Do you like our new look? Thanks to everyone who reached out to say something nice about it yesterday. It had been a minute since I started this work, and wanted to freshen things up to match what is to come this next year…

To celebrate, today’s papers were filled with all kinds of strange. A scam so absurd that of course it was rooted in something real, a haircut for a statue, a functional model airplane, and a paid ad for a “missing wife”, “no questions asked” (but I have plenty).

First up, in Chicago, three confidence men had a diplomatic post to sell: the ambassadorship to Hungary. That’s right. The buyer, a man named John Bolog of Raven Street, paid $2,300 for it, sealed with a document formatted like an official bill of sale, gold seal and all.

Here's the detail that makes the con genuinely clever rather than just brazen. Bolog later told police the sellers had pointed him toward a real, currently unfolding scandal to make their pitch credible: Frank L. Smith, the Republican who'd just won Illinois's Senate primary that spring, was at that very moment under a live Senate investigation for accepting a $125,000 campaign contribution from a utilities magnate whose company he regulated. If a "slush fund" could buy a man a Senate seat, the con men reasoned with Bolog, why couldn't a payment buy an ambassadorship? It wasn't a random lie. It was current events, weaponized.

They didn't stop at the sale. The men also told Bolog he was authorized to collect $25,000 from Chicago's Hungarian community before departing for his new post. He believed it completely, told friends about his good fortune, and started preparing his "collecting tour." That's when, as the Globe put it, his simple faith was shattered. Police arrested two of the three men, John Soerich of Pittsburgh and John Steiner of Chicago. Bolog never left the city, let alone became anyone's ambassador.

Literally right next to that story, a Los Angeles sculptor named Caspar Gruenfeld gave a marble statue a haircut. Literally, he bobbed its hair to keep it fashionable ahead of an industrial show, styling it to match Marie Chappelle, the real woman who'd modeled for it in the first place but since had her hair cut. A hundred years before beauty filters, a sculptor was already updating a woman in stone just to keep up with trends.

Across the Atlantic: apprentices at the Cranwell airdrome near London built what the papers called the smallest gasoline-driven model airplane anyone had seen, small enough for a man to hold up with two hands, and powerful enough to actually fly under its own engine rather than just glide. British airmen gathered to prep it for a test flight, and the little machine managed to stay airborne for a full fifteen minutes at a stretch. Not much of a story on its own, more a nice reminder that 1926 was a year everyone, professionals and apprentices alike, seemed to be chasing some version of flight.

And then there's this. A classified ad, paid for and placed in multiple newspapers by a man named Mike Baleski: "I Am Looking for My Wife." His wife, Bertha, had left on July 22nd, taking their two children with her. He offered a $25 reward for information on her whereabouts, and closed with a line addressed straight to her: "Return to me, no questions will be asked."

He may not ask questions, but I will. Did he simply want her back without an argument? I’m guessing she preferred to stay hidden for a reason? Either someone else, or his treatment of her? Either way, I’ve been looking at the papers for 297 days in a row now, and I’ve never seen anything like this.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources:
Washington Times, August 10, 1926
The Boston Globe, August 9, 1926
South Bend Times, August 10, 1926