If I told you that you got a job as a traffic cop, and needed to start right away, would you? How inebriated would you have to be to say yes? Well, let’s meet Harold Berger. Because in August, 1926, he found out the answers to those questions.
The Job That Wasn't a Job
His friends found him drunk and, instead of taking him home, made a different call. They dug up a burlesque stage costume, a fake police uniform from some theater production, dressed him in it, and told him he'd landed a job directing traffic on the corner. Starting now. One of them even played the part of a police chief to sell it.
Harold was all in. He walked to the corner and started directing real traffic in his fake uniform.
*not Harold Berger. “Police officer directing traffic at 4th and Pike, Seattle, circa 1920;” Webster & Stevens
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That's when an actual plainclothes police officer showed up and asked what exactly was going on. Harold, fully committed, tried to arrest him. The officer asked him to call it in. Harold couldn't even get the police call box open. So the real officer opened it himself, called in a disorderly conduct charge, and brought Harold to the precinct personally.
He was fined ten dollars.
Sometimes you just need better friends, Harold.
Also in the Papers Today
So Mussolini CAN smile! A wire photo ran with exactly that caption, showing the Italian premier grinning during a visit to the naval ship Cavour in Rome. The paper felt the need to point out that this was, apparently, unusual enough to note.
Alaska Daily Empire, Aug 17, 1926
The new "bobbed-hair bandit." Eighteen-year-old Mary Elizabeth Pearson spent the summer driving a cab in Philadelphia, and her friends had taken to calling her, jokingly, a "bandit," a nod to the real Bobbed-Haired Bandit, a young Brooklyn woman named Celia Cooney who'd made national headlines a couple years earlier for a string of armed robberies. The caption's own joke: it isn't really fair to compare taxi drivers to bandits, but here we are.
Washington Times, Aug 17, 1926
That Struggle for a Garden. A syndicated editorial cartoon by Quin Hall ran the same day, using a garden metaphor for household budgeting. One figure waters "Income" through a hose into a bucket labeled "Expenses," while a second figure tends a separate line running to "Savings," with the whole scene captioned as an ongoing struggle. Simple, a little corny, and apparently a message that needed making in 1926 as much as it does now.
South Bend News-Times, Aug 17, 1926
Extra Bits
Harold's costume is described specifically as a "stage uniform of a burlesque policeman," suggesting it likely came from a local theater production rather than being improvised.
The friend who posed as the fictional chief is named in the article as "Chief Laubenheimer," almost certainly a joke name.
The real officer who arrested Harold, John Redick, was in plainclothes at the time, meaning Harold had no way of knowing who he actually was when he tried to arrest him back.
Sources
Milwaukee Leader, August 17, 1926
Alaska Daily Empire, August 17, 1926
Washington Times, August 17, 1926
See you tomorrow. – Chris