From September 4, 1910

“THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LABOR DAY” BY SAMUEL GOMPERS: The President of the American Federation of Labor Writes of the Meaning of National Holiday and How It Originated (PDF)

As we head into the Labor Day weekend, it seems appropriate to include this article explaining the holiday, written by AFL president Samuel Gompers.

From September 4, 1910

RATHBONE ENDS LONG LIST OF LINCOLN PARTY TRAGEDIES: All Who Were With the President When He Was Assassinated Met Death in Some Unusual or Tragic Manner (PDF)

This was new to me: the night Abraham Lincoln was shot, there was actually another couple in the private box with the Lincolns at Ford’s Theatre, and it turns out that their story is even more gruesome than the Lincons’ story. In fact, it seems that anyone who was in that box that night met bizarre or early death. On the occasion of the death of Major Henry Rathbone, the last survivor from the box, the Sunday Magazine reviewed the events of that day, and the fates of all who were there.

On April 14, 1865, there were four people seated in the box at the theatre. “The President sat in the corner nearest the audience, Mrs. Lincoln next to him; Miss Clara Harris sat near Mrs. Lincoln, and behind her young Major Rathbone.” The latter two were step-siblings who had fallen in love. “The President and Mrs. Lincoln had a warm liking for the pair, and had invited them to share the box.”

After the play began, John Wilkes Booth entered from the ante-room adjoining the box and fired his shot into the President’s head. Rathbone lunged at him, but Booth slipped away, shouted “The South is avenged!” (according to this article, but “Sic semper tyrannus!” according to most sources) and jumped over the box. An actress on stage named Laura Keene urged everyone to remain calm. Clara Harris, “from the box, called to her to bring water. She ran and got some and flew up the stairs to the box.” And now there were five people in the box: the President, his wife, the young couple in love, and Laura Keene.

Here were five people shut up together with the crime. The curse was upon them all. Not one of them — and they all had fame, wealth, happiness, and love apparently within their grasp — failed to come to a tragic or untimely end.

All the world knows that Lincoln died early the next morning, without having regained consciousness. His wife was for a long time prostrated. For several weeks she was confined to her bed. Then she bestirred herself so far as to go over the personal effects of her husband, giving mementos to his closest friends. When this duty was done she returned to Illinois to spend the rest of her days in melancholy.

Not much has been told of Mrs Lincoln’s after life — there was not much, for that matter, to tell. No wife could ever have really recovered from the shock of such a tragedy, and Mrs. Lincoln rallied even more slowly than was hoped. She never came out altogether from the cloud, and as her years increased her melancholy grew. She had a horror of meeting people, yet in her disordered brain the idea remained that there were imperative social duties that must be attented to. She would order gowns and concern herself wearily with preparations for some phantom function. Then the gowns would be sent away, unworn, and she would brood until again she felt that she must attend to her duties, and the same dreary business would begin again. Thus she ended her days, blighted from the moment that Booth stood a few feet behind her chair and took his aim.

Mrs. Lincoln lived until she was 63, but towards the end of her life she was suicidal and delusional. After one suicide attempt, her son Robert had her institutionalized. See Wikipedia for more details. But first read on for the fates of the others in the box. It gets worse.

Miss Keene was a woman of stern stuff, “as fitted,” said one who knew her “to act a part in tragedy off the stage as on.” Self control was natural to her. Alone of all the people in the theatre she had known what to do and had done it. But strong natures do not fail to suffer from such repression.

Her daughter was at school near Washington, and the next day hastened to her mother. “As I spoke to her,” says the girl, “she trembled from head to foot. She could not speak. To hearten her I said, ‘Mother, where is your old-time courage?’ But it was no use.” Laura Keene had received her death blow, too. She lived, it is true, for several years and worked hard and successfully, as she always did, but the nerve had gone. She could no longer stand the strain that she had once borne bravely and, worn out, she died at the age of forty-four, at the height of her career, another victim of Wilkes Booth. [She died of tuberculosis.]

