Two strange headlines. One really made the papers.

Digging through old newspapers, I keep finding old headlines that sound made up. (Trained Monkey Reveals Murder, anyone?) So I decided to make a game out of it.

In Made the Papers, you pick the real headline, then see the original clipping and the story behind it. Five rounds per edition. The first two are ready now, with a new one unlocking each day.

Play Made The Papers

You’re my first beta players. If something breaks, you have a suggestion, or you want to tell me that you’re enjoying it, hit reply!

—Chris

I’m Chris, and this is Hidden Lens History. Every day I open newspapers from exactly one hundred years ago, find something worth sharing, and follow it as far is I can.

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I’m looking at a political cartoon from September 22nd, 1926. It’s President Calvin Coolidge standing near a vase labeled “3rd Term Precedent; Hands Off.” Behind Coolidge stands the Republican elephant, holding an enormous hammer labeled “Popularity.” And the elephant has some advice for the president: “Go ahead Cal, take a crack at it.”

Across the top of the cartoon is the question everyone was asking in 1926: “Will He Break the Third Term Precedent?”

Today, that question sounds silly. Somehow topical, but still silly. At least for most people. A president gets two terms. But I had forgotten, in 1926, that wasn’t actually the law.

The Constitution originally placed no limits on how many times someone could be elected president. That limit arrived in 1951 with the Twenty-Second Amendment. Before that, it was just a long-standing tradition dating back to George Washington, and his decision to leave office after two terms.

But Calvin Coolidge wasn’t about to just selfishly seek a third consecutive term. Instead, his case was genuinely confusing.

Coolidge didn’t enter the White House by winning a presidential election. He was Warren Harding’s vice president when Harding died in office and he inherited the final portion of Harding’s term.

So that was presidential term number one. To some. Then, he ran for president himself in 1924. Coolidge won that election convincingly.

That gave him a full four-year term running through March 1929. So… was that term two? To some. Almost immediately, people saw the problem coming. If Coolidge ran again in 1928, and won, would that be his second elected term? Or his third presidential term?

By the summer of 1926, two full years before the election, people were already talking about it. Some predicted that public opinion would “brush aside third-term objections,” and were certain nobody could defeat Coolidge if he chose to run.

Others said that wasn’t a good idea.

Henry Ford’s paper, the Dearborn Independent (which had its own issues), argued that Americans had a “deep-seated opposition to third terms” and reminded people what happened to the two men who had already toyed with it. One being a very close comparison.

Theodore Roosevelt had also famously become president because his predecessor William McKinley died after being assassinated. He then won his own term in 1904, then stepped aside in 1908. But four years later, he changed his mind, and ran again in 1912.

That campaign started the argument over what counted as a third term. Roosevelt said that the tradition only prohibited a third consecutive term. His opponents were less convinced.

At the time, one cartoon even showed Roosevelt trying to dodge something called the “Anti-Third Term Principle,” with the ghost of George Washington there to remind him of the tradition.

Roosevelt lost that election.

Everyone including Coolidge agreed that his situation was complicated. But it took him nearly a year to give everyone a real answer about what he was going to do. On August 2nd, 1927, exactly four years after Harding’s death, Coolidge called reporters to his office and handed them a little strip of paper containing one sentence:

“I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.”

Even that somehow failed to end the speculation. Did he refuse to run, or was he just saying he wouldn’t actively seek the nomination? And, would the Republican convention nominate him anyway?

The question lasted long enough that Coolidge had to make his position even more clear. And eventually, we did learn how he felt. In his 1929 autobiography, Coolidge wrote that he supported the country’s long-standing tradition against a third term. But he also said that he didn’t believe the rule technically applied to a vice president who inherited part of someone else’s term.

And his actual reasoning for not running was much simpler. Coolidge wrote that, “ten years would be a very heavy strain.” He worried about what another four years would demand of his family, and concluded that a president should avoid even the appearance of selfishly holding onto the office.

Which, that part, makes the cartoon from exactly one hundred years ago today, even more appropriate.

See you tomorrow - Chris

I’m Chris, and this is Hidden Lens History. Every day, I open the newspaper from exactly one hundred years ago, find something worth sharing, and follow the story as far as I can.

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It’s September 21st, 1926, and on page 19 of the Evening Star I found this headline:

“BABIES ON EXHIBIT APPEAL TO PUBLIC.”

The Florence Crittenton Home was holding what the newspaper called its “annual fall baby show” in D.C. Apparently ‘baby show’ meant exactly what it sounds like.

Starting at 10 o’clock in the morning, babies from the home were placed in the storefront window where they would be “seen by morning shoppers and people going to and from lunch.” According to the article, the babies looked “healthy and happy,” and the display would continue until 5 o’clock.

Then they’d do it again the next day, and the next, and the next. It went on all week.

It was a fundraiser. The Florence Crittenton Home, which primarily served unmarried pregnant women and young mothers, was asking the public for money to help support the women and babies in its care. Different groups of women would take turns running the exhibit throughout the week. Don’t worry about the babies though. The paper reports:

“Every precaution has been taken, it is pointed out, to make the children happy while they are lending their aid this week by making a visible appeal to the public for aid.”

Which is a pretty direct fundraising strategy. You could put a sign up in the window explaining why you need money. Or, you could just put the babies in the window.

But outside of the title that caught my attention, was how the newspaper called this the annual baby show. Annual?

Of course I had to go looking. Come to find out, this event had a long history. And lucky for us, there’s also a photo.

The picture was taken in 1914, and it shows the exact same thing described in 1926. There is one crib and a few babies/toddlers lined up inside the storefront glass. Women are also inside with them. And outside, there’s people on the sidewalk looking through the glass.

So it appears this was not just somebody’s strange idea in 1926: Something that they tried once and never spoke of again. They had been doing this over a decade.

The Florence Crittenton organization went back even further. Charles Crittenton opened the first Florence Night Mission in New York in 1883. He named it after his daughter Florence, who had died the year before at four years old. More Crittenton homes eventually opened up all across the country. This specific Washington home opened in 1896.

By the time of today’s story, the Washington home was primarily serving unmarried pregnant women, and young mothers with babies. And there’s obviously a much bigger history there.

Maternity homes have changed considerably over the decades. And I found some very difficult stories connected to institutions like these, unmarried mothers, and adoption. But that’s a entirely different trail to follow.

For today, I’ll stick with the strange event that week.

It makes me wonder whether this was equally strange to people back then? Imagine you’re reading the paper, or better yet, walking down F street at lunch and just happen upon some babies in a glass window on display. You wonder what in the world is going on here. Then realize you’re outside of the Florence Crittenton Home, and maybe you give them some money.

A brilliant marketing strategy.

And if you missed the babies on September 21st? Don’t worry. They’d be back again tomorrow.

Me too! See you tomorrow - Chris

Sources

• Evening Star — September 21, 1926

• Library of Congress — Florence Crittenton Home. Baby Exhibit, 1914

• VCU Social Welfare History Project — Florence Crittenton Homes

• Chevy Chase Historical Society — Florence Crittenton Home history

Welcome to all my new subscribers: Megan, Brad, Dave, Ryan, Gordon, Kevin, Alison, Green Tea, Mike C., William, AJ, Jim, HistoryGoneBananas, and Mike G! Substack has been a wild ride the past 11 days, and whether you’re reading, sharing, commenting, or supporting my work with a paid subscription, it’s much appreciated. Thank you!

