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“The Hat on the Floor”
By FLOYD GIBBONS
Famous Headline Hunter
BEATRICE JOHNSON of Brooklyn, N. Y„ has a doggone
good criticism to make of Old Man Webster, the bird who
wrote the dictionary. She says that when he defined the word
‘fear” he didn’t half do the job.
And to illustrate her point, she tells a story of a big night
at the Johnson home, when the whole darned family got the
scare of their lives.
Beatrice is fifteen now, but she was only ten at the time
of her adventure. Then she lived on Rockaway avenue out
in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn with her mother,
three little brothers, and an older sister.
Her father, a veteran of a colored regiment in the World
War, had died some years before. The Johnsons lived on the top
floor of a tenement, one of a long row of buildings all alike, and
all joined together.
Mama Johnson Believes in Playing Hunches.
The door of their apartment led from the hall straight into
the kitchen, and that door was a flimsy thing with a large pane of
glass in the upper panel. It wasn’t much of a protection, and the
Johnsons, who had no man in the house to take care of them—
well —it sort of got on their nerves a little.
One spring Saturday night in 1930, it got on Mama
Johnson’s nerves just enough so that she stayed home with
her family instead of going to a party to whihc she had been
invited. Ma Johnson still can’t explain why she stayed home
that night. She just had a hunch that something was going
to happen. And sure enough—something did.
It was a hot night, and the whole 'family had gone to bed.
Beatrice’s kid brothers were snoring away in the next room, and
her older sister, just recovering from an operation, was asleep, too.
Beatrice was just about to drop off, when suddenly she was awak
ened by a loud crash—the sound of shattering glass!
Beatrice Investigates the Cause of the Crash.
Beatrice sat up in bed, her heart beating rapidly. That crash
had come from the kitchen. It could mean only one thing. Some
one was breaking into the house.
Her throat was dry, and her whole body was shaking.
Mechanically, she picked up a bathrobe and jumped out of
bed. To get to her mother’s room she had to pass through
1 IS
EBB
The Burglar’s Hat Lay on the Kitchen Floor.
the kitchen. Would the intruder be there? She put her hand
on the door-knob and turned it slowly—quietly. The knob
turned all right, but when she started to swing the door
open, it creaked loudly.
Beatrice went weak all over from fright. “For a second, I
stood there, unable to move,” she says. “I tried to pray that the
burglar would spare our lives, even though we had no money to
give him. To this day I don’t know what prompted my hand, but I
reached up and turned on the light. Then my mother came rushing
into the kitchen.”
One glance told them that some one had been there. The
glass pane in the kitchen door had been smashed to bits. The
burglar’s hat—a gray fedora, lay in the center of the kitchen floor.
But the burglar himself was nowhere in sight. Was he hiding some
where about the house? Neither Beatrice nor her mother dared to
look. They were afraid they’d find him.
Hatless Intruder Grins in Through Broken Door
After that there was more confusion than the Johnson family had
seen in years. Beatrice ran to the window. Her mother woke up her
brothers and sister. Her little brothers were so scared that instead of
getting dressed, they undressed—took off the underwear they were
sleeping in and stood naked in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Beatrice has laughed about that scene a hundred times since, but
she didn’t then. “I was scared stiff,” she says. “I couldn’t have
smiled for a hundred dollars.”
And then, suddenly, the thing happened. Beatrice’s
smallest brother raised a pointing finger and screamed:
“There he is!” Beatrice looked up, and sure enough, there
he was—a short, middle-aged Italian, his head and torso
framed in the opening that had once been the glass panel
of the kitchen door. He was hatless; his face pale; his eyes
bloodshot, and he was grinning!
It was that weird, terrifying grin that scared Beatrice more
THE BULLETIN
Bank Installs Device
to Foil Robber Guns
Oran, la. — The Oran Savings
Bank has adopted an “electric
guard” invented by an lowa farmer
to protect .its workers from gunfire
in event of a holdup.
The guard was designed and pat
ented by Charles H. Rohrig, Oel
wein farmer.
The installation here is the first
use made of the "burglar proof”
mechanism since it was patented
by Rohrig in 1933. Bank employes,
when faced by bandits, have only
to press an electric button to be
shielded on all sides by an eight
foot high bullet-proof shutter and
mesh.