The two lovers, Miss Harris and Major Rathbone, left the theatre and made their way through the frenzied crowd on the streets broken with grief and shock. But they had each other, they had wealth and position and all the good things of life. They never thought as they turned from the place of crime and death that over them hung a fate more awful than they had seen befall him they held the best of men…

Major Rathbone was appointed Consul in Germany and the pair lived as happily as had been prophesied. But the husband added to his devotion to his wife a great and perfectly unreasonable jealousy. As time went on he developed fits of temper, enough to make their friends class him as “peculiar.” Perhaps they added: “And it seems to grow on him,” but none were prepared for the tragedy that followed. One day the news came from Germany that Mr. Rathbone had killed his wife and committed suicide. Nobody believed it. It was some other person or name; everybody knew the devotion of the Rathbones. Then official documents came, and there was no longer any doubt. Henry Rathbone had indeed murdered his wife, but thought he was thought to be dying from his own wound he was not yet dead. The letter added that Mrs. Rathbone’s sister and the children had “escaped.”

Escaped what, asked everybody, horrified and puzzled. It was only after many delays that the full truth came to this country. Specialists had examined Rathbone, and declared that he had long been insane. It was not mere temper, but a disordered mind that his friends had noted for so many years. How long had he been insane? The experts could not say. But probably the murderer who stole into Lincoln’s box that night had brought madness to the young man, and a death unspeakably awful to the girl he loved…

Thus four persons who were bespattered by the blood Booth shed that night have found a tragic end, four persons who were not only innocent of all wrong-doing, but who had every gift a fortunate fate could bring. There remains the murderer, man gifted as few have been with beauty and charm and genius. Everybody loved Wilkes Booth. His friends could never believe that he acted on his own initiative in the matter of the conspiracy…

Booth fled the theater and made his way to a farm in Virginia, where he was eventually hunted down by the Union Army and shot on site. The soldier who killed him was named Boston Corbett. His story, too, took a tragic twist:

Not quite yet is the story of horror ended. The man who shot Booth, Boston Corbett, was popular with his fellow soldiers, deeply religious, but not, they said, without plenty of humor. He had kept up their spirits on many a hard march. He went to Kansas, was [afflicted] with homicidal mania, and died raving mad in an asylum, the last victim of the curse.

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

From August 7, 1910

GRAFTING ON THE INDIANS AND HOW IT IS DONE: How Our “Century of Dishonor” Has Been Replaced by an Era of Plain Swindling (PDF)

This is a somewhat depressing and startlingly frank look at how Americans were swindling native tribes out of their land. It is nice to know that even in 1910 people already realized that the Native Americans were not treated fairly. For some reason I had a notion that this sort of guilt was a more modern perspective on history. It turns out that a lot of eye-opening was due to a woman named Helen Hunt Jackson, whose book A Century of Dishonor, published 30 years earlier, brought a lot of moral injustice to light.

The article uses her book as a jumping off point and brings readers up to date on how the Native Americans were still being taken advantage of:

When the Five Nations were moved westward-ho, to make room for a civilization that had no particular use for them, they were paid for their lands and were given over 19,000,000 acres in what is now Oklahoma. Here they were to live as they wanted to live, and hunt or farm just as they liked, unmolested by the white man. It was a good theory, but it did not work. It was, in fact, about the most conspicuous failure the Nation ever made.

As we grew and waxed fat we extended anxious eyes toward Oklahoma. The Indian land was, unfortunately for them, very good land. No sooner did we grasp this fact than we felt we must take up the white man’s burden.

Should that land be unopened merely because the owners preferred it that way? Never. The march of civilization cannot be stopped. The Indian must be civilized, which meant he must let in the white man. It is a great saving of time to belong to a race made exactly right; whenever we meet people made differently it is proved, without any argument, that whatever they like or do is wrong. It was very simple in the case of the Indian.

