Media – Historical Easter Eggs

April 25, 1898 Newsies

We hear a lot these days about “fake news”, but that’s nothing new. In 1835, the New York Sun published a six-part series describing civilization, on the moon.

United_States_presidential_election_results,_1796-1820 — US presidential election results from 1796 to 1820 gives a good idea of partisan press circulation, where Green shaded states usually voted for the Democratic-Republican Party, while brown shaded states supported the Federalist Party

During the early colonial period, American newspapers were little more than “wretched little” sheets according to America’s “1st newsboy”, Benjamin Franklin. Scarcely more than sidelines to keep the presses occupied.

Newspapers were distributed by mail in the early years, thanks to generous subsidies from the Postal Act of 1792. In 1800, the United States could boast somewhere between 150 – 200 newspapers. Thirty-five years later, some 1,200 were competing for readership.

We hear a lot these days about “fake news”, but that’s nothing new. In 1835, the New York Sun published a six-part series describing civilization, on the moon. The “Great Moon Hoax”, ostensibly reprinted from the Edinburgh Courant, was falsely attributed to the work of Sir John Herschel, one of the best known astronomers of the age.

350px-Great-Moon-Hoax-1835-New-York-Sun-lithograph-298px — Lithograph from the “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835

Whatever it took, to sell newspapers.

Two years earlier, Sun publisher Benjamin Day ran a Help-Wanted advertisement, looking for adults to help expand circulation. “To the unemployed — A number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy and sell again“. To Day’s surprise, his ad didn’t produce adult applicants as expected. Instead, the notice attracted children.

Today, kids make up a minimal part of the American workforce, but that wasn’t always so. Child labor played an integral part in the agricultural and handicraft economy, working on family farms or hiring out to other farmers. Boys customarily apprenticed to the trades by ages 10 – 14. As late as 1900, fully 18% of the American workforce was under the age of sixteen.

download (82) — *Brooklyn newsboy, ca. 1910 Photo by Lewis Hine (Library of Congress)*

Benjamin Day’s first newspaper “hawker” was Bernard Flaherty, a ten-year-old Irish immigrant. The kid was good at it too, crying out lurid headlines, to passers-by: “Double Distilled Villainy!” “Cursed Effects of Drunkenness!” “Awful Occurrence!” “Infamous Affair!” “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”

Hordes of street urchins swarmed the tenements and alleyways of American cities. During the 1870s, homeless children were estimated at 20,000 – 30,000 in New York alone, as much as 12% of school-age children in the city.

For thousands of them newspapers were all that stood in the way, of an empty belly.

800px-Riischildren — Homeless children sleeping in Mulberry Street district of New York, circa 1890

Adults had no interest in the minuscule income, and left the newsboys (and girls) to their own devices. “Newsies” bought papers at discounted prices and peddled them on the street. Others worked saloons and houses of prostitution. They weren’t allowed to return any left unsold, and worked well into the night to sell every paper.

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For that, newsies earned about 30¢ a day. Enough for a bite to eat, to afford enough papers to do it again the following day, and maybe a 5¢ bed in the newsboy’s home.

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Competition was ferocious among hundreds of papers, and business practices were lamentable. In 1886, the Brooklyn Times tried a new idea. The city was expanding rapidly, swallowing up previously independent townships along the Long Island shore. The Times charged Western District newsboys a penny a paper, while Eastern District kids paid 1 1/5¢.

The plan was expected to “push sales vigorously in new directions.” It took about a hot minute for newsies to get wise, and hundreds of them descended on the Times’ offices with sticks and rocks. On March 29, several police officers and a driver’s bullwhip were needed to get the wagons out of the South 8th Street distribution offices. One of the trucks was overturned, later that day.

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That time, the newsboy strike lasted a couple of days, enforced by roving gangs of street kids and “backed by a number of roughs”. In the end, the Times agreed to lower its price to a penny apiece, in all districts. Other such strikes would not be ended so quickly, or so easily.

In those days, the Caribbean island of Cuba was ruled from Spain. After decades spent in the struggle for independence, many saw parallels between the “Cuba Libre” movement, and America’s own Revolution of the previous century. In 1897-’98, few wanted war with Spain over Cuban interests more than Assistant Naval Secretary Theodore Roosevelt, and New York publishers Joseph Pulitzer & William Randolph Hearst.

This was the height of the Yellow Journalism period, and newspapers clamored for war. Hearst illustrator Frederic Remington was sent to Cuba, to document “atrocities”. On finding none, Remington wired: “There will be no war. I wish to return”. Hearst wired back: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” President McKinley urged calm, but agreed to send the armored cruiser USS Maine, to protect US “interests”.

The explosion that sank the Maine on February 15 killing 268 Americans was almost certainly accidental, but that wouldn’t be known for decades. Events quickly spun out of control and, on April 21, 1898, the US blockaded the Caribbean island. Spain gave notice two days later, that it would declare war if US forces invaded its territory. Congress declared on April 25 that a state of war had existed between Spain and the United States, since the 21st.

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Several days later, newsboys were shouting the headline: “How do you like the Journal’s war?”

The Spanish-American War was over in 3 months, 3 weeks and 2 days, but circulation was great while it lasted. Publishers cashed in, raising the cost of newsboy bundles from 50¢ to 60¢ – the increase temporarily offset by higher sales. Publishers reverted to 50¢ per 100 after the war, with the notable exceptions of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.

February_23rd_1908_Boys_Selling_Newspapers_on_Brooklyn_Bridge — Brooklyn newsboys, 1908

Newsies struck the two in 1899, refusing to sell their papers. 5,000 newsboys blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, bringing traffic to a standstill. Competing papers such as the New York Tribune couldn’t get enough of the likes of strike “President” Dave Simmons, the boy “prize-fighter”, Barney “Peanuts”, “Crutch” Morris, and others. The charismatic, one-eyed strike leader “Kid Blink”, was a favorite: “Friens and feller workers. This is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we’se got to stick together like glue…. We know wot we wants and we’ll git it even if we is blind”.

Neither Hearst nor Pulitzer ever dropped their price, but they did agree to take back unsold papers.

