Chapter IV · POLICE NEWS AND CRIME (continued 2)

Windows were thrown open and an attempt made to revive Mr. Herman but it was unsuccessful.

The gas was carried to the heater by a pipe that led from the wall. There were two valves on the pipe, one near the wall and the other near the heater.

The family declares that the lower valve had been turned off, but that the one at the wall was on full and in some way the gas had succeeded in escaping.

John L. O’Brien, the personal counsel for Frederick H. Herman, was notified of his client’s death and arrived at the house shortly after. Mr. O’Brien saw reporters who called at the house, explaining that members of the family did not care to be interviewed.

Mr. O’Brien denied that Mr. Herman committed suicide. He said that the circumstances surrounding his death made it appear that it had been accidental.

“Mr. Herman’s death was purely accidental; of that I am convinced,” said Mr. O’Brien. “He was not worried by the civil litigation in which he was engaged with the receivers of the Universal Reserve Life Insurance Company, and he long ago became satisfied that he would never be brought to trial for the criminal indictment that was hanging over his head in connection with the alleged misuse of money to influence legislation at Albany.

“If it had been Mr. Herman’s plan to take his life by gas he would have gone about it differently. The gas in his own room was turned off, and it is reasonable to assume that if he had had suicide in mind he would have turned on the gas in his room.

“He was fully twenty feet away from the gas heater in the bathroom and there was a constant current of air flowing between the two rooms.

“There was some trouble with the furnace, and Mr. Herman, who likes his room warm, had turned on the gas in the bathroom. Air was coming from the open furnace register.

“It is evident that Mr. Herman had been reading, had gone into the bathroom and turned off the valve near the heater, had then returned to bed, read a while, and finally turned out his own gas.

“He went to bed at 11.30, and must have remained up reading through the night.

“I had never seen Mr Herman more optimistic than he was in the last few weeks. He had been busily engaged with me in preparing for litigation in connection with the Universal Reserve Company affairs. He had no financial troubles that I know of. His family life was most peaceful and happy.”

Mr. Herman’s bedroom was on the second floor, directly over the parlor. Other members of his family slept on the same floor and the servants on the floor above.

Mr. Herman’s son, Frederick R., his daughter-in-law, Ethel, and the latter’s mother, Mrs. William Wilson of 961 Columbia Avenue, Worcester, Mass., were in the house. Mrs. Wilson had come to New York to spend the holidays with her daughter and son-in-law.

Dr. Wilson, on being questioned by reporters, said:

“The case appeared to be purely accidental. The gas was escaping from the stove, and from all appearances, after Mr. Herman had turned off the gas, he accidentally turned it on again. Mr. Herman had a weak heart, and the gas undoubtedly affected him more quickly than it would a person with a stronger heart.”

Dr. Wilson said that shortly before 6 a. m. he called up the coroner’s office to report the death, and a clerk there told him to notify the police. This was done, according to the physician, and a policeman from the East Sixty-seventh street station arrived at the house.

An ambulance was also sent to the residence, although, according to Dr. Wilson, he had told the police that he was a physician and that Mr. Herman had been dead for some time.

Note.—The different points of view from which the same facts may be told in news stories are very well shown in the two following examples.

SUICIDE

(1)

New York World

Facing starvation, Victor Schwartz and his wife, Louise, a respectable old Swiss couple, committed suicide yesterday by inhaling illuminating gas in their rooms back of a small confectionery and stationery store, which they carried on at No. 85 Arnold street, Williamsburg.

Each was sixty-seven years old. They had made careful preparations for their deaths. Every hole and crevice in their sparsely furnished rooms had been plugged with paper and rags, and in several places tacks had been driven into the woodwork to make sure that neither the rags nor paper would become dislodged. It was this hammering on Sunday night which caused neighbors to wonder what the old couple were doing, as they always retired before 10 o’clock.

When the Schwartzes rented the store and two rooms back of it eight months ago for $12 a month, they told neighbors that three years before their only child, a daughter of thirty-one years, had died. They said they had never recovered from the shock.

Business during the summer had been very poor, and of late Schwartz and his wife had a hard struggle to get along. The woman frequently told neighbors that she believed their misfortune would soon end. On Sunday evening Schwartz and his wife distributed much of their stock in the store to the children in the neighborhood. It is evident that they had decided on suicide.

Mrs. Rose Black, who has a grocery adjoining the Schwartz store, and Mrs. Kate Weck, a second floor tenant, heard the couple hammering in their rooms up to midnight Sunday, and yesterday at daybreak the two women were the first to detect the odor of illuminating gas from the Schwartz apartments. Policeman McCaffrey, of the Hamburg avenue station, was called in and, forcing an entrance, found Schwartz sitting dead in a chair in the kitchen, fully dressed. He had one end of a rubber tube in his mouth, the other end of which was fixed to an open gas burner. The woman lay dead on her bed in a night dress with a rubber tube in her mouth, fastened to another open gas burner. Ambulance Surgeon Sibbel, who came from the German Hospital, said the couple had been dead several hours. On a small card was a request that Edward Black be telephoned for at “421 Thirty-eighth street.” A dime lay on the card to pay for the telephone message. In the room was found 67 cents. The bodies were removed to the Brooklyn Morgue.

