TRAIN WRECK

I hate to admit it but Marcel Proust was probably right. Even people who know history tend to repeat the same idiotic mistakes their grandfathers made, who were, of course, repeating their grandfather’s mistakes - Etc. ad naseum. As proof of this dismaying lack of a learning curve in humans I give you the noble sacrifice of the Right Honorable William Huskisson, Minister of Parliament (above). If Christ died for our sins, then William Huskisson died to prove that the human species are morons.

On September 15, 1830, the first steam powered passenger rail line opened between Manchester and Liverpool, England. Riding in the inaugural train from Liverpool was Mr. Huskisson, stewing over a political beef he had with the then Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. (Get it? Stewing over Beef Wellington?) When the train stopped at Parksdale station, 17 miles outside of Liverpool, to take on water, Huskisson disembarked, the better to harass the Duke, who was riding in the last car of the same train. As he reached through that car’s window to shake the reluctant Dukes’ shoulder,  the inaugural train out of Manchester roared through the station at the unheard of speed of 25 miles per hour. Mr. Huskisson froze in a panic. The Duke tried to pull Huskisson into his car, but the westbound train was faster than the Duke. It crushed Huskisson’s foot and pulled his leg under the wheels and further mangled it. His death later that night in great agony made headlines all across England - Train Kills Man. And William Huskisson was the first.

In the 175 years since it has become a given that to be killed by a train you have to be an idiot. I mean, it’s not as if trains swerved and hit people at random. Pretty much you have to be on the train tracks to be hit by a train. See tracks, look for train. See train, get off tracks. But according to the U.S. Department of Transportation some 2,618 stupid people in this country were killed by trains in 2010.

But are people stupider for being hit by trains, or are the rest of us stupider for not noticing the consistency with which people avoid crossing guards and ignore flashing warning lights or who look but don’t see a huge locomotive barreling down upon them? Could it not be that perhaps having several thousand tons of steel, which may take a mile to stop, rushing through our neighborhoods “at grade” for the last 170 years constituted a fundamental design flaw? Perhaps being hit by a train is never entirely the victim’s fault. After all, just how smart are engineers who don’t allow for human stupidity in their designs?

I bring all this up to point out that the geniuses who operate the lovely Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco have finally decided to maybe build a suicide barrier on their lovely bridge. The idea is to put something between the potential suicide and the empty space hundreds of feet above the cold ocean water besides a simple waist high railing.

Since the lovely Golden Gate opened on 27 May, 1937, an average of 20 people a year have jumped from the lovely span. That makes around 1,369 people who were so stupid they thought suicide was romantic, and didn’t connect a graceful swan dive with hitting the cold water at something around 75 miles per hour. At that speed water behaves much like concrete. It can't get out of the way fast enough to remain fluid, and if you haven’t seen a jumper who has hit concrete, I highly recommend you avoid seeing one or being one.

The original design for the bridge had a higher barrier but Joseph Strauss, who was the head designer, was a short guy, and he rejected it because it would have blocked his view. The next serious proposal for a barrier on the pedestrian walkway did not come until the 1970’s, after some 600 people had already clambered over the railing. Of course, once the idea was suggested the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which operates the bridge, and the citizens of San Francisco who own it, they all slapped themselves in their collective foreheads and said, “Well, duh!”  Right?  Unfortunately, they did not.

The idea was rejected. And rejected again in 1998. And the arguments against a barrier were just….well, stupid. Said the opponents, “If people can’t jump off this bridge, they’ll just jump off some other bridge”. That may be true, but so what? Do we NOT put STOP signs at an intersection because if people don’t collide there, they’ll just crash at some other intersection?

Said the unadorned bridge's defenders, “Why should everybody pay for a barrier to save the lives of a small minority?” By that reasoning, all those suicides were sacrificed so a pint sized engineer could have an unobstructed view of San Francisco Bay -  on those rare days when the fog did not obstruct everybodies' view. It all seems particularly silly, when you remember that the members of the M.T.C. always agreed to a barrier to prevent pedestrians and bicyclists from falling onto the roadway, but remained opposed to one to prevent people from jumping or falling the other way, into the bay. It's just stupid.