For paid subscribers: if you’re ever digging into a historical question, or working on a research project of your own, send it my way. I’m happy to help point you toward sources or see what I can dig up. - Chris

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Anyway, back to what I found today from 100 years ago. In 1926, a Brooklyn inventor had an idea for a smart home. There was just one small problem with it, which is maybe why it never caught on.

I’m Chris, and this is Hidden Lens History. Every day, I open the newspaper from exactly one hundred years ago, find something worth sharing, and follow the story as far as I can.

On September 20th, 1926, a Brooklyn inventor named Frank Dzierzenga filed two patent applications.

The first was for an electrical device that could automatically close an open window. The second was for a switch that knew when it was raining. Together, Dzierzenga could wire an entire house that could close its own windows if the weather got bad. In 1926!

The idea sounds modern, but the mechanisms weren’t. The rain sensor was not electrical. Instead, it was a little container designed to catch rainwater. As the container filled up, the weight eventually tipped a balancing mechanism, which then brought two electrical contacts together to complete a circuit. The circuit could then activate the window-closing system.

The window closing system was a simple lock/latch. A window would be opened manually, but then held in place by a magnetic locking mechanism. When the rain switch completed the circuit, the electromagnet released that lock. Then, the window simply closed under its own weight.

Sounds cool, but also… dangerous?

What happens if someone was leaning out of the window when it suddenly decided to slam shut?

Dzierzenga thought about that, too. Or at least got feedback. The following year, he filed another patent for a safety device intended for use with his automatic window closer. In that one, he specifically mentioned the possibility of a person’s “head or arm” being in the path of the descending sash.

His solution was another mechanism designed to stop the window if it encountered an obstruction.

Seems fine. But the problem I noticed having opened and closed an old window or two in my day: wouldn’t slamming the windows shut from a wide open position break the glass?

Maybe that’s why these never caught on. Maybe the window latch and sensor system worked great, but smashed the windows out every time.

By 1927, his patents were all approved, but it seems no manufacturer ever licensed the devices.

And the automatic windows may have been the invention that made the newspapers, but they were not his only idea. The year before his sensor windows, he patented an automatic gas shutoff, designed to stop the flow of gas if a stove, furnace or other gas flame accidentally went out. Brilliant.

His device used heat from the flame to control a valve; if the flame disappeared, the mechanism cooled and shut off the gas, which Dzierzenga said could prevent poisoning or explosions.

I didn’t have time today to determine if his was the one that eventually turned into the exact safety devices we see today, but he certainly had plenty of good ideas for the home!

See you tomorrow - Chris

Everywhere else in the papers:

Also, the much more memorable event “100 years ago today” was the great Miami hurricane. Two days earlier, it had torn through South Florida. And the only thing every front page could agree on was that it was bad. Just how bad no one really knew. One front page estimated 300 dead. Another 1000. And another 1500. One headline reported loss up to $200 million. Those early numbers were wildly unstable as damaged roads and communications made entire communities difficult to reach. The Red Cross eventually reported 372 deaths and more than 6,000 injured, with damage estimated around $105 million.

That’s how long the movie ran before the chief of police walked in and arrested the owner of the theater. It wasn’t a surprise, either. He had announced it in the paper the day before. “I’ll be open on Sunday. Come get me.”

Well, they did. And this story, goes on for years.

I’m Chris, and this is Hidden Lens History. Every day, I open the newspaper from exactly one hundred years ago, find something worth sharing, and follow the story as far as I can.

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It’s September 19th, 1926 and if you picked up the Springfield Leader in Missouri, you read the news that people still talk about today. The headline says, “HURRICANE WRECKS MIAMI, FLORIDA.” The entire city of Miami was in ruins.

The numbers reported that day were way below the actual damage. The eventual toll from the Great Miami Hurricane climbed into the hundreds. Partly because the eye of the hurricane passed right over the city. Everything went quiet and lightened up outside, so people came out thinking it was over. That’s when the back half of the storm arrived and wiped out even more.

But that story has been told. Right underneath that headline, in much smaller print, is the thing I found interesting today. That headline reads:

“GRAND THEATER TO PUT SUNDAY CLOSING ORDINANCE TO TEST.”

Springfield had a law making it illegal to show a movie on Sundays. The minimum fine was a hundred dollars. Maximum five hundred.

The law basically came from the infamous evangelist preacher Bob Jones, and the city council actually voted it down at first. So it went to the people instead, and the people passed it. Then somebody petitioned to undo it, twice, and both times the city voted to keep theaters shut on Sundays.

The man who owned the Grand Theatre, W. W. Smith, had a theory about why that happened. He said any businessman in town who publicly campaigned for Sunday shows would be taboo. He thought the votes weren’t actually measuring what people believed. They were measuring only what people would admit to.

The night before he opened the doors, Smith gave the paper a long written statement. And he came out swinging.

Every Sunday, he said, the trains and the automobiles carry thousands of Springfield people out of Springfield to go do the exact things they’re not allowed to do at home. So what are we accomplishing? Don’t ship our sinners to other cities and let them come back worse.

And then he threw down a dare. Okay. You want a holy Sunday? Then close everything. Every business, every ballgame, all of it. Make the whole day black and dreary. Or, admit you’re not going to, and let me open my theater.

Sunday comes. His doors open a little after noon and the theater fills up fast. Before a single frame rolls, Smith walks out onto his own stage. And in front of a packed auditorium gives a fifteen-minute speech about how this law is unconstitutional and they all know it.

The paper reports there was a loud applause.

Then he goes back and starts the film. Seven minutes later, the chief of police and the chief of detectives walk in with a squad and arrest him and four of his employees.

That night somebody put a sign on the door of the evening crowd. It said: “The police won in the first round.”

The first round. Two days later he told a reporter it was the greatest thing he’d ever done, and that he felt the way Lincoln must have felt freeing the slaves.

They gave him a jury trial in municipal court, where he lost, and was fined the minimum $100. So he appealed the decision up to the county court, and won. The judge looked at the ordinance and said the law was junk, and threw the case out.

Which meant Springfield suddenly had no ordinance to arrest anybody with. The city said they’d stop making arrests while they appealed it, and the Sunday after the county ruling, for the first time in about five years, people in Springfield legally walked into a movie theater on a Sunday afternoon.

Smith wasn’t there for any of it. Or at least his theater wasn’t. He sold the Grand before the year was out. Later reporting said the Sunday fight had a lot to do with it.

So now it was the city doing the appealing. Springfield pushed the case up the ladder, trying to get its law back. Not to Washington, like Smith had threatened, but to the Missouri Supreme Court.

Springfield lost. Smith won. The city did not get its law back. The court said the ordinance was unconstitutional. But why is the strange part. You’d expect church and state, right?

The court said the opposite. It said a city absolutely can shut things down on Sunday. That everybody deserves a day off as a public health concern, and it doesn’t magically become a religious law just because the day happens to land on the Christian Sabbath.

So Springfield had the power to do what it wanted. It just used it poorly. The original ordinance only named four things. Theaters, Playhouses, Vaudeville, and Moving pictures. It said nothing about circuses, fairs, football games, boxing, greased pig contests, wrestling, or anything else I’ve written about in 1926.

And the court said what’s the difference between those four and other things? All pull a crowd. All take people working to run them. All make noise on the quiet day. One of the judges put it in six words:

And then the court went one step further, it said a law that hits some people but not others is easier to pass. Because the people you left out won’t fight it, and might even pick up business from what you want to shut down so would vote in favor of it.