800px-Child_Labor_in_United_States_1910_working_night_shift — Some worked well after midnight, to sell every paper

Long before modern notions of child welfare, street kids had precious few to look out for them, beyond themselves. “Dutch” Johnson, Brooklyn’s “Racetrack Newsie”, caught cold, in 1905. The illness soon turned more serious, and he was found unconscious on a pile of catalogs. Brought to Bellevue Hospital by the East River, the 16-year-old was informed that it was pneumonia. This was before the age of antibiotics. There was no chance.

“It goes”, Dutch said, in a voice barely audible. “Only I ain’t got no money and I’d like to be put away decent”.

tumblr_ne0yqmwDCl1u0ndouo1_500 (1) — H/T http://newsieshistory.tumblr.com for this image

Bookmaker “Con” Shannon offered to take up a collection for the burial. He could have easily produced hundreds from bookies and gamblers. Dutch’s diminutive successor “Boston”, spoke up. “Naw”, he said “we’re on de job and nobody else”. So it was that “Gimpy”, “Dusty”, and the other urchins of Sheepshead Bay pitched in with their pennies, their nickels and their dimes. For $53.40, Dutch Johnson would have his plot in Linden Hill Cemetery, complete with small stone marker. Not a plain black wagon and a nameless grave in some anonymous Potter’s Field.

March 22, 2228 Boldly Going where No Man Has Gone Before

Kirk was killed in 2329 on the Enterprise (B), after the ship was eaten by a Nexus energy ribbon on its maiden voyage. Only he didn’t die, because Jean-Luc Picard found him alive in the timeless Nexus, negotiating hotel deals for Priceline.com. Or something like that.

On March 22, 2228, a boy will be born to George and Winona Kirk. He would go on to become the youngest captain in Starfleet history but, before he could boldly go where no man has gone before, he had to have a name.

The real-world former World War 2 fighter pilot and veteran of 89 combat missions Gene Roddenberry had 16 suggestions for a name, among these “Hannibal”, “Timber”, “Flagg”, and “Raintree”. The television screenwriter and producer decided on James T. Kirk, based on a journal entry from the 18th century British explorer, Captain James Cook, who wrote “ambition leads me … farther than any other man has been before me“.

In his 1968 book “Making of Star Trek“, Roddenberry writes that James Kirk was born in a small town in Iowa. Full time “Trekkie” and part time Riverside, Iowa Councilman Steve Miller thought “Why not Riverside”. In 1985, Miller moved that Riverside declare itself the Future Birthplace of James T. Kirk. The motion passed, unanimously. Miller poked a stick in the ground behind the barber shop, (good thing he owned the property), declaring that this was the place. An engraved monument was erected, and so it was.

Riverside Iowa, population 963, became the “Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk. A bench was later added , along with a Shuttlecraft-shaped donation box.

Riverside’s official slogan was changed from “Where the best begins” to “Where the Trek begins,” the annual “River Fest” summer festival, became “Trek Fest”.

Fun fact: Turning on the television today it’s hard to remember how ground-breaking it was that a black, female character would play such a prominent role on a prime-time series as the actress Nichelle Nichols playing Communications Officer Nyota Uhura. The real life Nichols preferred the stage to TV and submitted her resignation, to pursue a career on Broadway. Gene Roddenberry asked her to take the weekend to reconsider, which she did. That weekend, Nichols attended a banquet put on by the NAACP where she was informed, a ‘fan’ wanted to meet her. Let her tell the story from here:

I thought it was a Trekkie, and so I said, ‘Sure.’ I looked across the room and whoever the fan was had to wait because there was Dr. Martin Luther King walking towards me with this big grin on his face. He reached out to me and said, ‘Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan.’ He said that Star Trek was the only show that he, and his wife Coretta, would allow their three little children to stay up and watch. [She told King about her plans to leave the series because she wanted to take a role that was tied to Broadway.] I never got to tell him why, because he said, ‘you cannot, you cannot…for the first time on television, we will be seen as we should be seen every day, as intelligent, quality, beautiful, people who can sing dance, and can go to space, who are professors, lawyers. If you leave, that door can be closed because your role is not a black role, and is not a female role, he can fill it with anybody even an alien”.

The conversation with Reverend King, was life-changing. Nichols returned to the series. When it was over she volunteered with NASA, working to promote the space agency and helping to recruit female and minority recruits between 1977, and 2015. The program recruited Dr. Sally Ride and United States Air Force Colonel Guion Bluford, respectively the first female and the first American astronaut of African ancestry. The program also recruited Dr. Judith Resnik and Dr. Ronald McNair, both of whom flew successful Space Shuttle missions before their deaths in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986.

Star Trek fans, ever-jealous protectors of series trivia, sometimes wonder why the March 22, 2228 date on the Riverside monument differs from the March 22, 2233 date usually cited as Kirk’s future birthday. The 2233 date didn’t come around until eight years after the monument, with the publication The Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future. 2228 or 2233 you may take your pick, but both agree on March 22, which just happens to be the real-life William Shatner’s, birthday.

In case you ever wondered what the “T” stands for – its “Tiberius”.

The Space Foundation of Colorado Springs bills itself as “the world’s premier organization to inspire, educate, connect, and advocate on behalf of the global space community“.

In 2010, survey conducted by the organization found that James Tiberius Kirk tied for #6 as the “most inspirational space hero of all time“, along with Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. You can’t make this stuff up. Tied for 6th place, with the first human in space. A guy who went there, and then came back. A guy who…you know…actually…exists.

February 15, 1898 The Sorry State of Journalism

On Friday, the Durham investigation filed indictments alleging that Clinton campaign operatives fabricated evidence of Trump campaign and later Presidential “collusion”, with Russia. If true this is a scandal orders of magnitude greater than Watergate and yet the legacy media, are silent. Five news cycles have come and gone since that announcement. The sum total of coverage by CBS, ABC and NBC amounts to the cube root, of zero.

Mickey Dugan was born on February 17, 1895, on the wrong side of the tracks. A wise-cracking street urchin with a “sunny disposition”, Mickey was the kind of street kid you’d find in New York’s turn-of-the-century slums, maybe hawking newspapers. “Extra, Extra, read all about it!”

With his head shaved as if recently ridden of lice, Mickey was one of thousands of homeless street urchins roaming the back lots and tenements of the city, not as much an individual as an archetype. Mickey Dugan was a cartoon character, the child of artist and “Buster Brown” creator, Richard Outcault.

