The Whitewright Sun (Whitewright, Tex.), Vol. 58, No. 31, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 15, 1937 Page: 3 of 8
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THE WHITEWRIGHT SUN, WHITEWRIGHT, TEXAS
PAGE THREH
Thursday, April 15, 1937.
Such Men Are Dangerous!
*
By Will Irwin in Liberty Magazine
*
I do
*
♦
Prescriptions
*
Filled
—PROMPTLY
—ACCURATELY
—ECONOMICALLY
*
awful
to
*
THE REXALL STORE
Tools For Sale
the
This Spring, Paint With
■ H
Sher win- W illiams
Fencing Wire
F
Paint
Wall Papar
*
i
I
A GOOD LAXATIVE
BLACK-DRAUGHT
Full line of Hog Wire, Poultry and Barbed Wire.
If you have already bought some wire without get-
ting our price, you probably paid too much I
We have a full line of Garden, Field and Carpen-
ter Tools at low prices. See our line of Hoes before
you buy anywhere.
Always at Your Service
With Better Service
i
“But it’s yesterday’s,” he
“I want today’s.” And his
changed suddenly from
sinister. Mrs. Jones,
never
she’s
San-
out.
GIRL DEMANDS $10,000
FOR LOSS OF HER SMILE
KNOCK, KNOCK, SAYS
CAR; MAPLE SYRUP
IS USED FOR OIL
NEW DISEASE IS
TRACED TO METAL
IN CERTAIN SOILS
HOBO GETS $100,000
ESTATE
Dyer & Childress
Pharmacy
I
“harmless
kill,
no
■
L. LaRoe & Co
Everything To Build With
HANCOCK, N. H. — Frank Bur-
roughs’ automobile developed an ex-
tra loud knock Monday. He found
that instead of pouring two quarts of
oil into his machine he had picked up
a can of maple syrup.
Donald — “My mother is
funny.”
Uncle—“Why?”
Donald—“When we have mince pie
or frosted cake she asks if I want
some; but when we have spinach,
she just gives it to me.”
WAR PENSIONER GIVES
$50,000 ESTATE TO U. S.
Sherwin-Williams Paint will last much longer
than “cheap” paint, making a Sherwin-Williams job
actually cost LESS in the end. Don’t take our word
for it—let us prove it.
I
When You Need
a Laxative
Thousands of men and women
know how wise it is to take Black-
Draught at the first sign of consti-
pation. They like the refreshing re-
lief it brings. They know its timely
use may save 1 aem from feeling
badly and possibly losing time at
work from sickness brought on by
constipation.
If you have to take a laxative oc-
casionally, you can rely on
| Whitewright Lumber Co.
“Neighborly Service”
Nationally advertised line of Wall Paper to sell
at prices in line with unknown paper. See our new
Spring patterns. Also canvas, tacks, etc.
GARY, IND. — The value of a
woman’s smile will be determined by
Judge B. C. Jenkins of the Gary
Superior Court when he rules upon
a suit filed by Miss Katherine Say-
manki. She values her smile at $10,-
000.
Miss Saymanki charges that she
lost control of her facial muscles and
was deprived permanently of “her
normal smile” as the result of an
automobile accident.
atrocious the authorities
best to prove him sane and
sible. But the facts were all against
them. He is back in an asylum, serv-
ing a life sentence in the insane
ward.
Finally, there is the case of Charles
J. Guiteau, who murdered President
Garfield. More than one alienist has
declared privately that if Guiteau
had murdered any one but a presir
dent he would probably have ended
his life in the criminal ward, not on
the gallows. He gave plenty of evi-
dence during the last two or three
years of his life. He was lecturing in
Boston. Suddenly he glared at his
audience, threw his notes down and
walked out of the hall. During the
campaign of 1880 he haunted Repub-
lican headquarters, trying to get a
job as a speaker. “His conduct on
these occasions was such as to cause
grave doubt of his sanity,” says a
chronicler of the time. Rejected, he
made eccentric, illogical speeches at
street corners. Opportunity came
that morning in the Union Station.