All exactly what Smith had said when it all began ^{(affiliate link)} standing in his theater about to get arrested. Close everything, or close nothing. Unfortunately when Missouri finally backed him up, he’d already sold the theater.

Like this story? Share it with someone else who might, or subscribe to see what I dig up tomorrow.

See you then - Chris

Sources

Newspapers

• Springfield Leader, September 19, 1926

• Jefferson City Tribune, September 20, 1926

• Springfield News-Leader, September 21, 1926

• The Webb City Sentinel, September 22, 1926

• Springfield Leader and Press, September 23, 1926

• Springfield Leader and Press, September 24, 1926

Court record

• City of Springfield v. Smith, 19 S.W.2d 1 (Mo. 1929) — CourtListener

Additional reporting

• Ozarks First, “He knew Springfield police were coming. He started the movie anyway” — ozarksfirst.com

Well, at least that’s what American newspapers were telling their readers one hundred years ago today. That sounded like a lot like, so I looked into it, and it only got better.

I’m Chris, and this is Hidden Lens History. Every day, I open the newspaper from exactly one hundred years ago, find something worth sharing, and follow the story as far as I can.

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It’s September 18th, 1926, and I found the Queen of Italy fishing. On the front page. And not just as a PR stunt. She was apparently out there destroying her family in a fishing competition.

The story appeared on the front page of dozens of papers that day.

“QUEEN OF ITALY GOOD FISHERMAN.”

“QUEEN OF ITALY WINS ROYAL FISHING CONTEST”

“QUEEN HOOKS ‘EM”

In the Covington Virginian newspaper, it’s sandwiched between a story about a husband and wife finding a robber in their bed, and another about two separate towns battling scanty swimsuits and what they called the ‘cult of nakedness.’ Which, of course both were also good candidates for today.

But back to our fishing Queen.

Apparently the Italian royal family had been staying in the Alps, at Sant’Anna di Valdieri, and somebody decided to hold a fishing competition.

The rules were simple: One day, and the most trout wins. And according to the United Press report, Queen Elena caught 268. Her husband, King Victor Emmanuel III? 179.

Her five children? Princess Yolanda reportedly caught 153. Princess Giovanna, 148. Princess Maria Francesca caught 86. Princess Mafalda caught 31. And Prince Umberto, as the papers put it, “had to be content with only 16 fish in his creel.”

On a day when the great Miami hurricane was the main story all over the country, I love that they still found the space to report on a possibly made up royal fishing contest across the Atlantic.

Let’s be honest, 268 trout is absurd. That’s two fish every two minutes if you fish for nine hours straight. But given the very specific numbers reported, I had to know if it was true.

Come to find out, Queen Elena was a fisherman. As were many queens apparently. After searching “Queen” and “Fishing” on Newspapers.com, I found the exiled Queen of Greece was also quite the angler.

As for Queen Elena of Italy, the place mentioned in the newspaper is in the Gesso Valley in the Italian Alps. And the Italian royal family’s connection to that place goes back decades, way before Elena.

In 1855, King Victor Emmanuel II visited the area and was apparently so taken with it that local communities eventually transferred over hunting and fishing rights.

The family established a royal hunting reserve there and built a summer residence at Sant’Anna di Valdieri. Years later, Elena married into that family, and became Queen of Italy in 1900.

And after searching around, I found some things that make that 268 number even more believable.

First, Elena didn’t just like fishing. She was obsessed with it. A history of the area says she owned an arsenal of rods, reels, hooks, and lures, and that she knew all the good trout spots every year.

And then there’s this illustration. It’s of Queen Elena, specifically fishing in Valle Gesso in 1906, twenty years before today’s newspaper story. She’s there holding the rod herself, with her children nearby, in the exact same valley where this 1926 fishing contest would have taken place.

There’s another story from 1925 that says she wanted to reach a fishing spot below a waterfall so badly that she had herself tied to a tree. She even reportedly had a device called a trotimetro for keeping count of all the fish she caught.

Which suddenly makes today’s newspaper story a lot more credible. Because it doesn’t just say Elena caught 268 trout. It says she won a fishing contest. And according to this later history of fishing in the region, that is something they did. Apparently, the King was not always thrilled with how good his wife was at it.

There was even a royal fishing scoreboard. The dining room at their summer house reportedly had large silver plaques on the walls, one for each year, showing the biggest trout caught that season. The name of the person who caught it was recorded along with the date and size of fish. Elena’s name kept showing up.

There’s also a surviving record from the summer of 1924, showing the royal family’s trout catches. And the largest trout on that record was of course, Elena’s.

The place itself remembers her for it. The modern Maritime Alps park describes the lower Sella Lake as one of the royal family’s favorite places to fish. There’s even an old painted inscription there that reads “W la regina” — “Long live the Queen”

Turns out, Queen Elena was absolutely a fisherman, and the claim of 268 trout in one day. Ok, we’ll give it to her.

But looking around I also found her in the papers that same day in another headline. Just to give us some context about what else was going on. An Australian paper ran a story about bobbed hair titled, “Truth About Bobbing—Queen of Italy’s Ban.”

Apparently reports had been circulating that women with bobbed hair were being kept out of the Italian royal court. The article is trying to figure out whether this supposed royal ban was even true.

Bobbed hair in 1926 was absolutely a thing that could become international news. But honestly, neither of these stories today are that important. Italy had a king. Mussolini was in power. There was plenty happening in Europe that all ended up in the history books.

But what I find interesting is seeing that people were also reading these kind of things. The weird little things people were talking about all while the big events were happening around them. And also thinking about Crown Prince Umberto, somewhere in Italy hoping everybody would move on to the haircut story and stop printing his fishing score.

See you tomorrow - Chris

This is Hidden Lens History. Every day I open the newspaper from exactly 100 years ago, find something worth sharing, and follow the story as far as I can.

It’s 1926, his name was J. D. Levine, and this wasn’t just one strange interview.

He was traveling around North America giving lectures on something called iridology. Basically, Levine thought he could look into your eye and tell what was wrong with you.

According to the article, blue eyes with a “silken finish” meant you were in perfect health. While all the other colors meant there was a problem.

Levine said that any other color was caused by toxins, inflammation, or congestion somewhere else in the body. He claimed that 90 percent of people with brown eyes were filled with toxins. And he said the color could change if you stopped eating certain foods.

He claimed that he had even done it himself. He said he came from what he called “brown-eyed stock,” but through changes in his diet, had turned them blue.

He had a working theory. A couple of months before this story, Levine was lecturing in Calgary, where one of the advertisements for it says, “Science’s Greatest Discovery: The Human Radio.”

Levine was billed as “America’s Leading Iriologist,” and the subject of the lecture was: “Human Vibrations — How to Detect Them.” Admission was free.

So what exactly was the human radio? Well, Levine believed that the eye functioned like a receiving station for the rest of the body. And the body was like a musical instrument. The way he explained it, everything inside your body was sending out vibrations. Your organs, your nerves, all of it. And somehow your eyes picked those signals up like a radio. Then the iris supposedly recorded what was happening as different colors, spots, or lines. If everything inside you is working properly, Levine said the iris would be smooth, and blue. If it wasn’t, the eye would show it.

He also believed that every child was born with blue or bluish eyes. Then, as problems developed, their eyes supposedly changed.