(2)

New York Times

“Auntie Schwartz” was the way in which Mrs. Louise Schwartz soon came to be known to the children of the neighborhood when she and her husband, Victor, each of them 67 years old, opened a small candy and stationery store at 85 Arnold Street, Williamsburg, about eight months ago.

Her small customers just kept the business going in the little shop, but it was a penny business, and when the rent of the store was raised recently from $12 to $15 a month, “Auntie” Schwartz almost despaired of continuing to make a living. Her face grew sad and careworn, and one day, when one of her little customers was grieving over the loss of a pet doll which a dog had chewed up, “Auntie” Schwartz did not console her with a cheerful word and a chocolate drop or two, as she was wont to do. Instead she took her on her lap and told of the little girl she had lost three years ago. She did not explain that her “little girl” had been 31 years old, and that she had helped greatly in making a living for the old folks, who were now staggering under the burden of age, increased rent, and a precarious trade. The old people seemed always oppressed by the sadness of the loss of their only child.

Day by day recently the children noticed that “Auntie” Schwartz was less cheerful that usual. Their elders seldom visited the little store, and so none who might have helped knew that old Victor Schwartz and his wife were almost starving to death, or that the old couple were slowly making up their minds to end their troubles together.

So it was that the children were the first to discover yesterday that the little store was not open for business when they passed it on their way to their first day at school, and “Auntie” Schwartz lost many pennies which her small customers had intended to expend for lead pencils and erasers. “Auntie” Schwartz had called them all in on Sunday evening and had distributed among them all her small stock of candy, telling them that she would have a full new stock for the beginning of school.

Meantime, Mrs. Kate Weck and Mrs. Rose Black, who live above the store, were puzzled by the odor of gas which permeated their apartments. At last the women traced it to the store, which they found closed and locked. The gas came from the two living rooms which the Schwartzes occupied behind their store, and Mrs. Weck and Mrs. Black finally got Policeman McCaffrey of the Hamburg Avenue Station to smash down the door.

The policeman and the women found the old man seated in a chair in the kitchen, a gas tube clutched between his teeth, the other end of which was made fast to a gas jet. He was dead. In the little bedroom they found also the body of Mrs. Schwartz dead like her husband from the gas which she had inhaled. Like him, too, she had tied the tube around her head, so that it should not slip from her mouth.

A search of the rooms showed that the old couple had been in the most abject poverty. Only 67 cents was found in the flat.

SUICIDE

Milwaukee Sentinel

CHICAGO, Ill., March 3.—Emma Johnson died on Monday. She was the grave faced little seamstress from La Crosse, Wis., who used to sit every day near a dingy window at 42 Wilson avenue, plying her needle in silence, wearing an expression like that of a nun. And every one said she “looked so peaceful.”

But the coroner’s jury found that the little woman, in whom no one would have suspected deep emotion, had been tempestuously in love, that she had not been able to win the man she wanted, and that she had sat there at her seams, “praying for strength to wait for a natural death.” She did not want to kill herself. But she did.

She went to the home of Mrs. Jennie Nelson, 4212 North avenue. Mrs. Nelson’s brother, William Larson, is the man she wanted to marry. He “was fond of her, too,” as Mrs. Nelson said, “but his health was poor and he did not want to marry for the present.”

Emma Johnson turned on the gas and died. She left a letter, in which she said:

“Dearest Friends—When you have read this I have crossed the bar. Ambition, energy and strength have deserted me and every hope and dream is shattered. Death is the only relief. I have called upon heaven to save me from myself—to send me a natural death. I don’t want to die like this. I want to live and be happy, but that is not to be.

“I’ve had my hell here, but it is hard to go like this, hard to bring this sorrow upon my folks, bitterly hard.

“For the one who has driven me to do this I feel only love, and if I am permitted to enter heaven I shall wait for him.

“Perhaps he will love me then; he will feel bad about this, but help him understand that I forgive all, and I hope some one else will be to him what I never could, a joy and a comfort, and that she may make him happy as I had hoped to do. I wish I could look upon the faces of my dear father and brothers and sisters again. I can’t still the voice in my heart. I haven’t the strength. Forgive me and pray for me. Only another lost soul.”

SUICIDE OF SCHOOL GIRL

Chicago Tribune

Rose Lubin’s younger brother, Max, wanted help with his “home work” last night. Rose, who is 16, is proud of her standing at the head of the eighth grade in the Winfield school.

“I can’t do my own work and yours, too,” she told Max. “I’ve got enough to keep me busy till bed time and I’m not going to lose my marks on your account.”