Washington, when Guiteau fired two
shots into Garfield from behind.
Few who had anything to do with
the Guiteau trial doubted that the
defendant was insane, in the medical
sense. But law asks only, “Was he
capable of understanding the nature
of his act?” In other words, could he
tell right from wrong? Guiteau, who
insisted on serving as his own law-
yer, maintained at his trial that God
told him to do it. If he really be-
lieved that, he was insane in the le-
gal sense. “He’s shamming,” said the
prosecutor to the jury, which agreed.
Yet in the crazy show which he made
on the gallows, when it was all too
late for shamming, Guiteau contin-
ued as the agent of God.
Reading the record, any one can
pick a dozen spots where a citizen
The “Harmless” Lunatic—a Look at a Ghastly, Needless
Peril—Must It Always Be With Us?
houses, of course. Then he began to 1 stranger turned abruptly and van-
hesiege the literary agents, with no ished down an abandoned wood road.
Now, Mrs. Jones’ husband was a
i a factory. He
other policemen. At the end of the
abandoned road a young man bran-
dished what looked like a rod. As
the police approached, he put one
end of this instrument to his head.
There was a light explosion, and the
stranger toppled over dead. The
weapon was a 22-caliber target rifle
from which he had removed the
stock. The bullets in Moore’s body
matched with the bore. The case
was solved.
He was Jean Phillips Gebhardt, of
Staten Island, New York, an electri-
cian with a passion for improving
television. A few years before the
tragedy he became palpably insane
and his family had him committed.
In the asylum his condition improved.
“But it’s not safe to let him out yet,”
said the doctor. In face of this, one
of his circle brought action and did
get him out. He found work as a
roving salesman for electrical de-
vices, and continued to mull over in-
ventions of television. He did not
succeed with them. His mind fixed
on Moore. This leader of his craft
had formed a conspiracy against him
—or was perhaps stealing his ideas.
With insane patience and persistence,
he stalked his man, studied his hab-
its, and found the moment when mur-
der would be most secret.
The Noel case, also in New Jersey,
was just as unnecessary and much
more harrawing. The son of brilliant
parents, Harrison Noel was consid-
ered brilliant himself before the af-
fliction struck him. He “went queer”
in the university. His parents sent
him to a private institution. Pro-
nounced cured, he returned home.
Then, one night, he tried to murder
his father with an ax. So they sent
him to an asylum. “Catatonic demen-
tia praecox,” said the physicians, A
year later he was very much better.
At this juncture he escaped and ap-
peared at his father’s apartment. The
elder Noel telephoned to the asylum.
One of its personnel, answering, said
the boy might as well stay at home—
all he needed was kindness and a
regular life.
Less than a month later, young
Noel shot and killed Raymond Pierce,
a negro taxicab driver. Then he went
home, took the family car, and drove
to the country place of Joseph A.
Bower, an affluent resident of Mont-
clair. Three children were playing
before the gate—children of a hard-
working mechanic of the neighbor-
hood. Noel caught up Mary Daly, six
years old, threw her into his car,
drove away. John Sandine, the Bow-
er chauffeur, jumped into his own
car and pursued. Noel fired from the
window a shot which grazed
dine’s head and knocked him
Turning into the woods, Noel stop-
ped the car, drove the crying, terri-
fied little girl into a deep thicket,
and there shot her twice in the back
of the head, killing her instantly.
Driving on, he telephoned to Mrs.
Bower, making an illogical rambling
demand for $4,000 ransom, and
calmly went home. Some one had
taken the number of his car and the
police got him. The affair was so
did their
respon-
MENA, Ark. — Thomas A. Beck,
94-year-old Civil War pensioner, left
his estate to the United States “be-
cause that’s where it came from,” it
was revealed in court.
