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From the September 23, 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Vienna — Dr. Serge Voronoff of monkey gland and rejuvenation fame, announced today he was confident he could create a superman if he were permitted to transplant chimpanzee glands to a 10-year-old boy.
‘If any mother would entrust her child to me, she might be the means of establishing a new type of human far superior to the normal man.'”
Tags: Serge Voronoff
From the July 6, 1937 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Spring Valley, N.Y. — Police Chief Abe Stern led a search in woods near here today for a reputed nudist colony where, he said, might be found the answer to the death of a man Sunday two miles from town.
The body, head bashed, was unclothed except for socks and shoes.”
Tags: Police Chief Abe Stern
From the March 30, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Sayville, L.I. — Florence Gamage, 14-months-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Gamage of this place, was allowed the range of the back door yard yesterday. The child was alone for a short time, and amused herself by thrusting bits of grass through the wire meshes of the rabbit hutch. The animals were eager to grasp the first evidences of spring, but the baby got her fingers wedged in the wire meshes and could not pull them out.
When the animals had devoured the herbage they began to gnaw at the ends of the baby’s imprisoned fingers.
The screams of the child brought the mother quickly to the rescue, who upon liberating her child’s hand found the end of one finger eaten through to the bone.”
Tags: Florence Gamage, Mr. Howard Gamage, Mrs. Howard Gamage
When they weren’t busy trying to establish a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Machines, F.T.Marinetti and his fellow perplexing Futurists of the early 20th century were thumbing their noses at whatever seemed conventional, even sleep and music. Two brief tales of their offbeat activities from articles which appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
From January 7, 1925:
From October 26, 1913:
From the December 6, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A Colorado lawyer deliberately blew himself up with dynamite while smoking a cigar.”
From the April 29, 1888 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The newest attraction for a dime museum is a man from Terre Haute who can drink thirty gallons of water a day.”
There had been other robots before the late 1930s, tin men who’d greeted conventioners and accomplished all manner of parlor trick, but Westinghouse’s Elektro took the mild amusements of early robotics national at the 1939 World’s Fair in NYC and in subsequent tours of the country. In addition to “playing” musical instruments and blowing up balloons, Elektro could smoke cigarettes, which the kids loved, because emphysema. Never reduced to the recycling bin, Elektro continues his travels to this day. The hacking, teeth-stained machine is one of the several displays of nascent artificial humans mentioned in a World’s Fair preview in the April 9, 1939 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
From the December 31, 1922 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Paris — A new toque is made of owl feathers with the owl’s head in front. It strikingly resembles the bird.”
Charles “Chuck” Connors was full of life, and other stuff.
The so-called “Mayor of Chinatown” was an Irishman called “Insect” by his neighbors until his penchant for cooking chuck steaks over open fires in the streets earned him a new nickname. An inveterate self-promoter, he was a tour guide, vaudevillian, boxer, bouncer and raconteur. Some of his stories were even true.
One that wasn’t: For a fee, he showed tourists “authentic” Chinatown opium dens, which were often merely apartments he rented and filled with “extras” paid to pretend to be dragon chasers. The crafty man realized that urban narratives, told just so, could be commodified.
Although he initially wasn’t so appreciated by his Chinese neighbors, Connors eventually earned their esteem and his blarney was sadly missed when it was permanently silenced. An article in the May 10, 1913 Brooklyn Daily Eagle announced his death.
Tags: Chuck Connors
From the June 19, 1952 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Pittsburgh — Millard F. Wright, 42, was back in jail today, convinced that a delicate brain operation has not cured his ‘urge to steal.’
The former Leechburg, Pa., resident, who risked his life in 1949 so the operation could be performed, was arrested last night and held in connection with a string of jewelry store burglaries.”
Tags: Millard F. Wright
No matter how patriotic a human cannonball may have been, it’s difficult to imagine much good would have come to that person if he or she accepted Benito Mussolini’s invitation to serve their country in the Italo-Ethiopian War. Il Duce’s odd request was recorded in an article in the August 22, 1935 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Tags: Benito Mussolini, Edmund Zacchini
From October 13, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Topeka, Kan. — Rules for the guidance of kissers were issued today by the Kansas Board of Health in co-operation with the United States Public Health Service.
Never kiss in crowded places or in a poorly ventilated room, the instructions say, but if you must kiss, take a hot mustard foot bath and avoid drafts as precautions against colds.
Other rules:
Guard against sudden changes in temperature when kissing. Kissing in a coonskin coat one minute and lighter apparel the next is extremely dangerous.
Don’t kiss any person who has chills and fever.
At a party where postoffice and similar games are played, be sure to gargle frequently.”
John du Pont had nothing on Jacques Lebaudy, the so-called “Emperor of the Sahara.” Lebaudy was the wealthy French scion of a sugar fortune, and due to dollar signs and decimal points, he was labeled eccentric rather than insane, despite stints in a sanitarium. In 1903, he embarked on perhaps the most eccentric-millionaire scheme ever, creating his own ad hoc navy and “invading” Africa, moving several hundred houses with him from Europe to enjoy the comforts of home in the desert. His ragtag “cabinet” proved inept in their new land, and the mission had to be aborted, the planned railroad never built.
Lebaudy’s behavior just grew more erratic from there. When his beleaguered wife eventually shot him to death in their Long Island home after the crazed millionaire decided to take their teenage daughter as his wife (the privilege of an emperor, he believed), no indictments were forthcoming. An excerpt follows from the report of his murder in the January 12, 1919 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Tags: Jacqueline Lebaudy, Jacques Lebaudy, Marguerite Augustine Lebaudy
From the January 24, 1886 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Cleveland, O.–Michael Browloski, a Bohemian, and his family, consisting of his wife and six children, are lying very sick at their home on Union Street from the effects of eating raw pork. Browloski, a few days ago bought a quantity of pork, of which the family partook liberally, and were immediately made very ill. A physician was called and an examination showed that the meat was strongly impregnated with trichinae. Medicines were administered, and yesterday the family had so far recovered that they were thought to be out of danger, when they again partook of the diseased pork and Browloski and his wife are now lying at the point of death.”
