Heels on wheels

Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1921. An interesting question is raised: What is the proper amount to tip a child after you’ve run him over with your car?

Bumper crop

Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1874. This is your standard-issue exposé of the baby-farming racket, which provided unwilling parents with fourth-trimester abortions.

Brothers from another planet

Baltimore Afro-American, March 3, 1926. Apparently there used to be race of immortal black Jews in New Jersey. Who knew? But this is very loose application of the term “baby farming.” I don’t see anything going on here but standard-issue religious sleazebaggery and fecundity.

Global warning

New York Times, February 15, 1899. Here’s some evergreen political doggerel for all you protest cats.

Tell us more, Your Grace

Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1933. The guy was right about jazz in the long term, wrong about ballyhoo. Though it seems kind of inconsiderate for a man in his position to go gunning after someone else’s racket. You wouldn’t catch Hoagy Carmichael or Fletcher Henderson saying “The Episcopal Church is all washed up, see? Nobody wants their down-market knock-off of Papism anymore.”

But other than that, how was the service? pt. II

San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 1895. People piss and moan about the current decline of customer service, but the Gilded Age had its own deficiencies on this score.

Sisters are definitively doing it for themselves

Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1887. Here’s the straight goods at last: No “almost mobbed,” no fig leaf of patriarchal oversight. Being a huge fan of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, I mentally cast Mercedes McCambridge as the “handsome little woman with fire in her black eyes.”

Sisters are doing it for themselves (give or take a dude)

Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1907. Interesting that this little party should have required the legitimating presence of at least one man. Inferably that’s because it would have been improper for any of the women to strip Hubbard of his clothes. Let’s hear it for standards of decency maintained in the heat of mob passion. Also notable: Women seem not to have required masks for their vigilante actions.

Sisters are almost doing it for themselves

Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1900. Particularly motivated women sometimes didn’t wait for the menfolk to get off their lazy asses and dole out the rough justice. I’m curious what “almost mobbed” means here.

Street hassle

New York Tribune, March 25, 1899. This is another perennial story: the urban wife-beater rescued from a street mob by the police. The scenario differs from a rough music or white cap action in its spontaneity.