It was done in this fashion. Beginning in 1887 certain severalty acts were passed conferring citizenship on any Indian who would give up tribal life and take up land individually. In 1891 this offer was extended to the Five Nations in Oklahoma…

It is not to be supposed that the Indians had anything to do with this arrangement. The white man took, along with his other burdens, that of deciding that the Indian should sell his land.

So it was sold.

It gets worse, detailing individual stories of Native Americans being taken advantage of. It’s probably an important read, but it might not leave you in the best mood. If you’re interested in reading more, you can find free eBook editions of A Century of Dishonor here

From July 31, 1910

HOW LONG SHOULD A MAN’S VACATION BE? President Taft Says Every One Should Have Three Months — What Big Employers of Labor and Men of Affairs Think on the Subject. (PDF)

President Taft said that Americans should get take two or three months vacation in the summer:

“The American People,” said he, “have found out that there is such a thing as exhausting the capital of one’s health and constitution, and that two or three months’ vacation after the hard and nervous strain to which one is subjected during the Autumn and Spring are necessary in order to enable one to continue his work the next year with that energy and effectiveness which it ought to have.”

So the New York Times Magazine asked several prominent businessmen what they thought of the proposal. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t like it.

William Ellis Corey, President of US Steel: “I am of the opinion that two or three months, as suggested by the President, is entirely too long under ordinary circumstances.”

John Dustin Archibold, VP of Standard Oil: “For people who conserve their powers carefully in their current work, reasonably short periods ought to suffice.”

John Wanamaker, former Postmaster General: “I cannot see the President’s two or three months idea at all, except to repeat that it should not be taken too seriously.”

And so on. I’m not sure how many vacation days Taft himself took during his Presidency, but these days the media keeps track of Presidential vacations pretty closely.

From July 31, 1910

“THE COUNTRY NEEDS A PERIOD OF REST AND READJUSTMENT” This Is the View of Roger W. Babson, Expert Economist, Who Thinks This Is a Time for “Cainting Ourselves to the Floor and Thinking” — A Careful Analysis of Financial Affairs (PDF)

The more I read about economist Roger Babson, the more I realize that he’s a hard guy to sum up in a blog entry. He was an economist who believed the business cycle followed the laws of nature. He thought that stocks were like gravity, so what goes up must come down. He didn’t just use gravity as a metaphor, but really believed the planet’s gravitational pull was a literal influence on business. He eventually founded the Gravity Research Foundation to study gravity (and the possibility of anti-gravity) in 1949.

Babson College, a business school he founded in Massachusetts, includes this note in their official biography of Babson:

His pseudoscientific notion, that the laws of physics account for every rise and ebb in the economy, had no more validity than the ancient beliefs that the stars govern the destinies of men or that base metals could be transmuted into gold or silver.

But it turns out that he did have some good ideas, and successfully predicted the crash of 1929 (I’m not sure how many crashes he may have predicted that didn’t come true, but that one he got right).

He was also the Prohibitionist Party’s candidate for President in 1940. I had no idea such a party still exists, but here is the tribute to him on their website.

Fun fact: The prohibitionist party mascot is a camel.

From July 10, 1910

HUNTING A JOB WHEN A MAN IS OVER FORTY FIVE: Some Are Pathetic Figures but Others Turn Apparent Adversity to Good Account (PDF)

An interesting look at ageism in hiring in 1910. It describes the “pathetic” man of 45 who can’t get a job, but offers hope in stories of companies who found some of their best employees in the over-40 crowd. Said one employer:

“I never had a better office force in my life, and from the first things went smoothly. There was no breaking in of green men; no carelessness; no idleness; no unruliness.

They were all tried veterans, and they knew exactly what was expected of them and they did it efficiently. They saved me an endless amount of annoyance and irritation so common in breaking in new, untried men.”