Beck received a pension of $100 a
month from the government for more
than 40 years which, coupled with
his life’s savings, amounted to more
than $50,000. He also received a pen-
sion from the Sante Fe Railroad as a
former employe.
Beck had informed two nieces of
Kansas City, his nearest living rela-
tives, that they would get “the sur-
prise of their lives” when they
opened the testament.
SANTA ANA, Calif. — Thursday
was April Fool’s day, but Frank Ors-
ban, 63-year-old hobo, knew it was
no joke that he boarded a train for
Ft. Wayne, Ind., to claim an estate
valued at more than $100,000.
For 27 long years Orsban has
roamed the highways of California,
working at odd jobs when he ran out
of money. Too proud to ask for re-
lief, he often went hungry.
The unassuming wanderer, nearly
bald and quite toothless, lived in
hobo camps here and there. He was
camping in the Santa Ana river bot-
tom when spring floods drove the
colony of “forgotten men” to higher
ground. It was there authorities fi-
nally found him with news that he
had been sole beneficiary of the
estate of his uncle, John Orsban, who
died in Fort Wayne two years ago.
“I’m not going to waste the mon-
ey,” Orsban said before he climbed
aboard the train. “I’m going to real-
ly start living, not at 40, but at 63. I
want to see the world from the front
seat of a car.”
He said that as soon as he gets the
estate settled, he intends to provide
a landslide of groceries and clothing
for his buddies in the hobo jungles.
Notoriously, we Americans have
the heaviest murder rate of any
■country which calls itself civilized.
.And killings by the stark staring mad
form a large item in this dismal roll.
If we do not, as a country, realize
this, it is probably because such
murders are usually so little drama-
tized by the newspapers.
That, I suppose, is the reason so
many families and communities tol-
erate gentle crackbrains, among
■whom a certain proportion will de-
velop in time some dangerous im-
pulse. When such a person begins to
go queer, his nearest and dearest
eithei’ fail to recognize the symptoms
or procrastinate foi- fear of what an
alienist may find.
Often the afflicted person yields
to some impulse which does not re-
sult in tragedy but does bring him to
the notice of the police. He is found
insane and committed -to an institu-
tion. After a few months he “gets
better.” Sometimes this means that
□recovery is on the way; the psychia-
trists of the institution know, how-
ever, that complete restoration de-
pends on months or even years more
of expert treatment. His family and
friends find him pathetically eager
to get out. He appears perfectly
normal. Unfortunately, that appear-
ance is common in the early stages
of insanity. Presently some relative
tries to overrule the physicians by
-appealing to the law. Habeas corpus
proceedings follow. The attorney for
the appellants, if he knows his busi-
ness, always gets a trial by jury. The
jurors hear the psychiatrists testify
that this patient is of unsound mind,
and may, if turned loose, become a
menace to society. Then they ob-
serve the central figure in the case.
He—or she—looks all right, talks
rationally. The lawyer for the appel-
lant does not let them overlook the
liorror of keeping a sane person be-
hind bars for no fault of his own.
Four times out of five they disregard
■expert testimony and turn the in-
cipient lunatic loose. And in a cer-
tain proportion of cases these jurors
are making themselves innocent, ig-
norant accomplices to murder.
I write this with feeling, since two
of my personal friends have died at
the hands of lunatics. The more
dramatic though less typical and fa-
mous case was the murder of Ed
Rothrock. He was my classmate at
Stanford University. After gradua-
tion he went into newspaper work,
and became city editor of the Chron-
icle, evening edition to the Spokane
Spokesman-Review.
An Austrian, Basil Alexiev, had
gone to work in a lumber camp just
across the Idaho border. His English
was imperfect, and his manners more
than eccentric. As usual in those
■days, the lumberjacks were a rough
and merry lot. He became their butt
tor practical jokes.