And apparently Levine had an answer for everything. Because at some point somebody must have asked: okay, then why are so many Irish people blue-eyed? Levine said it was because they were, “forced to live on a strict diet consisting frequently of nothing but potatoes and buttermilk.”

Sailors supposedly had blue eyes because they breathed pure oxygen in sea air. Mountain climbers apparently got a similar benefit from being at high altitude. And Levine wanted people to actually use this.

Dig through the archives yourself at Newspapers.com → I may earn a commission if you subscribe through this link.

In another talk, he told business owners that they should watch the eyes of their employees. That an employee’s eyes could reveal their physical condition, and their physical condition could tell you something about how efficiently they might work.

There was even a demonstration. During one newspaper interview a man entered the room who Levine said he’d never met before. Levine looked into his eyes, named three physical problems, and according to the reporter, the man said he was right.

If you’ve ever seen an Oz Pearlman act, you know this type of spontaneity can be staged. But you can also understand why a demonstration like this would be very convincing, staged or not.

Levine wasn’t operating completely on the fringes here. He was the editor of a Chicago publication called The Health Messenger.

I found Levine promoting himself still more than a decade later. So I wondered: did iridology just disappear? Nope. People are still practicing it.

The difference is that eventually researchers tested whether someone could determine diseases by looking into their iris. Spoiler alert, it did not hold up. Not under controlled studies anyway. In those studies, Doctors couldn’t diagnose disease from the iris any more than by chance.

And eye color itself does not work the way Levine described it. Brown eyes aren’t brown because toxins accumulate in your body. And changing your diet doesn’t normally change the colors of your eyes. Eye color is mostly about genetics and pigmentation. Brown eyes have more melanin in the iris, not because of toxins.

But the part that interests me most isn’t simply that Levine was wrong. It’s how convincing the whole thing sounded before you tested it. Even to him maybe. I don’t know if Levine knew he was selling nonsense. I don’t know if he believed every word of it. And after spending way more time with this guy than I expected today, I’m not sure which possibility I find more interesting.

Because he had a convincing explanation. He had demonstrations. And he also had the best sales pitch of all.

Look at me. I did it myself.

I did not wake up this morning planning to learn anything about iridology. I stopped because a hundred-year-old newspaper said some guy had changed his eyes from brown to blue with food.

And, unfortunately for me, and you, I needed to know more.

See you tomorrow - Chris

Her advice is pretty simple. When your husband plans a honeymoon, make sure he owns the car.

This is Hidden Lens History. Every day I open the newspapers from exactly 100 years ago, find the story worth sharing, and follow the paper trail as far as I can.

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I found today’s story in the Indianapolis Times, September 16th, 1926.

^{The newspaper images in this story link to Newspapers.com. If you subscribe through these links, I may earn a commission.}

The headline is “JAIL BRIDE ON WEDDING TRIP HERE,”

Her picture below the headline looks like it could be a mugshot, or a staged professional headshot. She’s looking straight into the camera, hair bobbed and waved, wearing a string of pearls around her neck and what looks like a dark dress with a wide collar.

Her name is Emma Catherine Jenkins. She’s twenty-one, from Louisville, Kentucky. Two weeks earlier she married twenty-two year old Nelson Jenkins. She calls him John. They’re both in jail, charged as fugitives with what the paper calls “vehicle taking.” The police say the car they were in was stolen at New Albany, Indiana.

And she tells a great story.

First, they print her advice to newlyweds. She says:

“When your new husband gets the idea of stealing an auto for cheaper transportation, discourage him, don’t help.”

“I got married, expecting to be happy, because I am in love and thought I was going to go big. Here I am in jail and John is over there, and it doesn’t look like either one of us is going to go very big for a while, does it?”

Then they print how it happened. They had been married two weeks earlier in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Since then they had been living in cheap, temporary housing. Here’s how she described it.

“John thought of getting a job at New Albany, Ind., and on Tuesday went there. We stayed at a hotel there with $5 left in our treasury. We asked the hotel manager to be allowed to sit on the front porch until the 1:30 a.m. train and while there another of the guests drove up and parked his car.”

Nothing wrong so far. But then then they started to admire the car of the man who just pulled in. And they also noticed the man also left his keys in the car. She recalls:

“’Couldn’t we travel swell in that?’ John said to me. I agreed so heartily that we were soon on our way, as the key was in the car and all we had to do was step on the starter.”

Chalk it up to young love and desperation at this point. But that’s when it goes from playful to down right callous. She said,

“When we arrived here we told his brother it was our car. We stole a license plate at Fifteenth St. and Senate Ave., hid the old ones behind a pole and threw the title card away.”

“We were planning to drive to Chicago today where John has another brother. We had $2 left, just enough to buy gasoline.”

A Sergeant O’Connor and his squad found them both at two in the morning, asleep in the car. She goes on to say,

“We had decided to catch a little sleep and I was in the back seat. When I awoke three big bluecoats were standing about the car.”

“Oh boy, that isn’t the grandest feeling in the world either.”

“John told them it was our car. I remained quiet, but you know you can’t get anywhere in this world not telling the truth so I up and told them the whole story.”

Which makes me wonder whether the police even knew about the stolen car. Maybe they were just checking on a couple asleep in a parked car at two in the morning, and she volunteered the rest. Her story continues.

“Now John wants me to let him take all the blame and be free and then come and see him while he is serving time, but how can I do that. I might just as well be in jail with him, and that is that.”

And here’s how the column ends. She says,

“I’ll tell every girl in the world that when she gets married, to see that her husband has a job or gets one. Either travel first class or not at all.”

“Honeymoons in jail don’t go so big, I’ll tell the world.”

I don’t know what the trial did to them, whether she served any time, or whether or not this was Nelson’s last run-in with the law. A quick search for their names didn’t immediately result in anyting. If somebody else wants to go looking, there’s a marriage at Jeffersonville, Indiana in late August or early September of 1926, and a Marion County booking and court docket that fall.

See you tomorrow - Chris

Source

• The Indianapolis Times, September 16, 1926, page 39. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.

And there was the woman they’d been looking for.

This is Hidden Lens History. Every day I open the newspapers from exactly 100 years ago, find a story that makes me stop, and follow the paper trail as far as I can.

Subscribe now

This one starts with Mrs. George Lewis of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

She and her husband had been camping for two weeks on the Housatonic River. They were planning to break camp and head home to Bridgeport that Tuesday.

Sunday morning, about ten o’clock, she told her husband she was going to take the small rowboat and go fishing along the river. He had no reason to be fearful. She’d been fishing many times herself before. So he stayed back at camp to get ready for the drive home.

It was only later, when he realized she’d been gone much longer than usual, that he went looking for her. Other campers joined in the search. They found the rowboat partially submerged. Mrs. Lewis was not in it.

Senior Sergeant W. E. Bushy of the Connecticut State Police was called in to search. He brought along eight recruits who were in training when the call came in.

And when discussing strategy for the search, Bushy remembered something from his childhood. Something about putting bread on the water.

So Bushy set out five loaves into the water. For a few minutes they floated together. Four of them kept moving on, but one didn’t. It just stopped.

The searchers grappled the water in the area underneath that loaf, and hours later recovered Mrs. Lewis’s body.

This is where I became a little skeptical about the method. But I looked into it, and instead of finding differing accounts. I kept finding the same story, with little explanation.

The local paper reported.

