The Case of the Sleepwalking Killer
Illustration of Mary Bickford's murder. From the National Police Gazette.
Rufus Choate approached his client just before the bang of the gavel, when Albert J. Tirrell was sitting in the dock, 22 years old and on trial for his life. It was March 24, 1846, three months after his arrest in the gruesome murder of his mistress. The defendant wore an olive coat with gilt buttons and a placid expression, looking indifferent to the gaze of the spectators. Choate leaned over the rail, raked long, skinny fingers through his thicket of black curls, and asked, “Well, sir, are you ready to make a strong push with me today?”
“Yes,” Tirrell replied.
“Very well,” Choate said. “We will make it.”
Within the week, the pair also made legal history.
The House that Polly Adler Built
Polly Adler and a friend. From the New York Daily News.
Polly Adler, the most celebrated brothel keeper in New York’s (and arguably the country’s) history, proudly proclaimed her goal to become “the best…madam in all America.” For more than 20 years she ran a string of brothels throughout Manhattan, her business card—featuring a parrot on a perch—bearing an East Side exchange: LExington 2-1099. From the dawn of Prohibition through World War II, “going to Polly’s” was the preferred late-night activity for the city’s haut monde: gangsters Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Dutch Schultz, boxer Jack Dempsey, Mayor Jimmy Walker and members of the Algonquin Round Table, including Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, who stacked Adler’s library shelves with classic and contemporary works. “Bob was the kindest, warmest-hearted man in the world,” she said of Benchley. “He lighted up my life like the sun.” She strove to cultivate an atmosphere that was more clubhouse than cathouse, where clients were just as likely to close a business deal or hold a dinner party as retire to an upstairs boudoir. Benchley checked in for an extended stay whenever he was on deadline, always marveling that “Lion,” the house maid, had his underwear laundered and suit impeccably pressed by morning. “The Waldorf,” he told Adler, “just isn’t in it with you when it comes to service.”
Paris or Bust: The Great New York-to-Paris Auto Race of 1908
A crowd of 250,000 jammed Times Square to see the start of the race. From www.sportscardigest.com.
Nascar is a multibillion-dollar business whose history and rich mythology are rooted in money; Southern liquor-runners and moonshiners gave the earliest, postwar version of the sport much of its tone. But long before the advent of stock-car racing, competitive drivers cared less about prize or profit than about simply completing the course. The men who lined up in the swirling snow of Times Square on the morning of February 12, 1908, were embarking on a nearly unimaginable feat: a race from New York to Paris, westward. The contest was sponsored not by Bank of America or Coors Light, but by the French newspaper Le Matin and the New York Times. The prize: a 1,400-pound trophy and proving it could be done.
The proposed route would take the drivers across the United States, including through areas with very few paved roads, and then head north through Canada. Next came a left turn at Alaska, which the drivers had to cross in order to arrive at the Bering Strait, which separated the American wilderness from the Russian one. The race’s organizers started it in the middle of winter in the hope that the strait would be frozen. The course then led through Siberia, which no one had traveled by car, before heading into the final stretch: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris—overall, a 22,000-mile trek in an age when the horse was considered more reliable than the horseless carriage. The New York-to-Paris race was suppoed to be (and is still largely considered) the greatest of them all, even surpassing the prior year’s Peking-to-Paris competition, in which the winner, Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, enlisted donkeys and mules to pull his car and sipped oily water from its radiator to relieve his thirst. His reward was a magnum of champagne.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Die
Headline from the San Antonio Light, November 12, 1933.
The plot was conceived over a round of drinks. One afternoon in July 1932, Francis Pasqua, Daniel Kriesberg and Tony Marino sat in Marino’s eponymous speakeasy and raised their glasses, sealing their complicity, figuring the job was already half-finished. How difficult could it be to push Michael Malloy to drink himself to death? Every morning the old man showed up at Marino’s place in the Bronx and requested “Another mornin’s morning, if ya don’t mind” in his muddled brogue; hours later he would pass out on the floor. For a while Marino had let Malloy drink on credit, but he no longer paid his tabs. “Business,” the saloonkeeper confided to Pasqua and Kriesberg, “is bad.”
Pasqua, 24, an undertaker by trade, eyed Malloy’s sloping figure, the glass of whiskey hoisted to his slack mouth. No one knew much about him—not even, it seemed, Malloy himself—other than that he had come from Ireland. He had no friends or family, no definitive date of birth (most guessed him to be about 60), no apparent trade or vocation beyond the occasional odd job sweeping alleys or collecting garbage, happy to be paid in alcohol instead of money. He was, wrote the Daily Mirror, just part of the “flotsam and jetsam in the swift current of underworld speakeasy life, those no-longer-responsible derelicts who stumble through the last days of their lives in a continual haze of ‘Bowery Smoke.’ ”
“Why don’t you take out insurance on Malloy?” Pasqua asked Marino that day, according to another contemporary newspaper report. “I can take care of the rest.”
Prohibition’s Premier Hooch Hounds
Izzy Einstein (left) and Moe Smith share a toast in New York City (Library of Congress).
As midnight approached on January 16, 1920, New York was in the throes of a citywide wake. Black-bordered invitations had been dispensed weeks before, announcing “Last rites and ceremonies attending the departure of our spirited friend, John Barleycorn.” The icy streets did little to deter the “mourning parties,” which began at dinnertime and multiplied as the hours advanced.