Finally, on 20 August, 2010, the M.T.C. accepted the design a steel catch mat, which will hang 20 feet below the bridge. So why did stupid San Francisco suddenly get smart? Well, in 2006 filmmaker Eric Steel released the ultimate snuff film, "The Bridge", staring the lovely Golden Gate Bridge. Over three years Steel had sought to capture the many moods of the bridge by just pointing a camera at the bridge and letting it run. In doing so he had also inadvertently captured 19 suicides on film. When his movie was released the public image of the lovely bridge was not so lovely anymore.  Of course, the M.T. C. has decided that the $45 million to build the suicide barrier "will not come from bridge toll revenues".   Isn't that the kind of thinking that originally led to those 1,379 deaths?

 Well, given enough time, Mr. Huskisson, perhaps your death will have meaning after all. Someday.

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MISTER UN - LUCKY

 I don't believe in curses, but the hard luck existence of Alfred James Brady may yet cause me to reconsider this conviction. Alfred was born on 25 October,  1910 in the isolated crossroads of Kentland, atop the flatlands of northwest Indiana - four miles from the Illinois border and just about forever from anywhere else.  Curse number two was delivered when Alfred was just two years old and his father, Roy Brady, died in a farming accident.  His mother Clara eventually remarried, to Mr. John Biddle . He moved her and the boy 140 miles south on the Monon Railroad to New Salem, northwest of Indianapolis. At the age of sixteen Alfred suffered yet another loss, when Clara died in December of 1926. She was just 37.  And in 1928 Alfred's stepfather also died. That was four strikes before Alfred was twenty.

It might be well to pause here to discuss the differences between Alfred Brady and that other Hoosier handful, John Herbert Dillinger (above), who grew up forty-one miles south of North Salem in Mooresville, Indiana. Dillinger – or Public Enemy Number One as the FBI liked to refer to him - was seven years older than Alfred, and his mother had died when he was three. But perhaps the most interesting thing these two men had in common was that Dillinger's Prussian born father ran a grocery store, and four months after his own stepfather's death, Afred Brady sought his fortune by walking into a grocery store.  He pretended to have a gun in his pocket and demanded all the money in the till. The clerk pulled his real gun and opened fire. Alfred got shot three times, and was arrested – strike number five.

Alfred served six months on the Indiana State Prison Farm, learning how to shovel horse manure, and upon his release tried to go straight. Despite the depression Alfred (above) found work as a delivery boy for a hot tamale stand, a stock boy in a men's clothing store, a welder in an automobile factory, and later, in a mattress factory. Alfred's dissatisfaction with entry level jobs reached a crescendo on 10 July, 1934, when he was arrested for vagrancy.  Alfred was adrift and looking for a career.

The next turning point in Alfred's life came when he met James Dalhover. James was a five foot four inch tall career criminal, four years older and two inches shorter than Alfred. James' skill set was mostly at making moonshine, which financed his purchase of a farm outside of Hanover, Indiana -  strategically located along the distribution route between Louisville and Cincinnati. But revenue agents had recently shut down this home industry and James had just been released from the State Farm. This setback, plus his time in jails in New Mexico, Kentucky and Ohio, tempted James to team up with Alfred.

Their first joint venture was robbing a movie theater 50 miles south of Indianapolis, in Crothersville, Indiana. Unfortunately they chose a Monday night for their holdup, and the cash register contained just $18. The two crooks marked this up to a learning curve, and did better on the following Saturday night, October 19^th , when they robbed a grocery in Sellersburg, Indiana, about ten miles north of Louisville, Kentucky. This time they walked out with $190 dollars (the equivalent of $3,000 today). The Brady Gang, as it would later be referred to, was in business.

The boys brought in twenty year old Clarence Shaffer, who stood five feet five inches tall. And the new gang began a regular Saturday night robbery routine around southern Indiana and Ohio. James would later boast that by the spring of 1936 they had successfully robbed about 150 gas stations and groceries, and they began to aim higher.  On Wednesday, 4 March, 1936 they hit a jewelry store in Lima, Ohio for $8,000.  So on Monday, 27 April, 1936, they returned to the scene of that crime and robed the same store again, this time making off with $27,000 in jewelry.  And then, the next morning,  fifty miles away, outside of the little town of Geneva, Indiana, Alfred's curse struck again.

