Miscellany, Nov. 13, 1939

Napper

In New Brighton, Pa., Health Officer Fred Myers, called by neighbors to investigate a house in which gas lights had shone night and day for two weeks, found a dead man sitting in a chair, an open book beside him. Said the man’s widow: “I thought there was something wrong. He wouldn’t talk to me.”

Anniversary

In Cincinnati, Ohio, Hobo King Jeff Davis and his wife celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. Reminisced King Jeff: “I was 16 and she was 15. . . . We wrote ’18’ on two slips of paper and put them in our shoes. Then when the marriage license clerk asked our age we truthfully said we were over 18.”

Tribute

In Cincinnati, Ohio, schoolboys, aged 9 to 12, organized a “Black X” gang, exacted tribute of 1¢ to 20¢ from their schoolmates for allowing them, to go to school without getting beaten up. One mother who received a note (“We want 15 cents by Monday or else we will go to town”) kept her boy out of school for three days. Police discovered he had written it himself.

Defects

In Washington, D. C., visiting Philippine Assemblyman Villarama told newspapermen that there were only two things wrong with the United States: the national debt is too large and no one knows how to clean white shoes properly.

Boss

In San Quentin, Calif., prison officials admitted why one prisoner (alone among 6,000) was allowed to wear a beard. Louis Gianopolis, an old shepherd, when taken to the prison barber to be shaved, screamed: “You’re not the boss here, God is boss and you will be punished.” The barber cried: “I’m the boss!” with that fell dead of a heart attack.

Eater

In Los Angeles, 17-year-old Luis Flores wormed through a hole between boards shuttering a grocery store under alteration. Safely inside, he wolfed so much food that he could not get out through the hole, had to telephone police to rescue him.

Orphans

In Philadelphia, trustees of an estate were refused civic permission to carry out their trust: to erect bronze statues of four Revolutionary War generals in front of Independence Hall. Puzzled, they turned the statues of Generals LaFayette, Montgomery, Pulaski and Steuben over to the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court.