May 27, 1906 (Sunday)

WONDER WHAT OPUS DEI THOUGHT OF THIS DOCUMENT: Here’s an interesting notice that’s from “the Orient correspondent of Berlin." Supposedly, it’s a letter from someone in Pontius Pilate’s court. The document was reportedly discovered recently in the library of the Lazarist Fathers in Rome. If this is authentic, it will be the “most imporant historical document ever discovered” that deals with the personality of Jesus, a news article says. According to that article, the text runs about 15 paragraphs. One section deals with Jesus' physical looks, saying his shoulder-length hair was the “color of ripe walnuts.” The most intriguing passage: “His mother is the best looking woman in these parts.”

SUMMER VISIONS: With warm weather coming, some Sunday papers are running a feature called “The Beauty Ideals of the Summer Girl.” Here’s the subhead in one paper:
She Bathes in the sea to develop the chest,
Goes wading to become graceful,
Goes loafing to improve her complexion
And sleeps on the roof to cure Rheumatism.
The picture on the right must be an example of the woman who “bathes in the sea.” Another suggestion, illustrated on the left: "The girl with weak lungs can go hunting." Get enough women out there hunting and, who knows, men might even grant them the right to vote.

OFF THE ISLAND: Eddie Guerin might have turned up in London. If the story is to be believed, he escaped from Devil's Island, where he was serving a life sentence for dynamiting a strong room of the American Express in Paris. He and a couple of other escapees covered 200 miles of ocean in a raft or dug-out canoe to make their getaway (as depicted at right in a French publication of a week ago). The French are trying to extradite the man who might be Guerin. He was in a London police court last Monday.

May 26, 1906 (Saturday)

A HIGHLY TRAINED ACTRESS: The special train carrying Sarah Bernhardt (left) ran into a snag. Near Mankato, Kansas, the train carrying her and her company had an accident on the way to a performance in St. Joseph’s, Mo. The accident sent the actress into a bit of a tizzy. The news report says she “seemed much excited and ran back and forth between her car and the locomotive. Even after workers had put her engine back on track, she demanded a new locomotive for her train. She said the old one was “hoodooed.” It had run along on railroad ties for about a half mile before leaving the tracks altogether. The delay blocked the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific railroad for several hours.

A CATCHPHRASE FOR JOURNALISTS: Lincoln Steffens (right)has a new book. It’s called “The Struggle for Self-Government.” One reviewer thinks it’s a bit frantic, saying “it is to be read with more calmness than it was written with.” That may be. What caught my eye, however, was a phrase the reviewer used for the type of journalism Steffens and others engage in: “the journalism of disclosure.” That sounds a little better than the dismissive “journalism of the muck rake.”

REMEMBERING IBSEN'S VOICE OF YOUTH: A couple of papers have reprinted an item about the late Henrik Ibsen from the New York Evening Post. That paper lionizes the dramatist. Here’s a snippet:
The voice of Russia in Tolstoy and of Norway in Ibsen has been that of youth. It has been their part to send a shudder in what we cooly take for granted, to express with poignancy the problems we ignore because they are very old and possibly insoluble. These exponents of youthful storm and stress do a service; they are a living protest against the prevailing moral staleness.

May 25, 1906 (Friday)

May 25
IT WAS NECK-AND-NECK, OR BOW-AND-BOW: The race is nearly over, and the winner is .... Private Enterprise, by an anchor length. People with nothing better to do have been keeping a spyglass on the building of two battleships, the Connecticut (above, upper) and the Louisiana (above, lower). The Louisiana, built by the Newport News Shipbuilding Co., was delivered to the government on Tuesday in Norfolk. It's finished. This ends a three-and-a-half year race with the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which has been building the Connecticut. Apparently, a private yard can do a faster, and less expensive, job building one of these big ships than the government can. The Louisiana's keel was laid on Feb. 7, 1903, about a month before the Connecticut. It looks like the Connecticut is still some months away from completion. The cost is revealing, if news articles are to be believed. The Louisiana cost $3.992 million. The Connecticut has cost $4.212 million and the builders want an additional $380,000. Not sure what the U.S. would even need to do with a bunch of battleships.
THE MAN WHO USED HIS CHILDREN TO PULL HIS PLOW: A farmer living about five miles southwest of Neenah, Wisc., has attracted the attention of the authorities, including Dr. Wilkie of the Fox River Valley Humane Society. After receiving a tip, Wilkie confirmed a story that the man has been plowing his 10-acre plot of land with the help of four of his seven children. He harnessed them to a heavy plow and guided it along its way as they pulled it. Of his seven children, most are girls and none is older than 14. Five are school age -- but don't go. They can't read. Officials are making him send those five to school. Not sure what he'll do with the other two. Guess he'll have to buy a smaller plow.

CONGRESSMAN WAXES ELOQUENT AND MAKES A CLASSICAL ALLUSION: A news report in the Atlanta paper says Congressman Charles A. Towne of New York was "in splendid voice" in yesterday's session in Washington. How splendid? Well, he flayed President Roosevelt over, among other things, his position on the railway rate measure. Towne drew from some history of ancient Rome: This vauntedly nonpartisan rate legislation became a partisan Republican bill as far as they could make it one, and the president of the United States, shorn of his barbaric, oriental powers, like another Caratacus, manacled and humbled, followed the chariot of the duke of Rhode Island."
(Who writes his stuff?) I wish I knew more about Caratacus (right). The "duke of Rhode Island," by the way, must be Sen. Aldrich.

May 24, 1906 (Thursday)

NORWAY LOSES A LITERARY GIANT: Today's morning papers say Norway's greatest dramatist, Henrik Ibsen (right),, has died. It happened peacefully yesterday afternoon. He was 78. His wife, his son, Sigurd, and his daughter in law were with him. All theaters were closed in Christiana last night. The slorthing (or parliamentary body) "formally recorded the national grief at the loss of this foremost figure in the literary life of the nation.