From June 26, 1910

FAMOUS PRIMA DONNA CHAMPIONS WOMAN SUFFRAGE CAUSE: Madame Lillian Nordica Talks Interestingly of the Movement, Which She Is Giving Her Enthusiastic Support (PDF)

Here we have the story of a famous opera singer, Lillian Nordica, who supports a woman’s right to vote. I found it interesting that this article tries so hard to let the reader know that men have no need to worry about too much change if women are allowed to vote. There is the explicit reassurance that the right to vote won’t make women any less feminine. This is underscored by an intermittent narrative* throughout the article describing Nordica sewing during the interview, as though to say, “See? The suffragette still does womanly things.”

Here is a representative passage:

The end of the long hem of the curtain had been reached. It was examined, laid aside, and a new piece taken up.

“We don’t want to fight husbands and brothers.” A new needle was threaded with the skill born of long experience. “Women will always continue to depend upon their husbands and brothers. There is not the slightest danger that they will become masculine and independent in any unpleasant sense.

“No, the world misunderstands us, purposely, perhaps. We want to help, not to hinder our husbands or brothers — not to fight them. We want to work with them as their equals in arms in the great battles of life.

“Certainly we can be of greater assistance to them by entering intelligently into their lives than by being excluded from them.

“It does not follow that I will exercise every right I am allowed under the law. I have selected a certain work in the world and the granting of the suffrage to women would not cause me to forsake my art, and it is the same with all women. But I don’t want to feel that under the law I am nonentity in the community.”

Meanwhile there had been a number of interruptions, for Mme. Nordica is a housekeeper in fact as well as name, and a dozen questions of detail were brought to her.

“Housekeeping is very well in its way,” said the great singer, after one of these interruptions. “I enjoy it for one. A woman’s home, we are told, is her life. I believe that it is. But the suffrage will not interfere with that, will not cause her to neglect this obvious duty. We will agree that housekeeping is very important, but why should it keep women from going beyond that? The drudgery of housekeeping does not round out the fullest possible life for her.

*I guess you could say her sewing is a running thread.

From June 19, 1910

A MORNING WALK AND TALK WITH MAYOR GAYNOR: Every Day the City’s Chief Executive Goes from His Home to His Office Afoot — A Vigorous Advocate of Fresh Air and Exercise (PDF)

William Jay Gaynor served as mayor of New York City from 1910 – 1913, and walked to CIty Hall from his home in Park Slope every day, enjoying the view of the city as he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and planned out his day in his head. This brings to mind the present mayor Michael Bloomberg, who famously takes the subway to work every day. Or does he?

Three years ago, the New York Times stalked Bloomberg for five weeks and discovered that while he does take the subway, he first takes a car from his Upper East Side home to a subway station a mile away, passing two subway stops in between. And he actually took the car the entire way to City Hall for all but two days per week.

I can’t help but wonder how often Mayor Gaynor took a hansom cab to the Bridge and walked the rest of the way.

From June 12, 1910

TRAGEDIES OF OUR INEXORABLE IMMIGRATION LAWS: How They Sunder Families and Wreck Hard-Saved Fortunes — A False Cablegram from Anybody Will Detain a Traveler (PDF)

Open any newspaper today and you’ll see that we still have problems with immigration law. But in 1910, when immigrants came through Ellis Island, the problems were of a different sort. People were turned away, and families were even separated, when someone was even suspected of carrying a disease, or being an undesirable person who might become a burdon to the state.

This article gives several examples of people wrongfully turned away, people of status being given preferential treatment, and legal loopholes used to deport immigrants even after they’ve been admitted to the country and lived here more than three years (the window of time during which the government could legally deport someone). Here is one such story:

Four years ago a lawyer’s clerk came over here, leaving behind him a not very savory reputation. In this country, too, he did not distinguish himself, and when word came across the water as to his past career then the authorities were glad to fall upon him and arrange for his deportation.

How did they do it, you ask, seeing that the three-year limit had been well passed? By this ingenious device.

It seems that once upon a time, when prosperity beamed, he had given way to a natural desire to look on the scenic beauties of Niagara. Not only that, but when there he took a carriage, the better to see the country side.

