Strange Times 138: Quits Force to Peddle Pie

As I mentioned in the last issue, I’m currently seeking four editorial clients to work with this fall. If you have a manuscript that needs revision or an idea for a book that you’d like to flesh out into an outline, I would love to work with you on the project! You can learn more here.

Today we have pie-peddling policemen, drop-dead tenors, and terror in New York harbor. We also have an exceptional ad boasting of the stability of the banking system, less than eight years before, well, you know. Remember the goddamned oars on…

May 18, 1921

• A mother owl and three chicks have begun nesting on the White House grounds, causing such excitement in President Harding that he mentions them to everyone he meets.

• The Weather: Fair today; Thursday partly cloudy; moderate temperature; gentle variable winds.

This may be the best decision ever recorded in the pages of the 1921 New York Times. Kudos, Alvin, and may your pies sell like hot cakes!

The Police Department lost a promising young member and the pie-peddling business regained an active worker yesterday when Patrolman Alvin M. Gehrke of the Bedford Avenue station, Brooklyn, resigned. After five months of experience as a policeman Gehrke decided he had had enough of “pounding the pavements.”

“This police game doesn’t appeal to me,” Gehrke told Captain Kreuscher. The Captain urged him to reconsider. The patrolman refused.

“Before I was appointed to the department,” said Gehrke, “I drove a pie wagon and made $75 a week. That job looks better to me than parading the streets in a uniform.”

I am absolutely enamored of this little article (articlette?), which is so to-the-point that it fails to tell us the name of the tenor in question. Don’t worry, longtime fans—Caruso survives…for now.

GENEVA, May 17 (Associated Press).—An Italian tenor dropped dead on the stage of the Bellinzona Theatre here last night while singing in the last act of Puccini’s “La Bohème” to Mimi, who was lying dying on a bed. The actress, unaware of the tenor’s death, continued singing her role until a physician appeared on the stage and ordered the curtain rung down.

The performance ended abruptly on announcement of the actor’s death.

This story is absolutely terrifying. It wasn’t until I was halfway through it that I realized that at press time the fisherman and his son were still out to sea. Would they be rescued? I have no idea! Stay tuned for Issue 139…

Borne along on a racing ebb tide, a man and his six-year-old son, helpless in a gasolineless launch were drifting down the bay toward the open sea early this morning while the police crowded two fast department launches to their last knot in the hope of rescuing them. The Harbor Squad men got a late start and had no hope of coming alongside the launch before 5 o’clock by which time they feared it would be in the open sea. Meantime they wirelessed to the Ambrose lightship to keep a sharp lookout for the little craft drifting in the current with no lights to mark its passage.

If the man, Herman Wader of 162 Sixty-fifth Street, Bayonne, N.J., and his son, William, are saved, they will owe their lives to Otto Wagner of 141 Sixty-fifth Street, Bayonne, who swam more than a mile in the cold water of the bay to Swinburne Island in the hope of finding a rescuing craft there. At the island was only a useless rowboat, but a police alarm soon set the available rescue machinery in motion.

The two men and the boy set out from Bergen Point yesterday afternoon on a fishing expedition.

They got as far as Roamer Shoals in the lower bay and fished there until 9 o’clock in the evening. Then they wanted to start home and found their fuel was exhausted. There were no oars in the boat and for an hour they drifted helplessly until they realized they were being carried rapidly seaward. Wader and his son were barely able to swim, so Wagner swam to the island, falling exhausted when he got there.

From the course of the tide the police figured the man and the boy would pass through the Ambrose Channel and the police boats set their course in that direction.

The sea was comparatively calm in the early morning hours, and it was believed the two passengers were not in immediate danger unless their unlighted craft should drift into the path of some wayfaring tramp.