In April, 1912, the steamship Ti-
tanic rammed an iceberg and sank
with a loss of half the passengers
and crew—the event of the year. The
Spokesman-Review spread the story
across the front page, with a picture
v of the ship. Alexiev could not read
English. That gave one of his tor-
mentors an idea. “This about you,”
he said. “That’s a picture of the ship
you came over on.” And he pro-
ceeded to “read” the story—as an ex-
pose of Alexiev’s stupidity, crudeness
and degenerate habits.
This started a new game in camp.
Every evening, around the fire, one
or another of the lumberjacks would
pretend to read, from the current
Spokesman-Review, further expo-
sure of the Austrian’s low character
and horrible behavior—while the
bunkhouse rocked with laughter.
These practical jokers might have
noticed that Alexiev no longer flew
into rages which added zest to the
game, and had become suddenly
morose and brooding.
One morning, ten days after
with a little enlightenment and initia-
tive might have had this wild crank
locked up. His fellow boarders in
Washington regarded him as
“cracked.” Yet they saw him at tar-
get practice in the back yard and did
nothing. Finally when he invaded
the president’s office and was thrown
out, no one took the trouble to fol-
low him up and find out about him.
Most wonderful of all, for 20 years
after the Garfield tragedy we denied
our presidents that protection against
regicides practiced by every other
civilized nation. Only when McKin-
ley fell before the bullet of Czolgosz
did we wake up and do the sensible
thing.
Guiteau differed from most ma-
niacs of this class in that he looked
the part. So did Alexiev, who killed
Rothrock. Every editor who dealt
with Goldsborough’s manuscripts
probably recognized that he was in-
sane. Yet he continued to haunt
Gramercy Park and to plot mur-
der. Moore, in that laconic re-
mark to his daughter before he died,
revealed that he knew his murderer
and knew him for a crackpot. Aft-
erward, Moore’s sister remembered
that a year before the inventor had
spoken of an anonymous threatening
letter in his morning mail. “I’ll get
you,” it said. Yet Moore did nothing
about it.
Further, Gebhardt had been in an
asylum—and had been released. And
the story of the Noel case writes its
own moral.
Note especially that these are not
exceptional cases. Since I sat down
to write this article, my morning
newspaper has printed briefly, three
repetitions of the old story—killings
or attempted killings by “harmless
lunatics” or persons “got out” of an
asylum.
Watch such persons. If you have a
crackpot in your family have him
looked over by the best alienist you
can afford. If the alienist recom-
mends confinement, keep him there
until medical authority just as good
declares he is again of sound mind.
If you receive an anonymous
threatening letter, send it at once to
the police.
Of course, not every
lunatic” will break loose and
But you never can tell. Take
risks.
The first cost of Sherwin-Williams is no more for
the completed job than “cheap” paint, because
Sherwin-Williams will cover as much surface per
dollar as any paint.
Titanic disaster, Alexiev walked in-
to the newspaper building at Spo-
kane. The staff of the Spokesman-
Review had not yet reported for
work. That fact probably saved the
life of Malcolm Glendenning, then as
now. its city editor. Alexiev wan-
dered around the building until he
found a floor filled with men writing
at desks—the office of the Chronicle.
A reporter asked what wanted.
“To see the editor,” said Alexiev.
“Sit down; I’ll call him,” said the
reporter. Alexiev, hands in overcoat
pocket, settled into a chair.
Rothrock came. “What can
for you?” he asked.
Without a word, Alexiev whipped
out a revolver and fired two shots,
aimed at the heart, into Rothrock’s
body. As he fell, Alexiev, now in an
insane frenzy jumped on him and be-
gan striking at his head with the
barrel of the gun. Half a dozen re-
porters overpowered the maniac.
They laid Rothrock out on a table.
“Get a doctor!” he gasped—and
died.
The authorities were reluctant to
call Alexiev unsound of mind—it had
been a most brutal murder, and
Rothrock was popular. But he went,
eventually, to the asylum for the
criminal insane. He is there yet, “dull
incoherent, his mind quite blank,”
says a recent report.
