Strange Times 82: You Are the Worst Boy

Today features a spanking judge, a one-sentence train robbery, a legendary gorilla, and a vanishing inventor. Feign innocence regarding the dead man in your boat for…

March 23, 1921

• Under cross-examination by the Railroad Labor Board, a V.P. of the Pennsylvania Railroad admits that before the war, his company maintained a force of anti-labor spies, as well as “little arsenals of guns and revolvers.”

• New York’s Board of Alderman request $25,000 to install public showers, fed by fire hydrants, in congested sections of the city during the summer.

• In 17 hours, the temperature in New York City drops from 80° to 37°, one of the steepest drops in history. I mention it because neither the unseasonable warmth nor the sudden chill rated a mention on the front page “Weather” box, which I always quote at the end of this section, and which is useless to the point of being a kind of poetry.

• The Weather: Fair today and probably tomorrow; moderate variable winds.

First we had Justice Sinn barring a young man from eating chocolate. Now we have Magistrate Coward threatening a “trouncing.” I’m beginning to worry that this whole newspaper may be made up. 

Also, no matter what dead judges say, don’t hit your kids.

PORT CHESTER, N.Y., March 22.—Whether Michael Ciccerello, 16 years old, of 132 South Main Street, must submit to a “trouncing” at the hands of Police Magistrate John L. Coward depends on the lad’ parents between now and Saturday.

“I believe you are the worst boy that has ever come before me,” said the Judge yesterday. The lad had been arrested by Detective Daniel Curtin, who caught him sleeping behind some trolley barns. The boy’s mother admitted to the Judge that Michael has been beyond her control for the last two years. 

“If parents would only administer a sound trouncing whenever it was necessary as the parents used to do, there would be fewer cases coming into this court,” said Magistrate Coward. He suspended decision until Saturday. If by that time the boy’s parents have not “trounced” him, the Magistrate said that he would do it himself.

I love these one sentence recaps of events exciting enough to merit a spot in the paper, but absolutely no detail whatsoever. Want to know more? Tough.

MUSKOGEE, Okla., March 22.—The Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad’s Texas special was held up and the passengers robbed thirty miles south of McAlester tonight.

If you’d like to know more about the first gorilla to visit the United States, however, you can learn quite a bit more here. Last year they unveiled a small, strange statue of him!

Wearing a natty sailor suit with gay ribbon trimmings, John Daniels, said to be the only gorilla ever seen in this country, arrived here yesterday with a keeper and secretary on the Old North State of the U.S. Mail line to join the Ringling Brothers’ circus, in which he is to be an attraction. Dexter Fellowes, chronicler of circus happenings, was on hand at the pier with a brass band to receive the simian, who occupied a de luxe stateroom on the way over.

Every sentence of this article is spectacular. Hopefully, every one of us will someday get the opportunity to tell our neighbors, “Hello! I’m not actually dead but I am rich now and no, I have no explanation for the dead man in my boat.”

Although for two years Paul Gesner, 54 years old, an inventor, was mourned as dead by his neighbors in Stapleton, S.I., he surprised them yesterday when he drove up to the door of his old workshop and home at Prospect and Bay Street in an automobile and announced he had acquired a small fortune in his absence.

When he disappeared on the afternoon of Dec. 2, 1919, the police began a hunt for him. A motorboat which he had bought was found on the beach at Bay Ridge several weeks later, and the body of a man in the boat was identified as that of the missing man. Yesterday, Gesner told his friends that he left the boat behind when he went to Dayton, Ohio, to begin a suit against an automobile company which had failed to pay him royalties on an engine he had invented, and could not explain the presence of the dead man in the boat. He said that he won the suit.