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was many things in Mussolini’s Italy: fascist, modernist, machine-lover and misogynist. As the leader of the Futurist Movement, he was a crackpot with an aluminum tie and tin books who deified machinery and automation and extolled the virtues of war (“the world’s only hygiene”). He not only favored violence being visited upon many institutions and people but also wished to legally protect technology, the kind that made Italo Balbo’s office hum. In the following article from the October 8, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, one of his minions, Signor Azari, proposes a society to guard machines as if they were family pets. Two interesting things: The question of robots having legal rights has come into vogue again in our time, and the idea that an autonomous society would eliminate economic inequality has proven false so far in our digital era.
Tags: F.T. Mainetti, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Signor Azari
From the November 18, 1926 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“After driving an unidentified woman passenger back and forth from 167th St. and Jerome Ave., the Bronx, to City Island for more than three hours this morning, Walter Clery, a chauffeur, stopped his taxi at a gasoline station at Williamsbridge and Boston Roads to replenish his supply. He looked into the cab and saw the woman apparently asleep. Failing in his attempts to rouse her, he drove to the Wakefield police station. She was pronounced dead. The woman was described as 40 years old, weighing 140 pounds, 5 feet 1 inch tall. She had bobbed brown hair and light blue eyes. She wore a black sealskin coat with brown fur collar and cuffs, a Poiret twill henna dress, tan stockings and black shoes. In her leather purse was found 13 cents.”
Tags: Walter Clery
At the conclusion of World War II, America collected as many Nazi rocketeers as we could find and dispatched them to Huntsville, Alabama, to do their voodoo. We dreamed that our new friends would help us develop a space program the world would envy, and while there were bumps along the way, that’s essentially what happened. In the first blush of our post-war power, unbridled enthusiasm for exploration was at high throttle, as evidenced by this article from July 30, 1946 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Tags: Maj. P.C. Calhoun
From the July 9, 1922 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The fat man who walked from Danville, Ill., to Los Angeles, crossing the Mojave desert without water, succeeded in losing eighty-one pounds. His condition is critical, but he may survive. We hope so. He’s a fine object lesson.”
From the November 14, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Miss Patricia Royer of Cleveland, Ohio, who for nine years made her living fighting men of her own weight in the boxing ring, has entered Fenn College to study salesmanship. She was born in England.”
Tags: Patricia Royer
Mark Twain, America’s second greatest comic ever in my estimation (after George Carlin), died of a heart attack 104 years ago. He lived a life writ large, won fame and lost fortunes, and, most importantly, reminded us what we could be if we chose to live as one, traveling as he did from Confederate sympathizer to a place of enlightenment. I think of Twain what I thought of Pete Seeger and Odetta when they died: You can’t really replace such people because they have the history and promise of the nation coursing through their veins. He was eulogized in the April 22. 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle; the opening sections excerpted below follow him from birth to his emergence as a “stand-up” and his shift to author of books.
From the May 8, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Mrs. Mary Hannigan of 83 Division Ave. today mourned the death of her daughter, Julia, the little girl who wanted to be a boy. And she is filled with bitterness because, she said, her daughter died of a broken heart, not the pneumonia listed on the death certificate at St. Catherine’s Hospital.
Too much notoriety killed the little girl, the mother says. The notoriety was gained by what the mother describes as an ‘innocent prank.’ Julia, who was buried on Saturday, decided last October that she wanted to be a boy. She disappeared from her home. A week later she was found. She had cut her hair, donned boy’s clothing and earned her living caddying.
But the little girl brooded over what she thought was the disgrace she had brought on her family. Her resistance was weakened. She caught a cold a short time ago which developed into pneumonia.”
Tags: Julia Hannigan, Mrs. Mary Hannigan
It wasn’t a commercial triumph like the organ named for him, but Laurens Hammond’s “Teleview” projection system was a critical triumph in early 3D films. The set-up was installed in Manhattan’s Selwyn Theater in the early 1920s, and moviegoers were treated to screenings of The Man From Mars, a stereoscopic film made especially for Teleview, which was shown on a large screen and on individual viewing devices attached at each seat. It apparently looked pretty great. Alas, the equipment and installation was costly, and no other cinemas adopted the technology. An article follows about the apparatus from the December 17, 1922 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Tags: Laurens Hammond
From the September 4, 1909 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Freeport, L.I. — While walking along the shore at High Hill Beach, Gibson Wanser and Garret Verity, whose homes are at Seaford, L.I., came across a rubber boot, which Wanser picked up. He was surprised at the weight of the boot and the two men became curious. With a knife, the boot was ripped open and a human foot was discovered inside. There were two pair of heavy woolen socks on the foot which had been severed at the ankle. It is believed the owner was drowned in the winter and that the salt water preserved the foot intact. The men showed it to the inhabitants in the vicinity and then buried it in the sand.”
Tags: Garret Verity, Gibson Wanser
Two years before piloting the flight that killed himself and the great comic Will Rogers, aviator Wiley Post completed a ’round-the-world trip that was solo save for a helpful robot, an autopilot device fashioned by Sperry. It wasn’t like he could sleep comfortably while his “co-pilot” took over the controls, but it did allow Post to journey the long distance navigator-less. An article from the July 15, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle published just prior to the mission.
Tags: Wiley Post
