Founded in 2017, Strange Times is a twice-monthly newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. To get free games and the original PDFs of every article that runs in Strange Times—plus stories that didn’t make the cut—back me on Patreon.

To Kill a Cook

There are only a handful of moments in the process of writing a book that are pure pleasure. Finishing a draft is pretty great. So is printing up a fresh copy of a recent draft and sitting down to read it, your favorite pen in hand. But the absolute best part is when copies of the book start coming in the mail:

It’s a gorgeous damn book and you should preorder it now.

Things I Like

1. Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales! My kids have gotten hooked on these graphic novels about American history, prompting many interesting questions like, “Why is yellow fever called yellow fever?” and “Why were World War I and World War II so close together?” If you’re looking for someplace to buy them, why not try…

2. Powell’s City of Books! I recently started a graduate program which means that, for the first time in nearly 20 years, I had to start buying schoolbooks again. I was happy to see that my favorite new and used online bookseller is still kicking and will still give you free shipping if you order more than $40. Anyway it beats the hell out of Amazon.

3. Other People’s Toddlers! Last week a friend asked me to spend an hour entertaining her 3-year-old so she could have a meeting. My goodness, did we have fun! A solid hour of playing with magna tiles and reading There’s a Nightmare In My Closet. A toddler that’s in a good mood is the most fun person in the world and when they’re someone else’s kid, you can clear out before they get overtired.

Today we have a beans dispatch and a pigeon whose heroics may be slightly exaggerated. Demand a thousand on a plate on…

August 18, 1921

• The increase in French tobacco consumption is blamed on women, who it is said have begun smoking in private, unlike “American and English women who in the last season have indulged in cigarette smoking in public with a freedom which a Frenchman associates only with Bohemia and the demi-monde.”

• The Minneapolis postmaster reports a successful experiment in playing phonograph music to improve the morale of night workers, “although he was careful to explain that no ‘jazz’ was played until the fag end of the night, as he ‘did not want the men juggling and tossing about letters and parcels.’”

• The Weather: Showers today; tomorrow fair; moderate temperature.

The image of beans “sweeping over the country like an advancing army” made me laugh for five minutes straight. Beans are truly the once and future king.

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 17.—Prohibition has affected the restaurant business and beans are “coming back,” according to Harry Doherty of New York, National President of the International Stewards’ Association, and other food purveyors meeting here this week in their twenty-first annual convention.

“You can’t fool the café patron anymore,” said Doherty. “When he orders ham and eggs he wants ham and eggs. The ‘à la’ business is a dead issue. There was a time, when a few cocktails could legally precede dinner, when the diner did not care what he ate, but not now, Dress ham and eggs up in a title ‘Ham and Eggs à la Portuguese’ and the public is skeptical.”

Reiterating the contention that prices would not drop in restaurants, Mr. Doherty said that cafeterias, where the masses were fed, would feel the lowering prices first when they did come.

Beans are “coming back,” sweeping over the country like an advancing army, according to stewards, who say it has taken the World War Veterans three years to forget the taste of the standing diet in the fighting service, but the old craving for “a thousand on a plate” is coming back. The demand is growing stronger every day.

This article is so sarcastic that I’m actually not sure what the heck is going on here.

Down in front of that Child’s Restaurant in Columbus Circle which evening clothes have made famous, there flopped at 10 o’clock last night from somewhere—coat pocket or the heavens—a carrier pigeon, wet and exhausted.

Patrolman Wilson took the bird to the West Forty-seventh Street Station, where Lieutenant Callahan detached from its leg this message:

Notify Dan Singer, Belleclaire Hotel. I am lost in Hoodoo Mountains, Yellowstone Park. Send help, provisions and pack-horses.

HELLER

8-13-21

Callahan telephoned the Belleclaire, which may be remembered as the hotel from which one T.R. Zan and a pet lion were expelled not so long ago, the unfortunate man and his beast having been forced to find refuge in the movies. Mr. Singer, who turned out to be Daniel J. Singer, insurance agent, hunter and naturalist, happily was at home. He would come to the police station at once.

There Mr. Singer identified Heller as Edmund H. Heller, naturalist and camera man, who accompanied Theodore Roosevelt on his African trip in 1909 and jointly with the Colonel wrote a two-volume work on big game there. Mr. Singer also identified the bird. It was a veteran. It was one of those which Heller took with him to Africa and used there to send out messages, not to America but to somewhere or other. Mr. Singer recognized it because it was one of several which Heller kept on the roof of the Belleclaire, three of which he had taken with him when he started for Yellowstone Park to gather lecture tour material.

Mr. Singer also knew the location of the Hoodoo Mountains to a hair, having hunted the country. They are not in Yellowstone Park, but just southeast of it, not far from Cody. They are hardly mountains—just rocks, and though Mr. Singer did not mention this, in a section well sprinkled with ranches and roads.

Maps showed that Singer’s location of the mountains was correct. It also showed, taking into consideration the date on the note, that the bird had traveled between 1,900 and 2,000 miles in an air line in four or five days, thus demonstrating that carrier pigeons do not deteriorate with age and that a record of 1,500 miles in a little over eleven days made in 1917 was just piking. Those who know say that carrier pigeons roost at night, so the bird to come from Wyoming must have flown with airplane speed in the daytime.

To revert to Mr. Singer, he knew exactly what had happened. Heller had started for the park alone, save for the animals in the pack train. A rock slide must have come down and wiped out the train and left Heller stranded. So he summoned his trusty pigeon, which fortunately wasn’t wiped out with the rest of the pack train, wrote the note and whispered to the noble and experienced bird to start eastward and not to stop or molt.

Heller had shown good judgment in sending his appeal to Singer. Singer knew exactly what to do. Without hesitation he bethought himself of Old Ned Frost in the Wapiti (some kind of Indian for elk) ranch. He wired Old Ned as follows:

“Start at once. Spare no expense. Best ponies and provisions. Heller lost southeast Hoodoo Mountains.”

Old Ned would start early this morning, said Singer, and ought to reach Heller in two or three days, long before Heller’s wife somewhere in Utah or Nevada learned that he was in distress.

Later Mr. Singer admitted he was trying to arrange for Heller to lecture before the New York Athletic Club, but said that otherwise he had no interest in his enterprise. He was quite sure, however, that Heller would abhor the movies and was much too honorable to deceive anyone for the sake of publicity. Besides, wasn’t the note on the bird’s leg dated Wyoming?

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