Outcault’s “Hogan’s Alley” strip, one of the first regular Sunday newspaper cartoons in the country, became colorized in May of 1895. For the first time, Mickey Dugan’s oversized, hand-me-down nightshirt was depicted in yellow. Soon, the character was simply known as “the Yellow kid”.

Outcault worked for Joseph Pulitzer in those days, owner of the New York World Newspaper. Archrival William Randolph Hearst hired the cartoonist away to work for Pulitzer’s cross-town competitor Journal American, but the pair soon received a lesson, in the law. There was no copyright protection on the Yellow kid. Before long, the character was simultaneously appearing in competing newspaper strips where he would remain, for over a year.

We hear a lot today about “fake news” but the sorry state of journalism, is hardly new. Circulation wars were white hot at the turn of the last century. Competing newspapers used anything possible to get an edge. Real-life street urchins hawked lurid headlines, heavy on scandal-mongering and light on verifiable fact. Whatever it took, to increase circulation.

The Yellow Kid character was gone by 1898 but he lived on in a way, in the style of newspaper reporting which came to be called “yellow journalism”.

After two wars for independence from Spain, the Caribbean island of Cuba found its economy increasingly intertwined with that of the United States. From the Spanish perspective, Cuba was more of a province than a colony. They were not about to relinquish a foot of territory. When the Cuban Rebellion of 1895 broke out, Spanish colonial administrator don Valeriano Weyler’s brutal repressions killed thousands in Cuban concentration camps.

In America, some saw parallels between the “Cuba Libre” movement, and the United States’ own revolution of a hundred-odd years earlier. Fearing the economic repercussions of a drawn out conflict, shipping and other business interests put pressure on President McKinley to intervene. Meanwhile, the yellow papers kept the issue front page, whipping up popular fury with tales of the noble Cuban revolutionary and the barbaric Spaniard. There were even tales of American women publicly strip searched, by Spanish authorities.

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The armored cruiser USS Maine left Key West headed for Cuba in January 1898, to protect US interests and to emphasize the need for a quick resolution to the conflict. Anchored in Havana Harbor on February 15, a massive explosion of unknown origin rocked the Maine, sinking the cruiser within minutes and killing 268 of the 355 Americans on board.

The McKinley administration urged calm. Conditions in Cuba were bad enough, without front page headlines like “Spanish Murderers” and “Remember the Maine”, accompanied by sensationalized accounts of Spanish brutality. War became all but inevitable when US Navy findings were released that March, stating that the sinking had resulted from an external explosion.

1890s_Spanish_Misrule_Cartoon-Dalrymple-Puck — “Spanish Misrule,” Puck, 1890s, by Louis Dalrymple

The Spanish-American War began the following month, leading to the Philippine-American war.

There is a story that illustrator Frederic Remington said there was no war brewing in Cuba. Hearst is supposed to have replied. “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” The story may be apocryphal. Newspapers then couldn’t tell us what to think any more than today, but the media most certainly controlled what the public was thinking ABOUT.

For two years, Hearst and Pulitzer had clamored for war with Spain. Both were happy to take credit, when war came. Beside that, the war was good for circulation. A week after the Spanish-American War began that April, Hearst’s American Journal ran the headline “How do you like the Journal’s war?” Front page. Above the fold.

It’s been said you should never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel. I disagree. I have broken that dictum myself and recommend the practice to anyone so inclined. For all the Wizard of Oz antics of the print and electronic media, there remains only the one man behind the curtain. Ask Jeffrey Zucker how that turns out.

President Reagan once said of the Soviet Union, “doveryai no proveryai” (trust, but verify). He might have said the same of an information industry whose business model it is, to rent an audience to a sponsor.

In 1976, a team of American naval investigators concluded that the explosion aboard the USS Maine was likely caused by a fire which ignited ammunition stockpiles and not by Spanish mine or act of sabotage.

What to say to the families of the 20,603 dead, wounded and missing from the Spanish-American war? The media of the day were and remain to this day, a tower of indifference.

February 1, 1968 Sometimes, Pictures Lie

“The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths”. Pulitzer prize winning photographer, Eddie Adams

According to some studies, the average World War 2 infantry soldier saw 40 days of combat in the Pacific, over 4 years. In Vietnam, the average combat infantryman saw 240 days of combat, in a year.

By 1967, the Johnson administration was coming under increasing criticism for what many in the American public saw as an endless and pointless stalemate in Vietnam.

Opinion polls revealed an increasing percentage believed that it was a mistake to send more troops into Vietnam, their number rising from 25% in 1965, to 45% by December, 1967.

The Johnson administration responded with a “success offensive” emphasizing “kill ratios” and “body counts”, of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. Vice President Hubert Humphrey stated on NBC’s Today show that November, “We are on the offensive. Territory is being gained. We are making steady progress.”

In Communist North Vietnam, the massive battlefield losses of 1966-’67 combined with economic devastation wrought by US Aerial bombing, causing moderate factions to push for peaceful coexistence with the south. More radical factions favoring military reunification on the Indochina peninsula, needed to throw a “hail Mary” pass. Plans for a winter/spring offensive began, in early 1967. By the New Year, some 80,000 Communist fighters had quietly infiltrated the length and breadth of South Vietnam.

One of the largest military operations of the war launched on January 30, 1968, coinciding with the Tết holiday, the Vietnamese New Year. In the first wave of attacks, North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong Guerillas struck over 100 cities and towns including Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital.

Initially taken off-guard, US and South Vietnamese forces regrouped and beat back the attacks inflicting heavy losses on North Vietnamese forces. The month-long battle for Huế (pronounced “Hway”) uncovered the massacre of as many as 6,000 South Vietnamese by Communist forces, 5-10percent of the entire city. Fighting continued for over two months at the US combat base at Khe Sanh.

While the Tết offensive was a military defeat for North Vietnamese forces the political effects on the American public, were profound. Support for the war effort plummeted leading to demonstrations. Jeers could be heard in the streets. “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”

Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency, was finished. The following month, Johnson appeared before the nation in a televised address, saying “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

In the early morning darkness of February 1, 1968, Nguyễn Văn Lém led a Viet Cong sabotage unit in an assault on the Armor base in Go Vap. After taking control of the camp, Nguyễn arrested Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Tuan with his family, demanding that the officer show his guerillas how to drive tanks. The officer refused and the Viet Cong slit his throat, along with those of his wife, his six children and 80-year-old mother.

The only survivor was one grievously injured 10-year-old boy.