In a farmer's field, Geneva Police retrieved one of the numbered boxes taken from the Ohio jewelry store. This meant the proceeds of the felony had crossed state lines. And J.Edgar Hoover, the bureaucrat running the FBI, used that slim opening to label Alfred Brady as the new Public Enemy Number One. You see, 1936 had been a presidential election year, and under pressure, Roosevelt had pulled back on New Deal spending. To ward off those budget cuts, Hoover needed a replacement for his very successful John Dillenger, Public Enemy Number One campaign.  And Dillenger's “neighbor” Alfred Brady looked like the perfect fit.  Hoover's F.B.I. issued wanted posters and held press conferences, and on Wednesday, 11 May , the Indianapolis Police arrested Alfred and Clarence Shaffer. Four days later James Dalhover was arrested in Chicago, where he had gone to fence the jewelry.

To their shock, the three crooks were charged with the murder of an Indianapolis Police Officer. Whether they actually committed this murder is questionable. They were prolific crooks, and they did carry guns, and sooner or later somebody was going to get shot. But if Alfred was so cold blooded, why didn't he shoot the would-be hero who interrupted the robbery by jumping on Alfred's back? In any case Alfred must have realized it was too late now. The F.B.I. had labeled the trio as “mad dog killers”. It was enough to make you think Alfred Brady was cursed.

On Sunday morning, 11 October,  1936 , a sheriff in the Hancock County Jail was delivering breakfast to the three prisoners when they hit him over the head with an iron bar, stole his .38 revolver and made their escape in his car.  If anybody thought to ask, they might have wondered why the blood-thirsty Alfred Brady had left behind the living injured sheriff.  But Hoover and the Indianapolis police made certain nobody gave that little conundrum more than a passing thought.

The trio, now permanently allied by circumstances and the police, fled to Baltimore, Maryland. Here they attempted to establish quiet, respectable lives under assumed names. James Dalhover and Clarence Shaffer even married a pair of nice Italian sisters (despite James still having a wife and two children back in Hanover). For his part, Alfred bought himself a bar. Oh, they periodically returned to Indiana to rob grocery stores and banks, but that was just “what” they did. It wasn't “who” they were. It became who they were on 27 May,  1937.

The original plan had been to rob a bank in Sheldon, Illinois, but that institution had failed in the 1937 economic downturn. So instead they robbed a bank in Goodland, Indiana, less than ten miles from Alfred's birthplace in Kentland. They walked out with all of $2,528. And in criss-crossing back roads making their getaway, the gang stumbled upon an intersection called Royal Center, where their careers collided with Indiana Highway Patrol Officer Paul Minneman (above) and Cass County Sheriff's Deputy Elmer Craig. In the ensuing fulsade of gunfire, Officer Minneman was killed and Deputy Craig was severely wounded. After the gunfire, Craig reported one of the gangsters approached the car, pointed a rifle at him and asked, “Shall I finish this guy too? ” Another gang member responded, “No, come on, let's get the hell out of here.” Trooper Minneman left behind a wife and an as yet unborn daughter.

Whatever the truth about Alfred Brady's responsibility in the previous killings attributed to the Brady Gang, there can be no doubt about this one. Even if he had not pulled the trigger, or had been the one telling the gunman not to shoot the wounded deputy, he was now legally responsible for the murder of a police officer. Time Magazine quoted Captain Matt Leach, head of Indiana's State Police, as saying that "because of their viciousness and the way they operate, the Brady mob is going to make Dillinger look like a neophyte.” Reading that, Alfred must have known how it was going to end. The only questions were  “when” and "where".

In late September, the three men drove to Bangor, Maine, looking to purchase guns and ammunition, telling clerks in at least two sporting goods stores that they were hunters. But nobody in Maine could mistake these Indiana hoods for outdoors men. They returned to Bangor in early October to buy even more guns, and paid the owner of Dakin's Sporting Goods for additional ammunition that was not in stock. The store owner told the men to return in a week.  And that was why, at 8:30 on the Tuesday morning of Columbus Day, 12 October , 1937, the “Brady Gang” pulled their black Buick sedan over to the curb in front of 25 Central Street, Bangor. Alfred was in the passenger seat. Clarence and James Dalhover got out, with James entering the store.

James Dalhover approached a clerk and asked, “Where's the stuff I ordered?” His answer came when F.B.I. agent Walter Walsh (above) poked a gun into the back of his head. Instinctively James turned, and Walsh hit him across the bridge of the nose with the pistol. Dalhover fell, and immediately struggled to regain his feet.

