Strange Times 126: His Finger Badly Chewed

Today we have slippers for the President and bullets for the police. Appropriate Native American culture on…

May 6, 1921

• Thomas A. Edison declares himself disappointed with the quality of applicants to work in his West Orange factory, saying “Men who have gone through college I find to be amazingly ignorant.”

• Invited to spend a day editing the Denver Post, crusading Reverend W. H. Wray Boyle kills stories related to prominent divorce trials and boxing, eliminates all large font, and uses the sports page to reprint “Casey at the Bat.”

• The Weather: Probably rain today; Saturday fair, with rising temperature; strong northeast winds, diminishing.

News you can’t possibly use! And I don’t think any of us should be surprised that the origins of the Camp Fire Girls are, to put it lightly, extremely problematic.

The secret is out—President Harding wears a 10-D shoe. The news came to two Camp Fire Girls, Doris and Edith Brown, of 3,130 Bailey Avenue, Kingsbridge, N. Y., 13 and 14 years old, respectively, who are going to make the President a pair of bedroom slippers of soft leather with a beaded appliqué, which will say in Camp Fire language that they are to be the property of the Great White Father.

Doris and Edith wrote to the President telling him they wanted to honor their President, that the police and secret service men had kept the Camp Fire Girls off when they tried to give him flowers, and they couldn’t make the slippers without knowing the size, and although they had read everything that had been written about him, there was not a thing about shoes, and wouldn’t he please tell them. The President’s Secretary, George Christian, sent them the information and the girls are working hard and promise that the slippers will be in the White House next week.

I can’t tell if these uniformed stick-up men are hapless or simply unlucky. In every issue of this newspaper there are stories of robbers who easily escaped with much bigger hauls, and yet these buffoons managed to catch the attention of every cop in Trenton. Perhaps taxis and army uniforms don’t make for such a clean getaway.

Every available military policeman at Camp Dix was rushed out, heavily armed early this morning to search the countryside for two soldiers believed to be from the camp who perpetrated a daring saloon holdup in Trenton, escaped in an automobile, felled one policeman who intercepted them, fought a running pistol battle with others and disappeared.

Meantime a policeman, who got an excellent look at the two while he was trying to disarm them and who was struck on the head and had his finger badly chewed, made his way to the military camp at Wrightstown, N. J., to try to identify his assailants, in case they had slipped back to the reservation. A careful checkup was made of every man absent with or without leave, and it was understood that the military authorities had a clue to the holdup men. Nonetheless, it had not been positively established that they were soldiers, though they were uniformed as such and apparently carried Government arms.

The saloon in Trenton is run by Paul Polinsky in Jersey Street. Just after midnight the two soldiers stepped from a touring taxi, entered the bar, pointed heavy automatics at the proprietor and commanded him to step away from the till. He did so, and in a second the two men had scooped $60 from the drawer and fled in their taxi.

Polinsky telephoned to the Second Precinct in Trenton, and the alarm was sent out over police wires. Meantime, Patrolman Frank Knoisky, on patrol nearby, had heard of the “stick-up” and learned that the men had fled in the direction of Camp Dix.

Knoisky, misunderstanding that the men had got on a Camden-bound trolley, took possession of a taxi standing near his post and started for Bordentown, hoping to head off the robbers.

At Crawfords Creek, near White Horse, where the trolley line emerges onto the main Bordentown road leading straight to the military reservation, Knoisky waited. In a few minutes along came the touring taxi driven by a civilian with two soldiers inside.

Knoisky stepped into the road and commanded the car to halt. The driver stopped and Knoisky started to question the soldiers. He found they were armed, but they tried to convince him they were authorized to carry pistols even though they were off the reservation. Knoisky refused to believe them and took possession of one of the pistols. As he reached for the other the man he had disarmed and the driver fell upon him, disengaging his attention for a fraction of a second—just long enough to enable the soldier still armed to bring the butt of the big automatic down on the policeman’s head.

Knoisky was stunned. The occupants of the car flung him into the roadway and sped on toward the camp. After a moment Knoisky made his way to a telephone and communicated with his precinct house.

While he was telling his story another group of policemen in an automobile came upon the taxi near Bordentown. Their command to halt was ignored and they opened fire. One of the soldiers returned the fire. Both sides emptied their guns, but in the darkness all were poor marksmen, hampered as they were in the swaying cars, and no one was hit. The taxi eluded the second band of patrolmen and disappeared.

Police headquarters in Trenton communicated with Camp Dix as soon as Sergeant Hebner on duty there got the alarm. The camp authorities ordered all the M. P.’s on duty to undertake the search. Both uniformed men and detectives were sent from Trenton headquarters to aid in the hunt.