Nguyễn was captured later that morning, near the mass grave of 34 civilians. He said he was “proud” to have carried out orders to kill them.

AP photographer Eddie Adams was out on the street that day with NBC News television cameraman Võ Sửu, looking for something interesting. The pair saw a group of South Vietnamese soldiers dragging what appeared to be an ordinary man into the road, and began to photograph the event.

Adams “…followed the three of them as they walked towards us, making an occasional picture. When they were close – maybe five feet away – the soldiers stopped and backed away. I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture – the threat, the interrogation. But it didn’t happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC’s head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time.”

The man with the pistol was Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, Chief of the national police. Loan had personally witnessed the murder of one of his officers, along with the man’s wife and three small children.

di_05292 — Composite sequence published by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History of the University of Texas, at Austin.

Nguyễn Văn Lém had committed atrocities. He was out of uniform and not engaged in combat when he murdered the General’s subordinates and their families. The man was a war criminal and terrorist with no protections under the Geneva Conventions, legally eligible for summary execution.

And so he was. Loan drew his .38 Special Smith & Wesson Bodyguard revolver, and fired. The execution was barely a blip on the radar screen.

In February 1968, hard fighting yet remained to retake the capitol. As always, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan was leading from the front, when a machine gun burst tore into his leg.

Meanwhile, Adams’ “Saigon Execution” photograph and Võ’s footage made their way into countless papers and news broadcasts. Stripped of context, General Nguyễn came to be seen as a “bloodthirsty sadist”, the Viet Cong terrorist his “innocent victim”.

Adams was on his way to winning a Pulitzer prize for that photograph. Meanwhile an already impassioned anti-war movement, lost the faculty of reason.

Photographer Eddie Adams (right), holds up his Pulitzer prize. H/T BBC.com

The political outcry reached all the way to Australia, where General Nguyễn was recuperating from an amputation. An Australian hospital refused him treatment, and so he traveled to America, to recover.

“I was getting money for showing one man killing another,” Adams said at a later awards ceremony. “Two lives were destroyed, and I was getting paid for it. I was a hero.”
H/T BBC

American politics looked inward in the years to come, as the Nixon administration sought the “Vietnamization” of the war. By January 1973, direct US involvement in the war, had come to an end.

d182757927d3e71bd2be3c3ce011ff94 — Scenes from the final evacuation of Saigon, April, 1975

Military aid to South Vietnam was $2.8 billion in fiscal year 1973. The US Congress placed a Billion dollar ceiling on that number the following year, cutting it to $300 million, in 1975. The Republic of Vietnam collapsed some fifty-five days later.

General Nguyễn was forced to flee the country he had served. American immigration authorities sought deportation on his arrival, in part because of Eddie Adams’ image. The photographer was recruited to testify against the General but surprised his interrogators, by speaking on his behalf.

General Nguyễn was a devoted Patriot and South Vietnamese Nationalist. An accomplished pilot who led an airstrike on Việt Cộng forces at Bo Duc in 1967, he was loved and admired by his soldiers. He and his wife were permitted to stay

The couple opened a pizza shop in the Rolling Valley Mall of Virginia and called it, “Les Trois Continents”. The restaurant was a success for a time, until word got out about the owner’s identity. Knowing nothing about the man except for Adams’ photograph, locals began to make trouble. Business plummeted as the owner was assaulted in his own restaurant, his life threatened.

The photographer and the General stayed in touch after the war and even became friends. The last time Adams visited Nguyễn’s pizza parlor, some self-righteous coward had scrawled the words “We know who you are, fucker“, across the bathroom wall.

In 1991, the couple was forced to close the restaurant. Seven years later Nguyễn Ngọc Loan died of cancer.

Eddie Adams won his Pulitzer in 1969, but came to regret that he had ever taken that photograph. Years later he wrote in Time Magazine:

‘The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, “What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?”‘

Photography has been edited to deceive, for nearly as long as there have been photographs. Consider this image of Leon Trotsky next to Vladimir Lenin. Now you see him, now you don’t. And yet, sometimes images lie, without the aid or even the intent, of dishonesty.

Before Nguyễn died, Adams apologized to the General and his family for what the image had done to his reputation. “The guy was a hero” said the photographer, after the General’s death. “America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.”

October 30, 1938 Fake News

“We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” – Orson Welles

October 30, 1938 was a Sunday. The 8:00pm (eastern) broadcast of the Mercury Theater of the Air began with a weather report and then went to a dance band remote featuring “Ramon Raquello and his orchestra”. The music was periodically interrupted by live “news” flashes, beginning with strange explosions on Mars. Producer Orson Welles made his debut as the “famous” (but non-existent) Princeton Professor Dr. Richard Pierson, who dismissed speculation about life on Mars.

A short time later, another “news flash” reported a fiery crash in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. What was believed a meteorite turned out to be a rocket capsule as a tentacled, pulsating Martian unscrewed the hatch and incinerated the gathering crowd of onlookers, with a death ray.

The story is great fun, a Halloween classic telling and retelling the story of a radio broadcast leading untold thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands to take up their families and their shotguns and flee into the night, to escape the Martian menace.

1 million Americans or more according to some news outlets, members of a generation who survived the Great Depression and went on to win World War II, actually believed Martian killing machines had blasted off and traveled across interplanetary space and attacked New Jersey, only to be destroyed themselves by microorganisms, all in the space of a sixty minute broadcast.

Umm…OK.

To be fair I wrote as much myself in this space, four years ago. Then as now the healthy skeptic might have begun, by following the money.

In 1899, the obscure Brazilian priest and inventor Father Roberto Landell de Moura successfully transmitted audio over a distance, of 7 kilometers (4.3 miles). That same year an Italian inventor called Guglielmo Marconi successfully broadcast, across the English Channel. Twenty years later, Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad began to broadcast music, in the Pittsburg, Pennsylvania area. Conrad’s broadcasts stimulated demand for crystal sets. A year later, Westinghouse started the radio station, KDKA. Within two years, KDKA was broadcasting prize fights and Major League Baseball games. By early 1927 there were 737 stations nationwide, and growing.

In the 19th century, newspapers alone carried the journalistic heft, to go toe-to-toe with the corruption of Tammany Hall and other such political machines. Books could be written about the newspaper wars of the turn-of-the-century and the Yellow Journalism which helped goad the nation, to war. A week after the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 William Randolph Hearst’s American Journal ran the headline “How do you like the Journal’s war?”

