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From the April 11, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Leadville, Col. — John Sullivan committed suicide by drinking three ounces of carbolic acid. Sullivan accidentally swallowed a twenty-dollar gold piece several weeks ago. This depressed him so that he ended his life.”
Tags: John Sullivan
From the December 8, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Ravenna, Ohio — Addie Potter Chapman and Glenn E. Colton, who live in this place, were married to-day before the open grave of Mrs. Lydia Potter Chapman, mother of the bride. The ceremony was performed by the Rev. Dr. A.D. Palmer, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, who officiated at the funeral, and having performed the last rites over the body of the mother, turned to the young couple at the grave. The body was in the grave and the grave diggers were ready to throw on the dirt, but waited until after the wedding ceremony was performed. Before her death Mrs. Chapman requested that her daughter be wedded at her grave.”
Tags: Addie Potter Chapman, Glenn E. Colton, Mrs. Lydia Potter Chapman, Rev. Dr. A.D. Palmer
While I’m sure Adolf Hitler’s personal yacht, the Aviso Grille, had some historical value, it probably shouldn’t have been employed as a floating tourist trap, even if the proceeds went to charity. But that’s what happened during the end of the 1940s, soon before the craft was smashed up and sold for scrap. Judging by an article from the June 16, 1949 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which uses some strangely admiring adjectives to describe one of history’s very worst villains, the Führer was unsurprisingly not a fun cruise director, at least according to his former staff, some of whom sailed with the vessel when it made its voyage to New York. Postscript: When the boat was sold in pieces, Hitler’s shitter wound up in a New Jersey gas-station bathroom.
Tags: Adolf Hitler
From the November 18, 1889 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“John Snyder, a big, burly peddler, who on Saturday night bit the head off a turkey in a saloon at 38 Varet Street, was arraigned before Justice Kenna this morning on a charge of cruelty to animals. The details were published in yesterday’s Eagle. Snyder pleaded guilty.
‘It was on a wager,’ exclaimed the prisoner. ‘The owner of the turkey was satisfied.’
‘But I suppose the turkey had no say in the matter,’ remarked Justice Kenna.
Snyder was sent to jail for twenty-nine days.”
Tags: John Snyder, Justice Kenna
Before method acting, Lon Chaney had his own method.
A master of makeup and body contortion, Chaney would go to any end to transform himself for each role, a character actor who became a star, eventually earning the sobriquet, “The Man of a Thousand Faces.” Like most people born in 1883, he had no reason to expect a long life and seemed in a rush, becoming a Pike’s Peak tour guide when he was only 12. The son of parents who could not hear or speak, he learned to be an expert mime at home, bringing this talent to the stage at 17, and, soon enough, the screen. A talented comic and singer, Chaney became best known for macabre roles in Hollywood, always disappearing into the performance. He was just as inscrutable off-screen, living quietly, even reclusively, refusing interviews, feeling he owed the public no twists beyond the turn. His grave was unmarked and remains so. The following is the report of his death from the August 26, 1930 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Tags: Lon Chaney
From the May 21, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Long Beach, Cal. — Three little chicks belonging to W.B. McCracken, yesterday picked their way into the world after an unusual experience. For thirteen days the mother hen had been busily attending to her sitting duties when a hungry snake drove her from the nest and gorged itself with three eggs.
The snake lingered about the premises and McCracken shot it. Wondering at its odd proportions, he performed an operation and found the eggs. They were placed back under the hen and at the end of the regulation time were hatched.”
Tags: W.B. McCracken
It sounds odd, but it seemed to some in the Roaring Twenties that the best way to get to the airport was by plane. In an article in the February 19, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, an engineer predicted that soon city dwellers would be able order up small planes that could take off from or land on midtown buildings which had been retrofitted as small airports, saving themselves from the veritable tortoise-like transport of trains and taxis.
From the September 16, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Oklahoma City — George Palmer yesterday reached home after a walk of 8,500 miles. He started from here the first of last December, walked to San Francisco, thence to New York, and thence home.”
Tags: George Palmer
For John Wanamaker, being America’s first great merchant wasn’t merely about ringing cash registers. It was also about innovation in a number of ways, many of which weren’t directly reflected in the bottom line.