“Members of the state police at the Ridgefield barracks were uncommunicative about the theory on which the floating bread method of recovery was used.”

So pretty much it worked, but they couldn’t explain why. The article says the police admitted it was an old idea, and that they’d never used it before. But, as far as they were concerned, it had worked.

A couple of weeks later, TIME magazine picked it up and gave the whole thing a little blurb under its “Science” section.

Their headline was “Bread & Corpse.”

And all of the coverage was making another connection to Tom Sawyer. The Bridgeport Telegram put it right in the headline:

“Method from ‘Tom Sawyer’ Employed to Recover Body.”

And there is actually a scene like this in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I hadn’t read it in decades so had to go find it. Sure enough, Tom, Huck and Joe are hiding on Jackson’s Island. They hear a cannon booming out over the Mississippi and eventually realize people are searching the river because everyone back home thinks the boys have drowned.

Dig through the archives yourself at Newspapers.com → I may earn a commission if you subscribe through this link.

Huck explains that people take loaves of bread, put quicksilver inside them (which means mercury) and let them float downstream. The belief was that wherever there was a drowned body, the bread would stop.

That’s almost exactly what the Connecticut papers were describing fifty years later. Except, apparently they didn’t get the idea from Tom Sawyer.

It says Sgt. Bushy hadn’t used quicksilver at all. Just bread. And it says he didn’t trace the method back to Twain. Instead he remembered it as “a custom of his childhood.”

So, if not Mark Twain, I wanted to know where it came from. Because if Bushy knew this from childhood, and Twain knew it well enough to put it into a novel in 1876, this clearly didn’t start with either of them.

And it turns out, it didn’t.

I found the same method printed in The Gentleman’s Magazine all the way back in 1767.

A child had drowned in the River Kennet near Newbury, England. Searchers couldn’t find the body. Someone took a loaf of bread, put quicksilver inside it, and set it on the river. The loaf floated more than half a mile, crossed toward the other bank and sank near the child, right where the body was recovered.

Even old re-tellings of that article have the same amount skepticism for the method that you and I do right now about this story.

The TIME piece wondered whether currents might explain it — whether the same water movement that carried a body into a particular place might also steer a loaf of bread to that spot.

The lake they found her in isn’t really a lake, it’s a reservoir, so there is current moving through it.

A hundred years later, there still isn’t a great reason a loaf of bread would somehow be attracted to a body underwater. Mercury or not. The closest thing to an explanation is probably the water itself. Send anything floating down a river and you’ll find where something might eventually settle.

Either way, a Mrs. George Lewis had drowned. The paper calls her an ardent sportswoman and an angler. She went out fishing by herself. Her boat was found partly filled with water. She was wearing heavy hip boots, and everyone seemed to think that’s what kept her from getting back to the boat, though her friends were insistent that she was a good swimmer.

Sergeant Bushy also had a theory about how it happened. He believed she lost her balance while trying to lower the anchor on the flat-bottomed boat and went over the side. The anchor was still partly lowered when they recovered the boat. The water was about twenty feet deep there, and in high rubber boots, Bushy didn’t think she ever came back up.

When news got back to the neighborhood where the Lewises lived, neighbors were astounded. Several of them recalled that she was a fine swimmer and capable of taking care of herself.

The paper says she was twenty-eight years old. Her funeral was the next afternoon, and she was buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery.

But here’s the thing I noticed all the coverage.

It names her father. It names her brother Louis, who lived in Bridgeport. It names her husband, the medical examiner, the undertaker, the officers who grappled for hours, the funeral home, the church and the cemetery.

But it never once prints her first name.

So I kept looking.

Mountain Grove Cemetery — the cemetery named in the article — has an Irma N. Lewis who died in 1926. Then I found an Irma Curdy quoted in the paper in 1920. Curdy is one of the names the newspaper gives for Mrs. Lewis’s family, alongside another spelling: Kerti.

And the article did name a brother, Louis Kerti, living in Bridgeport. I found a Louis Kerti buried in that same cemetery. He died in 1970, and if him, would have been about thirty when his sister died in 1926.

Then I found one more thing.

Louis had a daughter born that December — about three months after Mrs. Lewis died.

Her name was Irma.

I can’t prove she was named for her aunt. But I really do hope so.

Thanks for listening. Head over to hiddenlenshistory.com to see the original newspaper clippings and images.

Explore your own family history with Ancestry:
^{*Affiliate disclosure: I may earn a commission if you subscribe or purchase through these links.}

See you tomorrow - Chris

Sources

• Bridgeport Telegram, Bridgeport, Connecticut, September 14, 1926, pp. 1–2. “Method from ‘Tom Sawyer’ Employed to Recover Body” / “‘Bread Method’ Recovers Body.”

• The New York Times, September 15, 1926. “Say Bread Located Body.”

• The Daily Messenger, Canandaigua, New York, September 17, 1926. “Finds Drowned Body by Setting Bread Afloat.”

• TIME, September 27, 1926. “Science: Bread & Corpse.”

• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Chapter XIV.

• The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 37, April 1767, p. 189. Account of the River Kennet drowning and the use of a loaf containing quicksilver.

• Domestic Encyclopædia (1802), entry on “Drowning,” reprinting and commenting on the 1767 Gentleman’s Magazine account.

• Folk-Lore, Vol. 10 (1899), account of an 1898 attempt to locate a drowned woman using bread and quicksilver.

• Mountain Grove Cemetery records, Bridgeport, Connecticut. Burial record for Irma N. Lewis.

It’s titled, “‘Jazzin Up’ Jaded Appetites with Science’s New Taste Organ.” That’s right, taste organ. And they didn’t mean your tongue.

The picture alone is what stood out. It’s a giant organ like you’d see in a music hall, with two rows of keys, and an organist sitting at the bench. But instead of pipes extending from the top, it’s canisters of liquid, in different flavors. They’re labeled orange, lemon, wintergreen, apple, pineapple, vanilla, nectar, raspberry, cherry, lime, ambrosia, and blackberry. And the best part? There are three tubes connected to the organ. One is in the organists mouth, and the other two are in two “listeners” mouths. As the article explains, “so that the various concentrated liquids can be injected either singly or in the correct combination.”

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Yum. Unless of course you remember that eventually all of those flavors would be in your mouth at the same time, right? As I understand it, your brain doesn’t simply forget flavors. If you’ve ever had a glass of orange juice even 5 minutes after brushing your teeth, you know what I mean.

The idea was developed by a French scholar and further investigated by C.F. Schurch who built a real working model that was “quite successful.” Unfortunately there is no photo of the actual build, at least that I could find, and the one in the paper is just an artist’s rendering.

The piece originally ran in that summer’s edition of Science and Invention Magazine, and playfully mentions that:

Consideration of this subject is quite as interesting indeed as that of the "smell- organ”, described several years ago in the pages of this magazine.

Well naturally I had to track that down.

Dig through the archives yourself at Newspapers.com → I may earn a commission if you subscribe through this link.

Sure enough, June 1922, there it was. The smell organ. “The Newest Noiseless Organ. It Delights You Not With Wonderful Rhapsodies in Sound, But With Wonderful Musical Combinations Expressed by Delicately Graduated Odors.”

If you’re just listening to this it’s what I described earlier but now instead of canisters atop the organ, it’s perfume spray bottles. The idea stemmed from the work of French chemist Dr. Septimus Piesse, who claimed that “every perfume produces its own particular effect on the end organs of smell terminating in the mucosa.” He even mapped out each note and its corresponding smell.