The “stunt journalism” of Nellie Bly and her Ten Days in a Madhouse opened the door to an era of Muckraking, journalists reporting on waste, fraud and abuse in public and private life, alike.

In depression-era America, radio was not only the cheapest form of entertainment but a source for high quality programming. By the late 1930’s radio was not only the center of household entertainment but also, a center for news and information.

It was the Golden Age of radio. By 1934 some 60 percent of American households had radio sets as did 1½ million, of the nation’s automobiles. Many theaters didn’t bother to open their doors during the Amos & Andy program and those who did shut off the projectors while the show was on and hauled out, a radio.

To the news reader of the Great War period the newspaper was equal to the entire print and electronic media of our time, in all its forms.

Such was the media landscape in the inter-war years. A new and novel form of news and entertainment gaining ground almost daily, at the expense of a centuries-old competitor. Small wonder it is then that such an industry would find threat in this upstart, called radio.

And then came October 30, 1938. The War of the Worlds.

With memories of the Great War still painfully fresh and the Nazi threat looming in Europe an excitable few did indeed, take to the streets. Most had heard the repeated warnings that this was only entertainment though, or figured it out for themselves. Others did what rational people would do and picked up the phone, in search of information.

Friends and family called each other to see if they had heard anything. New York phone switchboards experienced a geometric increase in traffic, that night. New Jersey phone traffic jumped 39 percent during the broadcast. The New York Times received 875 calls about the program. The Newark Evening News logged over a thousand. Some called CBS, to congratulate them for the show. Others complained that the program was too realistic.

Then as now Sunday night newsrooms, are all but cold and dark. With few reporters working that night and little original reporting many papers relied on the Monday morning recap from organizations, like AP. And who was this irresponsible upstart in any case when the public already had a far more trusted source, for news and information?

The Associated Press reported Monday morning, a man in Pittsburgh returned home to find his wife with a bottle of poison saying “I’d rather die this way“. A woman in Indianapolis ran into a church screaming “New York is destroyed… It’s the end of the world!“. The Washington Post reported the story of one Baltimore man who died of a heart attack but somehow didn’t bother to follow up, for any of the details. The New York Times piled on with the October 31 headline “Radio listeners in panic, Taking Radio drama as fact”. The Times went on to inform its readers, “In Newark, in a single block at Heddon Terrace and Hawthorne Avenue, more than 20 families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture”.

Long on anecdote and egregiously short on details, the print media went with the narrative blaming the entire radio industry. It was the first clue, that something wasn’t right.

“For at least a couple hours or more and really into the next morning, we believed we were mass murderers, because the press which was very hostile to radio was delighted for this opportunity to piss on radio and say they were irresponsible, and so on”.
War of the Worlds producer, John Housman

Not a single one of multiple purported deaths was ever tied directly to the War of the Worlds and yet, 83 years later the panic narrative remains, alive and well. For the 75th anniversary in 2013 USA Today reported, that “The broadcast … disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems.”

NPR’s Morning Edition reported as recently as 2005, that “”listeners panicked, thinking the story was real. Many jumped in their cars according to the broadcast, to flee from the “invasion.” ‘Radiolab’, a program produced by New York Public Radio from 2002 to the present day reported that some 12 million people listened to that original broadcast, in 1938. 1 in 12 according to Radiolab believed the story, to be true.

The Truly Terrified likely numbered in the tens of dozens and not the tens of thousands but the narrative was already being set. What better tools to apply but fear and mockery, techniques we see in common use, to this day.

The War of the Worlds broadcast was, in the end, what it described itself to be. A Halloween concoction. The equivalent of dressing up in a sheet, jumping out of a bush and saying, ‘Boo!’. Instead, the story remains one of our great and enduring media hoaxes giving proof where little is required, of Winston Churchill’s wise and timeless advice: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on“.

August 6, 2011 Father and Son

“Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart, forever”

Edwin Milton “Ed” Sabol returned from World War 2 and took a job selling topcoats. He was good at it and provided a decent standard of living for his family, but his heart wasn’t in it. What Sabol liked more than anything else, was to watch his son Steve play high school football.

Sabol would take a motion picture camera, a wedding gift, and film Steve’s games. He found that he had a knack for it, and founded a small film production company called Blair Motion Pictures, named after his daughter, Blair.

In 1962, Sabol successfully bid for the rights to film the NFL championship game between the Green Bay Packers, and New York Giants. The game was played in cold so severe that camera operators suffered frostbite, and a wind so strong it blew the ball off the tee three times, before the opening kickoff. Despite all that, Sabol’s work on the game was impressive.

Commissioner Pete Rozelle proposed to buy out the filmmaker but the league’s 14 owners objected, instead giving Sabol $20,000 apiece in seed money to shoot all NFL games and produce a highlight reel, for each club.

Thus was born a storybook production company, called NFL Films. The production style was unmistakable: the “tight to the spiral” shot of the ball leaving the quarterback’s hand, the on-the-field close-ups and slow motion shots, all of it “mic’d up” in a way that let you hear every hit, every sound, as if you were personally, on the field.

Football fans of a certain age will remember the orchestral score and the stentorian tones of John Facenda’s narration, “the voice of God”: “They call it pro football. They play it under the autumn moon, in the heat of a Texas afternoon.” NFL Films became “the greatest in-house P.R. machine in pro sports history” according to Salon.com television critic Matt Zoller Seitz. “An outfit that could make even a tedious stalemate seem as momentous as the battle for the Alamo.”

NFL Films won 112 Sports Emmys. While the company’s $50 million earnings were small compared with the $18 billion in revenue NFL earns from television alone, the real value of NFL Films is how it promoted the sport. Many credit NFL Films as a key reason that the National Football League has become the most watched professional sports league in the United States.

Sabols, 2004 Sports Emmys — Steve and Ed Sabol at the 2004 Sports Emmys

Ed Sabol was inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame on this day in 2011. Steve was suffering inoperable brain cancer at the time, a condition which would take his life the following September. In delivering his tribute to his father, Steve Sabol explained the company’s operating philosophy. “Tell me a fact”, he said, “and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart, forever”.

