Detroit News, May 2, 1931. The professor may have understood, but I don’t. I would be completely immune to this “matching pennies” scam, because the grifters wouldn’t be able to explain it to me in 1,000 years.
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The Hope Chest 
2 Comments
What gets me is that the AP deemed this to be sufficiently newsworthy for an article. Was there a press release? Did Horace Morse want to prevent others from suffering the same fate?
I reckon an AP stringer got the story from a desk sergeant, with whom he shared a few prole yuks about it. There were way fewer university professors back in the day; consequently the caste commanded a lot more prestige. And the pie-in-the-face clash between lowbrow and highbrow was the defining joke of the 1920s and ’30s. Think of Groucho dry-humping a distressed Margaret Dumont throughout eternity and you’ve got it.