Here’s just a taste, or whiff, if you will. Mint, patchouli, lavender, cinnamon, violet, sandalwood, rose, and musk.

If you’re thinking what I am, that all those smells together would smell like walking past Bath & Body Works in the mall, Dr. Piesse was ahead of you. He says:

Of course, the combination of these odors will create a smell entirely different from any of the individual qualities of the various perfumes and it is necessary that in the soft dreamy compositions, the odors blend harmoniously.

…the audience will be saved the rather unusual embarrassment, of smelling disagreeable combinations. Some music, would perhaps have to be changed and the odors carefully graduated so that in the smells wafted over the audience no particular perfume will predominate, except when the loud pedal, or rather.in these smell organs, the strong odor pedal is trod upon.

The strong odor pedal? I’d say maybe light a match next time.

There is an elaborate explanation, then, of how the performance hall would be arranged so that the smells could waft playfully and delicately over the patrons in an organized manner. But if you’ve smelled the back ends of any regional airliner or crowded graduation in a high school gymnasium, I think it was just naive optimism on his part.

Both of these wild ideas stemmed from the “color organ,” which was described on earlier pages. That, of course is the one thing does live on today as a good idea: pairing lights with music.

But tastes and odors? I think those are better left to meal time.

See you tomorrow - Chris

Sources

• Science and Invention July 1926

• Science and Invention June 1922

• Herald and Review; The Decatur Herald September 14, 1926

“LONG FLOWING LOCKS WINS IN BEAUTY RACE.” Underneath it, in smaller type: “Over the Bold, Bob…

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The banner across the top says “PATZEL WINS WORLD HOG-CALL TITLE.”

Below it, in smaller columns, Mussolini was target of a bomb. A new law jars the entire criminal underworld. Those stories just got columns. But the hog caller got the banner.

I’ll apologize in advance for those of you who already knew this was a thing. I had no idea. And since ‘hog calling competitions’ were new to me today, I hope I’m able to uncover a little something for everyone. And most importantly, tell you about Fred Patzel.

The Nebraska City News-Press ran “POOWEE DEFEATS HOOWEE OR SOOEE,” which is absolutely the best headline I’ve come across all year. The story describes a field of finalists surviving a week of “tonsil-devastating yodeling,” until only one man was left standing, and everyone else had gone hoarse.

That man was Fred Patzel, and they describe him as a “leather-lunged farmer of Madison, Nebraska” who “attained the pinnacle of his life’s ambition tonight when he was crowned champion hog caller of the world.”

Hopefully you’re thinking what I was at this point. What is hog calling, and how do people compete at it?

Well, before electric fences and automatic feeders, hogs were spread across a lot of open space. And one of the only ways to get domesticated ones to come back, was your voice. The louder the better. If it carried a long distance, it usually worked well. For hunting purposes, it might also be used as an attempt to draw wild pigs nearer.

The Sioux City Journal reported that Patzel’s voice had carried six miles under favorable conditions. Patzel described his method as four escalating calls. The first was an introduction, the second an invitation, the third, an order. And the rest?

At this point I was still thinking this might be an old farm tradition that someone finally got around to holding a championship for, but that’s not what was happening here at all.

Another page has a photo of A. F. Stryker of the Live Stock Exchange pinning the medal on Patzel. The caption underneath explains the whole thing.

The World-Herald conceived the idea of a world championship contest. Stryker was the first man they consulted. He helped enlist the live stock interests, and also brought in the Radio Trades Association to stage and help finance the whole thing.

The contest was held during a radio trade exposition. It was broadcast over WOAW. Each caller gave one call over the radio and a second from the stage. Three judges scored both, and highest score possible was six hundred points. Patzel scored 562.

Pitch and expression were worth more than volume, and one of the scoring categories was “appeal or friendliness.”

And many people entered. Nine states and the District of Columbia sent people to compete. According to History of Nebraska, 49 total entrants across the week, and 15 in the finals.

Bob Warren of Waterloo finished runner-up, and is photographed shaking Patzel’s hand displaying a quite dignified piece of sportsmanship for the hog-calling competition.

Patzel’s own reactions are the thing that stand out to me. He said he could get his teeth fixed now. He thought he might buy a few shoats and maybe milk a goat (Shoats were new to me. They’re young weaned pigs or a hybrid offspring between a sheep and a goat). He mentioned he’d never got past the second grade and “figured he ought to fix things so his wife and children would have a good living.”

Then he asked if there was a telephone around, because he wanted to call Madison and tell his wife he’d won. He’d promised her he would before he left, and said she had been a little doubtful that he would.

That’s when this story goes from heartfelt, to slightly absurd.

The NEA ran a syndicated spread that went out all across the country, headlined “POO-EE! POOO-EEE! POOOO-EEEE!” with a subhead about how the hogs know their F-sharp. “Just Watch ‘Em Scamper.” It’s written like a nature documentary narrated by someone who’s been over served. It also introduces rival Hughie Henry, the Pied Piper of the Kansas City stockyards,

They printed a musical notation of Patzel’s call, reportedly supplied by Patzel himself, and invited readers to try Fred’s music on their piano (attempt at your own risk). A Nebraska radio station even had him set the call to music on the air.

By October the American Legion wanted him in Philadelphia as the feature attraction of the Nebraska delegation. A direct attempt to upstage the Iowa corn song. The paper printed the phone call that arranged it. They offered Patzel to come. He asked, “Where’s it at?” and when told it was east of Council Bluffs, train leaving at 10 the next day, he said, “Yeah, I guess so, What had I better do—take anything with me? I better take my sweater, hadn’t I, and a couple of shirts? When do we get back?”

It says he had never in his life been more than two hundred miles from home, and would “realize a life-long ambition to ‘see something of the world.’”

Fred’s life was about to get even more interesting from there.

A year later in the summer of 1927, P. G. Wodehouse published a story in Liberty called “Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!” (Correcting itself in parentheses that Patzel’s actual call is “Pooig.”) The story goes that a sulking prize pig is refusing to eat. In danger of losing a pig show medal if it can’t be called to eat, someone who has studied under Fred Patzel himself helps the butler learn. As he struggles to do so, they say, “You need a manly, sunburned, windy-scorched voice, with a suggestion in it of the crackling of corn-husks and the whisper of evening breezes in the fodder.”

The article explains how Patzel was entertained to hear he was in the story. Told them he was busy digging foundations for buildings, and hadn’t called a hog since February. That he had just turned down a thousand dollars for three months to tour with his voice.

In February 1933 a Norfolk announcer talked him into a call during the noon market report. Patzel overloaded the broadcasting lines, blew out more than two hundred dollars in tubes, and the station had to go off the air for three minutes.

Eight years later from that first world-championship, Patzel agreed to visit the state volunteer firemen’s convention in Omaha. He agreed because he “always liked to oblige the boys.” He apologized for being out of practice and explained he’d been busy cutting wood.

This time he was wearing the World-Herald gold medal, and his pockets were full of newspaper clippings about his calling escapades. Some that were even made up. He wasn’t just cutting wood anymore. By then, he was appearing at theaters, open air carnivals, and doing some broadcasting.

This simple man we met back in 1926 really had embraced life in the hog-calling spotlight.

Fred Patzel died in 1956. His obituary in the Madison paper doesn’t mention that he had been a world champion hog caller. It said he was in the excavating business most of his life.

