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:
I went into this with both my eyes open, telling myself that a man who has an ideal must be willing to sacrifice everything for it or else the ideal isn’t an ideal at all, or the man isn’t a man at all, but a humble creature who deserves only pity. -Carl Heinrich Meier, last […]
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 a party of learned antiquarians were led astray in their prehistoric searches by a bad boy of Madison, Ohio.
[more]
A ripple of excitement has been caused in Northeastern Ohio by a party of learned scientists who have been searching for evidences of the prehistoric race that dwelt on the borders of Lake Erie. They, in their own minds, have made some valuable discoveries, none more important than the finding of footprints of a colossal being, whose pedal extremities must have been enlarged and extended specimens of what is known to modern students as the Chicago girl’s foot. Tommy Opper, a bad boy, who lives near Madison, Ohio, where the wonderful footprints were discovered, could probably tell more about them than the astonished antiquarians. He says it took him two days to make the wooden model for “them air hoof-prints.” He feels quite elated at his success in aiding scientific investigation.
Reprinted from The National Police Gazette, October 27, 1883.
"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