Can this marriage be saved?

Miami Herald, August 29, 1914. That, my friends, is a world-historically beautiful opening sentence, belonging in the company of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . .,” “Happy families are all alike. . .,” “It is a truth universally acknowledged. . . ,” and “A couple of days later the phone rang.”

Money to burn

Boston Journal, December 2, 1905. It must be a bitter thing, having to pay alimony to someone that’s torched a bundle of bills and securities worth 15 large (and large it was, back then.*) “Collecting curios and antiques”–I wonder if that’s journalistic code for “invert.”

*I will never be smart enough to know what any of these mean, but here are various ways to translate $15K from 1905 into the strobing, intangible, virtual, Christian- Science dollars of this, our fantastical year of 2009:

$378,610.20 using the Consumer Price Index
$292,347.59 using the GDP deflator
$855,704.70 using the value of consumer bundle
$1,634,713.38 using the unskilled wage
$2,071,170.28 using the nominal GDP per capita
$7,524,679.49 using the relative share of GDP

So: somewhere between a quarter million and 8 million simoleons. A pretty serious chunk of change, whatever.

Her silken undergarments afire

Salt Lake Telegram, June 3, 1922. Is it because Salt Lake City is a faraway foreign capital that I cannot make heads or tails of what should be a straightforward bit of scandal-mongering?

She fainted while her underwear was on fire. Sheesh, what a mystery are the autonomous functions of the human body! But how odd that her dainties should catch fire and not the rest of her clothing. (Is silk particularly flammable, compared to other pre-synthetic fabrics?)
Then again, perhaps she was wearing only her underwear at the time–that would help explain their exclusive and limited combustion.
Or maybe she wasn’t wearing them at the time: She might have built a symbolic bonfire of her knickers on the hotel room floor before shooting the dude and herself.
The questions multiply the mysteries. . .
Anyway, I’m guessing “hotel attaches” are to house dicks as sanitary engineers are to garbagemen. Or maybe “attache” applies only to house dicks small enough to fit through transoms. But now let’s proceed to the intriguing literary aspects of the story.

Piece of my heart

Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1853. “Wilfully murdered”–yep, good call by that coroner’s jury. A pest house, by the by, is a quarantined warehouse for people with infectious diseases, e.g. cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis. It’s kind of classy on the part of Chicago to situate its pest house on the lake shore.

Trial offer

Chicago Tribune, March 7 and 8, 1914 [click on images to enlarge]. The cartoon is by John T. McCutcheon, same guy who drew this one. He seems to have had an enduring interest in the phenomenon of the unprosecutable female murder defendant. The defense attorney’s contention that a female jury would be easier and not harder on Stella C. is supported by this previous posting on the subject. But who knows?

You’re either part of dissolution. . .

New York Times, July 9, 1925. With all that acid flying around, it’s a given that some troubled souls would turn the acid-throwing impulse inward. This guy seems to been trying to expiate for stepping out on his wife, and undertook to do the throwing for her. By far the majority of acid attacks originate in romantic turbulence and jealousy. If you want to see a really compelling documentary related to this phenomenon, I heartily recommend Crazy Love (although technically it’s about the romantic fallout of a lye-throwing attack, and lye is a base rather than an acid).

“Canadian vampires of high and low degree”

Chicago Tribune, August 20, 1921. Technically the Trib was a broadsheet paper, as opposed to a tabloid, but content-wise it tended to blur the barrier between the two schools of journalism. A dude stepping out on his wife scarcely fit the New York Times’s definition of “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” But how about that Miss Gertrude Ingleby, putting out all over Chinatown?! Scandalous!

Flirt, hurt, disconcert

Chicago Tribune, March 26, 1859. Twenty-seven years before Stevenson would publish The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a Boston physician is driven over to the dark side by the trifling widow of a dry goods merchant.

Jekyll and Hyde, by the way, is one of those classics that’s everything it’s cracked up to be, like Heart of Darkness and Moby-Dick. Serious evil emanates from every page.

Drowned sorrows

Washington Post, March 31, 1904. It’s like a Louvin Brothers song.