Fake Beard Lands Gary Man in Cell

March 1920

Merchant-Sleuth Finally Released by Detroit Cops

DETROIT, Michigan — Wearing a false goatee and mustache, Isidor Vila, a well-to-do business man of Gary, Indiana, was arrested here.

Vila conducts a grocery store in Gary. During the strike there last summer a large number of the strikers opened charge accounts at his store. Many of them disappeared without paying their bills, some of them coming to Detroit. Vila decided to go on a collecting trip. He provided himself with false scenery, as he figured he would have a better opportunity of locating his debtors.

Detroit was the first city he visited, and five minutes after he left his hotel adorned with the camouflage he was spotted and arrested, despite his strenuous objections. The Gary authorities wired the Detroit police that Vila was a law abiding citizen and he was then released.


Weds Girl To Whom He Restored Beauty

PEORIA, Illinois — Two years ago Miss Ruth Wheeler, a Peoria school teacher, went to the offices here of Dr. Raymond C. Willett, orthodonist. An otherwise beautiful face was slightly marred by teeth which had grown crooked. She appealed to Dr. Willett to perform an operation to straighten them. Recently, in Chicago, the couple married. Miss Wheeler is the daughter of one of Peoria's prominent families. Dr. Willett is one of the best known practitioners in Peoria.

Enoch Ardens in Russia

1906

Many Returning Soldiers Reported Dead Find Their Wives Remarried

St. Petersburg. — Among the Russian prisoners arriving from Japan there are many who have been reported dead by the general staff and whose relatives had been so informed. The unexpected reappearance of these men is causing all sorts of strange family complications, as many wives, under the impression that they were widows, have remarried.

In the province of Perm, where a returning soldier found his wife already the mother of a child by a new husband, he took the matter to the village priest for settlement. The first husband offered to acquiesce to the new conjugal arrangement if he received $25, but the second husband was unable to pay the money, and it was finally arranged that the wife should return to her first husband.

However, as the second marriage was considered legal, and as official documents were at hand to prove the apparent death of the living husband, it was decided that the child born While the first husband was away must legally be registered as belonging to the second husband, and that it must be cared for by him.


Luxury for Left-Handed

Right handed men are no longer the only ones who can, if they so desire, avail themselves of the convenience of a mustache cup. There are now made mustache cups for left handed men as well. These cups come in at least two sizes and in a variety of styles as to decorations. Not nearly so many left handed as right handed cups are called for, but the left handed man can now be supplied.

Full Beards and Red Petticoats

1886

People who can remember back of the civil war must know that shaving was almost universal in those days, and that when the contrary practice began it so agitated the country that the newspapers were filled with leading articles on "The Beard Movement" and "The Mustache Movement."

Probably most of our older readers can remember when they first saw a preacher in the pulpit wearing a mustache and the shock it gave them. It was, if possible worse than the other sacrilegious act of bringing fiddles into the choir.

The event which started the beard movement was the visit of the wonderful Hungarian orator, Louis Kossuth, who was extremely handsome and picturesque in the full beard and mustache and soft felt hat with curling feather. He introduced the soft hat as well as the mustache, and as he traveled all over the country in 1854 and 1855 and spoke every where to great crowds whom he powerfully impressed with the masterly English which he had learned from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Webster's dictionary while he lay in an Austrian prison he advertised both his hat and his hair very widely. It would seem rather trivial nowadays for the newspapers to gravely discuss the "beard movement," but that was not the most trivial matter with which the newspapers of thirty years ago busied themselves.

Prominent among their themes shortly before the war was "the Red Petticoat Movement." It became the sensible fashion for women to wear red flannel petticoats instead of the white cotton one which had been the universal wear before. This was an innovation that worried the newspapers seriously. Many of them held the red garment to be, if not actually immodest, at least bold and daunting, and a symbol of the degeneracy of the age. Charles Mackay, then visiting in the country, published an earnest poetical appeal for "the white, the modest petticoat," which went the round of the press. — Buffalo Express.


1858

The Red Petticoat and the White

Charles Mackay sends the following lines, on an absorbing subject, to the public press:

Oh, the red, the flaunting petticoat,
That courts the eye of day,
That loves to flare and be admired,
And blinks from far away;
It may delight the roving sight,
And charm the fancy free,
But if its bearer's half as bold,
I'll pass and let her be;—
With her red, her flaunting petticoat,
She's not the girl for me!

But the white, the modest petticoat,
As pure as drifted snow,
That shuns the gaze in crowded ways,
Where follies come and go.
It stirs the primrose on its path,
Or daisy on the lea;
And if the bearer's like the garb,
How beautiful is she!
With her white, her modest petticoat,
Oh, she's the girl for me!

