they’ve bought from Sears-Roebuck
To whom they sent one handsome buck.
They’re looking for a bale of tripe,
A kiddy-kar or meerschaum pipe;
And round the office they will stick
‘Till I get peeved and durn near sick.
But yet, I have to smile and say—
“Your package did not come today.”
And then they draw an ugly sigh
As if to say—“I think you lie”;
I spread them one elastic grin,
And say, “’Twill soon be comin’ in.”
If Mr. Hays would come and see
The way some folks are treating me,
I know, full well, that he would sob
And he would let me keep my job.
He’d say—“Dear Doc, if you’ll stay here
I’ll boost your pay two beans per year.”