July 16, 1963 A Happy Little Tree

On this day in 1963 and, for that matter, every day between April 22 and August 20, the sun never seems to set in that part of Alaska. A personal friend jokes about a family trip from Fairbanks to Florida in which he learned his kids associate warmth and cold not with the change of season, but the presence or absence of light.

Anyone who served at Eielson Air Force Base in the early 1960s remembers Sergeant Ross. A man with a voice like a jackhammer, striding into the early morning stillness. The sleeping recruits. The voice let loose like the roar of a shotgun, fired over their heads.

RISE AND SHINE DIRTBAGS! EVRYBODY UP! EVERYBODY OUT! LET’S MOVE IT!

For 20 years Ross served as a training instructor, ordering this man to drop and give him fifty, and that one to scrub the latrines.

And yet, here in the last frontier Sgt. Ross grew and nurtured a secret, softer side of himself, one that wasn’t so secret, at all. This was the land of the Midnight Sun, Alaska style, just outside of Fairbanks. Here the Orlando Florida-born 1st Sergeant learned to appreciate the beauty of a fresh fall of snow. The majesty of the Aurora Borealis and the magnificent mountains and tall trees.

Image of the Aurora Borealis from the official website, of Eielson Air Base

First came the art classes, to fill the quiet hours, off-duty. The large brush, wet-on-wet painting techniques that allowed Sgt. Ross to wolf down a sandwich and complete an entire canvas, all in a half-hour lunch. Painting gave the man a moment of joy and then it was…back to work.

COME ON LADIES, WE’RE NOT ON VACATION. LET’S GET THE LEAD…OUT!

So it was this human bullhorn of a man had an abundance of daylight in which to appreciate the beauty of Alaska and to hone and practice, his art. He produced hundreds of paintings during this period perhaps thousands and sold them, for a few extra dollars spending money.

”I developed ways of painting extremely fast. I used to go home at lunch and do a couple while I had my sandwich. I’d take them back that afternoon and sell them.”
Sgt. Robert Norman Ross

All things, must come to an end. Today, Eielson Air Base hosts the 354th Fighter Wing with a mission statement, “[T]o provide USINDOPACOM combat-ready fifth-generation airpower, advanced integration training, and strategic arctic airpower basing”.

Robert Norman Ross left the military after twenty years to pursue different interests and died too soon at the age of 52, of lymphoma. The New York times obituary said simply that the man “Was A Painter On TV.” There was no picture, nor any mention of the ugly battle that was about to break out, over his fifteen million dollar estate.

But, imagine if you will the surprise of any of those Air Force recruits from the height of the Cold War, on turning on the TV. To their favorite PBS channel to see their former drill sergeant. The man with a voice that could crack rocks sporting not the crew cut and close-shaved face of the early 1960s but a beard and an afro, the size of a basketball.

And there it was again, that oversized brush and that voice, now speaking in the soporific tones of Mr. Rogers. The cerulean reds and the burnt umbers, the tranquil almost somnolent words painting a picture, of the Joy of Painting. The happy little tree I think we’ll put…right…Here.

Hat tip to Mike Rowe and a fun podcast he calls “The Way I Heard It”, without which I would remain entirely ignorant, of this tale.

May 26, 1907 Little Duke

The Wedge is a spot at the end of Balboa Peninsula in southern California. Located at the east end of Newport beach the place is a surfer’s paradise and a spot anyone with any sense, would stay out of. When conditions are right, a steeply rising sandy bottom causes waves to rise to 30-feet and more. Great, curling monsters breaking onto the shore with such force the outgoing water alone creates a surf and a backwash so powerful as be a danger, to the strongest of swimmers.

Wally O’Connor was a four-time Olympiad, a competition swimmer and water polo player inducted in 1976, into the USA Water Polo Hall of Fame. Long before that, he stood at the entrance of Newport Harbor admiring The Wedge, and what may have been some of the biggest waves he had ever seen.

O’Connor turned to his friend Marion and said I’ll take the first pass. “Watch and learn”.

O’Connor stood at the crest of a wave of his own at this time, a craze that was sweeping the west coast surfing crowd. Body surfing. The man didn’t invent the sport but his strength and skill was capable of drawing crowds on the beach.

Marion hated that name. As a boy, he was rarely seen outside the company of his best buddy, a large Airedale terrier, named Duke. Local firefighters took to calling him “Little Duke” and the name stuck.

Now years later on that day at Newport Beach, Marion Mitchell lit another Camel, and watched. It was easy to see why Wally had won Olympic gold in Paris, back in 1924. Powerful strokes brought his friend out to 100 yards where, diving into the face of an oncoming wave, he sprang from the bottom to emerge at the curl of a giant breaker, not on the crest but in it, speeding to the shore like Superman with one arm out straight and the other, tucked behind.

Wally was flying, not on but of the water, his body staying just ahead of the thunderous crash that hurled him forward like a spear where he glided, grinning, onto the sand. Like a seal.

For Duke, that ride was heart pounding. Electric. An upper Midwest kid who had moved with his family to southern California where he now played football, on a scholarship to the University of Southern California. Duke was well accustomed to the adrenaline, the bone crunching action of college football but this, was something different. This looked like human flight itself and no power on earth was going to keep him from it.

Though himself powerfully built, Duke wasn’t the swimmer that Wally was. The water wasn’t his home but, there he was, strong if ungraceful strokes bringing him out to where Wally had launched that virtuoso performance.

Waiting for a wave as big as Wally’s he too dove into its towering base, springing from the bottom to emerge from the crest and, for a moment, to fly.

And that is where the similarity, ends. One must have exquisite timing to do this at this level, to be at just the right place where the thundering crash of the water hurls you forward and not down, toward the bottom.

Duke hit solid ground with the force of a car wreck. He could literally hear his collarbone break, feel the shoulder dislocate with the terrific force, of that impact.

The other thing he could almost hear was the sound of a football scholarship, crashing to an end. Of the end of USC and the promising law career that would never be.

Duke emerged alive from the water that day but not so, his future plans. With the end of that scholarship he was left no choice but to drop out. Duke left USC never to return and took a job. A prop man, at 20^th Century Fox.

There, Director Raoul Walsh saw Marion moving studio furniture and thought, this guy would be better in front of the camera, than behind it.

So it is, one of the great leading male actors of the age of film, met with reporters some 35 years later, in the living room of his Encino home. He spoke with them of his lung cancer, only four days out of major surgery, though he didn’t call it that. With four ribs and a lung removed and stitches pulling loose even now he called it “The Big C”, assuring reporters it was no big deal. Soon, he’d be back in the saddle.

