O.O. McIntyre
Lima Gazette and Republicans/January 8, 1920
NEW YORK— A page from the diary of a modern Samuel Pepys: Up and trimmed by the new barber, fellow seemed not to know who Homer was or of his epics. With Mr. Scott to breakfast with Sir Hugh Walpole, the pamphleteer, and found him well spoke and his age amazing, being just merely turned 36. And he told of his father the Bishop of Edinburgh and how he himself had studied for the church rostrum.
For a walk and saw on the highway Channing Pollock, who hath writ a fine new play, and his daughter Mistress Helen and M. Maeterlinck wearing great tortoise spectacles, very noble At the club a bronzed man from Waikiki thrummed a strange instrument, the noise being horrendous and it recalled Bill Nye’s quaint comment that Wagner’s music was really better than it sounded.
Greatly troubled over the tale told me by J. Kaufman, the chronicler, of a women of the town having a gift of a great sable coat weighing five pounds and made of ninety-three skins costing $85,000 and in the public prints of the day tell of 500,000 children starving In Armenia.
A moving picture girl sent me today a tierce of claret which I must get rid of before the new amendment is in force for I fear some new twist in the law may make me trouble. Home where I fell to scrivening and worked until a late hour and so to bed.
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Miss Dana Gatlin, the short story writer, entertained during the holidays a young lady from Shreveport, La. Miss Gatling whisked her through the mazes of the subway to Battery Park where she might see the great New York harbor and the huge pile of skyscrapers that form the famous sky-line. The lady sucked in her breath at the sight and at length said: “This is certainly the Shreveport of the East.”
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Two daring crooks who pulled off the most startling hotel robbery New York has ever known bore the names of Adriano Alvares and Raymond Rodrigues. To vocalise the names shows that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. No playwright would dare expose his plot by bestowing such smoothly illiterative names on his characters, stamping them before the curtain rose.
And they scowled just like the regular villains and wore the finest English tweeds, spats, hats from a swell Fifth Avenue shop and carried gold cigarette cases in which nestled cigarettes bearing the monograms “A. A.” and “R R.”
They were Spanish bucaneers in Broadway trappings. Headquarters experts say that polished crooks always seek the high-sounding names. Many of them acquire a smatterlng of French to impress head-waiters. There is a celebrated adventuress, mixed up in two diamond robberies, who is known to her intimates as The Dawn.
She has an imported limousine and appears at the opera now and then, always trailed by detectives who are in the Metropolitan lobby to spot jewel thieves. She delightd in smiling sneeringly at them when they come too close to her.
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Broadway slang for money changes with the seasons. It has been known as “plaster,” “sugar,” “gels,” “mazuma” and the dollar has been known as a “bone,” a “berry,” a “need,” and now the latest name is “flitter.” A collector of Broadway anthology declares that most new words for money are coined over the gaming tables and the game of draw is productive of more new names than any other.
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