Part 3 — CHAPTER IX

A. Correct such of the following leads as need correction. Where the age of the person, his place of residence, or similar details necessary to an effective lead are lacking, supply them (paragraphs 100–120).

1. Adam Schenk fell off the runway at the Fernholz Lumber Yard on Monday forenoon and landed on his back at a point near his kidneys on a stake on the wagon, breaking the stake off.

2. Rather than to put the Tuttle Press Company to an unnecessary expense of appropriating $1,000 that would do neither the city nor any particular individual a cent's worth of material good, and assuming also that the city, by virtue of the fact that the company's original plant was erected on lines provided by the city's engineer, is in a measure responsible for present conditions, the city commissioners in conference with S. A. Whedon of the Tuttle Press Company this morning decided not to proceed further in the matter of ordering removed the walls of a big addition to the plant now in process of construction.

3. Roaming hogs was the cause of the recent illness of Mr. T. N. Davis. The hogs rooted under the wire fence surrounding his residence and in his effort to get them out he exerted himself beyond his endurance.

4. At an early hour Tuesday morning, as the beams of the rising sun were struggling to dispel the uncertainties of a winter night, the final summons came to Miss Ella O'Harrigan, our beloved librarian, to join the innumerable caravan that moves to the pale realms of shade.

5. Again the lure of Broadway, the craving to be among expensively clad men and women, and a longing to seem of more than actual importance, have resulted in a fall from a position of responsibility and trust to one facing the possibility of a long term of imprisonment.

This time it is a woman; good looking, possessing the knack of dressing smartly, capable and efficient, and less than 40 years old. For six years she had been head bookkeeper in Marbury Hall, an apartment hotel of the best class, at 164 West Seventy-fourth Street. For more than two years of that time, according to the prosecuting officials, she has been putting cash belonging to the hotel into her own diamond-studded purse, whence it was transferred to the coffers of expensive dressmakers, theatres, and restaurants, particularly those which maintained dance floors.

Yesterday afternoon she was arrested, charged with grand larceny. She raised her hand to her mouth as the detective tapped her shoulder, and a few minutes later was taken to the Polyclinic Hospital, to be later transferred to Bellevue. She will recover from the poison and will have to face in court in four or five days the charges which she attempted to avoid by death....

6. Swept by a 33-mile gale, a fire which started in a three-story frame Greek restaurant on Appomattox Street this afternoon quickly spread to adjoining frame buildings in Hopewell, the "Wonder City," at the gates of the Du Pont Powder Company's plant, twenty miles from here, and at nightfall practically every business house, hotel, and restaurant in the mushroom powder town of 30,000 had been wiped out, the loss amounting to $1,000,000 or more.

7. One man, a bank messenger, was shot mortally and his assailant wounded, perhaps mortally, two other men narrowly missed death by shooting, and thousands of persons were terrorized by an attempted hold-up in the Fourteenth Street subway station at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon, and by a chase which skirted Union Square, continued through a theatre arcade and ended blocks away.

8. As a result of an old quarrel between two citizens of Leroy, the melting snow-drifts on the streets of that city ran red with human blood, Wednesday. John M. Zellhoefer lay gasping his last breath on the sidewalk, with a fatal bullet wound through the midst of his body, while over him stood Francis Marion Dunkin, with smoking revolver in hand.

9. Nothing had been learned by the police last night to indicate that George de Brosa, who died early yesterday morning in Bellevue hospital after fatally wounding Allan Gardner, a bank messenger, and being shot by Walter F. Orleman, another bank messenger, in an attempted holdup of the two in the Fourteenth Street subway station Friday afternoon, had an accomplice.

10. At All Saints Cathedral Sunday morning, Dean Seldon P. Delany spoke on "Salvation through Self-Sacrifice," taking for his text Mark viii, 35: "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it."

11. Rachel Green, colored, suffered a dislocated and badly sprained knee last night while she was attending religious services at Main Street Colored Baptist church and another woman began to shout and jumped into her lap.

