Uses Flag for Coat Lining

1916

"Prettiest Thing I Could Find," Tailor Told Court.

BOSTON, Massachusetts — Pankus Brown, a tailor and a United States citizen for several years, admires the flag so much, he told the South Boston district court, that when he wanted to make a fur coat especially attractive he caused his assistant to use a silk flag for lining.

"I meant no insult to the flag," Brown pleaded, when charged with misuse of the national emblem. "I wanted to make the coat look nice and I used the prettiest thing I could find. That flag cost me a lot of money."

The court ordered him fined $50.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Sept. 16, 1916, p. 11.

Display of Dead Wife's Ashes Angers Former Ballplayer

1915

Mike Donlin Demands Revenge in Court

Mike Donlin, who forsook the New York National League baseball club for the stage, asked Magistrate Simms in a New York court to punish Ray E. Frye for alleged desecration of the ashes of Mabel Hite, Donlin's deceased wife, an actress, who died in 1912.

The former baseball star charged that the employees of Campbell's undertaking establishment were guilty of disorderly conduct by utilizing the urn containing the actress' ashes as a "prop" in a "press agent frame-up" staged one night recently at Murray's restaurant in New York.

According to the testimony of Jack Best, coat room boy at the cafe, Frye came in for supper on the night in question, and left the carefully wrapped urn in his care with the admonition that he "Be careful of it because it may explode." Visions of concealed bombs prompted the boy to tell Patrick Kyne, manager of the restaurant, what Frye had told him. The urn containing the ashes was placed in a bucket of water and the police notified. Detective Egan got it and found it harmless and returned it. In the meantime Frye had left the restaurant without Mabel Hite's ashes.

Magistrate Simms dismissed the defendant after hearing the full testimony. Frye said that he was taking the urn to a new repository where it was to be left until Donlin gave orders for its disposal and that he had forgotten it when he left after his supper. He admitted having told the coat boy that it might explode, but said that he had done so to insure better care of it. Donlin and Kyne nearly came to blows in the corridor of the courthouse after the case had been tried.

Milton's Tomb Desecrated, Exhibited; Bone, Teeth Taken

1904

There are probably many, even among the subscribers to Milton's statue — which, as just arranged, is to be unveiled on November 2 — who will be surprised to hear that the body of the great poet was once on view at a charge of threepence a head within a few yards from the site chosen for this splendid tribute to his memory, says the Westminister Gazette.

It was in 1790, after a little carousal, that two overseers and a carpenter entered the Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where Milton lay buried, and, having discovered the leaden coffin which contained his body, put open its top with a mallet and chisel. "When they disturbed the shroud," Neve says, when telling the story of the ghoulish deed, "the ribs fell. Mr. Fountain confessed that he pulled hard at the teeth, which resisted until some one hit them with a stone. Fountain secured all the fine teeth in the upper jaw, and generously gave one to one of his accomplices. Altogether the scoundrels stole a rib bone, ten teeth and several handfuls of hair; and, to crown the diabolical business, the female gravedigger afterward exhibited the body to any one willing to pay threepence for the spectacle."