The enclosure within which the
bank employes work is permanently
enclosed in a steel wire netting. The
upper half is of bullet-proof steel
mesh. The lower half is intended
only as a shield and is constructed
of lighter mesh.
Tippler Had Coat,
but Forgot Pants
Houston, Texas. —"Good gosh,
do you see the same thing I do?”
sputtered Officer A. H. Schim
burg to his partner. H. V. Har
rison, as they cruised along a
Houston street. He pointed to a
slightly inebriated man sitting
on the curb dressed in a buff
colored sports coat, striped
shorts, fancy plaid sox—minus
pants and shoes.
“I left ’em home. I guess,” the
man replied to the policemen’s
question.
Fix Eyes of Six-Foot Cobra
at the Risk of Their Lives
Daring Surgeons Operate on
Poisonous Reptile.
New York—Three agile snake sur
geons have risked agonizing deaths
in performing the most dangerous
reptile operation ever attempted—
removal of an eyecap from the head
of a deadly king cobra.
The operation was done just once
before by hand in this country, and
then by the same trio.
Staged as a press feature of the
first International Snake Exposition,
the remarkable surgery was suc
cessfully performed by Chief Sur
geon Arthur Greenhall, Assistants
Douglas Sullivan and Roy Allen.
Tensest scene of the operation
came in the business of snaring the
giant six-and-a-half-foot cobra.
Slowly, Greenhall moved his right
hand within a foot of the poisonous
viper’s head. His left hand mean
while maneuvered above and in
back of the diamond-shaped skull.
The snake weaved its head men
acingly at the hand in front of him.
Greenhall shot his left hand swiftly
to the cobra’s neck. He and his
audience breathed long sighs. His
grip rendered the snake harmless
as long as he held on.
Quickly, then, Allen clutched the
body and tail of the cobra. At a
signal from the chief surgeon,
Sullivan aimed a pair of tweezers
at a tiny scale above the snake’s
_ __________ *
than anything else. “My knees came near giving way under me,”
she says. “I ran to the window and screamed bloody murder?’
The garage man across the street heard her and called to a cop
who was just up the street.
“Dago Red” Was Cause of All the Trouble!
Meanwhile, the little Italian had vanished. The Johnson family
pulled themselves together, while the policeman and the garage
man searched the house for the intruder. They found him all
right, but when they arrested him for a burglar, he was the most
indignant guy you ever saw. He wasn’t a burglar, he said. No
such thing. And what was more, he wanted his hat back.
Then the whole story came out. The little Italian had
been out for the evening, and had taken a little too much
red wine. He got into the wrong house—that wasn’t hard to
do because the whole doggone row of them looked alike—
and when he had leaned against the Johnson’s door to
steady himself, the glass had broken and crashed to
the floor.
His hat had fallen from his head, landing on the kitchen floor,
and that’s what he had come back for when Beatrice saw him
there, grinning. He was grinning, he said, because the Johnsons
looked so funny, particularly those three kid brothers standing in
the middle of the "lor without a stitch of clothes on.
O—WNU Service.
|"TheManWho-O-O"
Tales and Traditions from American Political History
By FRANK E. HAGAN and ELMO SCOTT WATSON
DRAFTED
FROM time to time there has
been talk of “drafting” some
candidate. However, there have
been only two instances in our po
litical history when a man was giv
en the nomination against his will
and in both cases the drafted candi
date was defeated in the election.
These two men were Horatio Sey
mour and Charles O’Conor, both
from the state of New York.
In 1868 one of the Issues raised
by the Democrats was a demand
for the payment of the war debt in
paper money issued for this pur
pose. Its chief advocate was
George H. Pendleton of Cincinnati
and the appeal of the “Ohio Idea,”
as his inflationary scheme was
called, was so great in the agricul
tural West that Pendleton was tha
logical candidate for the Presiden
tial nomination.
But Horatio Seymour, the Civil
war governor of New York, was
opposed to both the “Ohio Idea”
and the candidacy of its chief sup
porter. As chairman of the con
vention he was able to prevent Pen
dleton’s nomination but he couldn’t
keep the inflation plank out of
the platform.
After many ballots and some
confusion it turned to Seymour
and, although he shouted from the
>
right eye. A jerk and it was off. The
same for the one over the left.
