Strange Times 136: "Let Me Die!"

Today we have bees, baseball, and bad faith journalism. Leap heroically into the Hudson on…

May 16, 1921

• Sing Sing convict Roman Leondowski, “whose sanity was restored seven weeks ago by the removal of a bullet from a brain,” tells of the hardships endured as a mentally ill man in prison, complaining that an inability to do work shifts has meant he’s had only 48¢ to his name for the last four years.

• Aviatrix Laura Bromwell sets a world record for loop-the-loops performed by a woman, breaking her own record of 87 by performing 199.

• As the controversy continues around Thomas Edison’s bizarre entrance exam questions, the inventor’s son admits that, despite being an expert on engineering, he would have failed the test.

• The head of the Bedford Reformatory for Women admits to having an “Edison List” of questions that determines his inmates’ fitness for work, including asking them to explain absurd statements and name the days of the week.

• The Weather: Partly cloudy and cooler today; fair tomorrow.

So much good stuff squeezed into three sentences here! I’m enamored of the phrase “vigorous action on the part of a mounted patrolman.” I imagine him scaring off the swarm by performing strongman poses.

Also: “Bees! Bees! Millions of bees!”

BOSTON, May 15.—A rally by a swarm of bees that descended upon a baseball diamond in the Hyde Park district today threatened for several minutes to prove disastrous to both teams and to the several hundred persons in the stand.

The game, which was between Cecil W. Fogg post of the American Legion and the Mount Hope Athletic Association, was held up, while the players and spectators dived for cover. After vigorous action on the part of a mounted patrolman the bees departed and the game was resumed.

This story presented both because saving people from drowning is exciting, and because it’s interesting to compare the various ways the Times belittles and exoticizes two characters of what should be a thrilling, heroic yarn. Zaron is mocked for being suicidal, while Green has his dialogue written in dialect and is denied the honor of being identified by his last name on second usage. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to cram so much cruel stereotyping into such a short piece, but the 1921 Times is efficient in everything, even its racism.

The buyers’ strike, it seems, has extended even to the privilege of paying to have one’s hat checked outside instead of occupying another chair in the restaurant with it. So Massion Zaron, a Turk who holds the checking concession for a Broadway dining places, worried and worried over dwindling business until he decided life in his line had become just as hopeless here in America as it would have been in his own land of the collapsible, pocket-fitting fez.

All the way from his home at 18 East 116th Street to the Erie piers on the Hudson River, at the foot of Duane Street, Zaron brooded yesterday afternoon.

Henry Green lives at 294 Third Avenue—when things are prosperous. Yesterday he wasn’t living there—he was just barely living at all. Stretched on a stringpiece at the pier, while the sun bronzed the ebony of his complexion, he was ruminating on possibilities in the matters of food and lodging from the proceeds of helping unload a hypothetical produce barge that ought to appear sooner or later among the pleasure craft on the river.

“Come back here, black man, that ain’t no way to die,” yelled Henry, and plunged into the Hudson.

A few strokes had brought him to the side of the figure struggling in the water and Henry realized his ethnological mistake. Just the same, he took firm hold of the Turk and started shoreward.

“One hundred thousand piasters I will give you if you let me die,” spluttered Zaron, hanging back.

“How you going to pay me if you daid?” asked the pragmatical Henry with another long stroke shoreward.

But just then he relaxed a bit, perhaps involved in trying to resolve those piasters into American money, and the Turk twisted from his grasp. Henry caught him again, but Zaron fought hard, and by the time an excited crowd had collected both men were near exhaustion.

Patrolman Talty of the Beach Street Station got there just in time to throw Henry a rope. He tied it about the Turk and he was hauled to shore. Then they flung it back and fished Henry in.

Dr. Hakaen of Volunteer Hospital listened to Zaron’s hard luck story, contemplated the $735 in American money in his pocket and ordered him to the observation ward at Bellevue.

The story ends with Henry, clad in heterogenous cast-off garments of the force, eating chicken in the squad room of the Geach Street Station and “wishin’ them newspaper men would hurry up if they wanta take my picture.”