Ok, so some things in the golden era were not too cool...

[BlueTrain]

Sometimes you just have a bad day, like that guy did. Once, about 20 years ago, someone driving down either the Baltimore-Washington Parkway or I-95, which almost parallels it, was killed when a piece of a bridge broke off and landed on his car. That would be up there with having a meteorite go through your roof.

 

[Fading Fast]

Basically, they looked up at the top of Coogan's Bluff -- the Polo Grounds was located in Coogan's Hollow, directly below the bluff, which is a tall cliffy hill -- and saw 515 Edgecomb looking down at them. They searched the building and actually found another pistol and a rifle in the apartment where the kid was living. The rifle was a .22, not a .45, but when they questioned him he admitted he'd shot the .45 and then ditched it when he heard what had happened. His name was Robert Peebles, and he ended up spending about two years in reform school for the shooting, on a charge of "juvenile delinquency."

At the time 515 Edgecomb was kind of a run-down tenement type of building, but it was renovated into an upscale co-op in the '80s, and still stands atop Coogan's Bluff to this day. The ballpark, however, was torn down in the mid-1960s to build a housing project.

I'd imagine there were a lot of random handguns floating around New York in 1950 -- organized crime was at its peak then, and there was a lot of shooting going on. Or somebody had used the gun to stick up a liquor store or something, and tossed it under a park bench when they were done with it.

A lot of rusty guns wash ashore at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, from a landfill that had been capped in 1954 and is now eroding into the bay. I imagine when futuristic archaeologists excavate the ruins of New York a few thousand years down the line, they'll imagine it was the world's aresenal.

Two thoughts here - one seems consistent with my impression of the past and one not.

When you say they "searched" 515 Edgecomb, I wonder if warrants, etc. were needed as my unscientific impression of police from that era is a lot more was done "because we needed to do it," versus today's everything has to be documented, recorded, etc.

Also, even though only 14, two years in reform school seems lenient for a time where my impression is our justice system imposed harsher sentences for everything.

And one last impression - half court shots happen if enough attempts are made. Everyday across this country, there is enough random stuff tried - guns fired in the air, crazy stunts with cars, tools, machines, etc. - that every once in a awhile an unbelievable half court shot will happen. Like the guy who shot himself in the head with the nail gun and the nail didn't do any damage. How many other people died or suffered brain damage from a nail gun injury before the no-injury half court shot happened? How many guns in 1950 (or the prior ten years) were fired randomly for this one crazy half court shot to happen?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The NYPD was known for playing fast and loose with the Constitution in the Era -- these were pre-Miranda times, and legal niceties were not always observed. But they did get warrants to search the building, as far as I've been able to find.

The arrest didn't happen immediately. Police combed Washington Heights for about two days, questioning every resident in a door-to-door investigation, with their search focusing on 515 Edgecomb. Peebles had had the gun since December of the previous year, and was known by other building residents to have other weapons, so he early on became a suspect. He denied everything at first, but gave up under repeated questioning. One can imagine what this questioning might have entailed, given the NYPD's reputation at the time -- "their coat of arms must be two rubber hoses crossed on a field of shamrocks," as one quip of the period put it.

One thing that came up in some of the newspaper accounts was the suspicion some neighborhood residents had that Peebles was taking the fall for an unspecified adult who had actually fired the gun, since it was likely that he'd only get a few years in reform school, compared to the penalty an adult might have received. No evidence was ever presented, or has ever surfaced to support this theory, but it was one of those things that passed in whispers around the area at the time.

The sentence does seem mild, but there really wasn't any malice involved in the shooting. Recklessness, definitely, but not malice. The fact that he cooperated with police after, perhaps, a bit of persuasion, also helped. It likely also helped that Dr. Frederic Wertham, the noted child psychologist best known for his crusade against comic books, spoke in Peebles' behalf. Wertham ran a clinic dealing with juvenile delinquency in Harlem, and Peebles had, according to him, been a participant in his program.

Nobody seems to know what became of Peebles after he got out of reform school. He'd be eighty years old if he were alive today, but he's never come forward to tell his side of the story. The boy who went to the ballpark with Doyle, Otto Flaig, grew up to become a police officer himself, and ended up as the police chief of Teterboro, New Jersey. He often spoke to youth groups about the incident, using it as a platform to warn kids away from playing with guns. He died of liver failure at the age of 55.