Outside, Clarence Shaffer saw the assault, and began firing through the store's windows. He hit agent Walsh in the shoulder. But as he did F.B.I. and Maine State Police “marksmen” stationed on the rooftops along Central Street, opened up.

Several stories under those snipers, 19 year old Poppy Valiades was sitting before the front window of her family's restaurant, the Paramount Cafe, typing up the day's menus. She saw Clarence staggering into the street. “ "I saw his clothes - oh, blood spilling out – bullets...he went into a kind of a coil as he moved into the street. I was probable 10 to 15 feet from him when he dropped.”

Inside the store, James Dalhover broke for the back door, and ran right into the arms of two Bangor city cops, who placed him under arrest. Meanwhile, two agents approached either side of the big Buick. They called for Al Brady to give himself up. Alfred put up his hands and responded, “Don't shoot, don't shoot, I'll get out." But he came out of the car firing and running.

He didn't hit anybody and he didn't get very far. The concentrated gunfire from the rest of the fifteen F.B.I. Agents, and 15 Indiana and Maine State Police Officers, dropped the newest Public Enemy Number One in the very middle of the busy street. Alfred had in his cold dead hand the .38 revolver taken from the holster of murdered Officer Minnemen.

Seventy-four years later, Andrew Taber, who had been on his way to the Dakin's when the shooting exploded on the street, remembered seeing Alfred Brady's body lifted into the wicker basket used to transport fatalities. He watched the silver coins glinting in the bright morning sunlight as they fell out of Alfred's pocket and onto the pavement. The two dead gang members had over sixty wounds in their bodies.

The second the shooting stopped people rushed from all over to have a look; Kalil Ayoob was having breakfast in Main Street that morning, and he remembered, “It looked like the running of the bulls in Spain.” The only surviving member of the “Brady Gang”, James Dalhover, was tried and convicted of the murder of Officer Minneman. And that was the only murder any member of the gang was ever convicted of. James had the dubious distinction of being the last of nine men executed in Indiana's electric chair in 1938, on 18 November , at the Indiana State Penitentiary, Michigan City.

Clarence Shaffer's family sent for his body, and had it brought home to Indiana. But Alfred Brady had no family. In the end,  he was lowered into a charity unmarked grave in Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor. However his brain continued to reside in a jar at the Eastern Maine General Hospital, along the Penobscot River, where curious nursing students could wonder if its convolutions hid an explanation for the violence of its lifetime -  until it finally disappeared. And with it, perhaps the Brady curse also evaporated. As the longtime caretaker for the Mount Hope cemetery often told author Stephen King, “In the end, there's always Hope”.

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=77377

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TALE TELL POE

I admit I smiled when it was revealed that Martin Eisenstadt, the McCain campaign staffer who admitted to being the source behind the “Sara Palin is an diva” leak during the 2008 Republican campaign, turned out to actually be the team of Dan Mirvish and Etan Gorlin. These two pranksters had actually taken the time to “Punk” the media by inventing Mr. Eisenstadt. And a lot of major media had swallowed their gag. But I smiled at the adolescence of the thing, not the inventiveness. Claiming to have fooled the news media is like claiming credit for inventing the “Get the Ball-Where’s the ball” game with your dog. It’s been done before; a lot.

In August of 1835 the “Penny Dreadful” New York Sun published a series of articles entitled “Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel…” John Herschel was a famous astronomer who was the son of a famous astronomer. Using a new telescope he reported that he had observed on the moon “…nine species of mammalian …” including tail-less beavers that walked on two legs and lived in huts, unicorns and four foot tall people with bat wings.

Of course Sir John Herschel had made no such report because he wasn’t nuts. But neither was Richard Adams Locke (above), who was the grandson of the philosopher and the actual author of the moon-beavers story. He was a one-time editor of the Sun, and an acquaintance of Edgar Allen Poe - who claimed he knew of “…no person possessing so fine a forehead as Mr. Locke”.

The story of the moon-beavers raised the Sun's circulation from 15,00 to more than 19,000, which gave it an advantage in its sales war with its rival the New York Herald. On 18 September, 1835,  the paper admitted the joke, and the only people not laughing were the editors of the Herald, who felt they had been made to look foolish for not knowing it had been a gag. But it is helpful to remember that in our age with unlabeled Corporate Video News Releases (VNRs) padding out local news programming from sea to shinning sea it’s gotten easier to fool the fools, not harder. In Edgar Allen Poe’s day fake news had to be an inside job. Even Edgar himself did it.

