On this date in 1994 — the ten-year anniversary of the robbery-murder that earned him his death sentence — Raymond Carl Kinnamon died to lethal injection despite his loquacity. A career criminal with 17 felony convictions and three prison stints previously to his name, Kinnamon robbed a Houston bar at gunpoint on December 11, 1984. […]
Via Newspapers.com
The unofficial motto of Austin, Texas is "Keep Austin Weird." In early 1964, someone or something certainly obliged. The "Austin American," January 29, 1964:
Can the mystery blast that shook Austinites Monday at noon be linked to puzzling reports of flying objects later the same day in Fort Worth and Dallas? Perhaps not, but the eerie events have one thing in common:
Jeff and Joe
Soapy Smith buries Joe Simmons
The Illustrated Police News
April 9, 1892
(Click image to enlarge)
oe Simmons
was a tall, slender gambler
known to many as “Gambler Joe” Simmons, a member of the Soap
Gang who managed Soapy Smith's Tivoli Club in Denver, 1890, and Soapy's Orleans
Club in Creede, 1892. According to William Devere’s poem "Two Little Busted Shoes," Simmons
William J. Elder, aged 61, was addicted to drink and when under its influence was violent and uncontrollable. His wife tolerated his abuse as long as she could then packed up and moved out of their farm in Hammonton, New Jersey, leaving behind her two sons, Robert and Mathew. In 1887, 19-year-old Robert Elder moved out of his father’s house as well.
12-Year old Mathew Elder was still
It’s the blue hour in “Rainy Day, New York,” a 1940 painting by Leon Dolice—a Vienna-born artist who came to Manhattan in the 1920s. The sun has sunk below the horizon, and sidewalks and buildings are cast in a blueish glow, illuminated by streetlamps, car headlights, and the reflection of rain-slicked streets. I’m not sure […]
[Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica Family […]
How They Meet Behind the Scenes—Temptations and Trials of the High Kickers. [more]
The ballet girl has other duties than those involved by her theatrical connection. Many a woman who spends her nights posturing before the pubic does so to secure the necessary food and shelter for some one dear to her. In Paris it is a regular practice among the girls to bring their sewing and knitting to the theatre, and in the intervals of rehearsal and performance when they have a a short respite from toil to busily ply the needle. Many even do quite an amount of lace work, tetting, embroidery and similar tasks for money in that precious period of leisure.
But our ballet girl has a more pleasing task before her.
She is laboring for her little one.
Baby is sound asleep in the cradles in that poor garret mother works day and night to keep between his little head and the winter sky. But the memory of his rosy face follows her through the snowy streets, into the blazing theatre and haunts her as she moves about the gay an tawdry scene. Even the lecherous old debauchee, the moving man of money and corruption who totters from wing to wing seeking fresh food for his debased appetite stops short of her, and hesitates before he utters his foul propositions for her. There is that in her employment that paralyses even his shameless tongue. He looks upon a mother working for her child, and though the gloomy visits of his debased life he sees himself a child and remembers that there was a time when he knelt at his mother’s knee, and had no conscience to bring him troubled dreams.
Reprinted from The National Police Gazette, October 16, 1880.
"We follow vice and folly where a police officer dare not show his head, as the small, but intrepid weasel pursues vermin in paths which the licensed cat or dog cannot enter."
The Sunday Flash 1841