The owner and operator of a pair of humongous department stores, one opened in 1876 in Philadelphia and the other 20 years later in Manhattan, Wanamaker believed that rather than than looking at your customer as a short-term mark, you should cultivate a long-standing relationship based on trust and satisfaction–not the conventional wisdom at the time–and introduced the price tag and allowed money-back guarantees. He was the first to wisely exploit the power of print advertising, but he sold you what he’d promised.
He also turned his emporiums into experiments in communications and technology, having telephones in his stores as early as 1879, allowing his roofs to be used as launching pads for balloonists in aviation’s pioneering days and installing into his sprawling shops wireless radio stations (customers listened to live reports of the sinking of the Titanic). Having the world’s largest playable pipe organ in his on-site theater and a working train car suspended from the ceiling to carry children around the toy department were nice flourishes as well. Wanamaker didn’t spoil his customers by starving his employees: He paid them holiday bonuses and gave them medical care and athletic facilities and other benefits. His passing was reported in an article in the December 12, 1922 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, an excerpt from which follows.
Tags: John Wanamaker
From the March 26, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Beaver Falls — When the bock beer signs made their appearance here, Joseph Bouva, an Italian fish dealer, made a wager that he could drink 250 glasses of the beer in three days. He won the wager, but is now in the hospital. He is dying.”
Tags: Joseph Bouva
Harold Robbins would have bragged if nine female typists had quit in shock while working on one of his novels, but it was different story in a different era for James Joyce. Getting Ulysses past censors was an arduous task, and he might have tossed the pages aside for good if it wasn’t for the intervention of Shakespeare & Co. owner Sylvia Beach. She gambled her own money and prodded Joyce through many iterations of his work on the way to the printing press, bringing the novel to Parisians in 1922. The volume was a smash hit in France and was soon reselling for $700 a copy. An article about Beach follows from the December 24, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, timed to the belated un-banning of the book in America.
Tags: James Joyce, Sylvia Beach
From the April 3, 1912 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Commack, L.I. — An escaped lunatic from the Central Islip State Hospital, caught in the act of devouring a live hen, created considerable excitement several miles to the west of here yesterday morning, leading a party of farm hands in a chase covering nearly a mile before he was finally captured.”
An article in the November 22, 1939 Brooklyn Daily Eagle tells of technological unemployment coming to the kissing sector in the late 1930s, when Max Factor Jr., scion of the family cosmetics fortune and creator of Pan-Cake make-up which was favored by early film stars, created robots which would peck to perfection all day, allowing him test out new lipsticks to his heart’s content. Bad news for professional puckerers Joseph Roberts and Miss June Baker, of course, but such is the nature of progress. The brand-new robots were capable of kissing 1,200 times an hour. Ah, young love!
The top two photos show the senior Max Factor demonstrating his Beauty Micrometer device and touching up French silent-film star Renée Adorée. The last one captures two actresses wearing the make-up Junior created especially for black-and-white TV.
Tags: Francis Factor, Frank Factor, Joseph Roberts, June Baker, Max Factor, Max Factor Jr.
There were quite a few fliers who claimed to have solved aviation sooner than the Wright brothers–Gustave Whitehead and Samuel Pierpont Langley and many more–but only one was a cousin to Buffalo Bill Cody and died while cooking naked, a recluse in Hawaii. His name was W.D. Custead. As the Texas Reader recalls, the end was bitter for the once-enterprising aviator:
On March 17, 1933 a Hawaiian newspaper reported that the Hermit of Nankuli had been found dead in his shack. He was known for living in almost absolute seclusion and being hostile to visitors. Those who did chance to visit were shocked to find that he wore no clothing when at home.
What readers of the Hawaiian newspaper didn’t know was that this ignominious end was not William Custead’s only fifteen minutes of fame. Thirty-five years earlier newspapers across Texas were celebrating his prowess as an inventor.•
Custead presented his airship plans to the War Department in 1899 and then continued to tinker with his flying machine. In 1903, the Wrights won the race to the sky (though some wonder), and the foiled, despondent aviator responded by walking out on his family and becoming an itinerant, ultimately landing in Hawaii.
A brief article follows from the April 13, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle about Custead before his dreams nosed down.
Tags: W.D. Custead, William Custead
From the March 31, 1889 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A girl who eats paper is the newest attraction in a dime museum in Boston.”