Then it was over.
Cobras shed their entire skin at
least once a year, it was explained.
Whe-. not in captivity, the scale
above each eye goes with the dis
carded skin, but for some mysteri
ous reason the scales remain to
obliterate the snake’s sight when
they are caged. These scales are
called eyecaps.
1 • —
Dead Woman Wins Suit
in French Law Courts
Nice.—To a dead woman has
been awarded more than $1,250
damages against a dead man in
the French law courts.
The woman was Mme. Paulette
Revertegat of Antibes. She sued
Vincent Lombardi, a plumber,
whose lorry smashed into her car
in 1928.
The action was started soon aft
er the accident, but the law moves
slowly^, and three years later the
woman died—as the result of her
injuries, it was asserted. Then the
plumber also died, death being
from natural causes.
Now, at last, judgment has been
given. It upholds the dead wom
an’s claim, and the plumber’s wid
ow must pay Mme. Revertegat’s
heirs $1,250, plus interest from the
time of the accident
platform “Your candidate I can
not be!”, the delegates went right
ahead and nominated him, giving
him Gen. Francis P. Blair for a p
running mate.
Although Seymour polled 2,709,-
213 popular votes to 3,015,071 for
Gen. U. S. Grant, the Republican
nominee, and carried eight states,
the electoral vote stood 214 for
Grant and 80 for Seymour.
Four years later a peculiar po
litical situation resulted in another
case of “drafting.” A faction of
the Republican party, dissatisfied
with the Grant administration and
his renomination, held another con
vention in Cincinnati and chose
Horace Greeley for President and
B. Gratz Brown of Missouri for
vice-president. When the Demo
crats met in Baltimore they de
cided that a fusion ticket might
defeat Grant so they also -nomi
nated Greeley and Brown and ac
cepted the platform of the Cin
cinnati convention.
But this action offended the “old
line” Democrats so they held a
convention in Louisville, Ky. For
President they selected Charles
O’Conor, a distinguished New York
lawyer who had won the deep af
fection of the South by his efforts
to secure the release of Jefferson
Davis from prison at Fortress Mon
roe and to defend him against the
charge of treason. O’Conor was
nominated on the first ballot by a
vote of 600 to four and for their
vice-president they named John
Quincy Adams of Massachusetts.
Immediately after the balloting
O’Conor was notified by telegraph
of his nomination and at once de
clined to accept it. The convention
was thrown into an uproar and an
attempt was maae to give the hon
or to the permanent chairman,
James Lyon of Virginia, but he
refused. So the convention adopt
ed a resolution reiterating the se
lection of O’Conor and Adams and
immediately adjourned. In the
election which followed O’Conor
and Adams received 29,489 votes
scattered through 23 states. This
was not an impressive showing but
the “Greeleyites” did little better
and the 29,000 had the satisfaction
of knowing that they had been true
to a plank in their platform which
read “we welcome an eternal mi
nority under the banner inscribed
with our principles rather than
an almighty and everlasting ma
jority purchased by their abandon
ment.”
MORE THAN A WHISPER
RARE indeed is the Presidential
contest which does not bring
out a “whispering campaign”—that
attempt to discredit a candidate
by circulating slanderous stories
reflecting upon his morals or mo
tives. So it is refreshing to learn
that occasionally political partisans
dare to speak out boldly against
an opponent instead of working
against him secretly and in the
dark—to shout rather than whisper.
One of the earliest examples of
this kind of campaigning took
place during the Adams-Jackson
contest in 1828. It was a printed
placard which read:
Immorality.
“Fellow citizens, can we vote
for the man who openly sets the
laws of the great Jehovah at de
fiance, thereby showing a bad ex
ample to our children? Some few
Sundays ago Mr. Adams passed
through Providence galloping and
running his horse, and at every
tavern stopping to receive the sa
lutes or huzzahs of the Federal
party. I have always been an Ad
ams man until he violated and
trampled on the laws of God; now
my conscience forbids my support
ing him. I therefore shall choose
Andrew Jackson, one who keeps
holy the Sabbath Day.
A Professor of Religion.
Kittery Point, Maine,
Sept. 9, 1828.”
• Weetern Newspaper Uplon.
