Pondering this morning an artifact that Peg rescued at the dump a few days ago.
As is our ritual on traveling days, she dropped me off to preflight the plane while she shuttled our garbage out to the solid waste facility adjacent to Perry-Foley Airport. There is no trash service on the farm. When she returned she was toting a framed front page of the New York Times dated January 9, 1925. Apparently a family was out at the dump saying their goodbyes to this artifact when Peg intervened and saved it from the scrap pile. Now it is here with us at Tara.
The quotidian nature of the headlines suggests one of them mattered at a personal level to someone who ended up in Taylor County. There was no celebrity death, no war begun or ended, no ocean liner sinking among the icebergs. Just the anodyne stuff of daily life in New York.
The lead headline that day addressed the ouster of Murray Hulbert from the position of President of the Board of Aldermen over an eligibility issue. He went on to a successful career as a federal judge, so whatever happened back in January of 1925, no matter how embarrassing at the time, seemed not to particularly affect the arc of his career.
Hulbert doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who's hang around Perry, and he surely wouldn't save a reminder of this little political slap-down.
There is an article about a bank merger, and another describing the litigation of a dispute over public transportation. Nope, those wouldn't cause a TayCo resident to frame the front page.
On the world stage, the Brits and the Americans are jostling over battleships, as near as I can tell an argument arising out of the interpretation of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. Apparently the Secretary of the Navy wanted improvements to battleships that he discerned were allowed by the treaty, but Silent Cal thought they were too expensive. Within a couple decades it would become clear that the advent of naval airpower had rendered the whole pile of steel obsolete, but in 1925 this was serious stuff.
Landlocked Perry wouldn't be home to anyone who cared either way, however.
Clarence Darrow's legal fees for defending Leopold and Loeb caught the attention of the Times--$130,000.00, or nearly $2 million in 2021 dollars. A lot of cash for a guilty plea and a twelve hour closing argument at sentencing.
Don't remember Leopold and Loeb? Two young men too smart for their own good who concocted and carried out the "perfect crime", the murder of a 14-year-old neighbor boy. They were apprehended after law enforcement found Leopold's glasses alongside the body. Maybe not so smart after all. It was the first of several "crimes of the century" during the previous hundred years.
On January 9, 1925, the two of them would have been sitting in jail. Maybe Darrow came to Florida for the weekend. Who knows?
Among the headlines one in particular may be the clue that leads us to how our framed newspaper ended up in Taylor County. Buried below the headline about Hulbert is an article about the fraudulent re-election of one Nathan Perlman as congressman for New York's 14th District.
Perlman was a Polish native, a Jew who rose to prominence as a prosecutor in New York before being elected first to the state legislature and then to Congress.
So how does Perlman's shady reelection in 1925 lead us into the fever swamps of the Big Bend?
Well, Perlman had ties to the Jewish mob that was active in the City back in those days. In the years that immediately followed, he conspired with that crime syndicate to violently disrupt the fascist gatherings that were taking place around the country, including in New York, preaching virulent anti-Semitism.
Among that circle of Jewish gangsters was one Benjamin Siegel, also known as "Bugsy".
Bugsy Siegel was one of the better known criminals of his day, with ties to bootlegging during Prohibition, gambling, and the eventual creation of Las Vegas as the Sin City it became. If Perlman had help in his reelection campaign through ballot stuffing and various other forms of fraud, the Jewish mob almost certainly played a role.
Would Siegel himself be involved? He was just coming into his own at the time, eighteen or nineteen years old, probably a small time player in a larger organization. Would they have known each other? Probably.
So why would Perlman's ties to the mob, and an article about election fraud, lead to a framed headline out at a dump in the middle of Florida?
Two words: Hampton Springs.
Back in the 1920s, just outside of Perry, sat the resort of Hampton Springs.
Situated at a natural sulphur spring, Hampton Springs once boasted not only a spring bath but a golf course, gambling, and a hunting and fishing club.
There's not much left of it now.
As it happens, the old resort was a favorite stopping off point for travelers heading to Miami from Chicago. Among the most famous of these was Al Capone, who liked to stop here and stretch his legs for a few days as he left the cold Chicago winters for tropical Florida.
One of Capone's good friends was Bugsy Siegel.
Okay, I know this sounds like that Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon game that was all the rage a decade ago, but hear me out. Maybe, just maybe, two gangsters stashed as a memento of one of their triumphs, the election of their very own congressman with the ultimate cover--he used to be a prosecutor! Cigars, brandy, and laughter out by the pool.
"Bugsy, you ought to frame that headline," Big Al slurs a little, flashing a thick-lipped smile at the younger Siegel.
And he did.
So, that's my best guess as to why an ordinary day as recorded by the Gray Lady would find itself framed and behind glass, then rescued at a dump by a lovely lady from Blue Grass, Tennessee who had no idea why it's there. This guess is as good as any.
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