12. James L. Crawley of Hastings is confined to his home with a broken arm and lacerated ear. His injuries were received when he stepped on the family cat and fell headlong down the cellar steps. The cat was asleep on the top step.

13. John Radcliffe, 16 years old, of Moultrie, had never been kissed, and in trying desperately to maintain this estate, while pursued at a barn dance by Mrs. Winifred Trice, Monday night, he fell out of a door twenty feet from the ground and was picked up with one arm and three ribs fractured.

14. Charged with having tried to obtain $1,000 by forgery, a handsomely gowned young woman, who gave her name as Irene Minnerly, and said she was a telephone operator, and a man who described himself as Webster Percy Simpson, thirty-six, living at the Hotel Endicott, were arrested yesterday afternoon as they were leaving the offices of Fernando W. Brenner, at No. 6 Church Street.

15. Allen & Co., Ltd., the well-known London firm of publishers, has been prosecuted for the publication of a novel called "The Raindrop," written by D. H. Lawrence, on the ground that it is obscene.

16. Interesting testimony was given before Justice Scudder in the Supreme Court to-day in the hearing of the suit for divorce brought by Harry H. Wiggins of Floral Park, a retired grocer. Mr. Wiggins alleged undue fondness for John Burglond, a farm hand formerly employed in Mrs. Wiggins' cabbage patch. Mrs. Wiggins is 53 years old and Burglond 33.

17. S. H. Brannick of this city lost a fine cow last week, the animal departing this life suddenly after the city had retired for the evening.

18. Miss Ellen Peterson, a former employee of Miss Josie Griffin's millinery, 2318 Cottage Grove Avenue, was married Tuesday by the Rev. Johnston Myers at Immanuel Baptist church. The couple left immediately after the ceremony for a wedding trip through the West.

19. Hilda is the daughter of one of the deftest colored janitors who ever kept a dumb waiter just that. With her father and mother she lives in a court apartment on the ground floor of No. 195 Main St., and last night she was slumbering blissfully, wrapped in dreams of a chocolate-colored Santa Claus with sweet-potato trimmings and persimmon whiskers, when she heard the window of her room open.

B. Comment on the leads to the following stories, rewriting any that need correction (paragraphs 100–120):

1. This story dates back eight months, when Mrs. Elizabeth Hochberger became a patient at the county hospital in Chicago. She was ill of typhoid fever and in her first night at the hospital she became delirious. While in this condition she seized a ten-inch table knife from a tray and in the absence of anyone to restrain her poked it down her throat. Attendants attracted by the woman's groans hurried to the bedside. Then an interne appeared, made a hasty diagnosis, and attributed the patient's action to the delirium. He administered an opiate. Several days later Mrs. Hochberger, having passed the crisis of the fever, began to recover. A week afterward she was discharged as cured.

From the time she complained of internal pains and to relatives she recounted a vague story of her delirium at the hospital. She had a faint recollection of swallowing a knife, she said. To swallow a knife and survive was improbable, she was told, but she was advised to see a physician. The first doctor called in recommended an immediate operation for a tumor. Another believed she had an acute case of appendicitis.

"It was not until we made our discovery that Mrs. Hochberger told us of her delirium," said the doctor. "Had I heard it before making the X-ray examination I would have hardly given it credence. I have heard of people swallowing coins and pencils, but this is the first knife ever brought to my attention."

The knife was removed to-day by Dr. George C. Amerson at the West Side Hospital.

2.

This is the chorus of one of the songs Pearl Palmer, pretty opera singer, was to have sung when she made her first Broadway appearance as one of the principals of the opera, "The Princess Pat." Now she is dead because she carried this philosophy into her own life, her friends say. Herbert Haeckler, who killed the young singer and himself Sunday night, had been kept "guessing," they said, until his mind had given away.

Eva Fallon will sing the song Miss Palmer was to have sung when the opera opens to-morrow night. It was postponed from last night because of the tragedy.