THERE WAS A FINE SHOW OUTSIDE THE THEATER: Some guests at the White House used the President's carriage and coachman to go to a performance at the Belasco Theater in Washington, D.C., last night. During the performance, the manager of the company playing in the theater, Clarence T. Boykin, asked the coachman to move the carriage because the sound of the hoof beats on the street was disturbing the performance. The driver (obviously having learned something about stubbornness from the president) refused to budge. Boykin dragged the coachman from the seat and began to fight with him. Police intervened.


YOU'LL NOTICE THEY DON'T CALL IT CANCERNO: Here's a big four-column ad for Scrapno chewing tobacco. It's kind of clever. "Scrapno" means "no scrap" in the wad of tobacco. Just good, old, healthy tobacco. I particularly like the claim on the lower right of the package: "No Scraps, Waste or Sweepings." What a thing to brag about -- no "sweepings." At least that distinguishes it from anything that comes out of the meat-packing plants in Chicago.

May 23, 1906 (Wednesday)

ARTIST'S LAST STAND: The body of John Mulvaney, the painter of this 1881 painting called Custer's Last Rally (above), was pulled out of New York's East River on May 21 and identified yesterday. His picture was exhibited in almost every major city in the country. His sister said the painter had been missing since the first of the month. The painting drew plenty of favorable comments.



SPORTING GESTURE FROM HARVARD: The Cornell crew (above, upper) is on its way to Cambridge for a meet with Harvard (above, lower). Cornell is at a bit of a disadvantage. That team's stroke, E.T. Foote, is not with the team due to illness in his family. (There was a front-page story in the Middletown, N.Y., paper on the 18th saying that Foote -- stroke for Cornell for two years -- had to go home to Bridgeport, Conn., because his mother was ill.) The manager of the Harvard crew, Emerson, telegraphed Cornell and offered to postpone the race until Foote was ready to row. Cornell sent a three-word telegram back to Cambridge: "Unnecessary to postpone." The Cornell crew passed through Syracuse at 11:10 on the way to Cambridge. They were in two sleepers on Train No. 36. The Cornell-Harvard meets have become significant since Cornell's spectacular upset of Harvard and Yale in 1897.

BREAKOUT PERFORMANCE: Three inmates of the Orleans County, Vermont, jail found a noteworthy method of busting through the wall for a taste of freedom yesterday. John Jenkins, Joseph McDonald and William Irving, who were awaiting trial for robbing the post office at Nortons Mills, sang and shouted boisterously as they broke through the wall. The sounds they made with their mouths covered up the noise they were making breaking through the wall. The four prisoners weren't noticeded until they were seen strolling down the street in Newport. After they were spotted, they ran and melted into the surrounding woods.

May 22, 1906 (Tuesday)

THE CYCLE OF LIFE ROLLS INTO THE GLOBE OF DEATH: The Globe of Death has rolled into Syracuse. It's kind of hard to understand exactly what's going on without seeing it, but here's how it's described in the paper:
A globe or sphere of latticed ironwork sixteen feet in diameter (right) is fastened securely to the stage, with a door in front just large enough to allow Dr. Clarke and his daughter to enter with their bicycles. Once inside the sphere they ride around at a rapid rate of speed, circling this way and that and avoiding a collision in a skillful manner. The climax of the act comes when, after Miss Clarke and the bicycles have been removed, a motor cycle is introduced. Mounted on this, Dr. Clarke starts on a circular tour of the sphere, pedaling slowly at first. Then the gasoline motive power is applied and the audience catches its breath as the rider, gaining sufficient momentum, suddenly swoops to the bottom of the globe and loops the loop time after time in a vertical circle.
Dr. Clarke clearly has a dash of daring in him. I wonder what his future holds.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE NINE LIVES, YOU'VE GOT TO START WITH ONE: A fire in a commercial district of Hartford City, Ind., threatened a mother cat and her four kittens -- who had made their home in the back of a store. As the room filled with smoke, she carried two kittens over counters and shelves to reach a window sill. There, she let them down. Then she went back for the other two. By that time she was soaked with water. She could only manage to bring one of them to the safety of the window. Firefighters, who were watching the feline rescue, took note. They rescued the fourth kitten.

IMPORTANT, IF TRUE: This might be true. Then again, it might not. But word out of St. Petersburg is that a tribunal investigating some of the unfortunate events surrounding the Russo-Japanese War has decided that Baron Anatoli Stoessel (left), the general who surrendered Port Arthur to the Japanese in the beginning of 1905 has been sentenced to death. The article begins this way: "It is rumored that...." So, we'll just have to wait and see. The same report says that Rear Admiral Nebogatoff (right) is also sentenced to die -- for surrendering part of the fleet. I'm pretty sure that none of the men sitting in judgment were among the soldiers or sailors whose lives were spared because the commanders had the good sense to quit while they could. Here's how the fall of Port Arthur was described in an Australian paper in January 1905:
The escapers who reached Chi-fu describe the state of Port Arthur as terrible. "A living hell," they call it.
Many of the hospitals were destroyed in the bombardment, and when the surrender took place there were 15,000 sick and wounded men, many of whom were sheltered only from the bitter cold of the winter among the debris of ruined buildings in the streets.
Some of the wounded soldiers, delirious with fever, staggered back from their lairs to the front, and getting into the fighting line madly hurled stones and shouted defiances at the enemy until they themselves were either captured or killed.
General Stoessel, it is stated, had only 5000 able-bodied and convalescent soldiers to man the whole of the forts when he capitulated.