To me, the best part is Fred’s lasting legacy. Last month the Iowa State Fair just held the hundredth edition of its hog calling contest. Versions of this have been going on all over basically without interruption at least since 1926.

What also sticks with me today is that people are incredible. Learning about people like Fred is my favorite part of doing this. It also is more evidence to me that everyone has amazing skills inside them. And you can only hope that someday, everyone gets their chance to showcase them, like Fred.

See you tomorrow - Chris

Sources

• Sunday World-Herald, September 12, 1926

• Omaha World-Herald, September 12, 1926

• Nebraska City News-Press, September 12, 1926

• The Sioux City Journal, September 12, 1926

• Sunday Times-Democrat, September 12, 1926

• Omaha World-Herald, October 8, 1926

• Evening World-Herald, July 7, 1927

• Omaha World-Herald, October 17, 1934

• James E. Potter, “Patzel’s ‘Poo-ey’ Piques Pigs’ Passion,” History Nebraska

• Des Moines Register, August 2026

The image is bizarre. An enormous goat staring directly at you. In ribbon bold font on the left “PREACHES FUNDAMENTALISM.” Under that a cutout of a doctor holding a little boy called “the first goat-gland baby.’ On the right, “PRACTICES GOAT-GLAND SCIENCE” and under it the doctor’s wife is holding two goats.

You can probably see why it gained my attention.

The “doctor” is John R. Brinkley, of Milford, Kansas. The article introduces him as:

“the most unusual scientist - fundamentalist in the whole world… who saves souls with the word of God and repairs human bodies with glands from lively goats.”

Basically he became famous performing operations that he claimed could restore youth and sexual vitality by implanting tissue from goat testicles into men. He built an entire hospital around it and became a national celebrity.

But this isn’t the John Brinkley story. He has an entire Wikipedia page. What I wanted to know today is what was it like for someone in 1926 to experience this… and also with a century of hindsight, how it happened.

On its surface, it looks like one newspaper devoting an entire page to a doctor in Kansas, and his redemption story. But it’s way too congratulatory to be journalism. The article outlines how Brinkley had been dropped from the list of practitioners in some states due to claims of license fraud, stating that he then went abroad and obtained his license at: “The Royal University which had awarded degrees to Napoleon, Michael Angelo…”. It went on to explain the irony of the fundamentalism and science cohabitating in Brinkley’s work, his message, and even property which contained a Sunday school run by his wife. At the bottom: Copyright, 1926, International Feature Service.

So this wasn’t just a local reporter stumbling onto Brinkley. It was syndicated, and after searching, I found it running in dozens of newspapers throughout September.

I should have left it at that, but at this point I was too interested to stop.

I found one Kansas paper six years earlier running another congratulatory story about Brinkley’s breakthrough work in sexual vitality using goat-glands. This time without the fundamentalism attached. They also spelled it out more clearly. A man named H. R. Mosnat, a mailing-list salesman, had sent editors this promotional material, photograph included.

The photograph was of Brinkley holding a small child. The goat-gland baby. And it stuck out because I’d seen it before. In that full-page spread. Six years later.

To me, side by side, it sure looks like the same photograph.

Both captions call the boy “Billy” and “Goat-Gland Baby.” The promotional photograph had already been circulating for six years. Later research confirms the same Kansas man, Mosnat was one of the Brinkley’s publicity men in 1926.

None of this was surprising. I’ve seen it before in other stories I’ve done. Men overpromising through aggressive marketing, underdelivering (sometimes dangerously or illegally), and making fortunes along the way.

Except it turns out, Brinkley wasn’t the only one. Apparently, all of America was having a real gland moment.

The very next day, September 12th, after the goat spread, a different paper ran this headline: “California Surgeon Practically Controls ‘Youth Glands.’”

This was a different doctor, Clayton E. Wheeler, claiming twelve thousand gland operations, free clinics, and access to wild goats on Catalina and Guadalupe islands. He believed glands from those animals worked better than a domesticated goat’s. The piece claimed he had “practically cornered the wild goat supply in the world.”

I was several columns in before I noticed tiny type at the bottom, “(Adv).” Of course it’s another advertisement. It has headlines, photographs, and all looks remarkably like the journalism running right next to it, but also ends with an invitation to mail Wheeler twelve cents for his book.

For the everyday person in 1926? Probably very confusing. These pages don’t include balanced skepticism . Just the bold advertisements paid by the people selling the treatments. And if you were just flipping through the paper, the sales pitch and the reporting could look remarkably similar.

I went back even further, to 1924. One advertisement says, “GLAND TREATMENT GUARANTEED. GO-GLAND-DO.”

Not surgery this time, but tablets sold at ordinary drugstores across Southern California, promising to restore health, strength, and “pep.”

A Nebraska paper even ran a testimonial from a woman in San Pedro, California, crediting Go-Gland-Do with curing years of sleeplessness. And you don’t have to look to find plenty more.

Surgery, clinics, tablets, mail-order books. All different cities, different doctors, different products. All selling some version of the same promise: getting older was something medicine could fix.

The science underneath all of this was not entirely made up. Researchers really were learning that glands were capable of affecting growth, reproduction, metabolism, and other functions throughout the body. It was also the era when real scientific breakthroughs were happening in hormone research. But plenty of people also saw the new scientific language and realized there was a lot of money in it.

The sales pitch was simple, and effective. Some use it today.

Modern hormone medicine isn’t quite the same thing as sewing goat tissue into somebody, but the words haven’t changed much. Youth, vitality, and rejuvenation. One Wheeler ad promised a patient “20 aging years” lifted from his shoulders. Another was headlined “Almost Like Being Reborn.”

Brinkley’s operation eventually collapsed. Kansas revoked his medical license in 1930, and his reputation and business only deteriorated from there. Wheeler has a less famous, but similar demise.

Eight years after that paper said he practically controlled the “youth glands,” Wheeler’s name showed up again under a very different headline:

“Court Upholds Fraud Order.”

The Supreme Court had declined to review a ruling upholding Post Office fraud orders against him over misleading claims in his advertising. Wheeler told the paper he had already stopped selling the treatment by mail.

What sticks with me isn’t really the goat glands. Or the extent any of this was science or not. Instead it was how normal all of this was made to look on the page to intentionally deceive people.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling older just having read about all this. Go outside and feel some sunshine today.

See you tomorrow - Chris

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Watch the YouTube Short here.

Sources

• Fort Scott Tribune and The Fort Scott Monitor, January 1, 1920

• Hamilton Evening Journal, September 11, 1926 (International Feature Service)

• The Salt Lake Tribune, September 12, 1926 (advertisement)

• The Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1924

• Los Angeles Herald Examiner, September 8, 1924

• Lincoln Journal Star, October 16, 1924

• The San Francisco Call-Bulletin, December 2, 1925

• San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 1934, “Court Upholds Fraud Order”

• Morris Fishbein, The Facts About Rejuvenation (1926)

Nobody had snuck on. The ship’s chief surgeon had a simple explanation for reporters waiting at the dock: “Two babies were born at sea.

Today’s article contains one affiliate link (Ancestry.com). If you sign up through it, I may earn a small commission at no cost to you

One of them was a girl, born on Friday the 13th, to a family also heading home from the Pacific fleet. The other was a boy named Harold Chaumont Flynn, and by the time the newspapers were finished with his story, he wasn’t just a baby born at sea. He was, they insisted, a baby with two birthdays.