The more famous case in my own
circle was that of David Graham
Phillips, probably the most popular
novelist of his time. A bachelor, he
lived at the National Arts Club, of
Gramercy Park, then the literary
center of New York. Among the
writing men and women who
haunted it in those days, Phillips was
the most conspicuous figure physical-
ly. Tall, with a striking face, he em-
phasized his appearance by dressing
conspicuously.
He had made friends with the New
York police, and especially with one
retired lieutenant. One evening he
pulled from his pocket two or three
anonymous letters.
“See what you make of these,” he
said.
The lieutenant read them. “These
are nut letters,” he said. “The fellow
who writes them has a mania of per-
secution. And it’s fixed on you.
They’re always dangerous in that
stage. He lives near you—look at the
station letter on the postmark. Prob-
ably he’s trailing you. Your, play is
to report him to headquarters. They’ll
put a counter-trailer on you and
pick him up.”
Very likely Phillips felt that the
affair might get into the newspapers
and make him look foolish. At any
rate he did not report to the police.
By this delay he signed his own
death warrant.
For he was being trailed by a
young man of aristocratic bearing
and pleasant manners who as a rule
appeared to be anything except a
danerous lunatic.
Fitzhugh C. Goldsboro ugh belonged
to an eminent family of Baltimore
and Washington. He had made a
brilliant record in preparatory
school. He entered Harvard, but
dropped out at the end of his fresh-
man year, apparently because of his
absorbing interest in music. He was
a violinist. Going abroad he finished
his training in that instrument, gave
several concerts which the European
critics treated more than kindly, and
composed a few short arias which
are played even yet.
Suddenly he returned to this
country—mad, as we know now,
though no one appreciated the fact at
the time. First, he broke with his
family and went to live alone in a
small apartment whose windows
swept Gramercy Park. Second, he
lost all ambition for music, and day
and night he wrote fiction—impos-
sible manuscripts with the unmistak-
able rhythm of insanity. They came
back from the magazines and book
WASHINGTON. — Selenium will
get you if you don’t watch out!
That’s what Chemists Maurice I,
Smith, K. W. Franke arid B. B. West-
fall of the United States health serv-
ice have discovered in recent experi-
ments.
Human beings get selenium from
plants and animals raised on soil
containing that heavy metal. In
three northwestern states it was
found that 92 per cent of the persons
in 111 families on selenium-bearing
soil had traces of it in their bodies.
Also in the group was a high per-
centage with diseased finger nails,
intestinal disorders, diseased skin
and severa 1 cases of arthritis, the
chemists reported.
But there is comfort in the fact
selenium is prevalent in only a few
isolated soil patches of the northwest.
better luck. Toward the last he was ]■’
affixing insane letters to these manu- special policeman in
scripts — scribbling which declared had told her of the murder'in detail"
that a conspiracy of authors was Could this be the man? She called
keeping his work out of print—and up her husband. He came, with two
making scenes in the reception ■’ -• .... ....
rooms.
Why his disordered mind fixed on
Phillips as head and front of the con-
spiracy, none ever knew. After the
tragedy the newspapers recalled that
one of Phillips’ novels touched criti-
cally on a fictitious family of Wash-
ington, and created the theory that
Goldsborough identified this family
as his own. That is possible; and pa-
pers which the killer left behind tend
to bear out the theory. It is more
likely, I have always thought, that
Phillip’s conspicuous appearance
caught the eye of the lunatic and
fixed his mania, and that the “in-
sult” was an afterthought. But the
lieutenant of police was right. Daily
Goldsborough was quietly, stealthily
following the novelist and marking
his habits.
Every afternoon Phillips began a
long walk by calling at the Prince-
ton Club for his mail. One fine Jan-
uary afternoon he found a telegram.
It read:
David Graham Phillips;
You will be shot today.
David Graham Phillips.
