Strange Times 53: The Romeo of the Ice Box

Strange Times is a tour through the strangest news of 1921. All material is excerpted from the day's New York Times. If you’re searching for a last-minute Christmas present, you can give a one year premium subscription for just $40. And remember to subscribe for yourself to get next week’s issue on New Year’s Day.

Today brings a Joycean fine, a Shakespearean butcher, a Fitzgeraldian ordinance, and a thief-chasing old woman straight out of Lawrence Block. Oh come, all ye faithful, for…

February 22, 1921

• State Senator Cotillo introduces a bill calling for New York City to become the 49th State, so that the city can take control of its transit system. 

• Speaking at Chicago's Sinai Temple, Socialist John Spargo denounces the anti-semitic propaganda peddled by Henry Ford. 

• A man murdered in the park is identified as the bandit who recently attacked a cigar store clerk with a cane. 

• Although his fever lingers, Caruso sleeps well and awakes in a good mood to continue his diet of soft foods, whiskey, and milk.

• The Weather: Snow today and probably Wednesday; not much change in temperature; northwest to northeast gales. 

Although I disagree with his efforts at censorship, I respect Justice McInerney for being brave enough to admit that he didn’t understand Ulysses. As near as I can tell, the passage in question concerning a woman’s dress comes in “Nausicaa,” and begins, “Gerty was dressed simply…” The line about the “smart vee opening down to the division” sounds beautifully improper to me.

Margaret C. Anderson and Jane Heap, publisher and editor respectively of The Little Review, at 27 West Eighth Street, each paid a fine of $50 imposed by Justices McInerney, Kernochan and Moss in Special Sessions yesterday, for publishing an improper novel in the July and august, 1920, issues of the magazine. John S. Summer, Secretary of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice, was the complainant. The defendants were accompanied to court by several Greenwich Village artists and writers.

John Quinn, counsel for the women, told the court that the alleged objectionable story, entitled "Ulysses," was the product of one Joyce, author, playwright and graduate of Dublin University, whose work had been praised by noted critics. "I think that this novel is unintelligible," said Justice McInerney.

Mr. Quinn admitted that it was cast in a curious style, but contended that it was in a similar vein to the work of an American author with which no fault was found, and he thought it was principally a matter of punctuation marks. Joyce, he said, didn't use punctuation marks in this story, probably on account of his eyesight. "There may be found more impropriety in the displays in some Fifth Avenue show windows or in a theatrical show than is contained in this novel," protested the attorney.

Assistant District Attorney Joseph Forrester said that some of the chief objections had to do with a too frank expression concerning a woman's dress when the woman was in the clothes described. The court held that parts of the story seemed to be harmful to the morals of the community. 

The idea of “bizarre entertainment tours” conducted at Quiver Beach is so perfectly 1921, I just can’t handle it. Quiver Beach!

CHICAGO, Feb. 18.—Details of the "ice box romance" which Professor Cyrus E. Palmer of the University of Illinois alleges his wife, Mrs. Sylvia C. Palmer, carried on with a Champaign butcher, were presented in the Superior Court today when the professor filed a cross bill in the divorce action which Mrs. Palmer began several months ago, charging cruelty.

The cross-bill, filed in anticipation of the hearing of a divorce bill on March 23, names Carl A. Carlson as the owner of the butcher shop and as the Romeo of the ice box.

Professor Palmer denies his wife's cruelty charges and alleges that she has "an uncontrollable temper and is subject to frequent sallies of wrath."

"It was Mrs. Palmer's habit," according to the cross-bill, "to visit the butcher shop late in the afternoon. When the day's business was over Carlson would lock up the shop, draw the shades and, with the Professor's wife, repair to the camouflaged ice chest. Frequently the two ate supper therein, having obtained food from a near-by restaurant."

Professor Palmer declares the butcher had fitted up the ice chest with the tables, rugs and chairs and, "in fact, it was a miniature drawing room."

The professor tells of parties given in Champaign and of bizarre entertainment tours alleged to have been conducted by his wife and Carlson to Quiver Beach, Ill., and to Chicago. 

A classic specimen of jazz age panic, reported mainly (I suspect) because 1920s reporters really enjoyed printing the funny names of sexy dances.

SYRACUSE, N.Y., Feb. 11.—No more will the toddle, the camel walk, the Chicago flop, the face-to-face or any other of the shivering, shaking, sinuous, distorting convulsions that have passed as terpsichorean interpretation be seen in this city. 

For the Common Council today unanimously passed an ordinance prohibiting all forms of the jazz dance in the hotels and public dance halls, ordering that all such places close their doors at midnight and forbidding any person under 16 years of age to attend these places, which hereafter must be brilliantly lighted. 

Some parents had complained that dance halls were not being conducted as they should be and there was too little of the foot and too much of the rest of the body in the dances that have been popular. 

I hereby award Wilhelmina Murphy the Bertha A. Miller award for Extreme Pluck, and condemn whoever wrote this little item for churning out one of the worst ledes we’ve seen in ages. The addresses and ages can wait until the second graf, you goof.

Wilhelmina Murphy, 65 years old, of 479 Ninth Avenue, yesterday captured, after a chase, Orrin Lane, 18 years old, of 306 West Thirty-eighth Street, who forced an entrance into her apartment, led him to the old West Thirty-seventh Street Police Station, only to learn that it had been abolished a month ago, and held him there until a patrolman arrived from the West Thirtieth Street Station and arrested the youth.

Mrs. Murphy returned home yesterday afternoon to find the door of her apartment unlocked, and realized that some one was inside. She entered and found Lane packing up some of her possessions. 

"You don't think you can get away with that, do you?" demanded Mrs. Murphy.

"Don't bother me," the youth is said to have answered, dropping everything and running past the woman, through the door and down the street. Lane ran through Thirty-seventh Street toward Tenth Avenue, where Mrs. Murphy succeeded in catching him. No policeman was in sight, and she led Lane to the West Thirty-seventh Street Station, attended by a crowd.

In Jefferson Market Court Lane admitted entering the apartment, and was held in $1,000 bail for the Grand Jury by Magistrate Rosenblatt. The Court commended Mrs. Murphy.