Here’s what actually happened aboard that ship.

Harold’s father was Quartermaster Sergeant Harold Flynn of the U.S. Marine Corps. He, his wife, and their two young daughters were making the long trip home from the Philippines to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, on August 4th, Mrs. Flynn went into labor. That alone would have been a fine story. A baby, born at sea, aboard a military transport with a family already halfway around the world from home.

But the Chaumont was crossing the 180th meridian right around the same time as Harold’s birth. The International Date Line. And that’s where this stopped being an ordinary birth announcement to, according to the newspapers, something closer to a magic trick. One ran a photograph of Mrs. Flynn cradling her newborn son under the headline “This Baby Has Two Birthdays.”

The paper declared,

“inasmuch as he was born on a forty-eight-hour day he hereafter will celebrate two days a year as his birthday.”

And the story kept traveling.

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A Los Angeles paper ran Harold’s picture within days. By October, a paper near Scranton, Pennsylvania, Sergeant Flynn’s hometown, was introducing him to the neighbors as “Daddy” Flynn’s boy.

And by December, when the Flynn family finally made it home for the holidays, the story got its best telling yet.

There they were. Sergeant Flynn standing behind his wife. Their two daughters beside her. And in her arms, four-month-old Harold, already a newspaper celebrity before he could even sit up on his own. The article laid out the math: twenty thousand miles, Manila to the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, up the Atlantic coast, to his grandparents’ front porch in Pennsylvania. Between the three Flynn children, they had already traveled farther than most people do in a lifetime. That December was the first time any of them had ever seen snow.

It’s a lovely place to end a story, and I almost did, but I was genuinely confused. The 48-hour-day explanation the papers gave was confusing. At least it was for me. If he was born on a day that lasted 48 hours, he’d still only have one birthday. It just happened to be 48 hours long that one time in his life. But that’s not really what was going on.

After looking into it, here’s what was happening.

If you cross the date line heading east (the direction the Chaumont was sailing) the calendar gets turned back one day. So let’s say his birth happened at 11pm. Depending on the exact position of the ship at the time, it could have been 11pm on August 4th, or 11pm on August 3rd, depending on whether they were over the line yet, or not. They genuinely didn’t know.

In 1926, a ship’s navigator didn’t have satellites telling him exactly where they were. Fixing their longitude precisely enough to know the exact minute they crossed that line was a careful estimate at best, using dead reckoning, star sightings, and math done by hand in a rocking cabin in the middle of the night. And on this day, with a woman giving birth on board too.

So faced with a birth nobody could precisely pin to one location, and thus date, one reporter decided that the fun answer beat out the accurate one. And honestly, I think it’s the right one, because “two birthdays a year” sounds a lot better than “we don’t know when this baby’s birthday is.”

But here’s where it stops being just a quirky 1920s headline, and becomes a little bit more personal. Harold lived to 79 years old, and his own gravestone lists August 3rd as his date of birth. Every 1926 newspaper prints the 4th. So whoever officially had to write it down, either believed, or decided, that the ship had already crossed the line by the time he arrived. If the ship’s actual log still exists, it might settle things, that is if somebody can track it down.

If anyone reading this has their own genealogical chops, or somehow gets their hands on that ship’s log, or is related to the Flynns, we’d love to know what you find. I ran out of time today, but I usually go looking for this sort of thing myself on Ancestry. (That’s an affiliate link, if you sign up through it, I may earn a small commission at no cost to you.)

It makes me wonder whether Harold Flynn ever knew. Did he grow up celebrating his birthday every year on August 3rd? Or did his family lean into it, and celebrate the remarkable uniqueness of his birth, and relive the whole story every August 3rd and 4th? I like to imagine the second one. A cake on the 3rd, and then another on the 4th. All because a bunch of sailors in the middle of the Pacific, and one newspaper reporter back on land, decided that’s how it all should go.

Either way, today’s 100-year-old headline led me to the kind of thing that may never have happened before, and may never happen again.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources

San Francisco Chronicle, August 17, 1926, “Baby Born as U.S. Navy Ship Passes Over 180th Meridian”

Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1926, “Baby to Have Two Birthdays”

Wire reprint, “This Baby Has Two Birthdays,” October 1, 1926

Scranton-area paper, “Baby Born to Scranton Couple Has 2 Birthdays,” October 9, 1926

Follow-up feature, “Travel Thousands of Miles to Spend Christmas at Home,” December 10, 1926

Naval History and Heritage Command, official ship history, Chaumont (AP-5)

Naval Cover Museum, “Chaumont AP 5,” ship designation and commissioning record

Find A Grave memorial, Harold Chaumont Flynn, findagrave.com/memorial/19473277/harold-c-flynn

U.S. Naval Observatory, International Date Line explainer

NOAA, International Date Line explainer

Maritime Economics SA, worked example of eastbound date line crossing

USS Chaumont, U.S. Navy official photograph, via Naval History and Heritage Command

One hundred years ago today, the B.F. Goodrich Rubber Company’s New York branch received a letter that had been mailed eighteen years earlier.

The letter had been posted sometime around 1908, less than a mile from where Goodrich’s branch office eventually stood. It never actually made it to its original destination. By then, the building had moved. Instead, the letter slipped into the mail chute of the Mills Building at 15 Broad Street and stayed lodged there, undiscovered, for nearly two decades.

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Nobody found it because nobody had reason to look (except maybe the original sender who was wondering where his tubes were). The Mills Building where the letter was lost, was a ten-story structure completed in 1882. It stood at the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, wrapped around the J.P. Morgan building next door. It stayed in use for 43 years until Equitable Trust took over the lease in early 1925. They began tearing the building down to put up a new skyscraper in its place.

It was during that demolition that workers pulled apart the old mail chute and found the letter still inside it. Here is a similar mail chute from the era:

And the best part of the story? Inside the letter was a check for $25.20 (roughly $900 today!). It was a payment for two inner tubes, written at a time when that was the retail price. By 1926, the papers report those same two tubes cost less than ten dollars. Apparently eighteen years of industrial progress in rubber manufacturing had cut the price by more than half.

Mail delivery at the time was pretty remarkable, too. You could mail a letter in New York one day, and have it delivered in San Francisco the next evening.

Even today, I once had a postcard delivered six months after I mailed it. But 18 years to go less than a mile?! Incredible. It reminds me of the Frog and Toad story where the two of them wait on the porch for days anticipating the mail. Because turns out, the mail carrier was a snail.

One thing I couldn’t find out was whether the original sender was able to get his tubes elsewhere.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Watch the story on Youtube

Sources

• Wire report, September 9, 1926 (”And He Cussed the Tire Concern, Sure”)

• Brownwood Banner-Bulletin, September 9, 1926 (”Eighteen Year Old Letter Contained Order for Tubes”)

• Photos: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library, “Equitable Trust Company Building,” The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1926.

• Mail Chute, Grand Central. Bain News Service, publisher, [between ca. 1910 and ca. 1915]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014699661/

Every episode is short, usually five minutes or less. That’s about how long it takes to deliver something genuinely strange, funny, or true that happened exactly a century ago every day. I follow the headline wherever it takes us and some days learn right alongside you.

I’ll have new episodes every day, right beside the newsletter where you can see the actual articles and images we’re talking about. Subscribe and you’ll never miss one.

-Chris

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