And in that carriage he crossed the bridge and spent about ten minutes in Canada. At this time he had been in America two years and ten months.

So when the authorities learned that the man was an undesirable citizen they pointed out that his residence in this country dated not from the time he landed at New York, but from the moment when he drove into it over the bridge after his ten-minute trip through Canada. They said he had left the United States and made a re-entry, and the fact that all this was done in the course of an hour’s drive did not alter the validity of their claim.

From June 12, 1910

EX-SLAVES DREAM OF A MODEL NEGRO COLONY COMES TRUE: Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in the Heart of the Fertile “Delta” Is a Community of 8,000 Where No White Man Can Own a Square Foot of Property (PDF)

The 13th amendment ended slavery in the United States when it was ratified in 1865. In 1887, Isaiah Montgomery founded Mound Bayou as an independent black community of freed slaves. Slightly smaller than one square mile, Mound Bayou today has a population of just over 2,000 people, 98.43% of whom are African American (as of the 2000 census), which is one of the largest black populations by percentage in the U.S.

The article is a fascinating look at race relations in 1910. I found the article’s account of what happens when white visitors come to Mound Bayou to be especially interesting:

It might be supposed that the white visitor to a community composed entirely of blacks would be expected to put himself on a plane with them, and if he sought their hospitality he must break bread with them on terms of perfect equality. But such is far from the case.

If a white man desires to spend the night in Mound Bayou he finds that certain rooms in the hotel are reserved exclusively for white visitors. They are neat and cleanly to a degree of nicety, far in advance of what is found in the average country hotel, and instead of being asked to eat at the table, or even in the same dining room with the colored boarders, the white sojourner’s meals are served in his own room in a most appetizing manner.

For more distinguished white visitors a pretty, cheerful room is set aside in the home of Isaiah Montgomery, the hospitality accorded being probably best expressed in the language of a Memphis newspaper writer, who was one of the first white men to spend a night in the colony.

“When I realized,” he said, “that we would be compelled to remain over night in Mound Bayou I began to wonder what treatment we, the only two white people in the place, would receive. I asked Montgomery about some place to eat and sleep, and he replied that there was a room at his home that had never been occupied excepting by white people. To his house my companion and myself were taken. We were met in the hall by Montgomery’s wife and two daughters, neatly dressed and with a manner and refinement that were a revelation. They had prepared for us a savory supper, which we ate with much relish in the regular dining room all by ourselves.

“Our bedroom was neat, clean, and as nicely furnished as you will find in the average hotel. After some conversation with Montgomery concerning his colony and the general condition of the negro farmers of Mississippi we retired to our room. The thought occurred to us, while the storm was raging outside, what a difference between our position and the position of two negroes who might have strayed into a town populated entirely by whites, and in which negroes were not permitted to live. Here we were at Mount Bayou — two white men — among 7,000 negroes, and our treatment had been irreproachable.”

The whole article is very thought provoking.

From June 12, 1910

HUDSON MAXIM ON A COMING WAR OF AEROPLANES: The Famous Inventor of High Explosives Predicts a Revolution in Warfare Due to the Use of the Craft of the Air as Fighters (PDF)

Hudson Maxim was a chemist and inventor. In this article, he predicts the use of airplanes as fighters in the “next great war,” writing, “there will be new and strange guns and strange missiles in that conflict.” Sure enough, in just a few years World War I would begin, and airplanes would be used for combat — perhaps most famously by a German fighter pilot named Manfred von Ricthofen, better known as the Red Baron.

But Maxim makes other predictions about air travel, writing enthusiastically about the opportunity for inventions that the airplanes will inspire:

Could we come back in 2010, to banquet some famous Curtiss* of that time, we should think little of a flight to the function to do him honor from Chicago, from the Thousand Islands, from the Summer estate on Mount Katahdin in Maine; and the wide stretches of country rushing under as, as we came, would be a strange commingling of villas, city, and farm; while the chains of carefully prepared alighting areas, stretching in all directions, would give the landscape something of the aspect of an enormous fox-and-goose board…

We shall not have to wait a hundred years for the stanch, wind-defying machine with automatic equilibriation. Very soon, automobiling of the sky will be as safe as automobiling upon the earth is now.