Another person affected by the shooting was Horace Stoneham, who was quite shaken by the incident. He mentioned it frequently in his arguments trying to get the city to do something about the deteriorating neighborhood around the Polo Grounds. It likely played a role in his decision seven years later to take the Giants out of New York.

 

[BlueTrain]

Your impression about harsher sentences may not be correct. Prisons are a growth industry in the United States. Why? Because more things are against the law. I think it started with prohibition. Prohibition was a joke, although there certainly was enforcement. The closest comparison I can make is with the speed limit. Rare is the person who obeys the speed limit. Everyone wants to go faster. Drive the speed limit and the guy (let's just say it's a guy) will tailgate you and make unrepeatable gestures. It's worse in the left-hand lane.

Before prohibition, things were wide open, not that everyone liked it. There was Carrie Nation and the temperance crowd composed of women who should have been attending to things at home like good women. These days she would be described as an activist but I can only imagine how she was described a hundred years ago. There were all sorts of ways of seeking pleasure in the good old days. But a good old boy just can't have any fun now without getting in trouble, it seems.

 

[BlueTrain]

You don't suppose Doyle was chief of police of Teterboro when Arthur Godfrey buzzed the tower, do you? Everything is connected, sort of.

Comic books! Easily the worst thing an innocent child could see. That is, until rock and roll came along. That stuff makes you do crazy things. "There oughta be a law!"

Ah, reform schools! Don't have them anymore! That is, they don't call them that and they probably don't have the same look they did before, say, 1960. Nothing else does. But a rose by any other name still has thorns.

And what about the county poor farm? They are part of history, along with stocks and public floggings. They were once a feature of the golden age in some places, although not places that would be remembered with any nostalgia. Unlike early spas up and down the Allegheny front where people went to take the waters, no one would care to restore an old poor farm. They wouldn't, would they?

 

[LizzieMaine]

A lot of women loved Carrie Nation -- the temperance movement was thoroughly entwined with the suffrage movement, and many suffragists embraced Carrie as an image of the new militancy women were going to need in order to get away from Victorian-era repression.

 

[BlueTrain]

There is a lot of "feminist" history, if I can call it that, that is simply ignored today. Of course, there is a lot of history that is ignored, forgotten, never mentioned and sometimes denied as well as made-up. It either didn't happen here, doesn't concern us, was too long ago or otherwise, shall we say, inconvenient. But much is still interesting. And much of it happened here.

There seemed to be a period in American history that the Civil War destroyed. New England produced some very curious individuals, from Thoreau to Emily Dickinson. There was also Amelia Bloomer, a sort of social reformer. Much of those early "activists" did not bear fruit until after yet another war and probably a lot of men hated them. It was noteworthy that black men got the vote before white women in most places.

My wife tells the story related to her by her grandmother about how the cavalry was called out from Ft Myer across the river from Washington to break up a march by suffragettes. She, her grandmother, also saw the Wright Brothers fly, also at Ft Myer. Interesting things like that just don't happen anymore.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My favorite forgotten feminist is Elizabeth Hawes, who had been a high-end fashion designer in New York in the 1930s, living in a penthouse with two Russian wolfhounds and a succession of sleek boyfriends, until she got fed up with the -- in her words -- "les bitches riches" who made up her clientele. She quit the fashion business, became the "women's editor" of the left-wing New York tabloid "PM," and then when the war came gave that up to become a worker in an aircraft-engine factory in New Jersey. She went on to become a militant organizer for the UAW, and wrote several hard-hitting books in the 1940s about the challenges facing working-class women. She also wrote an absolutely withering satirical attack on the "business of femininity," as promoted by the Boys From Marketing, and that, along with her union work, got her run out of the country as a Communist.

Her books said things that needed to be said twenty years before anybody ever heard of Betty Friedan or Simone de Bourgeois. She and I would have been best pals.

 

[BlueTrain]

If I may say so, you would be an interesting person to know but more on that later.

