In 1926, 82-year-old James Summers knew he was dying. He had one last request: a reporter from The Evening Star, brought to his bedside, so he could dictate his own obituary before anyone else got it wrong.

"I have read so many times about friends," he told the reporter. "There were mistakes. I thought perhaps you would like to get the story of my life from me, and be sure it is correct." If you know anything about newspapers and accuracy, you know how funny I thought this was.

But he had a real story to get right. And it was a doozy. He'd worked at the Washington Navy Yard during the Civil War and remembered Lincoln coming there personally. The morning after the assassination, Summers went fishing before he'd even heard the news, and soldiers hunting John Wilkes Booth spotted him on the water and opened fire, ordering him to shore. He was arrested on the spot, mistaken, in the chaos of the manhunt, for the man who'd just shot the President. He also tried to watch Mary Surratt's execution, the first woman hanged by the federal government, but his boat capsized on the way there, and he missed it entirely.

He told all of this fading in and out of sleep. At one point his family thought he was gone. Then he opened his eyes, asked "Where was I?", and kept going.

When the reporter finished writing and started quietly leaving the room, Summers called him back one more time. He'd forgotten something.

"Don't forget my grandchildren." Twenty-nine of them. What a beautiful way to go. Based on his headstone, it took another month so hopefully his family got to hear some of his stories as well.

A wearable diving suit, no helmet required. A French naval officer's new invention let a diver strap an oxygen tank to his back and descend without a helmet or air hose, good for about ten minutes underwater. The paper's headline: "It's Wee! Oui, Monsieur!"

A wedding that never happened. Seventeen-year-old eventual actress, Forrest Hope Walls camped for five weeks near Harry K. Thaw's Virginia estate that summer, waiting for a marriage he believed had been promised to her in writing. It wasn't some stranger's delusion, correspondence between them was real, and it started with a letter she'd written him. Thaw never showed. She eventually drove home. This one has more to it than fits here, including a lawsuit that got quietly settled outside court in 1930, so it's getting its own full treatment soon.

"The Most Beautiful Slayer." That's the actual nickname the papers gave Beulah Annan, a Chicago woman acquitted three years earlier of killing a man in her apartment, a case that later became the basis for the character Roxie Hart. Chicago. I think I can claim to have seen every version of ‘most beautiful ____’ now from 1920s newspapers.

The news on this particular day wasn't about the case at all, it was her divorce from her husband, described as having spent his last cent helping fund her defense.

The Washington Daily News ran a trivia quiz that same day. See how you do before checking the answers below.

How’d you do?

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources

Evening Star, August 21, 1926
Washington Times, August 21, 1926
Washington Daily News, August 21, 1926