Strange Times 99: Bags of Rotting Fruit

Strange Times is a newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. If you like it, forward it to a friend or back me on Patreon. And while you’re at it, why not grab yourself a copy of Westside, my 1921 mystery novel, or preorder the looming sequel, Westside Saints?

First, a bit of business! After a year’s experimentation with Substack’s paid subscription model, I have decided to switch Strange Times back to being free-for-all. If you have any questions or thoughts about this, feel free to drop me a line. Now, on to issue 99!

Today brings hermits in Hoboken and a fortune for Jackie Coogan. Get swindled by your step parents on…

April 9, 1921

• The former royal astronomer announces that observations of fortnightly changes in the moon’s craters suggest the satellite may possess an atmosphere, water, and even vegetation.

• All three of the city’s baseball clubs will begin their season today, with the Giants playing the Senators at the Polo Grounds and the Yankees facing the Robins at Ebbets Field.

• Responding to a Cosmopolitan article claiming that, “The slower you live the faster you die,” the director of the Medical Review of Reviews upholds the notion that hard work gives vigor to men of all ages.

• The Weather: Showers today; Sunday, fair and colder, fresh and strong southwest to northwest winds.

Shades of Gray Gardens here, with the added hint that the hotel suspects the women may have eaten their other dog.

For the first time in more than three years, two elderly women, formerly of New York, came out into the sunlight for a brief period yesterday, when the health authorities of Hoboken forcibly ended a life of almost unbelievable seclusion they had been living in a hotel in that New Jersey city and took them to a hospital.

Morbid fear of process servers, engendered by long litigation, in the course of which the modest fortune she had inherited from her husband had been swept away, seemed to be the younger woman’s only explanation of the long years in which the two had made themselves a hermitage in Meyer’s Hotel. In all the time they had lived there, they never had emerged from their rooms or admitted a soul. The older woman, dying of tuberculosis of the hip, could not speak. The only other living thing in the strange household was Kitty, an old mongrel terrier, dying, too, of a tumor. The animal was taken to the pound, that her misery might be ended.

The elder woman was Miss Carrie Sunderland, 60 years old. The younger was Mrs. Fannie Miller, 40, widow of Frank J. Miller, a New York broker, and niece of Miss Sunderland. Mrs. Miller was found to be infected with the disease for which she had attended her aunt without medical aid, and both women are now in St. Mary’s hospital.

The two women, before they went to Hoboken in January, 1918, appear to have led a somewhat similar hermit life in the Hotel Gregorian here. In the disjointed account she gave of herself when the police, threatening to break down the door, finally induced her to open it, Mrs. Miller told of her dealings with a number of lawyers, among them Edmund Wilson of Red Bank, former Attorney General of New Jersey, and Frank McDermott of Newark. Mr. Wilson could recall having been consulted, but would not disclose the nature of his client’s business. Mr. McDermott said he did not remember her.

Nine weeks ago Mrs. Miller ceased to pay rent for the three rooms she and her aunt had occupied more than three years. Recently, John Moje urged her in written communications to clear an accumulation of tin cans from the fire-escape. When he could get no responsive action he notified the police and Dr. F.X. Stack, Health Commissioner of Hoboken.

That is why the authorities demanded admittance yesterday, and this is what they found:

An aged woman helpless on the bed in one of a suite of three rooms. A younger woman, faded and graying and looking far older than she was, scantily clad in a kimono and other worn raiment. A feeble, sick dog crouched on the bed. Over everything accumulated filth. Thousands and thousands of New York newspapers baled all about the place, until they gradually had obliterated most of the living space. Colored Sunday supplements used as window curtains and keeping out light and air. Bags of rotting fruit, dozens of loaves of stale bread, crates and boxes of canned goods and everywhere empty cans and litter.

“I had to. I had to,” Mrs. Miller said when asked why she had lived like that. Later the fear of process servers developed out of her conversation as the only plausible explanation.

The women’s mode of life was simple. They moved in in January, 1918. With them were two dogs. What became of the other one no one knows. Milk was left every day at the living room door. When Mrs. Miller heard the milkman’s receding steps she would open the door slightly and snatch it in. Food came from a department store, ordered by mail and paid for by check on the Columbia Trust Company, New York.

A crack under the door was the sole means of communication with the outside world. Through it Mrs. Miller would thrust her check for $30 rent each week, through it she would order her canned goods, under it were thrust her newspapers. No employee of the hotel entered the room in more than three years. A man who lived in adjoining rooms all that time never caught a glimpse of the two women, scarcely ever heard them.

This does not go well!

CHICAGO, April 8.—Jackie Coogan, who gets $2,000 a week for throwing stones through windows in the movies, arrived in Chicago today, a tin automobile tucked under his arm. He is best known to movie fans as “The Kid” and the co-star with Charlie Chaplin in the film bearing that title. “The Kid” is five years old. He has bobbed, straw colored hair and wore green golf stockings, a slate gray ulster and a cream colored golf cap.

Jackie is accompanied by his father, Jack Coogan Sr., a professional vaudeville dancer, and they are on their way to New York to sign the youthful star up for $300,000 a year. His present salary is $62,400 a year. Although but five years of age, his drawing power has enabled him to set his own figure.

Jackie has aspirations. He wants to be a mayor. Policeman Judge recognized him instantly and followed him into the hotel to warn him not to break any window hereabout.

“Aw, I’m through breaking windows,” he asserted.

“What do you do to amuse yourself?”

“Oh, I play poker and old maid and rhummy—and I shoot craps, too.”

Here he was abruptly cut off by Coogan, Sr., who grabbed him by the coat collar and hauled him away.

“Honest,” he said, “that kid gives me cold chills. No telling what he’ll spill next—but he is a fine little fellow and a gold mine for us.”