3. A young man by the name of Tom Verbeck, 18 years old, living in Freeport, who rides a motorcycle, was passing along the Chicago road, Friday, when he met an automobile driver who was in distress. The motorcycle man stopped, and when asked to lend a hand gave freely of his time. He was unsuccessful, however, and it was decided to have the motorcycle tow the auto into Freeport. More complications presented themselves, as neither the auto driver nor the motorcycle rider had a rope to tie the two machines together. The automobile man solved this problem by taking off his wool shirt and using it for a tow-rope. The owner of the auto rode in the buzz wagon into town, and on account of the darkness it was not noticed that he was shy a shirt. The motorcyclist towed the machine to the residence of the driver by way of back streets, and here he unloaded the machine. The shirt used as a tow-rope was not dismembered by the operation.

C. Write the lead to the story the outline of which was given on page 290.

D. Write for Friday afternoon's paper an informal lead to the following story:

Characters: Anton Kurdiana and his wife, Rosa (née Novak). Anton's age, 24; Rosa's, 20. Married three months ago. Anton has a cork leg. Leg cut off above the knee by a train a year ago. Rosa Novak a nurse in the hospital to which he was taken. Rosa preparing to get a divorce. Anton did not want a divorce. A friend of Anton's told him if he would leave the state, Rosa could not get the divorce. A friend of Rosa's told her Anton was preparing to leave early this (Friday) morning.

Last night after he went to bed, Rosa hid his cork leg. He called for help from his bedroom window this morning and the police came. Bailiff also came and served notice of divorce proceedings. They live at 2404 Faraon Street, this city. Cause of divorce, cruelty and non-support.

E. Explain the different tones of the following leads and the writers' methods of gaining their effects (paragraph 119):

1. "You have stolen my daughter! Take that!"

"That" was a short right jab to the face. Mrs. Anna la Violette of 6632 South Wabash Avenue was the donor, and William Metcalf, who had merely married her daughter Elsie, aged 18, owned the face.

2. Twenty grains of cocaine and morphine a day, eighty times the amount an average dope fiend uses, enough to kill forty men, fifteen years at it too,—this is the record of Dopy Phil Harris, the human dope marvel found to-day by the California Board of Pharmacy in its combing of the San Francisco underworld. If poison were taken away from Harris for forty-eight hours, he would die within the next twenty-four.

3. The winds, whose treachery Archie Hoxsey so often defied and conquered, killed the noted aviator to-day. As if jealous of his intrepidity, they seized him and his fragile biplane, flung them out of the sky, and crushed out his life on the field from which he had risen a few minutes before with a laughing promise to pierce the heavens and soar higher than any human being had ever dared go before.

4. The champion lodge "jiner" is the title bestowed by Mrs. Jennie Gehret, wife of John D. Gehret, of this city, on her husband. It is not because she wants to be his wife. She is suing for divorce, and John's feats as a jiner are the reasons for her action.

5. And tragedy blurs out their joy again.

Five-year-old Norman Porter of Wadsworth, Ill., wanted a toy horse on wheels for Christmas, and his nine-year-old brother, Leroy, wrote Santa for an automobile that would "run by itself."

The wooden horse, its head broken off, lay last night in the snow at Kedzie Avenue and Sixteenth Street. A few feet away some children picked up the tin automobile bent almost beyond recognition. The toys were knocked from the arms of Mrs. James R. Porter, the boy's mother, when she was struck by an automobile and the same wheels which crushed out her life had passed over them.

6. A fair-haired boy in knickerbockers, who chewed gum with reckless insouciance and indulged in cool satirical comment on his companion's amateur efforts, yesterday directed a daring holdup of the Chicago Art and Silver Shop at 438 Lincoln Parkway, from which silverware and jewelry valued at $600 was carried off.

7. He is colored, forty-three years old, a laborer, and lives at No. 440 West Forty-fifth Street, and when he was brought before Lieut. Fogarty at Police Headquarters yesterday charged with having done some fancy carving with a razor on the countenance of Ira Robinson of No. 2004 Clinton Street, he gave his name as General Beauregard Bivins.