*I believe Curtiss here refers to aviator Glenn Curtiss.

From June 5, 1910

ONLY NINE MOTHERS OF U.S. SENATORS ARE STILL LIVING: They Are All Unusually Interesting and Forceful Characters and Have Contributed Much to the Successes of Their Distinguished Sons (PDF)

My first thought: “Oh, wow. Only nine mothers of Senators were still alive in 1910. That’s awful.”

My second thought: “Wait a minute. I have no idea how many mothers of Senators are alive today. Maybe nine is a lot. After all, there are lots of old Senators.” It didn’t take long to figure out that whatever the current number is, it surely must be higher than nine. After all, there are 41 Senators in their 40s and 50s, and the average female lifespan in the U.S. is around 80 years old. So it seems likely that dozens of Senator’s mothers are still alive today.

The oldest mother in the article is Mrs. Ingeborg Nelson, mother of Knute Nelson (R-MN). She was 95.

Also mentioned is Caroline Wingo Gore, mother of Thomas Pryor Gore (D-OK). I was curious whether there is any relation to Al Gore, and it turns out the answer is no. But there is relation to author (and unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress) Gore Vidal, who is Thomas Gore’s grandson.

From May 22, 1910

TORPEDO AIRSHIP CONTROLLED BY WIRELESS IS THE LATEST INVENTION: Thomas R. Phillips, Who Made It, Claims to Control a Dirigible Balloon Loaded with Bombs Without Leaving His Office. (PDF)

Today the military uses Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles to remotely bomb foreign targets. This must be the UCAV’s great grandfather.

“I can,” says Mr. Phillips, “sit in an armchair in London and make my airship drop a bunch of flowers into a friend’s garden in Manchester or Paris or Berlin.”

But it is not for the dropping of flowers that he intends his invention. It is for the dropping of dynamite bombs.

[At the London Hippodrome, Phillips demonstrated with] a twenty-foot model of a Zeppelin dirigible. In itself the thing looked harmless enough… It looked like a toy balloon at the mercy of any gust of wind — purposeless, slow, and unwieldy.

And then suddenly — Cr-r-rack! Mr. Raymond Phillips had touched a lever, and the airship sprang into life. Nothing had touched it — nothing, that is, that could be seen by the eye of any human being — and yet at that touch and at the sound of the compelling “Cr-r-rack!” the airship model awoke and became a purposeful thing.

“Crack, crack!” again and again. Running his fingers from one key to another he stopped it dead, turned it about, made it rise and fall, made it turn figures of eight in the air, and finally stopped it again, motionless in the air, forty feet above the orchestra stalls.

“Now,” said he, “just imagine that row of seats is a row of houses, and that instead of a model, with paper toys in its hold, I am controlling a full-sized airship carrying a cargo of dynamite bombs. Watch!”

He pressed another key. There was a faint click from the framework of the airship, and the bottom of the box that hung amidships fell like a trapdoor, releasing not bombs, but a flight of paper birds that fluttered gracefully down on the seats beneath.

The whole article is very interesting. But for the life of me I cannot figure out what any of it has to do with that woman in the middle photo who has antennae attached to her back. It’s hard to see, but I think the caption says “A Dress Lighted by Wireless.” I have no idea.

From May 15, 1910

MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT AS HUMAN BEINGS: When Not on the Bench They Are Pretty Much Like Other People — Characteristic Stores About Them (PDF)

This week President Obama announced Elena Kagan as his nominee to the Supreme Court when Justice Stevens retires at the end of this term. So it’s somewhat relevant that 100 years ago this week, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of the then-current Supreme Court Justices. The angle: Justices of the Supreme Court are just like other people. That is to say, they are not especially interesting.