It is interesting the way that many of the colorful individuals, and this includes a few men, were quickly tagged as Communists and even earlier, as Socialists. There's nothing like demanding clean water to get you branded as a troublemaker. Of course, many of these people were troublemakers. That's what activism is. It's not necessarily violence, which has its uses, but merely making trouble for those in high and typically unelected places. It's just as bad these days when anything associated with unions gets associated with thugs.

It is also interesting how many of these individuals associated with others in different circles. They had connections in a lot of places. People who left Russia after the revolution, people in the arts and entertainment businesses, people in the world of writing and publishing and people who actually worked for a living in a factory or other blue collar work. The center of that world seems to have been New York. I wouldn't be surprised if you went back far enough, it would have included people who left France, either after that revolution or after Napoleon finally lost at Waterloo. Many did in fact come to the U.S. but they weren't revolutionary types.

I also find it interesting that Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis' widow moved to New York after he died and lived there until her death in 1906. Even Santa Ana (the Mexican general) lived in New York. I ask you, what is it about New York?

The most interesting woman, maybe (and I've known several), was probably my high school art teacher. I would go visit with her every time I went home, until she passed away. She could be very outspoken, and being an art teacher, she was already a character. She learned to weld, presumably for art's sake. She never mentioned any of the well-known women we've talked about here but she was the first person to give me an alcoholic drink, which I believe was a rum and coke. I doubt that would happen these days, but who knows? She always had something going on. I would drop by for a visit, totally unannounced and before I knew it, we'd be going to an art show or to visit someone who "I just had to meet," and so on. And that was in West Virginia!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I come from a long line of troublemakers and hellraisers, all the way back to my 6x-great grandmother, who was hung as a witch in 1692. She didn't stop yelling at the magistrate even as they tightened the rope around her neck. And right on down to my own mother, who has been known to blockade the middle of her street to protest snowplows filling in her driveway, and once threw an ashtray at a cop who told her to pipe down.

The best description of the role of an activist I've ever heard paraphrases Finley Peter Dunne: "Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."

 

[BlueTrain]

My father did not have good things to say about unions and that was in spite of being a union steward for the Teamsters. He was a truck driver. My wife's side of the family has all the interesting people even though it's a small family. Her one and only uncle is the classic radical priest (Episcopal, of course), who has been known to chain himself to the statue in the middle of the street in Alexandria, VA, to protest war. His son, on the other hand, was a journalist who went to cover said war but got tossed out because he blabbed military information on the radio. In fact, I was stunned to hear his voice on the radio on the way to work one morning. My wife's cousin (she has a grand total of two) is a lesbian and actually married her partner. She's very likeable, though, and we do not think of her as a lesbian. That's our coping mechanism at work. She does acupuncture for a living, which seems typical of her. Both the father and daughter graduated from Swarthmore, which tell you everything you need to know. I still don't know how my wife's side of the family tolerates my presence.

One of my wife's uncle's best pieces of advise is to marry a woman who already owns a house, which he did.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

When I was college age if you used the term Wall Street"as a pejorative, you were branded a communist. Now, it's commonly used in that sense by right-wingers. If you called the police "pigs"it meant you were un-American. Visit any extreme-right website and you'll see the cops described as "jack-booted thugs," come to stomp on your liberties and seize your guns. What goes around comes around, I guess.

 

[BlueTrain]

It makes me wonder who the present-day right wingers, who call themselves conservatives but aren't, were doing in the 1960s and 1970s. I haven't changed one bit since I started college in 1964.


{Editor's Note: Please avoid political comments. Thank you.}

 

[LizzieMaine]

The anti-Wall Street angle in the American far right goes back to the Coughlinite movement of the late 1930s -- when it, and the related phrase "International Bankers," was used as a dogwhistle for "Jews." Father Coughlin, in turn, got a lot of his stuff from the midwestern populists and nativist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and even further back to the "Know Nothings" of the mid-19th Century.

All these threads converged in the isolationist America First movement of the early 1940s, which was concentrated in the Midwest, traditionally a hotbed for that kind of stuff. After the war, many of those who had been prime movers in "America First", including Sears and Roebuck head Robert Wood, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, and rightist book publisher Henry Regenry reconstituted themselves as a movement thru an isolationist/anti-Communist/nativist journal called "Human Events," which strongly influenced candy manufacturer Robert Welch in the formation of the John Birch Society, as well as Willis Carto in his formation of the even-more-extreme "Liberty Lobby."