Edgar had already written “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue” but when he moved to Baltimore with a sick wife he had just $5 in his pocket. And myself , as a hungry writer, who has produced articles for such distinguished men’s publications as “Velvet” and “Velvet Talks”, (back in the 1980's they paid $125 for 1200 obscene words and $25 for three accompanying obscene “letters”) I sympathize with Edgar.

Now, Edgar Allen Poe was “odd”. Both his parents died when he was young. He was adopted by a wealthy manic-depressive patriarch who was alternately loving and vicious toward him. The result was that Edgar became an un-socialized morose alcoholic who as a college student confided to his roommate that he had “joked” that he was going to murder their landlord, and the landlord had believed him: ha, ha.

Edgar had gotten married when he was 25, to the sickly Miss Virginia Clemm, who was just 13 years old - Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with this guy. Faced with imminent starvation Edgar sought out Locke’s advice, and probably based on what Locke told him, Edgar wrote what would later would be called “The Great Balloon Hoax of 1844”, or as I like to call it, “72 Hours of Hot Air”.

The headlines in the Sun read, “Astounding News by Express, via Norfolk! The Atlantic Crossed in Three days!...in the Steering Balloon “Victoria”, after a passage of Seventy-five hours from Land to Land! Full Particulars of the Voyage!”

According to the 5,000 word front page story, the plan had been to cross the English Channel suspended beneath a silk dirigible filled with 40,000 cubic feet of coal tar gas. But once airborne above Wales, and impressed with their “Archimedean Screw” propeller, the decision was made “on the fly” to sail to North America instead. “We soon found ourselves driving out to sea at the rate of not less, certainly, than 50 or 60 miles an hour…as the shades of night have closed around us, we made a rough estimate of the distance traversed. It could not have been less than 500 miles…The wind was from the East all night…We suffered no little from cold and dampness…

"Sunday, the 7th, this morning the gale…had subsided to an eight or nine knot breeze, and bears us, perhaps, 30 miles an hour or more…at sundown, we are holding our course due West...Monday the 8th, the wind was blowing steadily and strongly from the North-East all day…Tuesday, the 9th. One P.M. We are in full view if the low coast of South Carolina. The great problem is accomplished. We have crossed the Atlantic – fairly and easily in a balloon! God be praised!”

According to Edgar’s unbiased reporting, on the day of publication the Sun’s offices were besieged. “As soon as the first copies made their way into the streets, they were bought up," wrote Edgar, "at almost any price. I saw a half a dollar given, in one instance, for a single paper…I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy.” And Edgar was there in the crowd, telling anyone who would listen, that he was the author of the story, and…that it was a gag. Now why would he do that?

Poor old Edgar had a number of personality traits that confused even the people who liked him. For instance, he could not stop himself from maintaining contact with Elizabeth Ellet, a carnivorous little “pot-stirrer” and bad writer who made passes at Edgar in German. I mean, German has always been the language of love, hasn’t it? “Halten Sie mich schlieben, meine little Turtle Dove?” Doesn’t that make you feel all romantic? And then when Edgar cut off all contact with her, she told her brother that Edgar had insulted her. And he challenged Edgar to a duel. Luckily, since Edgar didn't own a gun the two fools ended up beating each other up, over a woman who clearly didn’t think much of either of them. Men. Sigh.

The point of all this, it seems to me, is that idiots who spend their time and energy perpetuating a hoax on the public are hoping the public will not be insulted. But even if the public is willing to laugh at themselves once, the chances are they will not trust the same source a second time, ever. Or, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, "...fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

The very day after the Sun published the balloon hoax there appeared on the back page of the paper the following notice; “…the mails from the south…not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England…we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous”. Well, that’s one way to maintain journalistic integrity: NOT!

Me, I’m willing to bet that Edgar was paid $25 for writing the back page mea culpa. The publishing business hasn’t changed much in 200 years. And neither has the life of writers. Edgar’s wife died of tuberculosis in New York, three years after the Balloon Hoax.

And two years later the New York Sun, which sold for a penny a copy, was bought for $250,000 (more than $6 million in today’s money). That was the same year Edgar Allen Poe died in Baltimore, flat broke as usual. Sigh.

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