I have no idea what the general public thought of the Supreme Court in 1910, but I can’t imagine they put the Justices on such a high pedestal that this came as great news to them.

Justice Harlan enjoyed golf and Kentucky history. Justice Holmes could talk vigorously about things that interest him. Justice Moody didn’t get seasick. Justice Day enjoyed basketball. That sort of thing. While I don’t find the content of this article especially interesting, I do find its very existence interesting.

From May 1, 1910

WIRELESS WONDER AGED 14 AMAZES SENATE COMMITTEE: Young W. E. D. Stokes, Jr., Glibly Discussed Radio-Activity and Modern Electricity in a Way That Made Staid Solons Wonder (PDF)

This is a great story. This 14 year old kid, W. E. D. Stokes, Jr., was the first President of the Radio Club of America, the world’s oldest radio communications society (then called the Junior Wireless Club). At his age, he already held patents relating to wireless communication. Back in 1910, there were no commercial radio stations — the first wouldn’t broadcast for another 10 years — and there was no FCC to regulate the airwaves (it was formed in 1934), but there were an estimated 25,000 to 40,000 amateur wireless operators in the United States. New York Senator Chancey Depew (R) had introduced a bill that would restrict the use of airwaves, posing a threat to the radio club’s hobby. So the club sent their president down to Washington to testify before Congress. At the time, he was the youngest person to do so.

Here is some of what he told the Times about why he testified:

“I don’t think it will be a very long time,” he said, “before men will be able to carry around with them in their automobiles or aeroplanes wireless telephone outfits. With these they should be able to talk to people having like instruments within a radius of forty or fifty miles… If the communication trust is allowed to go as far as it likes, all the wireless instruments will be gobbled up so you can’t buy one by the time science has made it possible for people to talk to one another that way. There are certain kinds of talking instruments now that can’t be bought; they can only be rented…”

“We amateurs are blamed for much that we do not do. The cases where amateurs actually interfere are few and exaggerated. In many cases antiquated apparatus and incompetent professional operators are responsible for the trouble. A good operator with an up-to-date machine can cut out interference and continue his work.”

Of course, we know that the airwaves finally became regulated, but that doesn’t diminish this kid’s passion and accomplishment. Amateur radio operators are still around today, and they have people like W. E. D. Stokes, Jr. to thank.

One of my favorite things about these old articles is that, with the benefit of 100 years of history, we can find out what ever became of W. E. D. Stokes, Jr. I did some research and found that he served in the Navy during World War II, and he had a family, including a son named Houston who today is an economics professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago with a family of his own. As far as I can tell, W. E. D. Stokes, Jr. died in 1992.

From March 20, 1910

The College Chorus “Girl”: How a Young Athlete Is Able to Carry Off a Clever Female Impersonation (PDF)

On the surface, this seems to just be a silly article about a student who is dressing up as a woman for a play:

The first picture shows a husky young college student entering his dressing room before a Cornell Masque. This broad-shouldered, athletic young man proposes to make himself into a captivating sample of the fair sex. A glance at the last picture, in which the college student is completely transformed into a ravishing “chorine,” will show how cleverly and thoroughly the transformation has been effected.

The last paragraph identifies this person as “J. Sloat Fassett, Jr., of Cornell ’12, who plays the leading part in a musical comedy which is to begin at the Waldorf-Astoria on April 1, and in which all the character, mostly ‘ladies,’ are played by made-up students.”

But what I find most interesting of all is a bit of information that is nowhere to be found in this article. This guy’s father — at the time this article was written — was serving his third term as a Congressman in the United States House of Representatives. He did not win reelection to a fourth term.

As for J. Sloat Fassett, Jr., he went on to a career as an actor under the name Jay Fassett. He has a handful of IMDb credits and several Broadway credits. In 1947, he appeared in a play called Command Decision, which was covered by Life Magazine, including a more recent photo of Jay Fassett.

Various buildings and even a town were named after members of the Fassett family. Jay Fassett died in 1973.