Garbless Dancing Man Gives Police The Slip

1920

'Varsity Set Resent His Nimble Capers on Campus.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota. — A garbless gent, who may be an interpretative dancer, proved also that he was as fleet as a fawn and as nimble as a chamois when the police sought to break up his antics near the University of Minnesota campus. He is still tripping the light fantastic toe somewhere at large.

Complaint that the dress-discarding man was capering about the neighborhood was first received by the police when three calls came in quick succession from residents of the cultured district.

A police squad, prudently provided with a blanket to wrap about the nymph, dashed to the scene in a touring car. They were unable to find him.

But shortly afterward two prudish policemen, left on watch, were shocked to see a human form that apparently hadn't attended any of the recent bargain sales dash across the street and disappear in the night.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Aug. 7, 1920, p. 5.

Old War Horses

1905

These old horses never forget the calls, no matter how long it has been since they last heard them.

One day some years ago, when I was passing an open lot in the outskirts of Chicago, I found a boy trying to play an old cornet, says a writer in Forest and Stream. While the boy and I were at work on the cornet, an old negro ash hauler came along driving an animal that had once been a good horse, but was now only a collection of skin and bones. The horse stopped when he heard us and stuck up his ears. I came to the conclusion that be had been a cavalry horse and asked the old negro where he had got him. "From a farmer," he said. I could not find a "U.S." on the horse; he had probably been discharged so long ago that his brand had been worn off. But taking the cornet I sounded the stable call, and the horse began to dance.

"Hold fast to your lines, now, uncle," I warned the old negro. "I am going to make that old horse do some of the fastest running he has ever done since he left the cavalry." Then, beginning with the call for the gallop, I next sounded the charge, and the old plug went plunging up the road at his fastest gait, dragging his wagon after him. I gave him the recall next, and he came down to a walk, much to the relief of the old negro. He said that this was the first time he had over seen the horse run. He had never been able to get him to go faster than a slow walk before. "You don't feed him well enough to get him to do much running," I told him. "That horse, when he did have to run, got his twelve pounds of corn and all the hay he could eat every day."

Dishwasher Runs Amuck With a Bread Knife

California, 1921

History states that the Battle of Thermopylae Pass in ancient days was not such an exciting affair, and if so, it faded into oblivion, alongside of the affair of late yesterday afternoon in which Denny Zanatos, proprietor of the restaurant on Main street above Third, known as Guidi's, did a Marathon down Main street to avoid the wild charge of a Greek dishwasher in the same restaurant, who took after the fleet restauranteur armed with a butcher knife.

The assailant began arguing with Zanatos over wages. Then the battle began, resulting in the knife wielder being arrested by the fire chief and is facing a charge of assault with intent to murder. It is claimed that the prisoner chased Zanatos about the Guidi restaurant a dozen times, not giving the fleeing Athenian a chance to open the door to make escape. Finally a waitress came to the man's rescue and when the door was opened he made one grand leap for the street and would have made Atlanta in her race of the Golden Apple look like a novice had he been her opponent on the mythical cinder path.

—Woodland Daily Democrat, Woodland, California, Dec. 17, 1921, p. 1.