From the November 7, 1926 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Paris — The world’s record for blood transfusion by one person is credited to Raymond Briez. He has just submitted to the operation for the hundredth time. Since November, 1924, Briez has given five and a half gallons of his blood for suffering human beings, without recompense of any kind except the satisfaction of having done a good deed.”
Tags: Raymond Briez
First William James Sidis amazed the world, then he disappointed it.
A Harvard student in 1910 at just 11 years old, he was considered the most astounding prodigy of early 20th-century America, a genius of mathematics and much more, reading at two and typing at three, who had been trained methodically from birth by his father, a psychiatrist and professor. It was a lot to live up to. There was a dalliance with radical politics at the end of his teens that threw him off the path to greatness, resulting in a sedition trial. In the aftermath, he quietly disappeared into an undistinguished life.
When it was learned in 1937 that Sidis was living a threadbare existence of no great import, merely a clerk, he was treated to a public accounting which was laced with no small amount of schadenfreude. He sued the New Yorker over an article by Gerald L. Manley and James Thurber (gated) which detailed his failed promise. He was paid $3,000 to settle the case by the magazine’s publishers just prior to his death in 1944.
Two articles follow from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle about Sidis’ uncommon life.
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From the March 20, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
From the July 18, 1944 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Tags: Boris Sidis, William James Sidis
From the May 30, 1871 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“During the days of the resurrectionists or body-snatchers, when graveyards were subjected to pillage for supplying anatomists with subjects for dissection, the teeth from the dead bodies formed a frequent article of sale for dentists. Sometimes graves were opened for the teeth alone, as being small and easily concealed articles. Mr. Cooper, the surgeon, relates an instance of a man feigning to look for a burial place for his wife, and thus obtaining access to the vault of a meeting-house, the trap-door of which he unbolted; at night he let himself down into the vault, and pocketed the front teeth of the whole of the buried congregation, by which he cleared fifty pounds!”
Tags: Mr. Cooper, the Surgeon
From the February 12, 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“After the death of the President, his body was carted about the nation in the world’s largest funeral march. A man was detailed daily to brush the dust from his face after he had lain in state in various cities.
His body was moved 19 times between the time of his burial and 1900.”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln
Tubes would eventually bring mail to every home, but they weren’t of the pneumatic variety. In a predictive piece he wrote for the December 30, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, U.S. Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith offered that the type of pneumatic tubing system utilized in early-1900s New York City might someday be linked to every individual residence. He was right in the big picture, even if he got the details wrong.
Tags: Charles Emory Smith
From the January 23, 1899 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Havana — General Fitzburgh Lee in command of Havana province, has ordered the men of his corps, at the request of the Chief Surgeon, not to keep human skulls and bones in their tents. The soldiers have been taking skulls and cross bones from the piles near Quemados and Colon Cemeteries, their custom being to rent a grave for a year or so from the managers of the cemetery and then dig up the bones and pile them outside.”
Tags: General Fitzburgh Lee
The Wright Brothers seemingly ceased to exist the moment after the Flyer lifted off in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, frozen forever in the moment of their greatest accomplishment, the height of their careers. Wilbur, the elder, died of typhoid inside of a decade. Orville, who manned the landmark flights, never handled the controls again after 1918. (Howard Hughes was the pilot for his last air trip as a passenger in 1944.) Perhaps because of competing claims to the title of “first flight” or maybe because the supersonic age had passed him by, Orville’s obituary in the January 31, 1948 Brooklyn Daily Eagle didn’t have the fanfare one might expect.
Tags: Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright
From the June 24, 1946 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Adelaide, Australia, reports that a blood donor had such a high percentage of alcohol in his veins that the recipient immediately became intoxicated.”
Just as talkies were announcing themselves across America, genius Russian silent film director Sergei Eisenstein was dejectedly departing Hollywood, no richer financially or creatively for his failed attempts at pleasing U.S. movie producers. An article in the May 1, 1932 Brooklyn Daily Eagle made clear his disenchantment with the business end of show business and the automaton nature of the burgeoning studio system.
From the June 12, 1953 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Santiago, Chile — Alicia Torres, owner of a slaughter house charged with using dog meat in sausages, testified in her own defense that ‘dog meat is good for rheumatism.'”
Tags: Alicia Torres