Rich Girl Sued for $150,000 — Stole Woman's Astrologer Husband

1909

RICH GIRL SUED FOR $150,000

Wife of Astrologer Says His Love Was Stolen.

FORGAVE HUSBAND ONCE.

Mrs. Marshall Clark Tells Graphic Story of Seeing Rival Run Out of Mr. Clark's Private Office and of Her Visit Later to Miss Gazzam, Who, She Says, Declared the Man Was Her "Affinity in Spirit, Soul and Body."

New York, Oct. 4.— Mrs. Marshall Clark of Chicago, a handsome brunette of thirty-five years, who has brought suit for $150,000 damages against Miss Antoinette Elizabeth Gazzam, possessor of a fortune of $3,500,000 and a palatial home at Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, charging the young woman with alienating the affections of her husband, an astrologer known as "Professor Niblo," has come to New York to prosecute her claim against the heiress.

"I met Dr. Clark in Chicago," Mrs. Clark said. "We were married in New York on March 24, 1903, by the Rev. Dr. Anderson, a Methodist Episcopal minister. At that time Mr. Clark was conducting a real estate business in this city.

"We had an ideal married life until Miss Gazzam and her millions appeared. We traveled much. I was my husband's business partner and confidential adviser as well as his wife.

Consulted Him on Astrology.

"We were living in Los Angeles in April last when Miss Gazzam arrived in that city. She evidently had read Mr. Clark's advertisements about astrology, and she consulted him. They very soon were having frequent meetings. Indeed, Miss Gazzam engaged the rose parlor at the fashionable Lankershim hotel, in Los Angeles, in which to entertain him.

"On April 29 I called at my husband's office, and, not hearing any sound in his inner office, I opened the door and entered. As I did so I was amazed to see Miss Gazzam spring past me and run out of the office.

"I began screaming, and my husband ran to his desk and took from the drawer a revolver, which he pointed at me, threatening to shoot me if I did not stop making a noise.

She Forgave Him That Time.

"Although I forgave my husband for the presence of the woman and for his attack on me, I soon found out that this mysterious new friend was calling upon him every day and he upon her. She called upon him five times one day and telephoned him twenty times. I sought the advice of counsel and was told to see if I could have a personal conversation with Miss Gazzam. So on May 24 last I went to her apartments, then in the Zelda hotel She met me at the door.

" 'Do you know that Marshall Clark is my husband?' I asked.

" 'Yes, I know all about you,' she said.

"Then I asked her why she was acting in this manner. She replied:

" 'Because Mr. Clark is my affinity in spirit, soul and body.'

"I began to cry and told her I was talking to her in heart to heart fashion. I said: 'Don't you know these tears are tears of blood? My heart is breaking.'

Told to Get Out of Their Way.

" 'I don't care for your tears of blood or your breaking heart,' she retorted. 'There is only one thing for you to do, and that is to get out of our way. I have always had what I wanted, and I want this man and am going to have him, no matter what it costs you or anyone else.'

"I tried to continue the interview, but she gave me a violent push that nearly knocked me out of the window, which was on the fourth floor.

"Turning upon her, I screamed: 'Are you trying to take my life? You have already taken my husband and ruined my home!'

"At this she grabbed my lace coat and almost tore it from my back. When I came to myself I was out in a hallway of the hotel, my hair down my back, my silk coat torn to shreds and blood streaming down my face.

"I got out a warrant charging her with assault and battery, but before it was served she had disappeared. I learned later that she had moved to the Hotel Pepper, where she registered as Mrs. S. W. Moore. At the time she also registered at the Westlake hotel as Miss Mazzag of Pennsylvania.

"I learned then that my husband visited her every evening. He posed as a physician. When he called upon her he worse a false mustache."

—Orange County Times-Press, Middletown, NY, Oct. 5, 1909, p. 9.

Curl Your Mustache

1884

At a late hour last evening a young man left a chair in a fashionable uptown barber shop with a handkerchief to his mouth.

"Cut him?" asked the next customer.

"No. He's got his mustache in curlers."

"Eh?"

The barber produced two bits of rubber tubing an inch long and quarter of an inch thick. In one end was a hole with a small rubber ring through it. In the other end was a slit.

"We roll the wet mustache around this tube, and, after making one turn around all with the ring, slip it into the slit. That holds the hair in the curled position until morning, when he takes off the curler. The hair will stay in shape for a day or two. If applied often enough it makes a permanent curl. We charge 25 cents for a pair of curlers and 6 cents for applying them — latest thing for mustaches. — The New York Sun.