That he did, going on to appear in 24 feature films over the next 12 years until finally, the Big C returned. This time there would be no encore. The man who shot Liberty Valance born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, died on June 11, 1979, at the age of 72.

So it is we remember his name, the man the LA Times once called a “$35-a-week prop department flunky” who performed in over 200 feature films, all because of a body surfing accident, in 1926.

Happy birthday, John Wayne.

Los Angeles, USA – September 8, 2012: John Wayne memorial on the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Hat tip Mike Rowe for this story and his excellent podcast, The Way I Heard It.

May 17, 1781 Windows on their Souls

“A daguerreotype is a unique image — it isn’t a print, it isn’t a reproduction of any kind. When you have a camera set up to take a daguerreotype and the sitter is in front of you, for example, one of these old men who actually looked and knew and talked to leaders of the Revolution … the light is coming from the sun, hitting his face, and bouncing off of his face through the camera and onto that very same plate.”- Joseph Bauman

Imagine seeing the faces of the men who fought the American Revolution. Not the paintings. There’s nothing extraordinary about that, except for the talent of the artist. I mean their photographs – images that make it possible for you to look into their eyes. The windows, of their souls.

In a letter dated May 17, 1781 and addressed to Alexander Scammell, General George Washington outlined his intention to form a light infantry unit, under Scammell’s leadership.

Dr. Eneas Munson

Comprised of Continental Line units from Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the Milford, Massachusetts-born Colonel’s unit was among defensive forces keeping Sir Henry Clinton penned up in New York City, as the Continental army made its way south to a place called Yorktown.

Among the men under Scammell’s command was Henry Dearborn, future Secretary of War under President Thomas Jefferson. A teenage medic was also present. His name was Eneas Munson.

One day, the medic would go on to become Doctor Eneas Munson, professor of the Yale Medical School in New Haven Connecticut, President of the Medical Society of that same state. And a man who would live well into the age of photography.

Reverend Levi Hayes

The American Revolution ended in 1783. By the first full year of the Civil War, only 12 Revolutionary War veterans remained on the pension rolls of a grateful nation.

Two years later, Reverend EB Hillard brought two photographers through New York and New England to visit, and to photograph what were believed to be the last six. Each man was 100 years or older, at the time of the interview.

William Hutchings of York County Maine, still part of Massachusetts at the time, was captured at the siege of Castine at the age of fifteen. British authorities said it was a shame to hold one so young a prisoner, and he was released.

Reverend Daniel Waldo of Syracuse, New York fought under General Israel Putnam, becoming a POW at Horse Neck.

Adam Link of Maryland enlisted at 16 in the frontier service.

Peter Mackintosh

Alexander Millener of Quebec was a drummer boy in George Washington’s Life Guard.

Clarendon, New York native Lemuel Cook would live to be one of the oldest surviving veterans of the Revolution, surviving to the age of 107. He and Alexander Millener witnessed the British surrender, at Yorktown.

Samuel Downing from Newburyport, Massachusetts, enlisted at the age of 16 and served in the Mohawk Valley under General Benedict Arnold. “Arnold was our fighting general”, he’d say, “and a bloody fellow he was. He didn’t care for nothing, he’d ride right in. It was ‘Come on, boys!’ ’twasn’t ‘Go, boys!’ He was as brave a man as ever lived…He was a stern looking man, but kind to his soldiers. They didn’t treat him right: he ought to have had Burgoyne’s sword. But he ought to have been true. We had true men then, twasn’t as it is now”.

Jonathan Smith

Hillard seems to have missed Daniel F. Bakeman, but with good reason. Bakeman had been unable to prove his service with his New York regiment. It wasn’t until 1867 that he finally received his veteran’s pension by special act of Congress.

Daniel Frederick Bakeman would become the Frank Buckles of his generation, the last surviving veteran of the Revolution. The 1874 Commissioner of Pensions report said that “With the death of Daniel Bakeman…April 5, 1869, the last of the pensioned soldiers of the Revolution passed away. He was 109.

Most historians agree on 1839 as the year in which the earliest daguerreotypes became practically accessible.

James W. Head

When Utah based investigative reporter Joe Bauman came across Hillard’s photos in 1976, he believed that there must be others. Photography had been in existence for 35 years by Reverend Hillard’s time. What followed was 30 years’ work, first finding and identifying photographs of the right vintage, and then digging through muster rolls, pension files, genealogical records and a score of other source documents, to see if each had played a role in the Revolution.

There were some, but it turned out to be a small group.

Peter Mackintosh for one, was a 16-year-old blacksmith’s apprentice, from Boston. He was working the night of December 16, 1773, when a group of men ran into the shop scooping up ashes from the hearth and rubbing them on their faces. Turns out hey were going to a Tea Party.

George Fishley

James Head was a thirteen year-old Continental Naval recruit from a remote part of what was then Massachusetts. Head would be taken prisoner but later released, walking the 224 miles home from Providence to the future town of Warren, Maine.

Head was elected a Massachusetts delegate to the convention called in Boston, to ratify the Constitution. He would die the wealthiest man in Warren, stone deaf from service in the Continental Navy.

George Fishley served in the Continental army and fought in the Battle of Monmouth, and in General John Sullivan’s campaign against British-allied Indians in New York and Pennsylvania.

Fishley would spend the rest of his days in Portsmouth New Hampshire, where he was known as ‘the last of our cocked hats.”

Simeon Hicks

Daniel Spencer fought with the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons, an elite 120-man unit also known as Sheldon’s Horse after Colonel Elisha Sheldon. First mustered at Wethersfield, Connecticut, the regiment consisted of four troops from Connecticut, one troop each from Massachusetts and New Jersey, and two companies of light infantry. On August 13, 1777, Sheldon’s horse put a unit of Loyalists to flight in the little-known Battle of the Flocky, the first cavalry charge in history, performed on American soil

Bauman’s research uncovered another eight in addition to Hillard’s record including a shoemaker, two ministers, a tavern-keeper, a settler on the Ohio frontier, a blacksmith and the captain of a coastal vessel, in addition to Dr. Munson.

The experiences of these eight span the distance from the Boston Tea Party to the battles at Monmouth, Quaker Hill, Charleston and Bennington. Their eyes looked upon the likes of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox, the battles of the Revolution and the final surrender, at Yorktown.