On the eve of Prohibition, guests paid their respects at the Waldorf-Astoria, hip flasks peeking from waistbands, champagne glasses kissing in farewell toasts. Park Avenue women in cloche hats and ermine coats gripped bottles of wine with one hand and wiped real tears with the other. Uptown at Healy’s, patrons tossed empty glasses into a silk-lined casket, and eight black-clad waiters at Maxim’s hauled a coffin to the center of the dance floor. Reporters on deadline tapped out eulogies for John Barleycorn and imagined his final words. “I’ve had more friends in private and more foes in public,” quoted the Daily News, “than any other man in America.”
Read more on the Smithsonian blog …
A Chess Champion’s Dominance—and Madness
Paul Morphy (left) and a friend. From "The Pride and Sorrow of Chess."
By the time Paul Morphy was felled by a stroke on July 10, 1884, he had become an odd and familiar presence on Canal Street in New Orleans: a trim little man in sack suit and monocle, muttering to himself, smiling at his own conceits, swinging his cane at most who dared approach. Sometimes he would take a fancy to a passing woman and following her for hours at a distance. He lived in fear of being poisoned, eating only food prepared by his mother or sister, and he believed that neighborhood barbers were conspiring to slit his throat. His family tried to have him committed to an asylum, but he argued his sanity so convincingly that the authorities declined to admit him. It had been a quarter-century since he became a world-renowned chess champion, and for the last decade of his life he was loath to discuss the game at all.
No one could say with certainty what prompted Morphy’s slow decline, but the discovery of his genius in 1846 remained legendary. Morphy, at age 9, was sitting on his family’s back porch as his uncle and father, a justice on the Louisiana State Supreme Court, played chess. After several hours, the men declared the match a draw and moved to sweep away the pieces. Morphy stopped them. “Uncle,” he said, “you should have won that game.” He maneuvered the pieces and explained: “Here it is: check with the rook, now the king has to take it, and the rest is easy.” And he was right.
Rabbi-Chaplains of the Civil War
Rabbi Dr. Arnold Fischel arrived at the White House on the morning of Dec. 11, 1861, prepared to act as a one-man lobby for the constitutional rights of Jews. He had traveled alone from New York, on his own dime, bringing several letters of recommendation from prominent Republicans and one from the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, then just three years old and the country’s only national Jewish organization.
One of Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries told Fischel that there was little chance of a meeting. But the rabbi was persistent, taking his place among hundreds of people hoping to see the president, some of whom had been waiting for three days. To Fischel’s surprise, Lincoln immediately received him with “marked courtesy.” The rabbi stated the reason for his visit: On behalf of the American Jewish community, including several thousand soldiers fighting for the Union, he hoped the president might reconsider a discriminatory law forbidding his people to serve as chaplains.
The Civil War: 8 Strange and Obscure Facts You Didn’t Know
Reenactors at the 150th anniversary of First Bull Run, July 2011. Courtesy of the author.
Gertrude Stein said it best: “There will never be anything more interesting in America than that Civil War.” And of course interest is high, now that we’ve begun commemorating the sesquicentennial anniversaries of the war’s key events. For the First Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas, to Southerners) last July, re-enactors descended upon Gainesville, Virginia, from as far afield as Germany, Uruguay, and Hawaii.
Even with the war’s vast bibliography—more than 60,000 books have been published since the last shot was fired, in June 1865—some of the odder coincidences and bizarre facts of the period are overlooked. Wilmer McLean became one of the legendary figures of the war merely by trying to escape it. (After his house was shelled in a skirmish preceding the First Battle of Bull Run, he moved—to Appomattox Court House, where General Lee surrendered to General Grant.)
The Daredevil of Niagara Falls
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently signed legislation permitting Nik Wallenda—self-proclaimed “King of the High Wire” and descendant of the legendary Flying Wallendas—to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Wallenda plans to run a cable, two inches thick and 2200 feet long, between two cranes raised 13 feet from the ground. To train, he will take wire walks over water near his Florida home while a caravan of airboats swarm around him, blasting winds up to 78 miles per hour to approximate the winds and spray of the falls. For the real thing, a rescue helicopter will hover nearby. “Worse-case scenario,” Wallenda said, “I sit down on the wire, the helicopter swoops in, I hook on and they get me out of there. I look goofy, but nobody gets hurt.”
Score One for Roosevelt
Richard Von Gammon, a football casualty of 1897. Illustration: the Atlanta Constitution.
On an apple-crisp fall day in 1897, an 18-year-old University of Georgia fullback named Richard Von Gammon launched himself into Virginia’s oncoming rush and vanished beneath a heap of players. He was the only one who didn’t get up. Lying flat on the field at Atlanta’s Brisbane Park, he began to vomit as his teammates circled around him. His skin grew pale and translucent as parchment. One witness recalled that he “raised his eyes in mute appeal, his lips quavered, but he could not speak.” The team doctor plunged a needle full of morphine into Von Gammon’s chest and then realized the blood was coming from the boy’s head; he had suffered a skull fracture and concussion. His teammates placed him in a horse-drawn carriage headed for Grady Hospital, where he died overnight. His only headgear had been a thick thatch of dark hair.
Fatalities are still a hazard of football—the most recent example being the death of Frostburg State University fullback Derek Sheely after a practice this past August—but they are much rarer today. The tragedy that befell Richard Von Gammon at the turn of the 20th century helped galvanize a national controversy about the very nature of the sport: Was football a proper pastime? Or, as critics alleged, was it as violent and deadly as the gladiatorial combat of ancient Rome? The debate raged among Ivy League university presidents, Progressive Era reformers, muckraking journalists and politicians. Ultimately, President Theodore Roosevelt, a passionate advocate of the game, brokered an effort to rewrite its rules.
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