Strange Times 169: Bar Baby's Balloon

Perhaps in the flurry of holiday excitement, you missed “Miss Quick Wouldn’t Die.” Fear not—it is never too late to contemplate immortality.

Today brings tales of fire found legal, fire contained, and children in terrible peril that turned out okay. Watch your damn kids on—

June 18, 1921

• A pair of firebugs run amok in Princeton, setting six separate fires over a twelve month period, causing costly damage to historic structures on the university campus.

• Three men, one of them the head of a private detective agency, are arrested in a laboratory containing 20 cases of morphine. Although they claim they obtained the morphine for the purpose of “experiments,” the police allege it was for the manufacture of narcotics.

• Claiming Swiss citizenship due to royal blood, the former Emperor Charles of Austria takes refuge in Switzerland, retiring to the famous Alpine abbey of Disentis.

• After a Nationalist member of the Reichstag declares that “the Communists are no Germans; they ought to all be killed off,” the venerable socialist Remmele crosses the aisle to begin a fistfight with his Nationalist rivals.

• The Weather: Partly cloudy today; Sunday probably fair; not much change in temperature; shifting winds.

There’s more adventure hinted at in that first sentence than most of us will experience in a lifetime.

HARTFORD, Conn., June 17.—Peter S. Green of Tolland, former globe trotter and circus man, who has posed of late as a hermit-farmer, was today found not guilty of arson by the jury in the Superior Court at Rockville. The jury failed to agree on the charge of defrauding insurance companies, and he was held in $1,500 bonds for another trial in September.

Green’s house and barn were burned three years ago, and after the insurance companies had paid in full, most of the furniture in the house was discovered in nearby woods.

Call me a killjoy, but I agree with Deputy Fire Chief Hayes—children should not be sold explosive balloons. Hilaire Belloc understood.

An ordinance forbidding toy balloons of the type commonly sold to children has been prepared by Deputy Fire Chief Thomas J. Hayes.

They are a source of fire danger, according to Chief Hayes, because they might explode from the heat of a gas jet, setting draperies afire. Most of the balloons contain hydrogen gas, which is highly inflammable. The balloon marchants usually carry small tanks of compressed hydrogen and inflate the rubber bags. The ordinance will not forbid balloons of non-combustible gas.

Another installment in our ongoing series: Why Apartments Need Window Guards. (Really, the same goes for any house taller than one story. We’ve got guards in all our windows and the amount of stress it’s saved me is considerable—so nice to be able to let your kids goof off on their windowsill without worrying about them falling to their deaths, don’t you think?)

With his right arm caught and held in a crevice under the roof of his home at Tyndal Avenue and 257th Street, the Bronx, eight-year-old Bertram Shanahan hung suspended three stories above the ground for twenty minutes late yesterday. Seven policemen and one fireman succeeded in lifting him into a window of his home.

Scores of persons saw the little fellow and one of them ran almost a mile to the nearest police booth. Policeman Parker of the Kingsbridge Station started for the Shanahan home, gathering reinforcements along the way.

Bertram was raised some distance by two policemen who reached his feet from a top floor window. The others bent down and around the cornice and lifted a heavy board which had caught and held his arm like a vise. They broke away the board, freeing the boy’s arm. He was then lifted to the level of the window and taken in. He did not seem to be injured and was soon playing about as though nothing unusual had happened. Bertram told the policemen that he had been trying to catch a bird under the eaves.