Daniel Spencer

Bauman collected the glass plate photos of eight and paper prints of another five along with each man’s story and published them, in an ebook entitled “DON’T TREAD ON ME: Photographs and Life Stories of American Revolutionaries”.

To look into the eyes of such men is to compress time. To reach back over the generations before the age of photography, and look into eyes that saw the birth of a nation.

February 23, 1908 Whatever it Takes, to Sell a Paper

“The September 1906 edition of Cosmopolitan magazine recounts a story once told of an old Native American chieftain. The chieftain was given a tour of the modern city of New York. On this excursion, he saw the soaring heights of the grand skyscrapers and the majesty of the Brooklyn Bridge. He observed the comfortable masses gathered in amusement at the circus and the poor huddled in tenements. Upon the completion of the chieftain’s journey, several Christian men asked him, “What is the most surprising thing you have seen?” The chieftain replied slowly with three words: “little children working.” – H/T BLS.gov

During the early colonial period, American newspapers were “wretched little” sheets in the words of America’s “1st newsboy”, Benjamin Franklin. Scarcely more than sidelines to keep presses occupied.

We hear a lot today about “fake news”, but that’s nothing new. In 1835, the New York Sun published a six-part series, about civilization on the moon.

great-moon-hoax-1835-new-york-sun-lithograph-298px

The “Great Moon Hoax”, ostensibly reprinted from the Edinburgh Courant, was falsely attributed to the work of Sir John Herschel, one of the best known astronomers of the time.

Whatever it took, to sell newspapers.

Today, kids make up a minimal part of the American workforce, but that wasn’t always so. Child labor played an integral part in the agricultural and handicraft economy, working on family farms or hiring out to other farmers. Boys customarily apprenticed to the trades, at 10 – 14. Girls went into domestic work. As late as 1900, fully 18% of the American workforce was under the age of sixteen.

Newsies — Brooklyn newsboy, ca. 1910 Photo by Lewis Hine (Library of Congress)

Lewis Hine - Indianapolis Newsboys waiting for the Base Ball edition, in a Newspaper office. Bad environment. Tough negroes etc., 1908 — Indianapolis newsies, waiting for baseball edition

For thousands of them, newspapers were all that stood in the way of an empty belly.

For all that, newsies earned about 30¢ a day. Enough for a bite to eat, to afford enough papers to do it again the following day, and maybe a 5¢ bed in the newsboy’s home.

Lewis Hine - Have been selling 2 years. Youngest, Yedda Welled, is 11 years old. Next, Rebecca Cohen, is 12. Next, Rebecca Kirwin, is 14. Hartford, Connecticut, 1909 — “Newsies” were not always, boys. These are Yedda Welled, 11 years old. Rebecca Cohen, 12. and, Rebecca Kirwin, 14. Hartford, Connecticut, 1909. H/T historyinphotos.blogspot.com

The plan was expected to “push sales vigorously in new directions.” It took about a hot minute for newsies to get wise, when hundreds descended on the Times’ offices with sticks and rocks. On March 29, several police officers and a driver’s bullwhip were needed to get the wagons out of the South 8th Street distribution offices. One of the trucks was overturned, later that day.

new-york-1896-alice-austen_newsboys — New York, 1896 Alice Austen newsboys

Newsboys of the era weren’t the ambitious kids of a later age, hustling to make a buck after school. These were orphans and runaways, with little to count on but themselves. The half-cent profit on each paper was all these kids had to get through the day, with a little held back to buy more papers.

february_23rd_1908_boys_selling_newspapers_on_brooklyn_bridge (1) — Newsboys selling papers by the Brooklyn Bridge, February 23, 1908 H/T UK Guardian

50¢ to 60¢ for the same bundle was an insurmountable increase. On July 18, 1899, a group of Long Island newsboys overturned a distribution wagon, refusing to sell Hearst or Pulitzer newspapers until prices were returned to 50¢. Newsboys from Manhattan and Brooklyn joined the strike, the following day.

Boys and men who tried to break the strike were mobbed and beaten, their papers destroyed.

Competing publishers such as the New York Tribune couldn’t get enough of the likes of strike “President” Dave Simmons, the boy “prize-fighter”, Barney “Peanuts”, “Crutch” Morris, and others.

The charismatic, one-eyed strike leader “Kid Blink”, was a favorite:

“Friens and feller workers. This is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we’se got to stick together like glue…. We know wot we wants and we’ll git it even if we is blind”.

The newsboy strike of 1899 lasted two weeks, in which Pulitzer’s New York World plummeted from 360,000 papers a day, to 125,000. Women and girls had more success as strike breakers than boys and men. As Kid Blink put it, “A feller can’t soak a lady.” In the end, it didn’t matter. Most news readers took the side of the strikers. Neither Hearst nor Pulitzer ever dropped their price, but both agreed to buy back unsold papers.

child_labor_in_united_states_1910_working_night_shift (1) — Some worked well after midnight, to sell every paper

The New York newsboys’ strike of 1899 inspired later strikes including Butte, Montana in 1914, and a 1920s strike in Louisville, Kentucky. In time, changing notions of urban child-welfare led to improvements in the newsboys’ quality of life. For now, street kids had precious few to look out for them, beyond themselves.

article-2467498-18D8274600000578-403_964x672

Brooklyn’s “Racetrack Newsie” “Dutch” Johnson caught cold, in 1905. The illness soon turned more serious. He was found unconscious on a pile of catalogs. Brought to Bellevue Hospital by the East River, the 16-year-old was informed it was pneumonia. This was before the age of antibiotics. There was no hope.

“It goes”, Dutch said, in a voice so soft as to be barely audible. “Only I ain’t got no money and I’d like to be put away decent”.

Bookmaker “Con” Shannon offered to take up a collection for the burial. He could’ve easily produced hundreds from bookies and gamblers, but Dutch’s diminutive successor “Boston”, spoke up. “Naw”, he said “we’re on de job and nobody else”.

So it was that “Gimpy”, “Dusty”, and the other urchins of Sheepshead Bay pitched in with their pennies, their nickels and dimes. $53.40 bought a plot in the Linden Hill Cemetery, with a little stone marker. Dutch Johnson would be spared the plain black wagon and the nameless grave, in some anonymous Potter’s Field.

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