Strange Times 117: Two Ton Sea Monster

Strange Times is a newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. If you like it, you will probably like Westside Saints, my latest Jazz Age mystery novel, as well.

Today brings giant fish, mistaken cremation, lunacy by taxation, and a thrilling escape from a Soviet jail. Adapt American hobo methods on…

April 27, 1921

• In Constantinople, a White Russian colonel delivers a beating to the Soviet envoy after becoming enraged at the sight of the Communist drinking champagne.

• Among a general round-up of the gamblers and ballplayers connected to the plot to throw the 1919 World Series, several key conspirators flee to Mexico.

• Unable to choose between two suitors, both of whom she already had marriage licenses for, Victoria Zina of Stoneco, New York, allows her children to choose their new stepfather.

• The Havana Special arrives at Pennsylvania Station, winning the race with Garfield A. Wood’s motor yacht, which has not yet arrived in New York.

• The Weather: Cloudy today, showers this afternoon or tonight; Thursday showers; fresh southeast to west winds.

There’s really nothing to say besides, well, that’s a big fish. Or fish-thing. Or whatever.

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J., April 26.—Old sea dogs, whose chief pastime is to spin yarns of gigantic fish they have landed, took two looks and then threw up their hands today when Cap’n Clarence Starn’s craft docked with a black sea monster weighing more than two tons. It was caught yesterday in a mackerel net sixty miles off the coast.

The first, which is only twenty feet long, was hauled aboard with a tackle after putting up a stiff battle in which the sea was whipped white. None of the sea veterans could name its species.

This is like the twist ending to a Damon Runyon story, and there is little praise higher than that.

Unter Uns, an organization of Hoboken bartenders and waiters, provided an elaborate funeral a few days ago for Anton Henry Madler, an inmate of the Laurel Hills Almshouse, who had been head waiter at a number of the older resorts in Hoboken. Following out Madler’s wishes, expressed when ill health first forced him to enter the institution, the body was cremated.

On Monday Madler strolled into the bar of Henry Ritter’s saloon and asked for a drink. An investigation disclosed that the man who died in the almshouse was Edward H. Mahart and that the names had been confused over the telephone.

Madler always kept a Prince Albert coat and a pair of striped trousers to replace his almshouse uniform when he came to Hoboken. He was annoyed when he learned that his friends had turned these prize possessions over to the undertake in order that the corpse might be cremated in fitting raiment.

Useful evidence that the mainstream press has never known how to write about women, or mental health, or taxes, or anything.

BUFFALO, N.Y., April 26.—Papers filled in the County Clerk’s office here today state that Ethel J. Mahan, owner of a grocery, became so worried over the fear that the Government would confiscate her business because of possible errors in her income tax report that she lost her mind. She was committed to the State Hospital for the Insane by Acting County Judge Ottoway.

The hero of this ripping adventure yarn is, I am not kidding, the same Merian C. Cooper who directed King Kong.

RIGA, April 26 (Associated Press).—Captain Merion [sic] C. Cooper of Jacksonville, Fla., the Kosciusko Squadron flier who was shot down on the Polish front and captured by the Russians last July, escaped from a prison camp near Moscow on April 12 and arrived in Riga today. Captain Cooper was accompanied here by two Polish officers.

The American aviator, while serving with the Poles in their operations last summer against the Bolsheviki, disappeared behind the Soviet lines in Galicia on July 18. No word of him was heard for some time, but it was learned last September that he was a prisoner in Russia. Numerous efforts had been made since to obtain his release, but without success.

His airplane was brought down by Cossacks connected with General Budenny’s forces, it develops.

Captain Cooper had made an earlier attempt at escape, and succeeded in getting free for several days while still near the Polish front. When he was recaptured he was sent after a few weeks to Moscow, where he was considered, not a Polish, but an American prisoner. He was in several prison camps, and worked last Winter shoveling snow on the railroads. Ultimately he was transferred to a work camp of prisoners. He did not give his captors his real name, passing himself off as a Corporal under an assumed name.

He finally learned that his identity was about to be revealed through the efforts of some outsiders to obtain his release, and he decided to take a chance of escape, together with some Polish friends, by whom he was scarcely able to make himself understood because of language difficulties. In dealing with the peasants with whom he came in contact after his escape, he represented the two Poles who accompanied him as former Austrian-Polish prisoners of war on their way home, while he said that he was a German prisoner similarly homeward bound.

The railway bridges on the way to the frontier were heavily guarded, and the little party had to make long detours at every stream. During the last seven days he and his companions had to walk through a heavily wooded country. Near the frontier they hid for thirty-six hours above a brick stove in a peasant’s hut. They parted with their shoes and overcoats to speculators, who for this consideration arranged the smuggling of the fugitives into Latvia.

The travels of the trio before leaving Russia were beset with difficulties. They had no compass and only sufficient money to buy a couple of pounds of bread. Their journey along the railway made necessary a constant dodging of guards, and they parted from time to time with various articles of clothing for food before the final giving up of their footwear and heavy coats.

“We adapted the American hobo methods to our circumstances,” said Captain Cooper. “We jumped freight trains at night when we could, and walked through the woods when we couldn’t get a ride, sleeping mostly in the daytime. Everywhere the peasants were kind to us.”

Captain Cooper said he thought the Bolsheviki would continue long in power as an extraordinary commission running the country. He found the peasants against them.

He declared that the American prisoners in Moscow were receiving very little food, especially Captain Kilpatrick of the Red Cross, with whom Captain Cooper lived at the prison camp. Some of the food received was in bad condition.

Captain Cooper is going to Warsaw. He is bronzed and wears a heavy beard. When he arrived he was clothed in blue overalls.