Max went to his father and the father went to Rose.

“If you don’t help your brother I’ll take you out of school,” said Lubin.

Whereupon Rose changed her mind about the manner in which the nickel she had earned in the afternoon was to be spent. She bought acid with it, returned to her home at 951 West Fifteenth street, and drank the poison.

Rose will not be at school today. Perhaps she will never go back. She is in the county hospital. Physicians there fear she will not recover.

CAUSE OF ATTEMPTED SUICIDE

New York Evening Post

Mary Stober, eighteen years old, of 951 East 135th Street, who tried to kill herself last week (Friday) because she has no piano, is home again from the Lincoln Hospital, and is starting in to live again in a world where no hope is, since she cannot have a piano.

To dream every night that you have a piano and “play just grand,” and then wake up to hear the alarm clock buzzing six o’clock; to forget where you are, and half close your eyes and pretend that the movements your fingers are making are on a piano, instead of having something to do with the bobbin of a machine in an embroidery factory; to hear beautiful music suddenly in the midst of your work, and listen, startled and ecstatic, for a moment until it is lost in the endless whirring of the machines—these things, if you have never done them, may seem a certainty that Life is, after all, very splendid while there is such a thing as imagination, and that the gray of it is woven full of unexpected and vivid threads of color.

Or it may impress you as deliciously funny that the lack of a piano can seem tragic, if you have a big enough view of tragic things to see that some of them are greater. But to this girl, who does them every day and night of her life, they are simply the things which have twice made her try to kill herself, the reason why she is “disgusted, always disgusted,” as she says, very simply.

Mary Stober has a pale, strong face, with a stubborn chin and a wistful smile, very gray eyes, light brown hair in a bang on her forehead, and very red lips. She looks very young and very determined and very wistful and somewhat sullen. Her hands are red and rough and square-fingered from hard work.

She was dusting one of the rooms this morning in the soggy apartment house of which her mother is janitress, and where they and the six other children live and pay half-rent. She goes back to the factory on Monday. She sat down in one of the innumerous chairs to tell her story, fingering the grimy dust-cloth with her red fingers, which are never quiet for a minute. Her mother stood up through the recital—the little German mother who speaks English only brokenly, who wears a little shawl over her head while she sweeps down the long flights of stairs and who used to play the piano herself when she was a girl in Germany—and looked at Mary with a worried, gentle, almost heartbroken look.

“When I was ten—that was when I stopped school and went to work—I thought always about when I would be eighteen and a grand piano player,” Mary began, fingering the dust-cloth. “Then I was eighteen and I didn’t have a piano yet, and I was almost crazy. Eight years I have worked, and I haven’t got anything yet. And what’s worrying me now is where we’re going to go. We can’t stay here. Other places we’ve been we’ve had coal and things, and our money could all go for the food and clothes. But now we’ve got to pay for a stove and coal.”

She and her sister, who is nineteen and who can play the piano by ear when she can find one to play—Mary herself can only play with one hand by ear, and “people don’t like to hear that kind o’ playing,” she says—and the oldest brother, are the only ones who make money. Mary makes seven dollars a week. All of these details, which she tells simply, go to show that there is little hope for a piano. The little, crumpled mother from behind the chair she is leaning on says, in her broken way, that a piano is not so easy to get, and looks hopelessly at her daughter.

“Then we got phonograph, but she only cry every time he play,” the mother said.

“I can’t bear to hear it,” interrupted Mary. “I’d rather play myself.”

And so finally the brother took the phonograph away, about a month ago, since it only made the girl more miserable than ever.

“And in every house I go to,” she said, “there is a piano. And one girl comes to the factory, saying she can play grand, and her father wants her to play in a cabaret. She’s only sixteen, too. I can’t be happy,” she finished simply. “I can’t be happy. And it gets my goat when anybody laughs. And every single night I dream I’ve got a piano and play so nice, and every day at work I imagine I am playing. All I want to do is to play a piano. I don’t want clothes. If I have good clothes the girls would want me to go out with them, and I don’t want to go out. It is only trouble comes of it. All I want to do is to stay home and play the piano.”

All the family like music, it seems, “but none of them but me would die for it,” she says. “And my father hated it. He wanted me only to work, day and night to work, since I was ten. But he’s gone away now. They took him away—Randall’s Island.” It was when the father was home, though, and earning a little now and then, that the phonograph, which proved a doubtful blessing, was made possible.

Mary Stober says, and her chin looks very square, that she knows she could pay for lessons—she would walk to the factory instead of riding and go without lunch—if she only had a piano to practice on at home.

It was a mixture of lysol and iodine that she took last week—the only things she could find. “I don’t care what I take,” she says, “if I can’t get what I want. Eight years I’ve worked and I haven’t gotten anything yet.” It was last August that she tried before to kill herself.