The Birchers, in turn had a strong influence over the Goldwater campaign in 1964 -- and that campaign, along with the conspiratorial theories of Willis Carto, became the ideological foundation for the "patriot" movement that would come to fruition in the 1980 and 1990s, which was basically Coughlinism in army-surplus fatigues. You can follow the rest of it fairly easily to the present day. All you have to do is immerse yourself in the broadcasts, articles, and newsletters put out by these various groups over the last eighty years and you'll see how it all evolved. The Birch "Blue Book," in particular, is the direct source for many of the most common theories and catchphrases which are popular in those circles.

 

[BlueTrain]

End of my comments.

 

[ChiTownScion]

The anti-Wall Street angle in the American far right goes back to the Coughlinite movement of the late 1930s -- when it, and the related phrase "International Bankers," was used as a dogwhistle for "Jews." Father Coughlin, in turn, got a lot of his stuff from the midwestern populists and nativist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and even further back to the "Know Nothings" of the mid-19th Century.

Interesting, in that Charles Coughlin was a Roman Catholic priest who wasn't born in the United States. Considering who exactly was the greatest target of the most violent and inflammatory manifestations of Nineteenth Century nativism (from Bill the Butcher Poole to Thomas Nast) it's a classic example of the bullied becoming the bully.

My favorite novelist, James T. Farrell, published a series of short stories in 1939, Tommy Gallagher's Crusade : the title story is about an embittered young man who embraces a thinly veiled fictional version of Coughlin "Father Moylan,"as his political savior over the objections of his working class family. A good read, if you can find a copy. And of course his magnum opus, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, ( Young Lonigan (1932); The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934); and Judgment Day (1935) ) also documents Moylan's influence within the Irish community in Chicago.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Interesting, in that Charles Coughlin was a Roman Catholic priest who wasn't born in the United States. Considering who exactly was the greatest target of the most violent and inflammatory manifestations of Nineteenth Century nativism (from Bill the Butcher Poole to Thomas Nast) it's a classic example of the bullied becoming the bully.

I think the most interesting irony about Coughlin is that he got his start in radio trying to raise money to build a new church after the Ku Klux Klan burned down his old one. He was also very strongly pro-FDR, until Roosevelt refused to give him a seat in his cabinet.

Coughlin was put out of radio by his bishop in 1942, and escaped being indicted as an enemy agent during the war by the skin of his teeth. But he continued to publish pamphlets setting out his views, and was still doing so well into the 1960s. He still has followers on the internet to this day.

John Spivak's 1940 book "Shrine Of The Silver Dollar" is an early expose of Coughlinism, and it pulls no punches.

 

[David Conwill]

A nice play on "Shrine of the Little Flower."

 

[ChiTownScion]

I think the most interesting irony about Coughlin is that he got his start in radio trying to raise money to build a new church after the Ku Klux Klan burned down his old one. He was also very strongly pro-FDR, until Roosevelt refused to give him a seat in his cabinet.

Childish in the extreme, if you want my unsolicited opinion. To realign not only your political and economic outlook, but essentially your entire world view by becoming the very thug which you've beheld and at whose hand you suffered, simply because you didn't get a favor, is the last thing that anyone of character would do. In the end, it revealed what Coughlin was at his rotted core: "Shrine of the Silver Dollar," indeed.

 

[Bushman]

Of course, there is a lot of history that is ignored, forgotten, never mentioned and sometimes denied as well as made-up. It either didn't happen here, doesn't concern us, was too long ago or otherwise, shall we say, inconvenient.

That is one of the better quotes I've seen in a good, long, while.

And right on down to my own mother, who has been known to blockade the middle of her street to protest snowplows filling in her driveway, and once threw an ashtray at a cop who told her to pipe down.

Reminds me of my own mother, who attacked a snowplow driver with a snow shovel. Every Winter, the county and village drivers would back up in our driveway because it was the last driveway at the border of the village and the county (I lived in the county, despite having a village postal address). Suffice to say, they got the hint: no more turning around in our driveway. Unfortunately, the concrete remains cracked and upheaved to this day. My father had to resurface an entire section himself because it was simply reduced to rubble. Our family names and the date are carved into the concrete.