One who saw him read this tele-
gram remembers that he laughed
nervously, thrust it into his pocket,
started foi' the door. It is quite prob-
able that he was starting to get the
threatening anonymous letters and
report the facts to the police. If so,
it was too late. As he walked down
the brownstone steps of the club a
young man who had been loitering on
the pavement poured five shots from
an automatic pistol into him. Before
passers-by could seize the killer, he
had pressed the muzzle to his own
head and blown out his brains.
Phillips, fighting hard for his life,
lingered for two or three days. “If it
had been only one bullet!” he said at
the last. “But five are too much.”
Once I nearly drew the black spot
myself. I was Sunday editor of the
San Francisco Chronicle. On a busy
Monday morning, Tommy, our im-
perturable office boy, entered with a
visitor’s slip bearing a Spanish fem-
inine name, togethei' with a para-
graph clipped from my supplement
of the day before. This was harmless
little digression in a syndicated story
to the effect that the beauty of a
Latin woman blooms early and fades
early.
“Well, what of it?” I asked Tom-
my . “Did she say why she wanted to
see me?”
“Yes, sir,” said Tommy,
blinking an eye. “She says
come to kill you!”
I laughed — and then stopped.
“Stay here, Tommy,” I said. And
by house telephone I called our day
watchman, a stalwart experienced
ex-policeman.
“Lock the door, keep the kid with
you, and stay where you are,” he
said. “I’ll get her so quiet she’ll nev-
er suspect.”
Two minutes laten I heard a strug-
gle and feminine screams. Tommy
and I ran outside. The watchman
had an expert grip on a big, hand-
some, dark-eyed woman. The police,
called by telephone, found a remark-
ably long and sharp stiletto up her
sleeve. They identified her as a mild
lunatic, “perfectly harmless,” who
had long walked abroad in the Latin
Quarter—and put her where she be-
longed. But for her insane whim to
confide in the office boy, I might
have gone the way of Rothrock.
The cases of Alexiev and Golds-
borough differ from the typical “nut”
killer in that they had never gone to
an asylum. The tragical death of
Daniel F. Moore, the eminent inven-
tor, whose creations, they say, sped
up the development of television by
five years, adhers to the regular pat-
tern. It happened last year, in New
Jersey. Moore, an elderly widower,
lived with his daughter, Beatrice, at
East Orange. One Sunday night the
doorbell rang. A young man whom
Miss Moore noted for his pleasant,
courtly manners stood on the piazza
asking for Mr. Moore. She sum-
moned her father. When, ten min-
utes later, he passed her door on the
way to his bedroom she called out:
“Who was it, Dad?”
“Oh, just that nut from Brooklyn,”
he laughed.
Miss Moore had never heard of
any nut from Brooklyn. She made a
mental note to ask her father about
him later. But she never saw her
fathei' alive again.
Mr. Moore rose very early next
morning, for he was due at a funeral
in a remote town. He went to the
garage for his car. A next door
neighbor was awakened by a man’s
voice raised in violent, angry con-
versation. There followed a little ex-
plosion, “like a light bulb breaking,”
then, after a measurable pause, an-
other. Setting it down as a quarrel
between belated Sunday night
drunks, the neighbor went to sleep
again. An hour later Moore was
found lying dead before the garage,
his ignition key in his hand and two
22-caliber bullets in his brain. A
discharged 22-long shell lay on the
gravel beside him.
On Tuesday morning a handsome
young man with grave, pleasant
manners emerged from a patch of
woodland near East Orange, knocked
at the door of Mrs. H. Jones, and
asked for a newspaper. She handed
g him one.
1 i objected.
M 1 manner
g pleasant to sinister. Mrs.
w frightened, explained that this morn-
ing’s paper hadn’t come yet. The
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The Whitewright Sun (Whitewright, Tex.), Vol. 58, No. 31, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 15, 1937, newspaper, April 15, 1937; Whitewright, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1230811/m1/3/?rotate=0: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Whitewright Public Library.